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The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)




  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.

 

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