Tough Traveling: Portal to Another Land
The Thursday feature “Tough Traveling” is the brainchild of Nathan of Review Barn, who has come up with the excellent idea of making a new list each week based on the most common tropes in fantasy, as seen in (and inspired by) The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynn Jones. Nathan has invited anyone who is interested to come play along, so be sure to check out the first link for more information.
This week’s tour topic is: Portal to Another Land
Fantasyland often has some unique entry points; not every traveler is born within its boundaries. It is a regular event for someone from a non-magical place to suddenly find themselves in this world of dragons, magic, and danger.
Mogsy’s Picks:
I have been totally slacking on Tough Traveling for the last few weeks, hopefully I’ll make it up to my co-bloggers today with a mixed-bag of varied titles featuring portals to strange, wondrous lands.
Protagonist Oscar Britton is an army officer working for the military’s Supernatural Operations Corps, tasked to monitor people with magic powers and take them down if they lose control. But then he himself suddenly manifests a power which allows him to summon portals, a rare and prohibited magical power. Oscar immediately comes under US government surveillance, sent to training in a fortress located in the source, an alien world that can only be reached via portal.
One of Lev Grossman’s original thoughts when he wrote The Magicians was to build on the work of C. S. Lewis, arguably the master when it comes to portals and portal travel. In fact, his magical land Fillory even has strong echoes of Narnia, which characters in The Magicians trilogy access via portals (not through a wardrobe though).
The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler
You’ve heard the saying that books are portals to new worlds, and in The Forbidden Library series this is literally true. “Readers” like our young protagonist Alice have powers that allow them to jump in and out of books, entering their worlds to defeat monsters trapped in them.
Protagonist Brianna Hai lives a double life as necessitated by her own very nature. By day the half-human, half-fae young woman runs an occult shop selling innocent knickknacks to tourists, while hanging in her home is a magical painting which acts as a portal between our real world and the world of the faerie, where her father the High King Leu of Fae lives.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
Speaking of double lives, in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, Karou is an art student attending classes in Prague, but behind the scenes it is revealed she was actually raised by four chimaera living in a workshop that straddles a trans-dimenional plane between the real world and an otherworld called Eretz. The workshop has a portal directly to Eretz, but also ones that can lead all over the world.
Dinocalypse Now by Chuck Wendig
And now for something completely insane and quirky. When the heroes of the Century Club were called in to prevent the assassination of FDR, the last thing they expected to face was a whole bunch of portals opening up all around the world, leading to another time and another place. Out comes a legion of psychic dinosaurs led by their leader, Khan the Conqueror Ape.
All her life, our teenage protagonist Jessica Drake has dreamed of other worlds. Some of them are like our own, while others are bizarrely alien. The only person she’s told about them is her younger brother Tommy. When he is kidnapped by a strange creature though, Jessica realizes there may be more to her dreams. To rescue Tommy, she must travel through a portal and brave a whole new world.
The BiblioSanctum 
I like portals, though portals through fantasy lands makes the fantasy book meh sometimes
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For me it all depends on the book. I can’t really say I like or dislike all portal fantasy, because every one I’ve read treats the subject differently.
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Oh, love the variety of your picks. 🙂
One book that always cross my mind when I think of portal fantasy is Weaveworld by Clive Barker. I read it when I was kid and I vaguely remember the plot, but that scene with magic carpet? I remember everything about it.
Others that come to mind… Coraline/Neverwhere by Gaiman, Chronicles Of Amber by Zelazny, Miserere by T. Frohock, Rifter series by Ginn Hale…
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Oh yes, one thing I was missing from my list was a bit of horror. Never tried Clive Barker, but would really like to!
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Oh wow. I couldn’t think of any to add to this list (thankfully Mogsy covered it), but now you are mentioning all ones I have read with some great examples of portals to other worlds.
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AH yes the Exile is the perfect book for that. The books by Sandy Williams as well… well almost all the books with faes
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I thought Exile was a great one for this. And the fact her portal is a painting in her house! LOL!
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Great list. As a portal fan, you’ve given me some new books I need to try out.
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Hopefully there were a couple that stood out for you!
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Oh, I wanted to do this one 😦 But I fell ill and totally spaced out about it. Control Point would have been on my list as well. I was also thinking about Feist’s Riftwar saga.
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Control Point was the first one that came to mind, funny enough! But that part of the book with the fortress in another world really stuck out for me.
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Great choices! I definitely need to check some of these out.
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Thanks! I just checked out your choices, and now I need to add more portal books to my TBR! Great blog too, btw! 🙂
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Yay for Daughter of Smoke and Bone! 😀 The Magicians is still on my TBR list. I should make a point of reading that one soon…
I guess the many portals to Narnia would be the givens this week, right? Apart from that… Wow. This one’s harder than I thought. I might have to think about it some more…
Unless computer games count. In that case, MYST. 😉
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As soon as I saw the topic, I knew Daughter of Smoke and Bone needed to be on my list 😀 And I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on The Magicians. It got a lot of mixed reviews. I was somewhat ambivalent about it too, but I have to say the books got better and better in the trilogy!
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I’ve loved this trope since Narnia! I have to check out The Magician at some point, it’s so popular I can hardly believe I haven;t read it yet. So happy to see ADOSAB on this list, I love that book! The Forbidden Library and The Exile also looks fantastic *madly adds to list*
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The Magicians is VERY popular! But the reviews I’ve seen are very mixed. Like I said in my reply to another comment, I was ambivalent about it too. It had a great start, but the middle flagged and then it became just a bunch of annoying hipsters doing nothing and complaining about how bored they were. But the books got better! Final book was my favorite of the trilogy!
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I was sure that The Magicians would end up on a few of these. My feelings on that book are well known these days but it is a portal.
I could have actually made a whole list of portal fantasy that DIDN’T work for me and it would have been easier. That said, I do want to read Control Point some day, I think it would be more my bag.
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Yeah I remember how you said you did not like The Magicians. I am with you on that. I did continue the series and it got a lot better though, thankfully. In any case, I put both books that worked and didn’t work for me on this list, makes for good variety 🙂
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I like the sound of The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I would though because I love Narnia 🙂
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The Magicians is interesting. The magical place in it called Fillory feels at once based on Narnia but also like a parody of it. It won’t work for everyone, the book has been described as what if Harry Potter grew older and became a right prat, which I can’t say is completely inaccurate 😛
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Clearly, I haven’t read much portal fantasy. Most of these sound quite interesting, though.
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It is a very wide and varied subgenre! I can probably find more if I dig deeper in my read-list, but I thought I’d choose a bit of everything 🙂
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Yep, great list. I still haven’t read The Magician. Nice choice with Daughter of Smoke and Bone as well.
Some interesting books here that I haven’t read – will definitely take a look the the Wexler book.
Ta
Lynn 😀
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Magicians is not for everyone, reviews I’ve seen are all over the place! That said, our tastes generally run the same way so I’d be quite interested to hear your thoughts if you ever do pick it up 🙂
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I really want to read something by Mike Cole. When I first saw his Shadow Ops series, it didn’t do much for me, but since then, I’ve read a bunch about of him online, from interviews and podcasts, and he seems like a cool dude, and now I want to see what he novels are about.
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I felt the same way about Shadow Ops, all the muscles and guns on the covers didn’t do it for me at all. Then I picked up the audio of the first book, and it was nothing like I imagined! In the good way. I also met Myke at Balticon last year, he’s a great guy. He signed my kid 😛
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Daughter of Smoke and Bone is such a great pick for this one! I always forget how awesome that series is (and I still have yet to read the third book). The Magicians is a solid choice, too.
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Love the Daughter of Smoke and Bones series, but have to say the first book was the best. You still have to read book three though, it was good. And for completion’s sake, of course!
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Oh, great picks! I just read CONTROL POINT (and LOVED it), and I’m with Danya, DoSaB is the BEST.
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Control Point pleasantly surprised me! I was glad I read it.
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Wooo, great pick with Laini Taylor! I’d love a door like that in my apartment, imagine not having to fly anywhere. You’d open up the door to Syberia if it was hot or to Hawaii if it was freezing and POP, there you’d be. *sigh* I keep wishing someone would invent a teleportation device, which would be a second-best option for this kind of thing, but no luck so far …
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That would be so handy! I’m a nervous flyer too, so I can totally get on board with a portal that leads anywhere to the world if it means I can avoid getting on a plane!
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