I was brought up on a diet of portal travelling
stories such as the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian Chronicles. From
Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass to Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy, the successful children’s and young adult
fantasy fiction novel often focuses on contemporary protagonist with access to
another world. Often theses are parallel or alternative dimensions, such as
Narnia in C S Lewis’s The Lion the Witch & the Wardrobe, or time
travel as with Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. Recent books
such as The Multiverse of Max Tovey can be a blend of both genres;
Alistair Swinnerton takes a contemporary character into the past, into a
parallel dimension where the Roman Empire still rules and to the underworld of
the Awin of Welsh legend. It's the portal through time I want to look at
here, and how the concept has evolved.
