Portal Fantasy: Threat or Menace?

[rachelmanija]

Yesterday there was a fascinating discussion of portal fantasy, in which a character from our world is transported to another world. The classic example of this is Narnia. I can’t link to the post, because it was filtered (the “portal fantasy” discussion was in the comments) but I offered to make a public post on the subject. I invite the participants to copy their comments to it.

There was a Sirens panel in which five agents, who were discussing their slush piles, mentioned that they were getting quite a few portal fantasy submissions. Two of them said those made up about a quarter of their total fantasy submissions.

I said, "This intrigues me, because I haven't seen a single one in the last ten years. Is it that editors aren't buying them? Did you pick any up?"

The agents replied that none of them had even requested a full manuscript for a single portal fantasy.

They explained that portal fantasies tend to have no stakes because they're not connected enough to our world. While in theory, a portal fantasy could have the fate of both our world and the other world at stake, in practice, the story is usually just about the fantasy world. The fate of the real world is not affected by the events of the story, and there is no reason for readers to care what happens to a fantasy world.

One agent remarked that if the protagonist didn't fall through the portal, there would be no story.

Of course, this is the key quality that makes a portal fantasy a portal fantasy. England was not at stake in the Narnia series, Narnia was. If the kids hadn't gone through the wardrobe, there would indeed be no story. Nor was Narnia tightly connected to England: the kids were from England and that was important, but the story was all about Narnia.

The agents added that nothing is absolutely impossible to sell, and one said that she had a middle-grade fantasy which had portal elements. But overall, they were not enthused.

In the filtered discussion, several people confirmed that it isn’t just that agents won’t even take a look at portal fantasy manuscripts; almost no editors are willing to buy them, either. Presumably, this is why agents don’t even want to read them.

Agents and editors: Is this correct? If so, why? The obvious answer is that they don’t sell to readers… but normally, you know that because they consistently fail to sell. In this case, there seem to be none published at all.

This puzzles me. It is rare for a genre or subgenre to become absolute anathema, as opposed to merely unpopular and comparatively rare. Usually, it takes a string of spectacular and well-publicized failures for that to occur, and I’m not aware of that happening with portal fantasy.

The fact that agents are getting a large number of submissions suggests to me that there might be a market. After all, writers are interested in portal fantasy enough to write it. It’s possible that only writers, and no other readers, are interested. But that seems a bit unlikely. This isn’t some extremely metafictional or otherwise of-interest-only-to-writers form, but a subgenre to which a number of classic, in-print fantasies belong, and one which was reasonably popular up until about fifteen years ago.

However, it’s impossible to tell if it’s really anathema among readers, because there’s almost none that’s new for them to read. (Curiously, the most recent exception I can think of, Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, is quite successful. It is, however, like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, middle grade. The only other recent one I can think of is Hiromi Goto’s Half World,, which may also be middle grade.)

As I said, I am puzzled. I can understand “unpopular.” I am bewildered by “absolutely not.” Urban fantasy is huge now, and high fantasy is doing well in adult fiction and is at least acceptable in YA. Books about magical creatures already in our world are desirable. Books about magical creatures traveling to our world are fine. Books about humans who are native to a magical world are okay. But books about humans traveling to a magical world are verboten. Why are portals into our world fine, but portals out bad? Is it because leaving our world might be considered escapism?

As another commenter noted, there is little YA which involves space travel or takes place on other planets, either. The closer the setting is to our world, the better. Dystopias are our world, but worse; ditto most post-apocalyptic novels. Urban fantasy is our world, with added magical creatures or powers. Maybe the lack of portal fantasy is a metaphor for the belief that modern teenagers don’t want to travel to strange new worlds, even in their reading.

There are also arguments that the subgenre is inherently bad or flawed. I won’t get into too much detail on these, because someone is going to make a case for that in comments. Instead, I will make a brief “pro” case:

1. The Secret Country, by Pamela Dean and Coraline by Neil Gaiman, in which the fantasy world is a twisted reflection of the protagonists’ real or imagined worlds – a story that can only be told by them traveling to the other world. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones. (Only $4.99 on Kindle –fabulous book, and one which could only be written as a portal fantasy. No portal, no story.) The Silent Tower (The Windrose Chronicles) and The Time of the Dark (The Darwath Series) by Barbara Hambly – neither bestsellers nor classics, but books which I love very much. The Summer Tree (The Fionavar Tapestry, Book 1), by Guy Gavriel Kay. The Subtle Knife: His Dark Materials.

Also, The Matrix is not only a take on portal fantasy, but riffs on a classic portal fantasy, Alice in Wonderland.

Neverwhere and Harry Potter merge urban and portal fantasy, as does the Percy Jackson series.

These are all good books in which the portal is essential to the story. In many cases, the story depends entirely on the protagonists not being from the fantasy world, in a way for which merely being from a different part of the fantasy world would not compensate. Many of these are books which are in print, read, and enjoyed to this day. Why shouldn’t there be more of them?

2. Many arguments against portal fantasies sum up to “they can/often are done badly.” This is true of every genre.

For instance, they can be wish-fulfillment. But in what way is every “A girl learns that she has special powers and must choose between two hot boys” urban fantasy not wish-fulfillment? And since when has wish-fulfillment been banned from fantasy? Just because something is wish-fulfillment doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable, is badly written, or shouldn’t exist. Also, they are not always wish-fulfillment. They can be, and that can be part of the charm. But many are more complicated, and in some, the other world is outright horrible.

Similarly, they can be pro-colonialist metaphors in which a kind foreigner must save the helpless native people. But they don’t have to be. That is especially unlikely to be the case in stories in which the stakes are smaller and more personal than “save the world.”

One could argue that the concept has been so over-done that all subsequent books have nothing of interest to offer. But the same could be said of stories about vampires, werewolves, fairies, dystopias, apocalypses, teens with psychic powers, teens with magic powers, ghosts, superheroes, dragons, princesses, destined loves, angels, and every other staple of the market.

3. Or perhaps they’re fine for children’s books, but anathema for YA. Harry Potter, Coraline, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, and The Golden Compass are OK because they’re middle grade, but YA portal fantasy is unsaleable. This baffles me. Why?

4. I enjoy them. Writers are still writing them. At least some readers still want to read them. Why not publish a few, and see if some catch on?

I’m frustrated with the lack of faith in teenagers, the lack of belief that they might try something a bit different from the latest dystopia/vampire novel/werewolf novel. Just because something is unusual or out of the received wisdom of what readers are interested in doesn't mean it won't sell. Sometimes it sells like Krispy Kremes.

I'm concerned that fixed ideas of what does and doesn’t sell have overridden other questions, like, "Is this a well-written book? Is this a fun book? Did I enjoy reading this book?"

If you ask that set of questions, you buy Harry Potter. If you ask, "Is this a disguised portal fantasy? Do American kids care about British boarding school stories?" you will pass it by.

Comments

[genarti]

As I said elsewhere, a portal fantasy with a non-modern and/or non-Western protagonist is something I would very much like to see.

This is tangenting for a rec, but if you haven't read the Twelve Kingdoms books, I recommend them. The protagonist of the first one is Nakajima Youko, a modern-day Japanese schoolgirl who finds herself transported to a magical kingdom where she doesn't know the rules, has no allies, and keeps being attacked by monsters. Most of the characters in the books are native to the magical kingdoms, but there are others who've come from Japan in various eras -- including some from earlier in history, so that not all the people who share the bond of coming from Japan to the Twelve Kingdoms are actually coming from the same culture. (It's that that made me think of the series for this, since the Japanese author writing a modern-day Japanese schoolgirl for the first book isn't any more of a departure than an American author writing an American schoolgirl for a portal fantasy.)

This doesn't really address the US or UK publishing system, so this is a side recommendation rather than much in the way of input to the wider discussion. It might be relevant that only four books of the series have been translated into English, but I couldn't begin to guess whether that has to do with the fact that it's portal fantasy, the fact that it's a translation, complicated rights wrangling, or any of a number of other possibilities.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Translations always face hurdles, yeah. Anyway, that's a series I've been meaning to pick up, but haven't gotten to yet.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

As I said elsewhere, a portal fantasy with a non-modern and/or non-Western protagonist is something I would very much like to see.

But this gets into a problem that Lewis explained, something like (quoting from memory), "An odd protagonist in an odd world is an oddity too many. Alice and Gulliver need to be commonplace people, Everyman."

An Everyman in Lilliput is a searchlight probing the oddities of Lilliput -- putting a lot of reflected light on Gulliver's England, for those who care and who are familiar with the basic facts of Gulliver's England.

If the protagonist's world of origin is too unfamiliar to the reader, that may be too much division of figuring-out from the target world. Of course this could be handled with enough skill, or in a short story for a 1950s SF magazine.

[genarti]

While that's a fair point, I do think there's a lot of room for a good author to make the protagonist familiar to the reader despite cultural differences -- especially since some of the readers will be history buffs, or from a non-Western culture themselves. It's easy to overstate the appeal of the Everyman.

Also, there's no rule that says the POV character has to be the only main character. I'm thinking of Homeward Bounders here, for one -- a main character who's a cocky kid from the UK, but from the 1800s, and the other kids are from stranger places. We can't all be Diana Wynne Jones, much though we might wish for her skill, but there's plenty of room for similar variations without losing the reader's ability to identify with and understand the character and their confusion at the world they've come to.

Of course, this is preaching to the choir around these parts, I'm sure, and marketing departments are a much harder sell with every step one takes away from the generic Every(wo)man Only Cooler.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking less of sympathy with the explorer's emotions, than the reader's exploration of the magical world. Alice and Gullivler aren't particularly likeable people. Dorothy's wish to go back to Kansas is a turn-off; we like her because, like E.T., she loves her new friends.

I think the examples you're describing, are from my 'not too unfamiliar cultures.

Hm. If the magic world is actually pretty standard as magic worlds go, then an explorer from a known different culture (such as a Regency romance heroine), might add just enough difference to the mix.

[marycatelli]

Dorothy's problem is the lack of an objective correlative, as T. S. Eliot put it. We have seen nothing in Kansas, even her aunt and uncle, that inspire a sufficient passion to motivate her through the book.

Though it's better than the movie, where she had to learn to want to go back home -- except that she didn't, she immediately want to know how to go back and was sent to the wizard for that. If they wanted her to become wiser, they needed her to ask whether she can stay forever and be sent to the wizard for permission or some such. Of course, then, she would have needed actual reason to change her mind.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Of course in the movie, Dorothy had already run away from home in Kansas but was on her way back to Auntie Em when the tornado intercepted her. The book had none of that Kansas family drama, no mean neighbor. I suppose the book had her wanting to go back to her family as motive to start her down the yellow brick road, but istm that was soon overshadowed by her concern for the Scarecrow and Tin Man and for their quests. (Which btw are objective goals within the portal world. ;-) )

If so, then that makes three founding iconic portal stories pretty free of the sort of Character Growth structure that now often seems to be taken for granted as a requirement of all YA, if not all MG also.

Before the stage of wanting to Grow to fit adult demands, there's a stage of wanting to escape those demands and those adults altogether, and do something simple and fun -- in a place like Oz.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

Well, bluntly: I disagree with Lewis on that, and I think the continuing popularity of the Narnia books is actually a testament to him being wrong, because kids from WWII are now odd protagonists.

Especially to small Canadian kids who go to a local elementary school and don't think boarding schools exist outside fiction. (Which is what I was when I was a wee thing, and first adored Narnia.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

That is becoming a problem for some packagers. Some years before the actual Narnia movie was made, there was talk of a script beginning with the children as Americans, who get somehow banished from L.A. because Edmund stole a CD!

For me also, in Texas, England in the blitz seemed already half way to Narnia. But the book doesn't show London at all iirc: it opens with the children exploring a place that's already odd to them, that is, the Professor's home.

Aside from some dated slang, was there much in the Pevensies' reaction to Narnia that seemed odd to you?

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

"Turkish delight" might as well have been "fillet of k'varblefish livers" for what it meant to me; the idea that a child would not have been raised on automatic "stranger-danger" was utterly bizarre (honestly, as a six year old, I COULD NOT CREDIT how Edmund could be so stupid as to even talk to a strange adult, and Lucy was only slightly excused because I couldn't decide if fauns were "strangers"); "war is ugly when women fight" and Susan and Lucy's ACCEPTANCE of that (at the same time I was watching Tasha Yar and reading Eowyn etc, etc) without being insulted . . .

And then my usual "I grew up in a place where -40C temperatures are normal for winter" head-tilts at the "winter" as described (sure, they got coats, but where were their hats and mitts? Do they WANT frostbite on their ears and fingers? What about proper boots? What idiot would go out in serious winter without them?)

Those are off the top of my head; I'm pretty sure if I were to pick up the books and look through all the various arrivings-in-Narnia of the various generations that I could come up with more.

Other things that I remember being odd to me at the time: the implied criticisms of Eustace's parents went totally over my head, as I knew plenty of people who didn't drink, didn't smoke and kept their windows open a lot of the time and thought smoking was disgusting, had never seen an adult drunk, and didn't like having my windows closed. As I mentioned before, the school-system in question might as well have been describing an alien culture, and a lot of references to it permeate the text (Edmund went bad when he "went away to that school" - paraphrase - and a deep puzzlement), the lack of presence of the adults in their lives at all and lack of intervention in children's squabbles . . . these were all alien to my upbringing.

It didn't throw me or make me disbelieve, of course - even the stranger-danger issue got explained away by my parents who read it to me by "this was in England in the 40s, they did things differently", much the way I accepted the same explanations for things that hobbits did that were weird, or dwarves, or elves, or cherubim, or whatever.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Those are excellent points. But those oddities may have thrown other modern readers, or at least made it harder for them to keep attend to the story.

Still, the Pevensies' oddity was their acceptance of those oddities in Narnia. What if the Pevensies had come from some third culture, neither Lewis's 1940s nor Canada later? A family of non-English Pevensies who called the Witch's candy by some other name we'd never heard of, wouldn't have helped.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think you're way underestimating readers' ability to take things in stride, as well as basic commonalities that'll show up; I found the Pevensies more or less as alien as I found Klingons, and I'd've totally read Worf in Narnia.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

In fanfic, so would I, already being famliar with both Narnia and Klingons.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

I answered a bit tersely because I was on an iPhone, which is my mistake; a little less abruptly:

A family of non-English Pevensies who called the Witch's candy by some other name we'd never heard of, wouldn't have helped.

I think you may have missed what I was trying to say, which is that for me it wouldn't've made any difference; "turkish delight" might as well have been "arblefraster scobbin" for all the sense it made to me. I understood from context that it was supposed to be something that tasted nice to Edmund; otherwise I had literally no idea what it was the text was talking about. For all the sense it made to me, it might as well have been âng-ku-kóe.

So no, it wouldn't've been better for white-anglo-Canadian-me if the Pevensies had actually been Chinese, or some totally fictional culture, but it wouldn't've been worse. Especially since fictional cultures tend to be based rather closely on historical cultures of the writer's (and thus often the larger part of the readerbase's) background or experience (ie: you might be CALLING them Parminians, but basically, they are 12th century Germans).

You're right. Some readers might be thrown out by them. Some readers are also thrown out by the Talking Animals. My personal anecdata leads me to think that the number is way smaller than you seem to feel is true.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

This sub-thread is getting toward the righthand, ie terse, side of the screen, so I'll try to do some summing up. ;-)

I may have slipped into conflating someone's wish for a non-white POV character from our world in a portal story, with someone's wish for a secondary world story where the visiting character is from another part of that secondary world, or at least not from our world.

In any case, imo, it's a matter of degree. Say, depending on the length of each reader's stride, we have a certain number of oddity points to safely budget among our magic world, our POV visitor, and our writing style. If we put too many total oddity points into the story, we may overload the reader and throw zim out. So the more oddity points we put into the world itself, the plainer the language and the more familiar the observer's
perception, would be Lewis's advice.

But this isn't about oddity by some fixed standard. Narnia is made of familiar elements arranged in a familiar literary form (Lewis called TLTWTW a 'fairy tale'). Klingons by now are familiar to most of us. It's an unfamiliar character's perceptions of some unfamiliar world, that could be a problem (or a specialized taste) imo.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have to point out that the reader might not be white, either. In which case such a character would not be odd, or even different.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Sorry, of course I meant 'non-Western'. Though some of the readers may be non-Western too, come to think of it.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I still remember my deep disappointment when years later I finally tasted Turkish Delight -- nowhere near the advance Narnian billing.

You're right: the children's lives in 1940s England were almost as alien to me, a child going to public school on the Canadian prairies, as Narnia (not the open windows, though: a parent who grew up in an unheated farmhouse liked cold air at night. And in my era no one did warn you about strangers).

But somehow I had no problem accepting the differences as the way things were then, especially since they were confirmed by other Edwardian, Victorian, and British books which I read around the same time.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

As an adult, I really like Turkish Delight; as a kid, though, I would have found it totally disappointing. I imagined something a lot more like Mackintosh's, which in retrospect is rather facepalmingly funny, given its . . . Canadianness.

. . . damn, I have just made myself crave Mackintosh's. *headdesk*

But somehow I had no problem accepting the differences as the way things were then, especially since they were confirmed by other Edwardian, Victorian, and British books which I read around the same time.

At the time I was reading/being read Narnia, LotR/Hobbit, L'Engel, Winnie-ther-Pooh, reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes, being read Pride and Prejudice, and my favourite movies and television were all fantasy-stuff. So I was . . . pretty much able to just absorb what the protags thought of as normal and adjust accordingly.

And in my era no one did warn you about strangers

In addition to the general Stranger Danger issues of the 80s, my father was a criminal prosecutor and I first encountered Narnia about the time I was starting school (aka, I had only just begun to be exposed to "normal" beyond my family in my everyday life): I got DRILLED on how to respond to strangers trying to get me to go anywhere with them, and my family and friends had recognition codewords to hand out to adults who were allowed to pick me up. (Fortunately, I also got drilled on the fact that friends and family were not allowed to do certain things to me, either, and that my parents would always believe me, etc, etc.)

So when Lucy went home with Mr Tumnus, I felt she got off REALLY LUCKY when he didn't kill her, and that this was a perfect example of why you don't go home with strangers (after all, he WAS GOING to hand her over to the queen). When Dad explained that once upon a time people didn't worry about stranger-danger stuff so much, I accepted this, although I pronounced them rather stupid - sort of like the people who used to think the world was flat.

(As an adult, of course, I understand comparative culture stuff etc etc. As a six year old, I just thought anyone who didn't do things the way my family thought was sensible were dumb. Ah, childhood.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, heck, even Tolkien thought that in real life (so to speak) you just didn't go home with a faun, or you might get raped.

[marycatelli]

One notes that in the movie that scene was played for far more creepiness. In the book, we don't learn he's up to no good until he's already repented of it. In the movie, we see him put the key where Lucy can't get at it.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the Pevensie family was No True Oddity. ;-)