The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (1996) is a book by Diana Wynne Jones that humorously examines the common tropes of a broad swathe of fantasy fiction. It was nominated for both a Hugo award and a World Fantasy Award.
The book takes the unusual angle of presenting itself as a tourist guidebook (the title alludes to the Rough Guide series of holiday guidebooks). It claims that the fantasy worlds depicted in many fantasy novels, games and films are in fact part of a single land. 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. In this context, it 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.
Thus it contains articles on Dark Lords and what they do, magic swords and where they come from, haunted forests and what they contain, and so on. There are several hundred articles, organised alphabetically, ranging from a couple of sentences to several paragraphs.
The book can be read as a thinly-veiled criticism of the fantasy genre for being overly derivative, clichéd, and unimaginative; alternatively it can be seen as an affectionate study of the themes and ideas that resonate through fantasy writing. Overall, the writing style is very tongue-in-cheek, with discussions of why there are Dark Lords but not Dark Ladies, why casual sex in Fantasyland almost never results in pregnancy, and why male virginity is useless whereas female virginity is highly prized. The author has herself written fantasy novels that both use and subvert common fantasy elements.
The book was considerably revised for the 2006 Firebird edition: the map was re-done, the text made to look more like a guidebook by including insets, eliminating the clip art, adding a list of other "Tough Guides" (to non-existent places) and the like.
Dark Lord of Derkholm by the same author is set in a Fantasyland which maintains the cliches detailed in the Tough Guide for the benefit of tourists, and can be seen as a conceptual sequel.