“Doors are important. What we find on the other side matters even more.”
September 25, 2018 6:54 AM   Subscribe

Portals in Science Fiction & Fantasy [Kirkus] “The most obvious definition of portals—doorways to other places—is too simplistic to convey the true nature of them. Sometimes those places are real, but far away. Sometimes they are fantasy worlds that shouldn't exist but do. Sometimes they are physical, sometimes metaphorical, mere plot devices to advance the story. They could take many forms, from holes in the ground, to mirrors, to large constructs big enough to fly a starship through. Sometimes they aren't about traveling distance at all, but instead are about traveling through time. In fantasy novels, portals tend to be ways for characters to pass from their world (usually our own) to a fantastical secondary world.”

• 8 Truly Transporting Portal Fantasy Novels [Barnes & Noble]
“Portal fantasy thrives on the crossing of the threshold; when characters make the leap into the unknown, fueled by any number of emotions—loneliness, desire, boredom, adventure, revenge, ennui. What’s on the other side though, is where the story starts. Wonder hums through our characters, like electricity in their blood, and they are enamored with the new world before them, filled to the brim with magic, color, light, and most of all, opportunity. The chance to be someone else, or become who they’ve always wanted to be, or even just to live away from who they were. Portal fantasies endure because, by escaping from who or what they’ve been told to be, our heroes are given the chance to really learn who they can be. Below are some of our favorite portal fantasies, from the classical to the modern. Each, in their own way, deals with the central question that thrums through the subgenre: who am I, and where do I belong?”
• Walk through this portal with me into another world [io9]
“One of the other problems with portal fantasies is that they are sometimes sheer wish fulfillment. The world on the other side of the portal is new Narnia or the perfect eco-feminist utopia of Woman on the Edge of Time. Or they fulfill a slightly creepier fantasy, like John Norman's Gor series, where our nerdy scholar finds himself on an alternate Earth where all women are slaves and men are leather-wearing masters. Either way, these stories offer portals to worlds that seem too simplistic. They also give us only one perspective: That of the displaced human, the outsider, looking in on another world from the perspective of tourist or prisoner. In the classic portal fantasy, nobody immigrates through the portal. Nobody jumps out of the portal into our world and says, "What the hell, people? This is some crazy shit. I've got to get home."”
• Coping with Destiny: The Chosen Children of Portal Fantasy [Tor]
“But what about those kids? What about the chosen ones who find out that they’re less lifelong companions, and more Christmas puppies, abandoned as soon as they aren’t little and cute anymore? What about the chosen ones who can’t get over what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, what they’ve been required to do? For me, the unrealistic thing about Narnia wasn’t that they found it at the back of a wardrobe; it was that only Susan eventually turned her back on something that had rejected her so utterly and unforgivably. But. But. If every portal fantasy starts with our world—not just the Dorothys and the Pevensies and the Wendy Darlings, but the Megans and the Sarah Williamses and the kids from Dungeons and Dragons: The Series—then how many damaged, traumatized former “chosen ones” would we have to deal with? ”
posted by Fizz (48 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not sure how much Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy counts as a portal fantasy, but it's worth a recommendation. There's not so much a door or a portal that our main characters pass through, so much as they're instantly transported to another place and time.

More directly related to portal fantasy, Child of a Hidden Sea by A. M. Dellamonica is full of kickass women and pirates. Lots of fun and worth your time.
posted by Fizz at 7:06 AM on September 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Describing doors is also important.
Dagless: "The doors of Darkplace were open. Not the literal doors of the building, most of which were closed. But evil doors. Dark doors. Doors to the beyond. Doors that were hard to shut because they were abstract and didn't have handles. They were more like portals really."
posted by logicpunk at 7:24 AM on September 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


Not a single use of the word "liminal". It's like they're not even trying.
posted by Leon at 7:25 AM on September 25, 2018 [18 favorites]


Not a single use of the word "liminal". It's like they're not even trying.

Defenestrate them!
posted by JohnFromGR at 7:41 AM on September 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


There's reddit.com/r/ImaginaryPortals also, for an occasional dose of portal related art.
posted by polywomp at 7:42 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Portals, you say?
posted by belarius at 7:47 AM on September 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


But what about those kids?

Relentlessly Mundane by Jo Walton, a short story about the kids who came back.
posted by fings at 7:51 AM on September 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


I just finished reading Exit West, which is sort of a portal novel, but a lot more, and a lot more complex, and tells us a lot about our current world and ... just read it. It’s fantastic.
posted by lunasol at 7:56 AM on September 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


(dad joke)

Did you hear about the amazing scientific invention that lets you see THROUGH walls?

(take a pregnant beat)

Window
posted by sammyo at 8:09 AM on September 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Not a single use of the word "liminal". It's like they're not even trying.
Yet somehow they brought that word to your mind anyway, without even a subdued direct use, via some subconscious means instead. That sort of wordplay is more subtle, yet may be even more sublime.
posted by roystgnr at 8:14 AM on September 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


In a way, a lot of classic horror stories are essentially portal fantasies, but the trouble is that things are coming out of the portal because some fool left it open (e.g. Hellraiser, Poltergeist, Lovecraft's most influential stories) and ordinary people have to leave their mundane lives to deal in arcane rituals and seal it shut.

Terry Pratchett was famously down on portal fantasies, but he did write the Johnny Maxwell books, in which an ordinary kid from a dying British town finds vast weirdness in his everyday life and solves the problems he can solve with insight, compassion and the help of friends. He's not a very special boy, or misunderstood or mistreated; he's just someone who has a lot of time alone and sees what he looks at. I liked that about him.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:21 AM on September 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is a kind of portal fiction, though more dimensional and less portal.
The "Long Earth" is a (possibly infinite) series of parallel worlds that are similar to Earth, which can be reached by using an inexpensive device called a "Stepper". The "close" worlds are almost identical to "our" Earth (referred to as "Datum Earth"), others differ in greater and greater details, but all share one similarity: on none are there, or have there ever been, Homo sapiens – although the same cannot be said of earlier hominid species, especially Homo habilis.
It's a great read and really fucks with your mind as only Pratchett and Baxter can do.
posted by Fizz at 8:26 AM on September 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I liked the premise of the secondary world in Roofworld, which was that people in London never look UP*. Once you do you're involved and it all kicks off...

* Once I moved to London I of course looked up all the time.
posted by Artw at 8:30 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Now we're portals with thinking!
posted by zamboni at 8:41 AM on September 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Stephen King's Dark Tower series is full of doors to other places, mostly between our world (and variations thereof) and Roland's world, and the second book concerns itself with locating some of these doors, learning what they can do (not just allowing people to pass back and forth between the worlds, but entering someone's mind and even controlling them in a sort of Being John Malkovich way), and eventually uses the doors' properties to heal one of the ka-tet's psychologically-damaged members.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:10 AM on September 25, 2018


In regards to the last link, I'm still so freaking annoyed that _Every Heart a Doorway_ took such a great premise and then wasted it on a dull and bad murder mystery. The setup was great! The details of the various worlds were often interesting and sometimes heartbreaking! And then it collapsed like a bad souffle into "we'll all just stand around while someone murders us for unconvincing reasons".
posted by tavella at 9:24 AM on September 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


Now if someone can give me a cogent explanation for the differences between the worlds in There Are Doors that would be grand. Wolfe’s narrators are always unreliable, but they’re usually not plain schizophrenic.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:40 AM on September 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Portals of course play a pivotal part Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, where they are referred to as Farcasters.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:52 AM on September 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


If you're looking for a good portal fantasy, I cannot recommend Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus highly enough. It's lovely and creative and fun, but also has the kind of psychological depth one really appreciates.
posted by suelac at 9:53 AM on September 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


(Drat! That will teach me to NOT read the referenced article before posting. Exuberance gets me every time!)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:54 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


One of the first SF&F books I ever read was The Forgotten Door, where a bit from another planet falls and accustomed activated an ancient teleportation portal. Except the exotic planet he ends up on its Earth, and human civilisation does not come off very well.

Currently I'm reading Foz Meadows' "An Accident of Stars" where a girl from Australia follows a strange woman through a portal, and finds herself in a fantasy world where...she's no one special. She's not a Chosen One, just a teenaged girl who's mostly irrelevant to the larger goings on, and just wants to survive long enough to go home. Which at this point seems far from guaranteed. In spite, or perhaps because of this, the story seems rather compelling.
posted by happyroach at 10:02 AM on September 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


First thing I did when using a TiltBrush was to make myself a magic door.
It's a 3d thing, so I could walk around it.
Then, of course, I stepped through.
posted by doctornemo at 10:19 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I prefer General Jack O'Neill's term, "the old orifice"
posted by Ber at 10:32 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yet somehow they brought that word to your mind anyway

You assume I read the articles. I commented 30 minutes after the post. Very borderline.
posted by Leon at 10:41 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I really loved A Million Open Doors which starts off as a fun scifi otherworld but quickly turns into an exploration of the economic effects of globalization.

Everyone talks about heroes and monsters going through magical portals, but does anyone think about a few tons of gold or worse yet, thousands of tons of manufactured goods or millions of tons of grain? Yeah. That's right.
posted by GuyZero at 10:49 AM on September 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


There's always the Spike Milligan school of transference of place, in which it is understood that since a door is a device that allows you to pass from one place to another place, what those places actually are for a specific door is largely irrelevant and can be ignored freely. Neddie Seagoon could, if the script called for it, open a door in the Himalayas and emerge in a flat in Croydon.

Of course, he'd also find Eccles living in the basement of his trousers and throw a calendar at him to send him into the following year.
posted by delfin at 10:53 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Great stuff. I remember briefly touching on the subject when tutoring a course on Children's Lit at uni, but there is so much to mine on the subject, whole courses can be developed around it.
posted by New England Cultist at 11:02 AM on September 25, 2018


Not one mention of the Guardian of Forever? C'mon, folks!
posted by DrAstroZoom at 11:06 AM on September 25, 2018


Another recc for Exit West. Picked it up completely randomly and went through it in just a couple of days.
posted by curious nu at 11:17 AM on September 25, 2018


Portals!
posted by mbrubeck at 11:25 AM on September 25, 2018


There are portals in the Bay Area, but they're really just one end of a tunnel. There's the portals on the Alameda-Oakland tunnel (which is called the Tube). San Francisco has several East and West Portals, and a whole neighborhood called West Portal.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:41 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


My house has a few more doors than Doars.
(I've heard all the puns, but go ahead if you want to)
posted by mdoar at 12:20 PM on September 25, 2018


Is The Vanishing Tower a portal? It's been so long since I read the Elric series...
posted by Chuffy at 12:54 PM on September 25, 2018


Any kind of Soft Spot would be, I would guess.
posted by Artw at 12:57 PM on September 25, 2018


Everyone talks about heroes and monsters going through magical portals, but does anyone think about a few tons of gold or worse yet, thousands of tons of manufactured goods or millions of tons of grain? Yeah. That's right.

On a similar track, I've been playing around in my head how one would set up a banking system in a world where time travel exists. How the bank branches would interact, how entities would deposit and withdraw. How funds could be maintained over time and through different political and economic systems, etc.
posted by theartandsound at 12:58 PM on September 25, 2018


a banking system in a world where time travel exists

Exists for whom?

But this is sort-of touched on in The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
wherein the Rothschilds et al are actually investment agents of time-travelling witches.

Also, what if the portal was... PEOPLE?
posted by GuyZero at 1:27 PM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I went to the McDonald's portal and ordered a McGuffin. They said, "Nice Freudian slip," and transported me to Farador.
posted by Chuffy at 3:00 PM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, what if the portal was... PEOPLE?

The portal was inside you all along.

I went to the McDonald's portal and ordered a McGuffin. They said, "Nice Freudian slip," and transported me to Farador.

Good thing you didn't order

*whisper* sliders
posted by curious nu at 4:49 PM on September 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


I love portal stories; I even got a story about them in the now sadly defunct WorldSF blog (it's about small annoying portals; selflink)
posted by dhruva at 6:56 PM on September 25, 2018


happyroach, I came here to mention The Forgotten Door, but I don’t think humanity comes out too badly. The majority of humans Little Jon meets are good and helpful, but of course there are bad people as well. As often happens with juveniles (at least those written in the ‘60s), the good guys and bad guys are pretty sharply delineated. It is still one of my all-time favorite books, definitely formative of my love for science fiction.
posted by lhauser at 7:12 PM on September 25, 2018


No mention of Gateway, which doesn't have portals per se, but rather a bunch of abandoned alien spaceships that, if you can get them to work, will take you to....somewhere else. Fantastic series.
posted by zardoz at 9:30 PM on September 25, 2018


Also, what if the portal was... PEOPLE?

Paging cstross.
(Actually the first series if his books I really got into before the Laundry Files, and it’s wonderful)
posted by daq at 9:31 PM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


And because I just realized that they aren’t mentioned in any of the linked articles:
The Merchant Princes Series
posted by daq at 9:34 PM on September 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


In the classic portal fantasy, nobody immigrates through the portal. Nobody jumps out of the portal into our world and says, "What the hell, people? This is some crazy shit. I've got to get home."”

• Coping with Destiny: The Chosen Children of Portal Fantasy [Tor]
“But what about those kids? What about the chosen ones who find out that they’re less lifelong companions, and more Christmas puppies, abandoned as soon as they aren’t little and cute anymore? What about the chosen ones who can’t get over what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, what they’ve been required to do? For me, the unrealistic thing about Narnia wasn’t that they found it at the back of a wardrobe; it was that only Susan eventually turned her back on something that had rejected her so utterly and unforgivably. But. But. If every portal fantasy starts with our world—not just the Dorothys and the Pevensies and the Wendy Darlings, but the Megans and the Sarah Williamses and the kids from Dungeons and Dragons: The Series—then how many damaged, traumatized former “chosen ones” would we have to deal with? ”


His Dark Materials anyone?? Has both of these things.

Also, Dr. Who is a big ol portal story with smaller portal stories inside it sometimes.
posted by bleep at 12:19 AM on September 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


And the thing about His Dark Materials is that the kids have smart, caring adults who help them cope by helping them grow up & learn stuff & learn to understand what happened to them & understand the world. The way grown ups are supposed to.
posted by bleep at 12:23 AM on September 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Everyone talks about heroes and monsters going through magical portals, but does anyone think about a few tons of gold or worse yet, thousands of tons of manufactured goods or millions of tons of grain? Yeah. That's right.

There's an episode of SG1 that did this. They tip the Stargate on its side and pour tons of grain straight into it like a funnel. Always thought that was a very smart bit of "logical extension of the tech" - like beaming warheads onto an enemy bridge.
posted by Leon at 12:44 AM on September 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Just mentioning Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle which has portals. I read the series years ago and remember enjoying them.
posted by Pendragon at 1:22 AM on September 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Every Heart a Doorway (and associated books) by Seanan McGuire is all about what happens to the children after the adventure. Which I now see has been mentioned further up, although I have a much more positive view of it.
posted by clockworkwasp at 6:32 AM on September 26, 2018


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