Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
1. Legends of Maps
Once upon a time, mapmakers who came to the edge of their knowledge did not leave the terra incognita beyond simply blank; instead, they filled the empty quarters with images of lions and monsters and at least once, on a 1504 globe made of conjoined halves of ostrich eggs, the inscription “Hic sunt dracones,” or in English, “Here are dragons” (Livingston 2002)1. A literary cartographer, trying to survey the genres that spread across the landscape of story and coming upon the one called fantasy, might well be tempted to throw up their hands over a terrain so confused, various and wild, and simply say, along with the antique globe, “Here are dragons.”
In a previous essay here (Swanger 2007), I attempted to map the genres of horror and sf from the perspective of recent neuropsychology. The essay suggested that it might be instructive to look at genres in terms of their underlying cognitive and emotional appeals, which are universally human and have deep evolutionary roots but are expressed in different forms in different places and times. Thus, comedy, found in all cultures, can be considered a natural genre, while limericks, found only in those who speak English, constitute a cultural genre. I went on to examine horror and sf in this light, at that time focusing on the emotions primarily evoked by them such as disgust and fear in horror and especially cognitive emotions such as puzzlement and wonder in sf.
When asked how fantasy looked in that same light, my first thought was that the antiquity and global prevalence of fantasy surely indicated that it was a natural genre. After all, places, powers, and beings we would call fantastic populate the mythologies of the world. But should we call those myths fantasy? While fantasy has been almost universally defined as the genre of the impossible (Wolfe 2011, though Wolfe himself takes a narrower view), some, such as John Clute, have argued that only the fancies of a scientific culture like ours, where the border of the possible is sharply drawn, should be called fantasy. But even in the modern West, many still believe in angels; are stories about them fantasies? What if written by a skeptic and read by a believer, or the reverse? Whose belief makes the difference? Since even the scientific consensus shifts, this seemed to me building on quicksand. Maps of fantasy drawn by these shifting lights must be fantastic themselves, recording lands that come and go as belief in them wavers. But stabler than belief in angels or dragons is fascination with and fear of them; it is the persistence of dragons in our minds despite our disbelief that roots the archipelagos and allows our maps of fantasy unlike those of sf to be inked instead of penciled.
My previous essay here discussed not only the emotional roots of horror, but its cognitive roots as well, drawing a line between natural and supernatural horror. I argued that supernatural horror was counterintuitive, defying our intuitive expectations of the world and its natural laws, and as such transcended cultural boundaries. I will now argue that drawing such a line for fantasy will allow us to define its nature, trace its roots, chart its kinds, and sketch its borders with less dragon-laden lands.
2. The Nature of Fantasy
In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute and Grant 1999), John Clute defines fantasy as “a self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though stories set there may be possible in its terms” (Clute 338 1999). Clute goes on to say, “There is no easy division between realism and the fantastical in writers before 1600 or so,” the time of the Scientific Revolution, and postdates fantasy accordingly. Indeed, adding a second condition, that fantasy “deliberately confronts or contradicts the real,” he pushes up the appearance of fantasy recognizable as such to the early nineteenth century (though in the introduction he gives it as “a few decades before the nineteenth century”[viii]).
But Farah Mendlesohn, in her Rhetorics of Fantasy (Mendlesohn 2008), disagrees with Clute. Fantasy, she says, is “a genre that is not new in the nineteenth and twentieth century” (Mendlesohn 61 [her italics]). She believes it is mimetic literature, “new ways to write the real,” that made its debut in this era (as the term describing its main form, the novel, suggests), and that “ways to write the unreal” were “already established in Bible stories, in myths and legends, and in the traditions of the marvelous.” Except for the type she calls immersive, fantasy needs “that belief in the dividing line between the real and the not-real to function,” and it is clear she believes that line was drawn, easily or not, at least thousands of years ago.
Yet both Clute and Mendlesohn make concessions to the other’s point of view. She uses Gary K. Wolfe’s terminology (Wolfe 130 1986), inspired by Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, to divide “unreasoning delights of fancy” [her italics] from “the rules and rigors of fantasy”(Mendlesohn 180), and places 1926’s Lud-in-the-Mist “at the very edge of the turn from fancy to fantasy,” long after Clute would date the shift. Clute himself uses the phrase the fantastic in the Encyclopedia when he describes pre-Industrial Revolution material of this sort, and in such entries as “Underliers,” “Taproot Texts,” “Twice-Told,” and “Cauldron of Story,” makes clear the antiquity and abundance of it.
These recognitions of the merits on both sides in the debate suggest that both Clute and Mendlesohn have points that need appreciation, and perhaps the best way to give each their due is to consider that both might be right on different levels. Returning to Clute’s definition, perhaps its key phrase is “impossible in the world as we perceive it.” Clute’s emphasis on science suggests that he is using perceive, not in the literal sense of sensory perception, but in a broader way, which includes our personal and cultural expectations (including scientific ones) of what is possible. It is these expectations of possibility which differ with place, time and culture, and give Clute “no easy division.”
But developmental psychologists have found that such expectations exist on a lower level, too, an intuitive level which seems innate and universal. Even infants incapable of speech are surprised to see objects apparently pass through each other, or suddenly disappear to rematerialize elsewhere, or act in other ways one might see in a magic show; indeed, it would seem the thrill of a magic show is its violation of our intuitive theories of how things work, the performance of the impossible. These counterintuitive events evoke a sense of the uncanny, which I discussed in my previous paper as an emotional response to the viscerally impossible. This is the level at which I think that Mendlesohn is right. It is the line between real and unreal drawn at this deepest level that allows us to bypass issues of time and place, cultures and individuals (for the moment; these still matter at the higher, more local, levels), and put these matters in their broadest perspective.
All peoples, then, have distinguished possible from impossible in this sense and have encountered things and events which defied the expectations of their intuitive physics and biology. Even such humble, familiar companions as shadows and reflections puzzle and disturb because they seem to be both us and not-us at the same time and somehow manage to be objects “without having mass, volume or continuity in space or time” (Pinker 557 1997). But they and the marvels and beings met in dreams, visions and trances are not simply or utterly baffling; throughout history and the world over, they are regarded as otherworldly, taken as evidence of a realm where the rules are different. The supernatural (or in E.F. Bleiler’s phrasing, the contranatural (Bleiler 116 ), which outrages intuitive physics and biology, is amenable to intuitive psychology and is interpreted as the action or presence of magical beings, who, however unlike us in other ways, are seen as having beliefs, desires, and intentions just like us.
And why not? After all, as Paul Bloom points out in Descartes’ Baby (Bloom 2004), we naturally regard ourselves as amalgams of body and soul. Being intuitive dualists as we are, what could be more reasonable than to conclude there are two worlds as well, a physical world our bodies are part of and a spiritual world to which our souls belong but populated by other beings as well? And since our souls, when we wish to, may move our bodies and affect things in the material world, then surely the line that divides the worlds is permeable to spirits, ghosts, and gods as well, their wills made magically manifest. It is this intuitive, universal picture of things, of two bound yet divided worlds, one plain to our eyes, one hidden from them, which stands behind the local, cultural elaborations of folklore, myth, and fantasy.
3. Types of Fantasy
The line the counterintuitive draws can not only divide worlds but define types of fantasy as well in a manner that resembles Mendlesohn’s classification closely enough that her terms can be applied. Three of these four subgenres depend on the line’s presence; those she calls liminal, intrusive, and portal-quest (which I will call portal); the remaining subgenre, immersive, implies the line.2
Intrusive fantasy sees the magical released and coming across the line into our world as in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It or Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Liminal fantasy is structured around and about the line, dancing along the border as in Hope Mirlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist or John Crowley’s Little, Big. Portal fantasy has us crossing the line and going into the magical otherworld (and usually returning home) as in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. (Mendlesohn’s notion of portal is subtle enough to allow her to treat Lord of the Rings as a portal fantasy, at least for the hobbits; but while there are aspects of the tale that fit this model, I will treat it as belonging to the next category.) Immersive fantasy takes place entirely across the line in an otherworld where magic is possible and often taken for granted as in Conan’s Hyborian Age or Tolkien’s Middle-earth. In these, the line is not depicted within the tale as a limen that may be crossed by characters, but lies implicit between the story and its audience, making a portal of the book or in folklore the opening line (“Once upon a time ... “).
It is interesting to compare this typology with the more informal one from A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy (Searles, Meacham, and Franklin 1982). A sequel to their similar guide to sf, it was compiled by the owners of The Science Fiction Shop in answer to reader’s requests for more fantasy not by a favorite author (as they found was the case for sf) but of their favorite kind, and so it presents a sort of folk taxonomy of fantasy. Naturalists, in the making of their more formal taxonomies, often find the way the locals classify the local creatures, their folk taxonomy, worth listening to (though not definitive), and the results of this folk taxonomy match Mendlesohn’s fairly well. “There and Back Again” is clearly synonymous with portal fantasy, “Beyond The Fields We Know” with immersive fantasy broadly defined, and intrusive fantasy with the next two categories, “Unicorns In The Garden” and “That Old Black Magic,” the latter being supernatural horror differing in emotional tone but not structure from the former.
Searles and his coauthors have no type that corresponds to Mendlesohn’s liminal fantasy; they classify Lud-in-the-Mist as “Beyond The Fields We Know” and Little, Big as “Unicorns in the Garden.” But they do list two kinds of fantasy that Mendlesohn does not, which do not quite fit her scheme. The first of these, “Bambi’s Children,” are stories in which animals speak, a class of tales popular in folklore and literature around the world. Mendlesohn does not discuss this type; Clute and Grant do, separating stories further by whether they take place in an otherwise realistic world, as in Felix Salten’s Bambi or Richard Adams’s Watership Down or in less realistic venues where either beasts are protagonists, such as The Wind In The Willows, or humans are such as the Narnia books or Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs.
It is the first sort that is the most problematic; Clute calls it “animal fantasy,” yet goes on to say that “To tell a pure [animal fantasy] is, ultimately, to depart from fantasy” (Clute 31 1999) because of its unrelenting realism in all respects but that of animals speaking. Magic is not involved, and the fantastic element might seem minimal; after all, we ourselves are talking animals. But this is a sophisticated, scientific view; we feel in our bones a greater gulf between ourselves and other animals than Darwin would allow, not simply a difference of degree but of kind. I have said that the counterintuitive may defy both intuitive physics and intuitive biology, and this would be a case of the latter, a transgression of our sense of natural kinds. And, as we shall see, there is even evidence that the minimally counterintuitive might be better remembered and ways to test the hypothesis. If it is true, then animal fantasy might be considered a sort of immersive fantasy set in an otherworld within ours in which the animals take their own speech for granted. Perhaps it deserves its own category; if so, it would be an important type of tale, for though narrow in scope, its emotional appeal can be profound especially in childhood. However we place it, because it has such impact, it should not be ignored.
The other type the Reader’s Guide lists is labeled “Once and Future Kings, Queens, and Heroes,” fantasies based on the enormous corpus of myth, legend, and folklore we have inherited from millennia past. Mendlesohn, though not treating this as a separate kind, does say something in her discussion of magic realism that seems relevant. She treats books such as Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude with its taking of magic for granted as immersive fantasy for a foreign audience; but for its original Latin American audience, she suggests “it is a representation of a ‘once world’ similar to the ‘once world’ of classical mythology” (Mendlesohn 106). Similarly, when discussing immersive fantasies that “create a universe within the world and stories the reader already knows” (Mendlesohn 99), she cites Greer Gilman and others as using fairy tales and folklore in the same way; and though she does not use the phrase “once world” in this connection, what could be more of one than the setting of stories that start, “Once upon a time, when wishes came true and magic could do some good ... ”?
Nor is our Western oral tradition the only one set in such a once world. The most famous is perhaps the Dreamtime of Australian aboriginal tradition, but the anthropologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama lists many other examples of what she calls “distant time” from foragers around the world and considers it a potential cultural universal (Scalise Sugiyama 201). Such globally scattered tales of distant time also typically feature examples of our other potential type, talking animals, who in this bygone era also spoke with us; and even our Western, written tradition presents a speaking serpent with whom we shared the lost once world of Eden.
Mendlesohn says, however, “I shall not discuss fairy tales here, because they take place in the realm of fancy, rather than fantasy; their magic is part of the background context of the world, even though they disrupt the lives of the protagonists” (Mendlesohn 146), again drawing on Gary K. Wolfe’s distinction. Wolfe proposed coherence as that which distinguishes fantasy from fancy, and Mendlesohn complains of fantasy that lacks it as in her criticism of the Harry Potter books as not having “a system of magic” (Mendlesohn 63). This seems a bit odd, given that her vigorous disagreement with Clute’s view of the recent vintage of fantasy appears only two pages before this passage. It seems odder still given that she is willing to regard magic realism as a form of immersive fantasy because of its thinning world and its characters’ easy acceptance of the fantastic, despite its incoherence and lack of internal logic or system, when she earlier identified coherence as one of immersive fantasy’s characteristics (Mendlesohn 71).
I would myself define immersive fantasy in a broad sense, as simply taking place entirely in an otherworld. Narnia is an incoherent world, a motley grab bag of Classical and Norse figures mixed with Father Christmas and talking animals, assembled into a world unified only by Lewis’s love for its elements, whose diverse origins stick out like the Cowardly Lion’s tail from his stolen uniform. On the other hand, Middle-earth was worked over carefully by Tolkien, adjusting every inconsistency, such as the anachronistic New World tomatoes of the first edition of The Hobbit. But both Narnia and Middle-earth are still otherworlds, and Narnia is arguably more so, since it is not an earlier stage of our world, as Middle-earth is. And despite Narnia’s incoherence, The Horse and His Boy, at least, is an immersive fantasy rather than a portal fantasy, like the later Oz books which started and ended there. (Nor would I cite Oz as a coherent otherworld.) In this light, it might be best to regard coherence as an optional feature of immersive fantasy, and a defining one of a secondary world, which evokes a “secondary belief” in its readers through its “inner consistency of reality,” as Tolkien said (Tolkien 46-8 ).
But even if we leave Mendlesohn’s terminology aside, we may still take the hint of her passing reference to once worlds and perhaps consider both magic realism and fairy tales, along with myths and legends in general, as immersive fantasies, invocations of otherworlds separated from us (or their original tellers) by time. In this broad sense, one not requiring full secondary world status, immersive fantasies can also be set in “lands of fable” as Clute calls them (Clute 558 1999), as in Arabian fantasies such as William Beckford’s Vathek or Oriental fantasies like Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds. Once worlds may also feature in portal fantasies involving time travel to them, as in the visit to Atlantis in E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, and intrusion fantasies that feature the survival or revival of their denizens, such as Lancelot and Merlin in Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot.” (And though obviously not once worlds, fantasy realms such as Clark Ashton Smith’s far future Zothique are also temporally displaced from us; one might call them, by analogy, “hence worlds.” But these are rare and modern save for the millennial or apocalyptic visions of religion, hence worlds which offer tableaux rather than stories after the final tale of their arrival.
Finally, there are immersive fantasies set in entirely imaginary once worlds lacking even the fig leaf of legend, earlier realms that have been forgotten entirely. These include perhaps the two most influential milieus in modern fantasy: the Hyborian Age “undreamed of” that Conan wanders is one such, and it is easy to forget that the Ages of Middle-earth before the elves sailed into the West also belong to this type, rather than a true secondary world with no connection to us. Once worlds, therefore, continue to be central to modern fantasy, as well as being its historical sources. Once worlds have bequeathed us most of the materials of modern fantasy, incoherent though they may be; and as Brian Stableford reminds us (xxxvi-xxxviii 2005), no other genre is as close as modern fantasy to its roots in oral tradition and myth, and its principal concern for the past few centuries has been reworking and refitting this armory of antiquity for a modern age.
4. The Borders of Fantasy
To conclude this charting of the territories and further test this proposed definition of fantasy, we should explore the boundaries and discuss stories and books often regarded as fantasy even though nothing impossible, fantastic, or supernatural happens therein. Searles and his colleagues list such books as The Mouse that Roared, one of Leonard Wibberly’s comic novels of Grand Fenwick (a tiny imaginary country lost between the borders of European geography like Ruritania, Latveria, and their kin), or Islandia, Austin Tappan Wright’s novel of a larger imaginary land in the South Pacific. These compromises with geography, like the lost worlds of Haggard and Burroughs, violate, not deep intuitions, but only our current maps. Excepting Florin in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride which hosts a miracle, and Kôr, in Haggard’s She which hides immortality, these tales of imaginary countries might better be called geographic romances, romance being a term allowing some liberty with fact. (The television series Lost, a very late newcomer to this tradition, is the exception in that the counterintuitive happens in abundance but is framed as science fiction till the end of its run, when elements of posthumous fantasy intrude, making it an odd amalgam indeed. )
Less eccentrically, Searles et al. list Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, often included as fantasy by other sources (including Mendlesohn) even though they often admit, as Clute puts it in the Encyclopedia ‘s entry for Peake, that “there is nothing literally fantastic” in the lives of its characters, and that, in the first volume at least, the world it depicts is “exaggerated (but not impossible)”[Clute’s emphasis]. He goes on to compare it to a Gothic fantasy “stripped of all intrusions of the supernatural, until only impacted ambience remains” (Clute 749 1999); this sense, shared by others, that it feels like fantasy, is not to be dismissed, but it is perhaps best considered in a following piece on fantasy’s emotional roots. Otherwise, his case is that it “closely resembles a secondary world,” a self-consistent setting totally autonomous and independent of our world.
While this strays from the common definition (and Clute’s own) of fantasy as concerned with the impossible, it has at least one defender. This is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose definition states that “fantasy is ahistorical.... Sometimes the worlds described in fantasies have histories, but they do not connect with our own. Fantasies are not alternative history but alternative reality” (Robinson 54–55). This, however, cannot cover tales featuring magic in our world, magic entering ours from another, or our entrance into worlds where magic works, all fantasy by common consent and perhaps a majority of fantasies. It does not even cover “Black Air,” the story for which he won the World Fantasy Award, set during the time of the Spanish Armada. And it is not clear that some stories mentioned as potential nonfantastic, secondary world fantasies are either nonfantastic or set in a secondary world.
To return to the Gormenghast trilogy, the first two books leave open the possibility that it is set on an Earth removed in time. And in the third book, with its death rays and satellites circling the moon, it becomes clear, as Colin Greenland says (Greenland 617), that it is so removed and science fiction of some sort. And the novella “Boy in Darkness,” featuring an encounter by Titus, the central character in the books, with the Lamb, a being capable of paralyzing others with his mind and transforming men into beasts by his touch, is clearly fantasy, unless it is sf that looks like fantasy as in Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books, or is taken as a dream as it is referred to in its first appearance in Sometime, Never. (It is, however, an odd dream that continues from other characters’ points of view when the putative dreamer falls asleep within it.) But whatever it may be, it is not a member of the potential class of fiction we are considering.
Perhaps the most prominent other candidate is Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, often considered the paradigm for “the fantasy of manners” first discussed by Don Keller. Set in an imaginary country with no use of magic, it would in isolation seem a perfect example of a nonmagical fantasy, were it not that in the sequel, The Fall of the Kings, it is revealed that magic does indeed work in this world though that fact has been concealed. As for those books following in its footsteps, Jo Walton has suggested that all of them “have overt, definite, magical magic” save Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, which has a magical ritual ambiguously presented, and her own Tooth and Claw with a cast made up entirely of dragons (Walton 2004).
Perhaps the best fit for this potential category I know of might be Shardik by Richard Adams set in the imaginary Beklan Empire. While the title character of Shardik is an immense bear taken for a god, and Clute refers to him as having “paranormal powers,” all alleged supernatural events in the book can be regarded as misperceptions by his believers. But even here, Clute suggested that the novel may be set in the future of our world (Clute 5 1999) while others have proposed that it is set in our unremembered past. Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn comes close, but while its magic is “marginal” (Clute 785 1999), it remains magic. While stories set in secondary worlds without magic or the supernatural are clearly possible, prominent and unambiguous examples seem hard to find, and most might perhaps best be considered imaginary world romances by analogy to those set in imaginary lands that we have discussed, leaving fantasy to deal with the impossible, or as I have phrased it here, the counterintuitive.
5. Maps of Legends
We may regard fantasy as a natural genre about unnatural things, featuring powers, objects, beings, and places that defy our intuitive expectations of physics and biology and are therefore universal throughout our species’ range in time and space. Expectations are also culturally instilled and therefore can vary over time and space, building cultural genres on top of this foundation. But beneath that is a layer which remains constant and common (though never commonplace) beneath the cultural variations.
We see this intuitive sense of the impossible in the reactions of speechless adults at magic shows and literally speechless infants who goggle at similar illusions in experiments. Natural phenomena that violate such expectations include both physical ones such as shadows and reflections, and psychological ones such as trances, dreams, and visions. Yet we do not regard these phenomena as wholly enigmatic; we think of them as otherworldly, belonging to a realm where the psychological rules the physical as our minds magically rule our bodies. We appear to naturally project an instinctive dualism onto the sensible world to divine another behind it as we naturally divine souls behind faces.
The structural subtypes recognized by Mendlesohn depend on the essentially dualistic picture of reality I have sketched as the basis of fantasy and are implicit in it. This picture shows us our world and an otherworld (or worlds) separated by a border—stories may happen in our world as it once was or will be, or in an otherworld as in immersive fantasy; in both, involving the transfer of power or beings from one to the other as in portal or intrusive fantasy or around or along the dividing limen, as in liminal fantasy. Mendlesohn also suggests connections between the once worlds of myth and fairy tales and magic realism while I suggest regarding also the lands on the maps that Howard and Tolkien drew as much as the Dreamtime and Eden, as otherworlds similarly found in the past that anthropologists call “distant time.” Such worlds are filled with animals that speak as are all the other types; even our own can host them in immersive fantasies such as Watership Down, set in wainscot worlds within our world.
Finally, we looked at the borders newly redrawn to this standard to see whether it accords with the general sense of readers in the field as recorded in such folk taxonomies as that of Searles and his coauthors. The most frequent exceptions are what I have called geographic romances such as those of Ruritania or Islandia, imaginary lands neither blessed nor infested by dragons and not an often requested category. Imaginary, secondary but resolutely nonmagical worlds with no connection to Earth might be reckoned fantasies, as they are by Kim Stanley Robinson but seem uncommon. The Gormenghast stories might seem the most prominent example, but on closer inspection, they seem more like science fiction set in a forgotten past or dreadful future on our own world or another. (And to condense a discussion into a parenthetical remark, though weird, interstitial, slipstream, and equipoisal fictions are becoming more common, those deploying magic or supernatural creatures seem to me at least liminal fantasies whatever else they may be as well.) Otherwise, this account seems in good accord with previous popular and critical maps of the territories fantasy comprises, populating them with wizards and gods, ghosts and dragons.
The sixteenth-century globes that bears the legend “Here are dragons” have it placed on the south-eastern coast of Asia (Van Duzer ibid.), near the island of Komodo, famed for giant, predatory lizards which may have occasioned the caption (McCarthy xxi–xxii). But in making a map that locates the dragons of fantasy, we chart a different archipelago, one that sprawls across leagues of space but dives down through epochs of time as well, individual islands rising from their shared evolutionary base in distant time, a once world with talking animals, our ancestors. On this chart, the realms of fantasy are a myriad of isles, a host of diverse shapes and sizes, each offering a different prospect above the shore. But their peaks fall away beneath the waves of the present, beneath the shallows of history, beneath the abyss of ages, down to their common root, and ours.
David Swanger lives in Mobile, Alabama.
Works Cited
Bleiler, E.F. “Definitions.” In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. Edited by Jack Sullivan. New York: Viking, 1986.
Bloom, Paul. Descartes’ Baby. New York: Basic Books, 2004
Clute, John. “Adams, Richard.” In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant, eds. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
——. “Animal Fantasy.” ibid.
——. “Face of Glory.” ibid.
——. “Fantasy.” ibid.
——. “Lands of Fable.” ibid.
——. “Peake, Mervyn.” ibid.
Greenland, Colin. “Peake, Mervyn.” In Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers. Third edition. Edited by Noelle Watson and Paul Schellinger. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1991.
Kim, Meen. “Oldest Globe to Depict the New World May Have Been Discovered.” The Washington Post, August 19, 2013.
Livingston, Michael. “Modern Medieval Map Myths.” Strange Horizons, June 10, 2002. <strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/modern-medieval-map-myths-the-flat-world-ancient-sea-kings-and-dragons/>
McCarthy, Dennis. Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Plant and Animal Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009
Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008
Peake, Mervyn. “Boy in Darkness” (1956). In Sometime, Never. New York: Ballantine Books, 1957.
Pinker, Steven. How The Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Notes for An Essay on Cecilia Holland.” Foundation 40, Summer 1987.
Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle. “Distant Time: A Possible Typological Literary Universal.” <literary-universals.uconn.edu/2017/01/31/distant-time-a-possible-typological-literary-universal/>. Accessed 24 June 2017.
Searles, Baird, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin. A Reader’s Guide To Fantasy. New York: Avon Books, 1982.
Stableford, Brian. Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Swanger, David G. “Shock and Awe.” The New York Review of Science Fiction #233 (January 2008).
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories” (1947). In The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.
Van Duzer, Chet. “Hic Sunt Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
Walton, Jo. “Fantasy of Manners.” <papersky.livejournal.com/191023.html> Dated 31 August 2004; currently inaccessible.
Wolfe, Gary K. Critical Terms For Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
——. “The Encounter With Fantasy” (afterword). Evaporating Genres. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
1 In a footnote to his survey of monstrous cartography, Smithsonian expert on historical maps, Chet Van Duzer, states that only one map and one globe have the legend. Writing before the finding of the eggshell globe, he points to the metallic Hunt-Lennox globe, which now appears to be a copy. But he identifies the map as one found “in a manuscript of Jean Mansel’s Les Fleurs des Histoires that was created circa 1460–70,” which has the slightly different legend, Hic sunt dragones. (notes 8, 9)
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