The Ties that Bind Across Time and Space - A Review of An Accident of Stars

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Portal fantasies are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. I’m not entirely sure what got me into this particular subgenre of fantasy, but I’m reasonably certain that I got interested in it when I first watched the anime Magic Knight Rayearth when I was in grade school. I know that some people would be surprised to learn this: after all, when people think of portal fantasy, most people would immediately point to the Narnia Chronicles, or perhaps Alice in Wonderland. But I did not pick up the Narnia books until I was in high school, and I did not realise Alice in Wonderland could be considered a portal fantasy until I was in university.

Therefore, most of my notions about portal fantasy have been shaped by anime: Magic Knight Rayearth first, then Fushigi Yuugi when I was in high school. As a result, I tended to imagine portal fantasy as being a particularly “female” subgenre: schoolgirls going into other worlds to save aforementioned worlds from impending disaster. It was only later I realised that, yes, the male half of the species also did get to slide into other worlds and have adventures of their own, but by the time I found this out I was not all that interested in reading about boys in this context. After all, most of the protagonists in fantasy are male, and they seem to need no further help finding the kind of action and adventure girls seem to. When I read portal fantasy, I do so because I want to read about people like me: women (and girls) escaping from a world that would not or could not give them the purpose and fulfilment they deserved and craved, finding it instead in a world (or worlds) that would.

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