Today sees the release of Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land (Amazon US/Amazon UK), the concluding chapter of his excellent Magicians series. Over at the A.V. Club, Grossman discusses 5 favorite magic portals in fantasy fiction, with some interesting insights into our fascination with doorways to other magical places or dimensions:
There’s an appeal to those portals, and it’s always been extremely primal to me. Even when I was 8 and read The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe for the first time, it hit me like a truck. Of course this can’t possibly be all there is. There has to be some alternative to this world that’s all around me. If I could just look in the right direction, I could see it. There’s something so seductive about that idea, and I knew I had to write about it at some point. I remember reading [the first book in] A Song Of Ice And Fire in the ’90s and thinking, Martin has remade epic fantasy completely. He’s taken the Tolkien tradition and transformed it. Nobody had done that for the C.S. Lewis tradition, which has always had more of an air of middle-grade fiction about it. Could you take that idea of the portal fantasy and drag it into adulthood? What would it look like? That’s where The Magicians came from, trying to reengineer that subgenre for adults.
Grossman mentions just a few of the famous magical portals from history, but when I began to think about it, the idea of magical portals is amazingly prevalent, from fantasy right through to science fiction (hence the Stargate image at the top of this post).
It’s a genre that has always appealed to me, so if you’ve got some favourite ‘portal fiction’ to share, please do so in the comments!
Link: Lev Grossman lists his 5 favorite magic portals in fantasy fiction
