By Weronika Mamuna
Portal fantasy is a subgenre in which a magical, fantastical world co-exists right alongside a disenchanted reality. Those two planes of existence are strictly separate, except an occasional crack or rift allowing people to move from one to the other. Portal fantasy protagonists start out in a mundane, typically un-magical reality, only to fall out of their world and into a different, fantastical one. In this way, these narratives mimic the experience of the reader, who also gets transported into a magical world via the medium of a book. Thus, portal fantasy can be seen as perhaps the purest distillation of escapism, which Tolkien famously defended in his essay On Fairy Stories, saying: “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” (later paraphrased by Ursula K. Le Guin in a more famous formulation, “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?”).
In order to showcase the fantastical setting, portal fantasy frequently makes use of a quest structure: the protagonists try to obtain or achieve something (usually: defeat a tyrant ruling the land or find a means of getting back home), and that goal requires them to travel far and wide across the magical world. The quest is so strongly tied to portal fantasy, that in her 2008 book The Rhetorics of Fantasy, SFF scholar Farah Mendlesohn ties them into one category: the portal-quest fantasy.
By stepping across the portal, the protagonist leaves their home world behind and enters a radically different, often entirely unknown space. This alternate world, however, is not a mystical gateway to the protagonist's instant freedom, agency, and self-determination. According to Mendlesohn, the quest is usually strictly delineated, with the protagonist dependent on information from the realm's denizens and prophecies. When the Pevensies end up in Narnia, a family of beavers tells them about the tyranny of the White Witch and the prophecy concerning the “Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve”, while later on they follow the advice of Aslan. This type of narrative is usually pretty simplistic: Aslan will not turn out to have been misleading the children, and the White Witch is not guided by motives that the reader can empathize with. The goal of the journey is frequently a restoration of the proper status quo by putting the proper ruler or their heir on the throne. The wonder of a magical realm does not mean autonomy, and the coming of age achieved in the course of the journey frequently boils down to recognizing the wisdom of the elders.
Perhaps precisely because the protagonist’s actions are influenced by a higher power, they frequently enter the otherworld not of their own volition, and after fulfilling their designated task they get sent back to where they came from. It’s rare for them to decide to go on a quest on their own (though it does happen in books such as The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, or Neil Gaiman’s Stardust). The return home can however be seen as a final confirmation that order and harmony have been re-established. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the critic John Clute introduces the term thinning to denote a crisis in which magic slowly vanishes from the world and things are no longer the way they should be. The existence of a portal heralds the arrival of a savior-hero destined to rescue the magical land – but the existence of the portal itself is a symptom of the existing order's breakdown. Restoring everything means reverting everything. The hero, too, must leave; the borders between realities must be closed off again.
This story structure makes the reader resistant; after all, we also get transported to another world when we start reading a novel. If we keep reading, it means we want to stay in that world. We want the book to be as long as possible, and better yet to be a part of a series or a cycle. Portal fantasy makes the metaphor literal, but in its classic form it continuously reminds the reader that the escape is temporary. The freedom they attain by crossing the border from one world to the next is temporary and in fact strictly delineated. At some point the powers that be will force the reader to put down the book, get some sleep, go to school or to work and become a productive member of the society again.
Newer authors, however, approach the portal fantasy with self-awareness. They know their literary forefathers (with many references to The Chronicles of Narnia for instance), the conventions of the genre, as well as the themes and subtexts it carries. This insight allows them to subvert norms and contest the messaging of the earlier texts, presenting new solutions to the tensions and conflicts fundamental to the genre.
One of those tensions is between remaining in the magical world or going home. If the protagonists are allowed to remain, like in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (1997) or Dorota Terakowska’s Władca Lewawu [The Lord of Lewaw] from 1989, it frequently turns out that they have secret lineage that makes them a part of the fantastic. A somewhat more subversive approach can be found in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy (2009-2014), whose protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, looks for an escape from a privileged but monotonous existence. He tries to find meaning in magic, first in the magical college of Brakebills, and then in a fantastical realm of Fillory, which he read about as a child (in this way, the series draws from both portal fantasy touchstones such as Harry Potter and Narnia, as well as from the experience of being a reader of portal fantasies). This search is, however, in large part unfruitful: the university structures fall away and lead Quentin to the malaise and aimlessness of adult life, the divine authority figures turn out to be untrustworthy if not outright malevolent, culminating in an act of deicide of the twin creators of Fillory. The various signposts of portal-quest narratives guiding the protagonist’s coming of age turn out to be deeply insufficient to achieve meaning and in the end Quentin finds it on his own, rekindling his childhood sense of wonder, reconnecting with his lover Alice, and embarking on an exploration of a brand new fantasy land. If it’s unsatisfying, it’s because we never felt that Quentin truly engaged with Fillory – as Sam Reader astutely observed back in Typebar Magazine Issue 4, the series struggled to address Quentin’s material and cultural privilege and the way they impacted his relations with anything outside of himself. This rendered his quest too unmoored from reality, culminating in him setting out to explore a realm that’s a complete blank canvas.
A similar narrative can be found in Marcin Guzek’s short story A wy nie chcecie uciekać stąd? [And Do You Not Want to Get Out of Here?], opening his 2007 linked short story collection Królikarnia [Rabbit Warren]. The main character, Adam Niezgoda (whose name references the protagonist of the 1946 Polish magical school classic, Akademia Pana Kleksa [Mr. Inkblot’s Academy]), is a happily married corporate employee. He is however dissatisfied with his orderly and seemingly idyllic life. He starts suspecting his wife of an affair and his boss regularly mobs him and sets him impossible expectations. In his spare time, Niezgoda likes to listen to sung poetry and read Alice in Wonderland. These passions suggest an only partial adaptation to a life focused on material success, and a desire for more. At a certain point Niezgoda begins seeing the specters of a White Rabbit and Mad Hatter. At first he takes them as meresymptoms of a mental illness, but eventually they assist him in getting revenge on his wife’s lover and fulfilling his boss’s demands. Eventually, the duo helps Niezgoda escape into a magical world on the other side of a rabbit hole.
(Interestingly, in further stories the Mad Hatter – an alter ego of Niezgoda himself – features as a henchman of the Polish armed forces subjugating the magical realms. Escape is never absolute; the fictional worlds we want to escape to are being sold to us by the same system we seek to escape from. Rather than the flight of the prisoner, as Tolkien would have it, escapism might more resemble a walk along the walls of the prison courtyard.)
A more grounded look at what makes people want to escape from reality can be found in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children novella series (2016–current). The first installment, Every Heart a Doorway, starts out as a follow-up to a typical portal fantasy narrative: it’s set in a facility for children who went to magical lands and then came back, and who need support in adapting to reality again. The following installments jump backwards and forwards in time, focusing on various side characters, depicting their first and subsequent escapades into fantasy lands. The overall series paints a picture of children pushed aside and neglected (because of queerness, neurodivergence, body size), overwhelmed by expectations they’re unable to fulfill – who gladly leave the ordinary world behind when a portal opens, particularly when the world on the other side seems tailor-made to suit their personality and interests.
But while the series explores the children’s desire to escape, it also depicts the problems that it can engender. Although the first volume presents a return to the magical world as something positive, the subsequent ones (at least up until volume 5) paint a more complicated picture. The Moors, where the twins Jack and Jill end up, is a cruel place that has its own rules and while Jack can engage in her passion for science under the supervision of Doctor Bleak, Jill gets groomed by the vampiric Master and raised to be a monster. Though some of the worlds presented in the series seem friendlier than others, they all mold the protagonists into one specific role – such as Nancy, turned into a living statue in an underworld populated by the dead, which eventually becomes her sole ambition. In other worlds, the fantastical realms can sometimes be flat and much simpler than the real world.
As Mendlesohn writes, the worlds on the other side of the portal are essentially static, assembled out of areas and cultures that remain the same, easily explicable so that they can be fully comprehended by the protagonist in the course of their quest. They don’t really have a history, aside from a golden age and a period of decline which can be reversed at the end of the story. If we transpose the opposition between the center and the periphery that Eden Kupermintz wrote about with regards to secondary-world fantasy in Typebar Magazine Issue 6 onto portal fantasy, then the real world is the center and the fantastical realms become the periphery. This isn’t far from the discursive strategies of orientalism: just like the Eastern cultures in the Western imagination, the magical worlds are repositories of historical greatness that cannot be matched by current inhabitants – they cannot overcome evil and tyranny on their own, and require a hero from elsewhere to help restore them to greatness. Those similarities are used and subverted for instance by Diana Wynne Jones in her 1998 novel The Dark Lord of Derkholm, which centers on the peaceful inhabitants of a fantasy land who get enslaved by a businessman from the real word and forced to play the role of various NPCs for the benefit of tourists pretending to embark on a magical quest.
This typical way of depicting magical worlds is also problematized in the works of the aforementioned Maciej Guzek. The story which concludes his short story collection is focused on the brutality of the Poles who turn into colonizers and exploiters of the fantasy worlds located on the other side of the rabbit holes. His follow-up novel, 2009's Trzeci Świat [Third World] continues in a similar vein. It’s a faux reportage set in a world controlled by the Polish army, divided between a wealthy and lawful North and a chaotic, destitute South. This division, similar to the divide between Global North and Global South in reality, gains a metaphysical dimension, as the world of the novel is influenced by the radiation from two suns, the Mother and the Whore. The expanding influence of the latter can be seen as reflecting the anxieties of the Global North as it faces the consequences of the colonial politics of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as the ongoing extraction of economic and natural resources from the South. As the protagonist of the novel makes his way into the South, this seemingly natural division is more and more undermined, although it remains uncertain whether this is due to his own shifting sympathies, or the influence of the evil sun.
The colonial dimensions of portal fantasy are also grappled with in Alix E. Harrow’s 2019 debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. The novel centers on January Sculler, a girl of mixed heritage raised by a wealthy guardian, who discovers the existence of magical doors, as well as a mysterious society that tries to destroy them after plundering the lands on the other side. The story has a visibly anti-authoritarian bend and critiques many of the portal fantasy conventions described up to this point: the passages between worlds are depicted as something natural and existing since the dawn of time, and the protagonist is fully capable of opening and restoring them. This power is intimately tied to creativity and imagination, as January has to write down that the door opens for it to open for real. At the same time, through much of the plot she is guided by a document of the past (in fact the whole novel turns out to be a similar document, created to restore another character’s memory), and her power comes from her magical heritage. And the worlds on the other side of the portal are static, frozen in time, simplified: an idyllic archipelago whose inhabitants devote their lives to sailing and science; a savage world in which a tribe of leopard women wage eternal war against ogres; a hidden city populated by refugees from the real world. Even in a novel as self-aware as The Ten Thousand Doors…, the genre conventions find ways to re-assert themselves.
The complicated relationship between mundanity and magic, reality and fiction, the center and the periphery, are prominently displayed in one of the best portal fantasy novels: Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979). In the second half of the novel, Bastian is charged with rebuilding Fantastica destroyed by the Nothing. With each wish he makes, Fantastica gets restored, but at the cost of one of Bastian’s memories. As a result, he slips further and further into madness, proclaims himself the new emperor, attacks his friend Atreyu and ends up in a picture mine, looking for images that will allow him to remember who he is and return home. The worlds to which we escape are screens onto which we can project our desires and anxieties, but they aren’t necessarily places that we can live and form actual relationships in. What The Neverending Story demonstrates clearly is that these other worlds are worth anything only inasmuch as they help us to connect to other people – like Bastian does at the end, when he brings the Water of Life to his father.
Then there are other books, such as Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series (2011–2016) starting with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, that try to find a balance between fantasy and reality: their protagonists straddle the line between the worlds, travelling freely to and fro. This is still, however, a change on an individual scale. The divisions between worlds remain unchanged.
As I hope I've demonstrated, portal fantasy underwent some significant changes throughout the decades – particularly, I think, in the 21st century, when a new generation of authors started to subvert the more didactic, coming-of-age structure of The Chronicles of Narnia, and indulge the impulse to escape. Perhaps it had something to do with the increasing popularity of nerd culture, the notion that you don’t have to “put away childish things” once you grow up, that you can still fantasize and play. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the very notion of “growing up” became complicated, the traditional milestones of starting a family, beginning a career, or buying a home no longer as attainable as they once were. Or perhaps it’s because there is a bit more freedom now to lead one’s life in ways less typical.
But still it seems like the tension at the heart of the genre, the question of escapism, has not been resolved once and for all. It’s a question formulated by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1974 essay Escape Routes (the same one where she paraphrases Tolkien): “From what is one escaping, and to what? Evidently, if we’re escaping a world that consists of Newsweek, Pravda, and the Stock Market Report, and asserting the existence of a primary, vivid world, an intenser reality where joy, tragedy, and morality exist, then we’re doing a good thing, and Tolkien is right. But what if we’re doing the opposite? What if we’re escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a simple cozy place where heroes don’t have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured – like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony.”
The fantastical realms of portal fantasy too often feel phony – simple, flat, shallow. In order for Le Guin’s proposition to be achieved, an “intenser reality” of a “primary, vivid world”, we need an interplay of both here and there, reality and fantasy, and a further interrogation of portal fantasy conventions – or maybe a complete reformulation. Thinking about this problem, I can’t help going back to two novels from a century ago: Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). While they can’t quite be called portal fantasies, they both feature magical lands bordering “the fields we know”, to borrow a phrase from Dunsany. Both feature protagonist’s venturing forth from their mundane reality – and their coming back heralds a seismic shift, the blurring of the borders, the unification of the worlds, in which reality itself becomes enchanted and magical. Perhaps this is the hope and potential that lies unused deep in the heart of every portal fantasy: not an escape, but a tearing down of walls and turning the prison into something different.
Weronika Mamuna – a writer, critic, and editor from Poland. Her essay "Bodies of Mass Destruction: Gender, Personhood, and Violence in Trans Speculative Fiction", out in Strange Horizons, was longlisted for the BSFA Award.