In defense of dual-world fantasy

[mrissa]

sartorias made a comment yesterday in the what-would-you-see-me-write thread. She said, "I'm sure this is utterly way off, or totally repellent, but it's occurred to me more than once that if Narnia were to be reborn with a new story arc, but echoes of the old, you would be the one to write it."

Heh. Well.

Not Narnia, exactly, because the fella is gone, and what he left us is what he left us. But my first two books (one a sequel to the other) were what I'm calling dual-world fantasies: people from our world dealing with a separate fantasy world. (There may be some other term for this, but I'm not remembering it at the moment, and a quick look at my Clute Encyclopedia of Fantasy is not helping.) And I have another one that keeps demanding bits of me from time to time, though I'm trying not to write it next. It's an older book than the first two, and...maybe not darker. But higher-contrast? Sharper? More starkly lit?

I'm trying not to write it next for several reasons. One of them is that I have the impression that a lot of people are a bit scornful of dual-world fantasy. I have been told by more than one agent that it's harder to sell, that it is not currently fashionable, and that "everybody" is "burned out" on it. This makes me a little sad.

Sure, it can get old. Of course it can get old. "Oh, look, the portal is in her cousin's guest bathroom this time, how creative. That sure does make the king/quest plot feel more original." But I feel pretty sure that some of you are like me and really, really wanted that coat closet to open into Narnia, once upon a time. And I feel pretty sure that some of you know exactly what you'd do if there was a portal to another world, just there behind the copier at work, or off the alley next to your favorite coffee shop. There is nothing wrong with letting some of our escapism be literal, and a good dual-world fantasy does it better than just about anything else: here is someone like you. Really like you, down to the sneakers. Ta da! Flowing cloak. Hey presto! Magic staff. Admit it: isn't that just the tiniest bit awesome? Wouldn't you go? Of course you'd go. It's that taste of a book that said, "Things don't have to be this way. Things can be different. Things can be wonderful." For a lot of us, the first book that really said that--just when we needed to hear it, just when the rest of the world was maybe not so sure of us--was a dual-world fantasy.

It's cheesy. Of course it's cheesy. You like cheesy. I like cheesy. Somewhere under our highly polished, sophisticated exteriors*, we all have weaknesses made of pure cheese. I think what we're really tired of is not dual-world fantasies, but dual-world fantasies done shoddily. Dual-world fantasies that color inside the lines. Dual-world fantasies that make us wonder why we are not rereading The Silver Chair, since that gets us away from school bullies and features Puddleglum.** But look, everybody was sick unto death of dragons, and then Naomi Novik came along and said, "Yes, but Napoleon!", and we went, "Ooh!", and Robin McKinley said, "Research station!," and we went, "Tell me more!", and Mole and Bear said, "And look, not quite dragons, but about that companion animal thing," and we squinted sideways and said, "I never thought about it that way. Or else I did and you're totally right and I am so glad somebody finally said it."

Maybe the dual-world fantasy isn't your cheesy weakness. Maybe yours wears mirrorshades or can always get through to troubled children with a kind word that erases all life troubles. Some of us don't like vampires much; I'm not trying to claim that the dual-world fantasy is or should be universally beloved. I just don't think it's quite done yet, and I'm not sure it ever will be. Slipping away between the cracks to find something completely magical is not an urge that looks to me like it's going anywhere any time soon.

*I am currently wearing a nightshirt, a bathrobe, my glasses, and slipper socks with grippies on the bottom. The difference between me and other people who haven't yet had their workout and shower is, of course, that I wear them elegantly, and with a certain panache.

**I have recently become aware of how much Puddleglum is an iconic figure in my life--how much more than anyone else in those books, in fact. Reshpectomrissle. People have been going around declaring the Year of This and the Year of That for themselves, or picking words for themselves, and I wonder if picking iconic fictional characters for particular years might not be a better approach for some folks. Make 2009 the Year of Lady Alys Vorpatril. The Year of David Audley. The Year of Number Ten Ox. Whatever gets you going, really.

Comments

[shana.livejournal.com]

The Year of Lady Alys Vorpatril is extremely elegant.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And underestimated. Everybody thinks that the Year of Lady Alys Vorpatril is going to be about having awesome clothes and parties, and it has those things, and then they look at you around September and go, "Holy crud, look what you've done with this year!" and you smile serenely.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, this thread is already #3 under a Google search for "Lady Alys Vorpatril".

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Year of Miles Vorkosigan: you start out aimless and depressed, with no idea of what the future holds, then one thing leads to another and suddenly you're on top of the world... which means that when the sky is falling, it hits you first.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Narnia is cheesy??

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think people think Narnia is the last word in dual-world fantasies, the way they think Middle-Earth is the last word in secondary world fantasies. So of course it wasn't cheesy for the Inklings to write them, but for us, in these days....

And there is an essential nerdiness to much of fantasy, including Narnia, and I think we need to accept that about ourselves and go with it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

You have just helped me to what might be a rather odd insight into why I personally do not actually write dual-world fantasies, which is that the world-building plausibility meter in my head gets stuck on "but why only two ?" One is plausible; many are plausible; two is not.

The more I think of it the more I realise that this is a universal for me. Armageddon Dreams starts off dual-world-shaped because it is doing things with the literary traditions of dual-world stuff, but is actually somewhere in the region of sixty-five-thousand-world-shaped with stuff going on among and between them. Nine Children of the Dragon has more than one world in, but the three the protagonists think they know about turn out to be only options among many more. It just sort of always needs to pull back to a scale which makes sense. It's like manticores, really; if I want to be able to believe in one manticore, I either need a solidly established ecosystem supporting a viable population of manticores, or a wizard (or an engineer) to contrive a manticore and have a reason to do so.

This makes me want to do something in a setting with our world and the Otherworld as a nimbus around it, which feels the option that would work for me as a dual world of sorts.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, from database theory: the only useful cardinalities are "none", "one", and "some". "Two" is right out :-).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I believe "portal fantasy" is the phrase you're looking for.

Interestingly, I think Harry Potter is juuuuuuuuust this side of a portal fantasy, at least for the first four books. By the fifth, you start getting enough points of intersection between the worlds that it looks more like what it really is, namely, a very closed urban fantasy ("closed" meaning the magical side is secret). But I always wanted the interface between those two to work better.

Both of my oldest big story-ideas (dating from the ages of ten and thirteen, respectively) were portal fantasies. Surprise! One of them is not worth revisiting; the other, I really want to revamp somehow, someday. Probably because it starts off with the portaled-characters realizing that they've skipped off to another world but can't get back, and that hey, their teen angst about how much their lives sucked back there looks a lot less angsty and sucky now they've made an irrevocable choice to leave them behind. And then the rest of the series would be ongoing portal-episodes -- a la rysmiel's comment, if there's two worlds then there's many.

In retrospect, the fact that I wanted to write a series about characters continually visiting other worlds should have alerted me that I was going to major in anthropology.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I tend to distinguish urban fantasies between "alternate history urban fantasy" and "secret history urban fantasy": in the former, everybody has always known about the elves who run the bodega on the corner, in the latter not.

I have to put my fingers in my ears and hum if something is clearly alternate history urban fantasy due to the huge numbers of people who know about it, but nothing in our world has changed. Often I just can't do it, but sometimes other elements of the book make it look worth trying.

I don't know, I wanted to write a series about characters continually visiting other worlds, and I majored in physics, and that looks perfectly logical, too.

(Majoring in physics always looks perfectly logical. That's why it's dangerous.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. The first "novel" I ever wrote (when I was twelve) was a dual-world fantasy, and it was terrible, but it was terrible with love.

One of our closets when I was little actually had a fur coat in it (I think it must have been my maternal grandmother's), and I loved it because it told me how the way into Narnia smelled. One of my mother's friend's house had one of those weird little doorways up near the ceiling in the stairwell--I think it was an attic access, but I remember I was fascinated by it, partly because it was weird and partly because of Narnia, because what was on the other side of that weird little door might be something entirely other than an attic. My in-laws' coat closet is also the entrance to their basement, and I love that. (No, I've never been down there--there's no reason I would, and also, if I don't, then maybe it's more than just a basement.)

And yes to Puddleglum. Utterly. Besmittenly.

I think you're right: people aren't tired of dual-world fantasy; they're tired of the inevitable demonstration of Sturgeon's Law. But it's always easier to tar the subgenre with the "this is crap" brush than it is to make a reasoned judgment of, "Some of these are excellent and some of these aren't very good."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Icon <3 <3 <3.

I smelled my mother's rabbit fur hat. And I never went up the stairs to my Gran's attic, because I couldn't bear it if the spiral stairs behind coats for heaven's sake only went to a broken lamp.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I can see 2008 as the Year of Puddleglum.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Here at Team Rocket, our book Brave Story did well enough that we are doing a second, similar novel by the same author and doing Brave Story in paperback. So not everybody is burnt out on it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Go Team Rocket.

[blythe025.livejournal.com]

I rather enjoy dual world fantasies. I love the idea that you can turn a corner and suddenly be somewhere other. I also like the idea of that dual world slipping back and forth. People from the other world coming to this one, as opposed to access being a one way ticket. I also wonder what it would take for me to choose to stay in that other world. Would there be a reason that I would permanently leave all I know behind? The characters in Inkspell did, and it totally worked for me.

[aedifica]

When that choice was offered to the characters in the Secret Country trilogy I loved seeing what choice each character made. It's one more reason why Ted and Laura's mother is my favorite character in the series, despite stiff competition from the others and despite the fact that she's only actually onstage in one book. That said, I think I would have made a very different choice myself--but I don't really know.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Somewhere under our highly polished, sophisticated exteriors*, we all have weaknesses made of pure cheese.

Well said. I think I need that on a T-shirt.

Personally, I always approach dual-world fantasies with a certain skepticism - they often don't work for me. But the ones that do work are precious to me, for just the reasons you describe.

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Oh! How wonderful! You know the David Audley books! They are amazing - though I can never quite make up my mind whether he's a monster or not.

Puddleglum, on the other hand, is one of the most heroic characters in literature.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Blame dd_b; he lent me the whole series and I gulped them down and started my grandfather down the same dark path (forever will it dominate his destiny) (wait, wrong story).

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

I've seen 'em called portal stories, crossover fantasy...can't remember what the real term is, either.

I like them. I wrote one because I like them! But only about two people in the world like it as much as I do, and one's my mom. Agentdom didn't like it so much. Agentdom is tired of seeing them and I'm pretty sure it's an auto-reject for some people no matter how good it is. They're hard to sell.

That said, I *do* see a lot of query letters for them, and quite often they're Narnia without the serial numbers filed off. It makes me sad.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I write the one that is nothing whatsoever like Narnia without the serial numbers filed off, and if I don't have an agent at that point, I will probably make you suffer through the query before any other agency, because I know you like them, and I know you will cry and cry if I manage to write a really good one and you have to reject it.

And apparently I am a mean person and like to make my friends cry and cry.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Write that book!

In almost sixty years, I have never gotten tired of dual world fantasies. Never.

[jenett]

I love dual-world fantasies (it's actually part of why I love well-done urban fantasy, because you get the same thing, just with different crossover, y'know?)

I also adore your Year of the [Character] idea. Only I'm utterly uncertain what I'd pick. (After today, I feel like it's the Year of the White Rabbit, already, and I don't really want it to be that, y'know?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, actually I think I am not so thrilled with a lot of Mr. Dodgson's options. Year of the Red Queen, for example: not so much with the running to stay in place. Thanks. Year of the Oysters. Year of the Pig Who Looked Like A Baby. Year of the Dormouse. Nononono.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Puddleglum is the only reason I reread that stupid book.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Whereas I reread it for the foxy bitch in the green kirtle. Mrow!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The only thing that's a bigger weakness for me than dual worlds is magic in *this* world: anything from Edward Eager's Half Magic to E. Nesbit's magic books to War For the Oaks.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But I think that dual worlds are getting scorn where magic in this world is not; people don't think that magic in this world is even close to played out. (And I agree. I just think dual worlds aren't, either.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I don't know why I assume wardrobe fantasy is more likely to be bad than any other fantasy. Maybe it's the assumption that this is Science World and the other is Magic World, so things like matches don't work in Magic World. Maybe it was two or three series that began with someone failing at something in this world that turned out to be supremely useful on a magical scale in the other world. Some of it is definitely the many/one/none/not two thing, with an edge of many-worlds-but-ours-is-special being annoying. Or anything where there's Good World and Bad World.

It may just be that they are more difficult to do right. It may be that I have read enough mediocre ones that I am oversensitive to badness.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I don't do Science World vs. Magic World. But then, I've been accused of writing SF characters regardless of what genre the plot/setting/spec conceit are in.

There may be some truth to that. "Poke it and see what happens" is a major life thing for me.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Something that hasn't been done enough, I think, is dual-world fantasy in which the story has a leg in the real world as well as in the alternate world. I don't know how much fun that would be, but it would be interesting.

Does anyone else remember Donaldson's horrible The Mirror of her Dreams books? Very readable, and inescapable around 1985 when they came out, but full of ick. I'm trying to remember other (good) portal fantasies but I can't at the moment because those books are sitting in the front of my memory bank. Blech.

Oh, right - OZ, of course. Love those books.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I tried to have fun with it, in my first two books. Not sure how well I succeeded.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

So now I confess that I wrote a story about a dual-world fantasy where the portal was the girls' bathroom in my high school.

(Mostly because one of the other characters was male, and it was a bit of an obstacle for him to get to the last stall in the girls' bathroom.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I see nothing wrong with this.

I also don't think it's enough to render the thing professional-grade awesome, but I notice you haven't claimed that, either.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

Being John Malkovich is mobius strip-world fantasy.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Ha, i don't see you as Puddleglummy at all. More Jill maybe except with more clue.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

i mean, you're cheerful.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Note that there's a fair amount of dual-world science fiction. (Not exactly hard science, but "It's not fantasy if you call the elves aliens.") I think most of it is alternate history, but I might well have missed large amounts of it which isn't.

[brooksmoses]

Hmm -- there's an interesting thought: Alma Alexander's Gift of the Unmage, which I recently read, is in many ways a dual-world fantasy. It's got a rather interesting twist, though -- magic exists in both worlds, but the second world the protagonist finds herself in is still very fantastic to her. And, unlike the Narnia books, a lot of the real story remains in the first world.

I really quite liked it, as a book.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Added to my library list.