The Way of the Wizard, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Prime)
The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Viking)
Fantasy Magazine.
Quartet and Triptych, Matthew Hughes. (PS Publishing)
Cloud Permutations, Lavie Tidhar. (PS Publishing)
Strange Horizons.
Clarkesworld.
Abyss & Apex.
Apex Magazine.
Daily Science Fiction.
Destination: Future, Z.S. Adani & Eric T. Reynolds, eds. (Hadley Rille Books, 978-0-9823140-9-2, $15.95, 313 pages.)
Some quick year-end (as I type these words, with about twelve inches of snow piled up outside my window and New Year’s Eve looming ominously on the horizon) wrap-up stuff.
This has been a pretty good year for fantasy anthologies, especially those that feature what I suppose must be called “genre fantasy,” as opposed to the tricksy slipstream, metafiction, surrealism, and fabulism that often passes for fantasy these days. The best of these was probably Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery, edited by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan, but also very impressive was a mixed original/reprint anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, The Way of the Wizard, which gives us an interestingly varied mix of milieus, beyond the usual faux-Medieval genre fantasy setting. The best story here is probably “End Game,” by Lev Grossman, which is not only set in the modern-day milieu of his bestselling novel The Magicians, but which is one of two stories this year (the other being K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia”, from Subterranean Online) which feature complex and unique (and difficult and tricky to use, with costs for the user—most magic in fantasy is too easy to use, just wave a wand and you can do anything) systems for employing magic that are very different from the usual Harry Potter knockoffs. Simon R. Green returns to his Nightside setting (“the dark heart of London where it’s always 3 a.m.”) to follow a low-level “Street Wizard” who gets his hands dirty doing the minor (but essential) magical jobs that keep things going smoothly, but that more potent wizards don’t want to be bothered with. New writer Rajan Khanna takes us aboard a Mississippi riverboat with an unusual kind of “Card Sharp,” Genevieve Valentine shows us a wizard struggling with the consequences of Global Warming, in “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen,” new wrier Krista Hoeppner Leahy tells us how things look from the perspective of one of Odysseus’s doomed crew who must struggle to deal with “Too Fatal a Poison,” new writer Christie Yant explores the interface of reality and fairy tales in “The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s somewhat unpleasant young protagonist must deal with an enraged were-emu in “The Go-Slow.” There are also good original stories by T.A. Pratt, Charles Coleman Finlay, Wendy N. Wagner, Cinda Williams Chima, John Fultz, Vylar Kaftan, and others.
The Way of the Wizard also features a strong spine of reprints, including “The Word of Unbinding,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “In the Lost Lands,” by George R.R. Martin, “John Uskglass and the Cambrian Charcoal Burner,” by Susanna Clarke, “El Regalo,” by Peter S. Beagle, “How To Sell the Ponti Bridge,” by Neil Gaiman, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” by Robert Silverberg, and others.
Another good fantasy anthology is The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, one of a sequence of YA anthologies on “mythic themes” that have been produced over the last few years by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Don’t be put off by the fact that this is a YA anthology; there’s some good work here, some of it surprisingly dark (as shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with Datlow’s work as one of the field’s major horror editors). The best stories are probably “The Flock,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Children of the Shark God,” by Peter S. Beagle, and “Island Lake,” by E. Catherine Tobler, but also good are “The Puma’s Daughter,” by Tanith Lee, “The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin,” by Gregory Frost, “The Children of Cadmus,” by Ellen Kushner, and “The Salamander Fire,” by Marly Youmans, and there’s also good work by Shweta Narayan, Christopher Barzak, Richard Bowes, and others, and poetry by Jane Yolen and Delia Sherman.
Unsurprisingly, considering its name, there’s also often good fantasy to be found at ezine Fantasy Magazine. Good stories there in recent months have included “Holdfast,” by Matthew Johnson, “The Gold Silkworm,” by Tony Pi, “Malleus, Incus, Stapes,” by Sarah Totten, and “From the Countries of Her Dreams,” by Jay Lake and Shannon Page.
For a change of pace, let’s switch to consider some science fiction—although it’s that kind of non-rigorous, not-hard SF full of unexplained magic technology (and occasionally actual magic, or something close to it) that used to be called “science-fantasy,” back when anybody other than me gave a crap about these fine distinctions. Two recent novellas published as individual chapbooks do a good job with this kind of stuff. Matthew Hughes’s Quartet and Triptych, from PS Publishing, is a novella set in a milieu heavily (and acknowledgedly) influenced by the works of Jack Vance (perhaps the master of science-fantasy), one still set untold thousands and thousands of years from now but an era or two before humanity gives up on space travel and retreats to the haunted gloom of Vance’s Dying Earth. This is one of a long sequence of stories that Hughes has written about the misadventures of master thief Luff Imbry, and, like all of them, is great fun, a satisfyingly robust and colorful tale, much as Vance himself might have written it, in which Imbry matches wits with some sinister and powerful high-tech “ghosts” from ages past for the possession of the ultimate prize (until the next adventure, anyway). Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations, also from PS Publishing, is another Vance-flavored almost novel-length novella (although the writer specifically referenced in the text, in what TV fans would call a “shout out,” is Cordwainer Smith)—this is also an entertaining picaresque adventure, across the face of a largely aquatic planet whose culture has been shaped by immigrants from the South Sea Islands of old Earth, although this one is somewhat more serious in tone and deeper in ambition, full of mystic elements drawn from Island mythology, and concerning a young outcast fighting through desperate trials and against all odds to fulfill a destiny larger than himself.
Lavie Tidhar shows up again with perhaps the best story in the last few months of ezine Strange Horizons, “Aphrodisia,” a postcyberpunk story about spacers who have been altered by high-tech modifications on a spree in Vientiene while on vacation on Old Earth. The main plotline here, about someone whose former girlfriend has uploaded herself into fame and virtual immortality and is now lost to him forever (although forever present), is a tip of the hat to William Gibson’s “The Winter Market,” but the story also has strong echoes of Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gommorah”—all updated a bit for 21st Century sensibilities. Other good stories in Strange Horizons for the last few months of the year include “Iteration,” by John Kessel, the oddly-titled “Zookrollers Winkelden Ook,” by Tracy Chapman, “Blood, Blood,” by Abbey Mei Otis, and “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots,” by Sandra McDonald.
Over at the ezine Clarkesworld, the last few months have given us strong stories such as the wistfully autumnal “My Father’s Singularity,” by Brenda Cooper, “the space adventure “Laying the Ghost,” by Eric Brown, and the sad, postapocalyptic “The Cull,” by Robert Reed, one of their most powerful stories of the year. Ezine Abyss & Apex has in the last few months run good stuff such as “Talking to Elephants,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, “High Art,” by Alan Smale,” “The Torturous Path,” by Bud Sparhawk, and “Anything Chocolate,” by Caren Gussoff, while Apex Magazine, back after a brief hiatus, has provided “The Faithful Soldier, Preempted,” by Saladin Ahmed, “The Green Book,” by Amal El-Mohtar, and “L’Esprit de L’Escaller,” by Peter M. Ball.
New website Daily Science Fiction (http://dailysciencefiction.com) has the ambitious—perhaps too ambitious—goal of publishing a new SF or fantasy story every single day of the year. Probably unsurprisingly, most of them are not terribly good, although some interesting stuff pops up occasionally. The best story there so far is by the ubiquitous Lavie Tidhar, who contributed “Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World”—another story set on a planet settled by South Sea Islanders, which to me is reminiscent in some ways of James Tiptree, Jr.’s “On the Last Afternoon” with its depiction of human colonists threatened by inexorable alien processes—but there has also been decent stuff there by Tim Pratt, Jeff Hecht, Matthew Johnson, and others.
Destination: Future, edited by Z.S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds, is an anthology of stories, mostly about human/alien relations, from ultra-small press Hadley Rille Books. There are no award-winners here, I don’t think, or even contenders, but there is solid and interesting work by Elizabeth Bear, Caren Gussoff, K.D. Wentworth, Sandra McDonald, Simon Petrie, and others. (This will be extremely difficult to find on bookshelves, even in SF specialty bookstores, so I would recommend that if you want it, you order it directly from the publisher’s website, at www.hadleyrillebooks.com.)