Portal Fiction Defined: 10 Stories Featuring Magic Portals

In speculative fiction, a portal is some sort of door or window into a new world. When a character passes through a portal, they travel through time, space, or both to find themselves in a far more fantastical surrounding than wherever they were previously.

Portal fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy) centering on characters that move from their present reality to another world via a “portal” of some kind. These stories often revolve around characters teleporting to entirely new surroundings and dimensions, while others focus just on time travel within the characters’ home worlds.

Traveling from one time or place to the next by mystical means is a regular occurrence in speculative writing, also known as the science fiction and fantasy genres. Here are ten portal fiction books and television series to give you an idea of the subgenre as a whole:

1. 1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: You have to travel down the rabbit hole to enter Lewis Carroll’s fantasy world in this book. After Alice passes through this portal to Wonderland, she finds an eccentric group of nonsensical characters that readers and viewers of the screen adaptations have remembered fondly now for centuries on end.
2. 2. The Chronicles of Narnia: C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series relied heavily on portals of one sort or another throughout many of the book series’ installments, which Hollywood also adapted for the silver screen. In the first of the seven books, four British siblings leave post–World War II England and enter Narnia through a wardrobe. Lewis was also good friends with author J.R.R. Tolkien, whose book series The Lord of the Rings still leaves fans hungering for a portal of their own to enter his Middle-earth.
3. 3. Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire turned the portal fiction concept on its head with this first installment of what became her Wayward Children book series. In it, she explores how children who passed through portals into fantasy worlds would acclimate upon returning home.
4. 4. The Fionavar Tapestry: Guy Gavriel Kay’s trilogy begins with five students whisked away to a land where all of our world’s many myths are true. In the books, the author plays with multiple mythological traditions within the context of a single series.
5. 5. Harry Potter: After kicking off with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, this series of seven fantasy books won many lifelong fans in the early twenty-first century. The series became cemented in the zeitgeist, thanks to the feature-film adaptations, and an homage to the magical portal Platform 9¾ in the real King’s Cross Station in London further demonstrates its influence.
6. 6. The Magicians: The protagonist of Lev Grossman’s novel passes through a portal and realizes the world depicted in one of his favorite fantasy series is, in fact, real. Soon, he learns to wield the ways of magic with others who have made their way into this other plane, too. The book was so successful Grossman wrote two sequels, and producers also adapted the story into a television series.
7. 7. Outlander: Diana Gabaldon’s story begins and ends in real-world Scotland but with a twist. After visiting a set of standing stones (à la Stonehenge), the heroine finds herself whisked between her home time (post–World War II) and the eighteenth century. Fans adored the novel so much Gabaldon decided to make it the foundation of a ten-book series. Hollywood also turned the series into a multi-season TV show.
8. 8. Stargate: The original sci-fi film eventually spun off into a number of books and multiple television series. In any of its iterations, this story revolves around people on Earth wilfully building portals into other dimensions.
9. 9. Star Trek: Now one of the longest-lasting science-fiction franchises, the original Star Trek is an anthology series whose televised short stories occasionally dabble in portal fiction. Choose a random episode from the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or another spinoff, and odds are decent you’ll find the crew members passing through a wormhole to time travel or enter a new galaxy.
10. 10. The Wizard of Oz: This silver screen production adapts L. Frank Baum’s similarly named novel. The quintessential portal fantasy has quite a worldly means of transportation—the protagonist Dorothy moves from Kansas to the fantastical realm of Oz by virtue of a magical twister hitting her ranch.

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