Even the EMBROIDERY factories are kept well out of sight. Apart from a bit of pottery and light metalwork or some slagheaps around the domain of the DARK LORD, most Tours encounter no industry at all. Short entries may convey the nature of the work in some respects (only). The Tough Guide comprises several hundred articles organised alphabetically, ranging from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages.
The Guide proper begins with a generic "Map of Fantasyland", "How to Use This Book", and a key to the marginal symbols ("Identification Symbols"), all preceding the alphabetical catalogue: A, Adept to Z, Zombies (pages 1–234).Īlong these lines the Guide catalogues many of the common places, peoples, artifacts, situations, characters and events likely to be found on such a journey – in other words, the archetypes and clichés found in fantasy fiction. Also preceding the title page is a phoney list of ten "Other Tough Guides" such as The Tough Guide to Transport in the Multiverse (mostly by Telephone Box). In an extended metaphor, the readers (or viewers or players) are tourists authors are tour guides, and their stories are sight-seeing tours or package holidays to this Fantasyland. Its conceit is that the fantasy worlds depicted in many fantasy novels, games, and films are identical, although tours visit different places such as provinces of Finland. Unusually, the book presents itself as a tourist guidebook its title alludes to the Rough Guide series, The Rough Guide to Finland and so on.
"Our job was to decide whether each entry was necessary, to suggest new ones, to discuss whether some of the entries made sense (many didn't), and to provide examples in support of what each entry said." Description While hospitalized in 1994, she and Chris Bell worked on projected entries for the The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute & Grant, Orbit Books, 1997). The inside back cover of the revised edition is a 2006 postscript by Jones, "How I Came to Write This Guidebook".
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