| The Grail has been used as a theme in fantasy,
historical fiction and science fiction; a quest for the
Grail appears in Bernard Cornwell's series of books The
Grail Quest, set during The Hundred Years War. Michael
Moorcock's fantasy novel The War Hound and the World's
Pain depicts a supernatural Grail quest set in the era
of the Thirty Years' War, and science fiction has taken
the Quest into interstellar space, figuratively in
Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova, and literally on the
television shows Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1 (as the "Sangreal").
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon has the
grail as one of four objects symbolizing the four
Elements: the Grail itself (water), the sword Excalibur
(fire), a dish (earth), and a spear or wand (air). The
grail features heavily in the novels of Peter David's
Knight trilogy, which depict King Arthur reappearing in
modern-day New York City, in particular the second and
third novels, One Knight Only and Fall of Knight.
The
grail is central in many modern Arthurian works,
including Charles Williams collections of poems about Taliessin, Taliessin Through Logres and Region of the
Summer Stars, and in feminist author Rosalind Miles'
Child of the Holy Grail. The Grail also features heavily
in Umberto Eco's 2000 novel Baudolino. In King and
Emperor, the final volume of Harry Harrison's 1990s
trilogy The Hammer and the Cross, the name "grail" is
explained to be a corruption of "graduale", Latin for
ladder, and the Holy Grail is discovered, being the
ladder which was used to remove Jesus' body from the
cross and on which the body was carried away. The story
further "reveals" that Jesus survived the crucification,
and went on to live a life and father children, as well
as writing a repressed Gospel.
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