Adult portal fantasy - reasons for exploring

[sholio]

I was in a brief discussion elsewhere (locked post) about adult portal fantasy and how it needs to come back, and after that, I got to thinking about character arcs for adult portal fantasy protagonists. I feel like MG/YA portal fantasy usually has a fairly inherently built-in arc - growing up/coming of age - and in addition to that, you don't really need a reason for why kids would leave it all behind to start over in a new world. Kids are inherently curious, investigative, and not very well connected to the world they came from (that is, they don't have jobs/dependents/etc), and naturally have a lot of free time to explore any portals they might find.

So this led to thinking about why adult characters might go through portals to fantasy worlds in the first place - not that one wouldn't want to, necessarily, but you get very different types of characters depending on how and why they got there in the first place.

I ended up with three basic categories of "ways people get to fantasy portal worlds," plus one theoretical one that I can't think of any examples of, but it seems fundamental enough that there OUGHT to be examples.

• Accident (wrong place, wrong time)
• Escape (getting away from enemies, a depressing life, etc)
• Pursuit (went there on purpose because there's something they want)
• Manipulation (the theoretical category: someone made them go there or kidnapped them and took them there)

More on this under the cut, with examples and some random thoughts on the sorts of characters or character motivations you might end up with that way. This is basically brainstorming for some kind of half-assed project that I don't even have a plot or characters for, just kind of spitballing ideas.

These also overlap quite a bit; a lot of canons mix more than one of these.


Accident - The character just happened to be there when a portal opened, fell/jumped/walked/got sucked in, and now they're trapped. This type of character could like their new setting and want to stay, or desperately want to get back, or some combination of the two. Either way, they're completely unprepared for it, physically and emotionally, and have only whatever they have in their pockets and occasionally in their vehicle if they managed to bring one.

There's a pretty straightforward example from Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series - WWII serviceman Paul Janus Finnegan (who, like most of the author's heroes, has the author's initials) stumbles across a portal while exploring a bombed-out farmhouse, steps in, and finds out he can't go back. PJF likes this one, because I can think of at least a couple more of his books/series that are just "some guy falls through a dimensional portal into an alternate Earth/weird magic place/etc."

I have the general feeling that there's a *lot* of this in MG because "kid randomly discovers a portal or falls into one" is so relatable to kids. It's going to be a bit more disorienting or scary and perhaps less of a fun fantasy for most adults. Still, I feel like this one was pretty common in 80s-style portal fantasy of the "ordinary schmoe discovers a fantasy world" variety.


Escape - The character is running from something and the portal is their way out. It could be active pursuit (the law, an enemy, etc) or simply a life that they hate and want to get away from. Either way, the portal offers a step to something they didn't have before: safety, a new life, etc. These characters usually don't want to go back, even if it's just that they have nothing to go back to. They might be unprepared or they might have brought at least some supplies, but either way they're desperate enough that they care less about dangers in the new world than in the one they left behind.

Eddie in Dark Tower is this. Robert Wolfe in World of Tiers is also sort of this (a retiree in a loveless marriage seizing the opportunity to go through a gate in search of something better) with elements of Pursuit which he's not fully aware of yet.


Pursuit - The character really *wants* to get to the fantasy world because there's something there they want. It could just be the world itself; this is the one for people who came from the fantasy world in the first place and are trying to get home. Or maybe something valuable to them has been taken there, and they have to get it back. These characters are probably as well prepared as they can be, and have some supplies, weapons, etc with them. They also usually have at least some idea of what they're going to and what they want to do when they get there.

This is a YA example (but one that would also work for an adult), but the movie Labyrinth is this: Sarah's baby brother has been kidnapped and she wants to get him back. Zelazny's Amber is not precisely portal fantasy, but it's basically this - Corwin doesn't quite realize at first why he wants to leave Earth and go to Amber so badly, but he knows he wants it. (There are also elements of escape, since he's being chased at the time.) And Landover (Terry Brooks) is this: the protagonist bought a magic land, and therefore goes there with the intentional goal of taking possession of the fantasy kingdom and trying to rule it.

I feel like this one is probably common in adult portal fantasy because it gives the protagonist more agency than the other types, and usually some sort of built-in Maguffin, goal, or endpoint.


Manipulation - The character is being coerced, forced, or manipulated by someone whose main goal is to get them to the fantasy world. It seems like there HAVE to be examples of this, but I'm drawing a blank on anything. Obviously the protagonist has little agency here, which might be why it's rare.

Update: Actually, I *did* think of a couple of these, where the mechanism for getting to the fantasy world is that they were magically snatched from their original world by someone who thought they were important or necessary. Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger books are this - I was thinking of them as the "accident" type, but actually now that I'm thinking about it, the protagonist was effectively kidnapped from our world into a fantasy world by a wizard who thought he had magic powers.


Edit - new type supplied in comments:

Punishment - Characters forced to go through portal by the legal system as a mandated punishment.



Thoughts, examples, anything I've forgotten?

Comments

[yhlee]

I'm 90% sure that Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame portal fantasy is Manipulation - in book 1, The Sleeping Dragon, the characters (a group of college RPG players) are kidnapped into the fantasy world by the GM, who is also a wizard in the other world. They spend the rest of book 1 trying to get back home, and then the rest of the series takes place in the magical world because they decide to stay.

I feel like isekai (anime or manga or light novel) actually has a LOT of Manipulation or similar. IIRC in Sword Art Online, all the characters are basically VR MMO players who get trapped in the fantasy world by the malicious and/or possibly psychopathic programmer who designed the system. Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, which is a deconstruction of the genre, might be a partial example - not only do the characters wake up in their medievaloid fantasy world without having chosen to go there, they seem to mostly have amnesia about their former lives (hinted at hauntingly through things like a character whittling an airplane) and never recover their memories. (It's a deconstruction for other reasons, like the revelation that the mook goblins that they've been killing for cash quests in typical murder hobo fashion have a culture and mourn their dead.) I'll ask Joe in the morning if he can think of other examples - he watches/reads more isekai than I do.

Terry Brooks' Magical Kingdom for Sale - Sold is mostly Escape, I think - Ben Holiday is leading a miserable loveless life after his wife died, and he wants to start over.

I desperately want to write a portal fantasy novel now. *sob* I think I could have so much fun with one!!

[rydra_wong]

I've been thinking a lot about rachelmanija's Haunting of Hill House post and the discussion there, and it occurs to me that Eleanor is really a prime candidate for portal-ing, and Hill House does in the end kind of sort of act as a portal in a horrific way (categories: Escape, and certainly Manipulation).

[helen_keeble]

I think Die (the comic) falls into the Manipulation category - initially it seems to be an accident (teenagers playing an RPG with haunted/eldritch dice that pull them into the game world), but later on things get considerably more complex. In a way that means I, uh, am still not entirely sure what the heck was meant to be going on, but I enjoyed the ride anyway!

[ursula]

Die and Max Gladstone's Last Exit both have a setup where the protagonists visited another world as young people (teens for Die, early twenties for Last Exit), something went wrong, and now they have to go back to fix what they broke.

You're right that Die fits Manipulation, and I think the initial visits in Last Exit fit Escape/exploration, but "you broke it, you fix it" kind of feels like a trope on its own.

[helen_keeble]

What was the Charlie Stross series with someone from our world discovering portals to a parallel fantasy realm with congruent geography, which ended up getting exploited for real world benefit in increasingly unexpected ways across the series? It kinda took portal fantasy and ran it through a hard SF “let’s think of the consequences of this technology” lens.

I bring it up because it’s one of the rare examples I can think of where the protagonists can _freely_ travel between the two realms via portals, rather than in taking a lot of effort to get from one to the other. I kinda wonder if that free-travel system makes it easier to do adult protagonists, since (if you want your protags to end up in the fantasy realm) one doesn’t have to go through great contortions to explain why a full grown adult has no ties keeping them in the real world.

[philomytha]

The Merchant Princes series! That was the first thing I thought of, taking a portal fantasy and having the characters move back and forth with technology transfers and so on.

ETA: As with a lot of Stross's series, I really liked the first couple of books, but then it got increasingly depressing and dismal as everything seems to tend towards More Awful and the fun goes out of it.

[lunabee34]

The Outlander series begins as the accident type.

[sholio]

Oh, that's right! Actually I think nearly all time travel romance and a lot of portal-ish romance in fantasy and SF romance is basically this - everygirl heroine (usually) falls into hero's world.

[anna_wing]

Andre Norton, Witch World - Escape category. Post WWII protagonist is running from some serious enemies, finds a fixer who promises a way out, which turns out to be the Siege Perilous, which turns out to a one-way gateway to another reality. Subsequent books in the series would probably be considered YA today, but this one had fully-adult protagonists. Also the heroine of Barbara Hambly's Antryg Windrose novels, and the protagonists of her first three Darwath books.

I'd think that most portal fantasies involving adults, that aren't about accidentally falling through, would be about adults who are in some way disengaged from their milieux. Otherwise, your average first-world person with career and family responsibilities is probably more likely to report the portal to the nearest appropriate municipal authority or media organisation than to pack their pocket-handkerchief and a Swiss Army knife and go adventuring.

[sholio]

I'd think that most portal fantasies involving adults, that aren't about accidentally falling through, would be about adults who are in some way disengaged from their milieux. Otherwise, your average first-world person with career and family responsibilities is probably more likely to report the portal to the nearest appropriate municipal authority or media organisation than to pack their pocket-handkerchief and a Swiss Army knife and go adventuring.

Yeah, that's basically what I was thinking, and why I started wondering how other adult portal fantasy handled that problem! There's a lot more of a built-in reason for kids and teens to go exploring, but most adult lives make it more difficult.

[epeeblade]

I just wanted to recommend some classic Barbara Hambly novels. She has two series I would consider adult portal fantasy, and while one is extremely dated now, I still highly recommend them. That's the Silicon Mage. The other series is The Time of Dark Series. And I realize she has a third series that would work as well: The Rainbow Abyss.

[sholio]

Rainbow Abyss is actually the other one I was thinking of for the Manipulation category! It absolutely threw me for a loop when I read it as a teen; at that time I was not used to fantasy going that dark in a real-world way. (I think it would be less startling now, though I suppose nothing really prepares you for "your protagonist is helping with the Holocaust.")

Time of the Dark is a longtime favorite which I haven't reread in a really long time!

[ursula]

I reviewed Kate Elliott's forthcoming novella The Keeper's Six recently. This is a Pursuit story (the protagonist's adult son has been kidnapped and she needs to negotiate for his release); the background involves a family business centered around using and guarding portals.

[heavenscalyx]

I think the Thomas Covenant books were manipulation type -- IIRC he was essentially summoned.

[viridian5]

Donaldsson's Mordant's Need series (The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through) are also adult portal fantasy, though it's been so many decades since I read them that I no longer remember for sure which type it is: I think escape (from a meaningless life) would fit but I'm not sure about manipulation.

[ducened]

Rachel Neumeier's Death's Lady series, starting with A Year's Midnight, is definitely an adult portal fantasy. IIRC it has two varieties of categories - I don't remember which of those four, because it's been a while since I've read, but I believe pursuit is not one of them.
I appreciate the series because on both sides of the portal people are competent & have lives; no one is ~pining~ to be carried away on a Calgon-scented wave of fluff.

[snickfic]

I think Piranesi would count for your theoretical category.

[skygiants]

lol, I am attempting to draft one of these right now! my gimmick revolves on the 'actually came from/tied to the portal world originally' which I guess you have under the 'pursuit' subheading? The Princess Diaries of portal fantasy -- it turns out my father was secretly a prince of the realm etc. and now I've got to go assume my responsibilities -- which I feel like must be an existing portal fantasy trope but maybe I've just mentally ported it in over from Ruritanian romance ...

Anyway the aspect I'm leaning on while trying to write an adult portal fantasy is much more of a riff on the YA portal fantasy, in that the primary portaler is a young adult with a Destiny and the POV character/protagonist is her mother who refuses not to be involved in the situation; this is Our portal fantasy adventure now! What I really want to do is try to use portal fantasy to mess around with feelings about immigration and diaspora and culture clash, but we'll see whether I actually achieve any of it.

Anyway: adult character, children's book, but the backstory for both Howl and Wizard Suliman in Howl's Moving Castle appears to be escape, lol ....

(Would you count older gate-to-fairyland variations like Lud-in-the-Mist as portal fantasy? 'there's a gate over there and everyone knows about it' is slightly different, I suppose, than 'there's a hole in the world right here and nobody knows about it but me.')

[sovay]

What I really want to do is try to use portal fantasy to mess around with feelings about immigration and diaspora and culture clash, but we'll see whether I actually achieve any of it.

I support this endeavor entirely and want to read it.

M. John Harrison's "The East" (1996) posits an influx of refugees from a secondary world, for whom we are the portal of escape; the narrator thinks the old man he's interacting with in London is post-Soviet, until it becomes apparent that he's really not. (The narrator handles it badly.)

Anyway: adult character, children's book, but the backstory for both Howl and Wizard Suliman in Howl's Moving Castle appears to be escape, lol ....

I always assumed Howl blew himself into Ingary by accident/experimentation, doing his PhD on magic in a world where it wasn't supposed to work; it was just such a nice escape after that.

[edit] How can I have left this comment and forgotten about The Homeward Bounders (1981)?

(Would you count older gate-to-fairyland variations like Lud-in-the-Mist as portal fantasy? 'there's a gate over there and everyone knows about it' is slightly different, I suppose, than 'there's a hole in the world right here and nobody knows about it but me.')

(I would if it is not a necessary component that we see the world on the other side of the portal: if having the portal there and people passing through it is enough.)

[genarti]

I might add Altruism -- someone decides to go because they think the fantasy world needs help they can provide -- although there's certainly overlap with Manipulation and/or Pursuit, there. (And of course, as others have said, the protagonist needs to be disconnected from their ordinary life enough to sign up to go, although it's possible they think this is a short-term trip, and even that it actually is.)

Barbara Hambly's Darwath books probably fit more under Manipulation than anything else, but altruism is a factor too. (And then, of course, Pursuit is what keeps them there.)

Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry might be YA or adult -- I'm not sure how it was originally marketed -- but either way it's got protagonists in grad school and reads to me as fairly adult , just of its era. (Either way, I think if it were being rewritten in the modern day it'd be easier to shade it adult than to shade it modern YA, though ymmv.) A wizard invites the protagonists to come to the fantasyland for a week because he needs to present the king with otherworldly visitors for a festival for internal political reasons, which he's quite open about, though there's room for interpretation in terms of how truthful he's being about underlying motives; anyway, then the plot happens, and they stay rather longer than a week and a whole lot more happens than a festival, but the original plan was a short-term visit for reasons that had nothing to do with grand destinies and saving the world.

(Also, I love portal fantasies and hope they make a comeback! Would love to write one, too. Some of my unfinished childhood stories were attempts to do something interesting with the portal fantasy tropes, although since I was like 14 the word "interesting" can only be used with affectionately generous airquotes.)

[rachelmanija]

Fionavar was definitely marketed to adults.

I guess Altruism could be considered a variation of Pursuit, though it feels different to me.

[recessional]

Manipulation - The character is being coerced, forced, or manipulated by someone whose main goal is to get them to the fantasy world. It seems like there HAVE to be examples of this, but I'm drawing a blank on anything. Obviously the protagonist has little agency here, which might be why it's rare.

I'd say Neverwhere, if you're glossing "coercion" under this heading. Richard Mayhew is dragged into the whole thing through largely other people's choices and goals and as part of [spoiler]'s manipulations.

The Fionavar Tapestry is quite CLASSICALLY this - while you could argue there are tinges of your "pursuit" in that the manipulation that Loren Silvercloak uses is "hey did you know there's an AMAZING fantasy world that you could come explore as Special Guests?", it's still Silvercloak doing it, he's absolutely manipulating the SHIT out of them for his own purposes (which are arguably noble, but are still his own), and Dave in particular is literally dragged along at the finish.

Being as all of Lyra and Will's actions were "meant" to bring them to the point of being the next Adam and Eve, arguably the portal elements of that work match this, tho that's less clearly an "adult" book.

[boxofdelights]

How about being forced by the legal system to go through the portal as punishment? Would that fit better under Manipulation or Escape? I can think of two examples: Susan Palwick's The Necessary Beggar, and Nalo Hopkinson's The Midnight Robber.

[sholio]

Oh, that's a good one, thank you for supplying it! There's an SF example in Julian May's Pliocene Exile series, in which the discovery of a one-way portal to the Pliocene soon becomes used as a one-way criminal removal system, with people being surgically sterilized and sent to the distant past. (This is, of course, a fantastic idea that in no way could have negative consequences.)

[sovay]

Kids are inherently curious, investigative, and not very well connected to the world they came from (that is, they don't have jobs/dependents/etc), and naturally have a lot of free time to explore any portals they might find.

I wrote a short story which has adults in a context of portal fantasy, but it started when the character from our world was a child.

Manipulation - The character is being coerced, forced, or manipulated by someone whose main goal is to get them to the fantasy world.

Stories of people lured or kidnapped to Fairy should work as this subtype. Unfortunately the first recent example with which my brain presented me was T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones (2019) which I actually did not especially like (comments full of spoilers), but I know there are others.

[sholio]

I also had a lackluster reaction to The Twisted Ones - write-up here. But you're right that there are definitely portaling aspects, and The Hollow Places by the same author is also portal horror.

I will check out the short story!

[definitely_not_an_alb]

Very in favour of more portal fantasy for adults.

The Reckless Books by Cornelia Funke (which is at least NA, no matter how much everyone keeps mis-shelving it) are several of these categories – as a teen, the protagonist flees to the fairy tale world from his neglectful mother and to search for his father who he is convinced has abandoned the family for the other world. By the time the first book starts, he’s an adult and accomplished adventurer in the employ of the world’s rich and powerful, and his younger brother and his fiancé have followed him into the magic world and immediately gotten themselves horribly cursed. So obviously the protag and his trusty foxshifter companion have to save them now.

I think this example is interesting because the central conflict is Will and Jacob's difference in this: Jacob is a classical Escapee and wants to stay in Mirrorworld as much as possible, but for Will, who likes the theoretical idea of Mirrorworld, it becomes a trap the moment he sets foot there, and as the book points out at lenght; Will is not made for this world, as little as Jacob is made for ours. Jacob has to fight to get him back to our world, because (for reasons) the longer Will stays, and the longer the curse holds, the less Will wants to leave. Since the novel begins in Mirrorworld there's a strong level of Pursuit here, it's just a pursuit to get back to the wrong world posited in the category here. And then there's how Jacob's whole thing is Pursuit. He's a treasure hunter, in Mirrorworld, but also as a smuggler to collectors in ours. And of course he wants to find his and Will's father.

On a semi-related note, I'm a sucker for reverse-portal-ing (so people from the fantasy world coming to the modern world) and alternative universe hopping, which I don't see much of now that there's less Gimmick of the Week SF anymore. Though admittedly I especially like those in fanfic and am not actively looking for them.

[ducened]

A Year's Midnight is definitely that! "What if a fantasy person came into The Real World?" - she gets to talk a therapist, that's what. She's originally in a very pleasant mental facility, eventually moves into Real World (California, IIRC) and gets an appropriate job as an instructor at a martial arts dojo.

[madripoor_rose]

The first of the The Owl House series finale specials had Dr. Noceda follow her daughter and her friends through a portal to the Demon Realm because she's not going to let them fight The Collector alone, and feels responsible for getting the witchy kids back to their parents. I thought it was very cool that we didn't get the usual coming of age scene with a parent trying to forbid a Chosen One from completing their quest...protecting their child, and the child becoming an adult by defying them and going anyway. The mom just gets her baseball bat and comes with.

[yhlee]

Oh, I thought of one - Henry Kuttner's The Dark World (possibly co-written with his wife C. L. Moore, they were apparently loosey-goosey about that)

One moment, I looked him up and he DIED in 1958, jeez I did not realize How Long Ago he was. Anyway.

The Dark World is a portal fantasy in which Our Hero, apparently an Earth fighter pilot in WWI or similar, is recovering from an injury and has visions of another fantasy world. He goes into the fantasy world only to discover that he has a fantasy counterpart there and they're vying for control over his body and what to do. Wikipedia has a better summary:

The protagonist is airman Edward Bond, who discovers that he shares his body with an alternate version of himself, a despotic wizard named Ganelon. Bond travels through a portal into the fantastical alternate dimension and enters a conflict: the Coven (consisting of a sorceress, a werewolf and an immortal) fight for Ganelon while the white witch Freydis leads a rebellion against him. Trapped between the two sides, Bond/Ganelon battle for supremacy over their shared mind and the fate of a world.

(The original reason I sought this out was that Zelazny stated it was an influence on him, especially Amber.)

So, this sooooort of has elements of "Earth person discovers that they're 'actually' 'from' the fantasy world originally and didn't realize it."

[yalumesse]

The only one I can think of that hasn't (I think) been mentioned already is Terisa in Stephen R. Donaldson's Mordant's Need* I can't decide quite what category she falls into: She's basically sleepwalking through life when someone turns her mirror into a portal and asks her to come because they think she's a sorceress. Probably closest to Pursuit, though it's very lacklustre - she doesn't really want anything (at that point) beyond a vague interest that it might offer something different from her dull life.

*These books... have a number of Problems when read now (they were written in the 80s), but I haven't re-read it recently enough (read: this decade) to make an accurate list.

[lilacsigil]

Maybe a combination of Pursuit and Manipulation? But yeah, she's very passive at that stage.

[frith_in_thorns]

There's one in totally blanking on the name of (The Mirror Empire? Shattered Empire? Something like that) where one fantasy world invades a parallel reality through portals. They were after something specific I think and there was a lot of killing of the counterpart people - I actually very much didn't like it so my memories are unclear. But it's definitely Pursuit!

Starless Sea is a really lovely one, and has examples of several of your types (it's stories-within-stories structure). I'm actually having trouble classifying the primary protagonist though! Mostly Pursuit I guess? But with shades of all four! (I strongly rec this one to you if you haven't read it. The author is friends with the Fallen London people and drawing on several of the same sources.)

[frith_in_thorns]

Also, would Spinning Silver count? It's of the "accidentally struck a fae bargain, now being collected as payment" type. With one of the other characters travelling very much as Escape.

[ilyena_sylph]

Okay this is really funny, because I am right in the middle of listening to The Spellsong Cycle (I've read them several times, but this is my first listen), and the titular character of the first book is a fascinating mix of 'Accident', 'Escape', and 'Manipulation'.

Anna Marshall is a divorcee, a teacher and performer in the music department at Iowa State University, with two living adult children (and one recently deceased adult daughter), who in the middle of a very bad day makes the mistake of thinking she'd rather be anywhere than in Ames, Iowa about to be rained on just before a performance -- while on Erde, two half-trained late-teenagers attempt a spell to summon a 'powerful sorceress' from "the mist worlds" in an attempt to avenge one of them's father.

Because they're ridiculously lucky, they get Anna instead of a terrible death. Anna, who wasn't a sorceress at all, but because music is sorcery on Erde, is already the best trained sorceress that planet has ever seen.

Shit ensues, epicly.

[rachelmanija]

There's a rare category of portal fantasy in which the world is the protagonist - they may think they're there for any of your reasons, but the actual journey is into themselves. A Castle of Bone by Penelope Farmer, for instance. A related category is traveling to a world the protagonists created themselves or think they created.

[sholio]

I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever read one in which the world is literally the protagonist, though I do think I've read ones in which the protagonist created the world and you're right, that's probably a separate category of its own.

[yhlee]

Oh - I think Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest is Pursuit? People going into the magical world in search of their life partners. (I always think of this book as "magical tattoo as venereal disease"...)

[viridian5]

There's the whole genre of isekai, which isn't all YA. I'm currently reading The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, which is manipulation and coercion all the way through: the same System that reincarnated the protagonist, Shen Yuan, against his will after his death into a particular character he knows has a really terrible end in the novel he read but is also forcing him to do certain things in-character. Yuan is in his 20s.

[mikeda]

"Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" (H Beam Piper) falls in the "Accident" category. Someone from our world is accidentally transported to one of the many alternate Earths.

"Silverlock" (John Myers Myers) is portalish ("Accident" category) although the actual means of getting to Commonwealth at least seems mundane.