ALSO EDITED BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (with Mark Roberts)
Best American Fantasy 1 (with Matthew Cheney)
Best American Fantasy 2 (with Matthew Cheney)
The New Weird
Steampunk
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
Fast Ships, Black Sails
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
Last Drink Bird Head
ODD?
The Weird
The Time Traveler’s Almanac
Sisters of the Revolution
The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals
The Big Book of Science Fiction
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy
ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER
FICTION
The Southern Reach Trilogy
Annihilation
Authority
Acceptance
Dradin in Love
The Book of Lost Places (stories)
Veniss Underground
City of Saints and Madmen
Secret Life (stories)
Shriek: An Afterword
The Situation
Finch
The Third Bear (stories)
Borne
The Strange Bird
Dead Astronauts
NONFICTION
Why Should I Cut Your Throat?
Booklife
Monstrous Creatures
The Steampunk Bible (with S. J. Chambers)
The Steampunk User’s Manual (with Desirina Boskovich)
Wonderbook
ALSO BY ANN VANDERMEER
Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution
The Bestiary
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2020
Introduction and compilation copyright © 2020 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: VanderMeer, Ann, editor, writer of introduction. | VanderMeer, Jeff, editor, writer of introduction.
Title: The big book of modern fantasy : the ultimate collection / edited and with an introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Description: New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020. | “A Vintage Books original.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047608 (print) | LCCN 2019047609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525563860 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525563877 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PN6071.F25 B537 2020 (print) | LCC PN6071.F25 (ebook) | DDC 808.83/8766—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047608
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525563860
Ebook ISBN 9780525563877
Cover design by Joe Montgomery
Cover painting: Myth of 1,000 Eyes by Leonora Carrington © 2020 Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images
www.vintagebooks.com
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For Sally Harding
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER
TEN ROUNDS WITH GRANDFATHER CLOCK
Maurice Richardson
THE CIRCULAR VALLEY
Paul Bowles
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
Vladimir Nabokov
THE ZAHIR
Jorge Luis Borges
LIANE THE WAYFARER
Jack Vance
POOLWANA’S ORCHID
Edgar Mittelholzer
THE MAN WHO SOLD ROPE TO THE GNOLES
Margaret St. Clair
O UGLY BIRD!
Manly Wade Wellman
THE GOPHERWOOD BOX
Abraham Sutzkever
MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS (EXCERPT)
Amos Tutuola
A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS
Gabriel García Márquez
THE ANYTHING BOX
Zenna Henderson
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
Fritz Leiber
THE DREAMING CITY
Michael Moorcock
CRONOPIOS AND FAMAS
Julio Cortázar
KAYA-KALP (METAMORPHOSIS)
Intizar Husain
THE LAST DRAGON IN THE WORLD
Tove Jansson
THE DROWNED GIANT
J. G. Ballard
THE MONSTER
Satu Waltari
NARROW VALLEY
R. A. Lafferty
THE SINISTER APARTMENT
Mikhail Bulgakov
THE ORIGIN OF THE BIRDS
Italo Calvino
THE PREY
Bilge Karasu
THE TOPLESS TOWER
Silvina Ocampo
THE BARBARIAN
Joanna Russ
THE YOUNGEST DOLL
Rosario Ferré
THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
Ursula K. Le Guin
ARK OF BONES
Henry Dumas
WINGED CREATURES
Sylvia Townsend Warner
LINNAEUS FORGETS
Fred Chappell
THE ERL-KING
Angela Carter
THE GREAT NIGHT OF THE TRAINS
Sara Gallardo
THE TALE OF DRAGONS AND DREAMERS
Samuel R. Delany
THE WHITE HORSE CHILD
Greg Bear
THE DREAMSTONE
C. J. Cherryh
FIVE LETTERS FROM AN EASTERN EMPIRE
Alasdair Gray
THE ICE DRAGON
George R. R. Martin
ONE TIME
Leslie Marmon Silko
SISTER LIGHT, SISTER DARK
Jane Yolen
THE LUCK IN THE HEAD
M. John Harrison
WARLOCK AT THE WHEEL
Diana Wynne Jones
MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT
Stephen King
ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE STATION WHERE THE TRAIN NEVER STOPS
Pat Murphy
AFTER THE HURRICANE
Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz
THE GIRL WHO WENT TO THE RICH NEIGHBORHOOD
Rac
hel Pollack
THE BYSTANDER
Leena Krohn
WILD BOYS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Karen Joy Fowler
THE MOLE KING
Marie Hermanson
WHAT THE TAPSTER SAW
Ben Okri
THE FOOL
David Drake
THE FLYING CREATURES OF FRA ANGELICO
Antonio Tabucchi
A MEXICAN FAIRY TALE
Leonora Carrington
THE BOY IN THE TREE
Elizabeth Hand
TV PEOPLE
Haruki Murakami
ALICE IN PRAGUE OR THE CURIOUS ROOM
Angela Carter
MOON SONGS
Carol Emshwiller
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SHED NUMBER XII
Victor Pelevin
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE DRAGON
Patricia McKillip
TROLL BRIDGE
Terry Pratchett
LONGING FOR BLOOD
Vilma Kadlečková
A BRIEF VISIT TO BONNYVILLE
D. F. Lewis
TRAVELS WITH THE SNOW QUEEN
Kelly Link
THE NEUROSIS OF CONTAINMENT
Rikki Ducornet
THE DARKTREE WHEEL
Rhys Hughes
FŒTUS
Shelley Jackson
TAN-TAN AND DRY BONE
Nalo Hopkinson
WHERE DOES THE TOWN GO AT NIGHT?
Tanith Lee
POP ART
Joe Hill
STATE SECRETS OF APHASIA
Stepan Chapman
THE WINDOW
Tatyana Tolstaya
THE WEIGHT OF WORDS
Jeffrey Ford
ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD
Han Song
THE KITE OF STARS
Dean Francis Alfar
MOGO
Alberto Chimal
THE MALADY OF GHOSTLY CITIES
Nathan Ballingrud
END OF THE LINE
Aimee Bender
I LEFT MY HEART IN SKAFTAFELL
Victor LaValle
THE GRASSDREAMING TREE
Sheree Renée Thomas
LA PEAU VERTE
Caitlín R. Kiernan
A HARD TRUTH ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT
Sumanth Prabhaker
BUFO REX
Erik Amundsen
THE ARREST OF THE GREAT MIMILLE
Manuela Draeger
AUNTS
Karin Tidbeck
FOR LIFE
Marta Kisiel
THE SPRING OF DONGKE TEMPLE
Qitongren
THE WORDEATERS
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
CREATURE
Ramsey Shehadeh
BEYOND THE SEA GATE OF THE SCHOLAR-PIRATES OF SARSKÖE
Garth Nix
THE BEAR DRESSER’S SECRET
Richard Bowes
TABLE WITH OCEAN
Alberto Chimal
THE JINN DARAZGOSH
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
Acknowledgments
Permissions
About the Translators
About the Editors
INTRODUCTION
FANTASY IS A BROAD and various category that on the one hand can feature fire-breathing dragons and on the other can be as quiet as a man encountering a strange plant. As with The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, we have worked from a simple concept of what makes a story “fantasy”: any story in which an element of the unreal permeates the real world or any story that takes place in a secondary world that is identifiably not a version of ours, whether anything overtly “fantastical” occurs in the story. We distinguish fantasy from horror or the weird by considering the story’s apparent purpose: fantasy isn’t primarily concerned with the creation of terror or the exploration of an altered state of being frightened, alienated, or fascinated by an eruption of the uncanny.
Argument over the details of this broad definition could go on for hours, days, lifetimes. Only the most narrow and specific genres can be defined with precision, and fantasy is one of the broadest genres imaginable, if it even qualifies as a genre and not a mode, tendency, tradition…But every anthology needs criteria for selection, for inclusion and exclusion. For us, the defining moment of fantasy is the encounter with the not-real, no matter how slight, and what that moment signifies. Sometimes it is the entire world and sometimes it is the slight distance from reality that allows a writer to bring our reality into focus in a meaningful way.
We defined classic fantasy as stories from the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II in 1945. Modern fantasy, then, begins with the end of the war. There are practical reasons for this separation: we knew it would require two books to offer an acceptable selection of the body of work we wanted to draw from, and we wanted those books to be balanced in size and scope. However, the separation also makes sense in the context of what was happening culturally in the middle of the twentieth century.
Soon after 1945, fantasy solidified into a publishing category. In 1939, two pulp magazines were established that helped readers see fantasy as its own category, separate from both weird/horror and science fiction: Unknown, edited by John W. Campbell, and Fantastic Adventures, edited by Raymond A. Palmer. Campbell and Palmer were quite different as editors, but they created markets for stories that were lighter or less horrifying than those in Weird Tales and its imitators, and not beholden to pseudo-scientific rationalizations that grounded the science fiction in Astounding and Amazing magazines. Nineteen forty-seven saw publication of the first Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and then in 1949 The Magazine of Fantasy, retitled The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, reappeared with its second issue and continues to be published up to this very day. F&SF (as it is known) lived in the liminal space between the pulps and the commercial slick magazines, publishing writers who had established themselves in the pages of Weird Tales and Unknown alongside writers like Shirley Jackson and James Thurber, familiar to readers of The New Yorker. While the popularity of these publications varied, they had a strong effect on English-language writers in particular, creating a sense of a type of fiction called fantasy that was different from other types of writing. F&SF in particular is heavily represented in this volume.
Just as fantasy was beginning to become a recognized, separate type of writing in U.S. magazines, the postwar boom in paperback publishing opened up new opportunities for writers and readers both, creating a space for the phenomenal success of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels in paperback in the mid-1960s, and leading to countless imitators, some of them also bestsellers. The next decade saw the rise of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, the conception of which was influenced not only by Tolkien but also the writing of well-known genre fantasy writers such as Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance (plus unjustly lesser-known ones, such as Margaret St. Clair). D&D would go on to influence not only the structure and content of other games (including computer games) but also many works of fiction, including television shows and movies. By the 1980s at the latest, fantasy, as a marketing category, was a significant part of most media. Today, it is arguably the dominant category of pop culture.
To some writers, fantasy is an element in a wider set of tools that can be taken out and used for a particular story or novel. Other writers are born with a worldview that skews toward fantasy or become steeped in the non-real and it becomes part of their core identity.
Neither approach is inherently better than the other, but for the purposes of post–World War II fantasy it often signified a continuing widening of the breach between the real and the non-real in terms of what most general readers think of as “fantasy” and what kinds of fantasy have been most accepted by genre communities. At times, fantasy has become “that which is produced by a fantasy writer” or “that which I recognize as fantasy because of pop culture.”
The power of pop culture to familiarize readers with the fantastical cannot be overstated. Inherent to popularity is a tendency to render key elements familiar and conventional, even safe. Marketing categories let you know what to expect. (While this can create cliché and generic qualities, they also allow subversive and genre-defying material to reach a wider audience, by allowing “mimics” of a kind to infiltrate the mainstream. The cuckoo’s egg that cracks open to reveal a fairy.)
In a purely technical sense, until recently, sophistication in movie and television versions of fantasy has lagged behind the sophistication of even the most generic Tolkien-derivative fantasy. Thanks to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, the year 2001 has a mythical science fiction meaning, but the actual year itself proved to be one of the most important in the history of pop culture fantasy, because it was at the end of that year that the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies were released, having an effect on the popular imagination of fantasy comparable to the effect of Star Wars on the popular idea of science fiction in 1977. Before 2001, the influence of written fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons made it a major source for much pop culture; after 2001, pop culture and fantasy were nearly synonymous.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 1