by Rich Horton
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Fantasy: The Best of the Year (2006 Edition) is copyright © 2006 by Wildside Press, LLC.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Please see end of this book for individual story copyright information.
THE YEAR IN FANTASY, by Rich Horton
Every year, as I read through my list of favorite stories, I attempt to find trends, themes, and motifs that define the world of fantasy. And almost every year I find that writers, especially at the shorter lengths, remain stubbornly individual, and don’t particularly hew to any party lines. So I’m not sure what overarching story themes defined 2005.
One thing that is undeniable, however, is the way in which Fantasy has become part of the pop culture mainstream. Of course this was already obvious with the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies, and the Lord of the Rings book and movies. But this year we saw contemporary fantasy writers, nurtured within the genre, being praised highly at such places as Time magazine. Neil Gaiman’s new novel Anansi Boys was respectfully reviewed in Time and became a best seller. Time also called George R. R. Martin the best writer of epic fantasy alive. And Time and Salon both listed Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners as among the best books of the year, regardless of genre. And speaking of “mainstream” acceptance of Fantasy, I’m delighted to include a story from The New Yorker, George Saunders’s “CommComm,” which is at the same time a satire of present day military bureaucracy and a quite moving ghost story.
I did notice a couple of “mini-trends,” if you will. I saw a great many retellings of fairy tales, usually with either a feminist or an ironic gloss. This isn’t precisely new, but I sensed that there were more such this year than typical. And I saw several ironic examinations of superheroes. (Perhaps in part this is a response to movies such as The Incredibles.) I’ve included one story in the superhero category: Michael Canfield’s “Super-Villains,” which adds age and sex roles to the concerns of superheroes. No story here is precisely a fairy-tale retelling though Gregory Feeley’s in a sense follows on from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and the stories by Goss, Schaller and Taaffe all riff at least somewhat on fairy tale/folk tale traditions.
What if anything does this mean? It is often said that Fantasy is backward looking, in that its settings tend to reflect historical or quasi-historical times. (This is certainly true with fairy tales, and it seems also true, though the “historical times” are much more recent, with superhero stories.) But just as Science Fiction stories that are set in the future usually reflect contemporary concerns, so too do Fantasy stories set in a version of the past. Indeed, the fairy tale retellings (certainly the best of them) are trying to examine what meaning traditional fairy tales have in our present-day life, and the superhero stories are usually placing relatively ordinary contemporary people in “superhero” situations—their reactions to having superpowers inevitably reflect their own, often quite mundane, lives.
And so with the fantasy stories here, which I believe reflect the very best short fantasy currently being published. We do see a couple of stories that look back fairly explicitly to older models: Elizabeth Bear’s “Wax” recalls Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, with a couple of quite effective variations, while Neil Gaiman’s “Sunbird” is in part delightful hommage to R. A. Lafferty. And the “older model” for Peter Beagle’s “Two Hearts” is his own novel, the lovely and moving The Last Unicorn (1968), to which the new story is a sequel of sorts. But in all these cases the stories, for all that they have older models, are absolutely fresh and contemporary in flavor. (Which is not to forget that such an older story as The Last Unicorn, which I read within the past couple of months, remains fresh and unique.)
The border between SF and Fantasy remains thin, and a few stories here wander very close to that dividing line. Paul Di Filippo’s “The Emperor of Gondwanaland” extrapolates from contemporary social science ideas about “micronations,” with a fantastical, and explicitly Borgesian, twist. Matthew Hughes’s “The Gist Hunter” is one of a series of stories set in the age just prior to the age depicted by Jack Vance in his classic The Dying Earth, itself one of the canonical early examples of “science fantasy”. Gene Wolfe’s “Comber” is set in a strange world where cities are islands on a huge ocean—there is no scientific explanation for this ocean, no place in our universe to locate this ocean—but, given that premise, there is no explicit “magic” in the story itself. Joe Murphy’s “The Secret of Broken Tickers” has characters who are in a sense robots: but surely it is magic making them live!
Central to today’s publishing world is the importance of the small presses. Here we see a story from a small-press anthology: Wheatland Press’s TEL: Stories, edited by Jay Lake, gives us Gregory Feeley’s “Fancy Bread,” a meditation on economic history, of all subjects, featuring Jack (of the beanstalk) as a main character. And the extremely fecund world of small desktop-published ’zines has produced stories like Eric Schaller’s “Three Urban Folk Tales,” a delightful linked set of short-shorts about such things as postmen and rats in love, from the most established of the small ’zines, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Also, Sonya Taaffe’s “On the Blindside,” from Flytrap, is an intense story of a woman about to get married, confronting an old lover who represents a familiar fantasy trope. And then there is Holly Phillips, who published a collection with this very firm, Prime, consisting mostly of brand-new stories, such as the striking “By the Light of Tomorrow’s Sun,” in which a young man returns to his childhood home to deal with a dark mystery in his grandfather’s past.
Also central to the new world of Fantasy publishing is online publishing. Last year was the last year for the best SF/Fantasy fiction site ever, Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction. It’s a terrible loss for the field that it’s gone, and in its last year it published as usual some outstanding work. Here we have “Jane,” Marc Laidlaw’s stark tale of an isolated family with a hidden and significant back story, and the portentous results of a terrible crime the father is driven to. Also Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Invisible,” a wrenching and true allegory of a couple whose social invisibility becomes matched by physical invisibility. And Pat Cadigan’s delightful “Is There Life After Rehab?”, a wicked clever look at substance abuse recovery for a group abusing rather a different than typical “substance.” In the absence of Sci Fiction perhaps the most established online fiction source is Strange Horizons, and from there we see Theodora Goss’s “Pip and the Fairies,” in which Pip confronts her memories of her late mother and her childhood, lived in poverty as her mother produced stories of a girl in fairy land—Pip herself? And Fortean Bureau has been a neat online source for the past couple of years, nominally following the weird tradition of Charles Fort: from there we see Samantha Henderson’s “Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died,” a sardonic and affectionate look at alternate lives (and of course deaths) for the great author.
For one reason or another this book doesn’t feature much traditional heroic fantasy. Of course much of the best heroic fantasy is confined to novels—it is a form that seems to demand scope. But there is still strong stuff at shorter lengths, and Richard Parks’s “Empty Places” features a thief and a wizard and a queen in a fairly traditional fantasy world: but with a non-traditional resolution and a quite individual theme.
Where is Fantasy going? It’s never easy to say. But the best of our writers are always going to intriguing places—as the stories to follow will amply demonstrate.
PIP AND THE FAIRIES, by Theodora Goss
“Why, you’re Pip!”
She has gotten used to this, since the documentary. She could have refused to be interviewed, she supposes. But
it would have seemed— ungrateful, ungracious, particularly after the funeral.
“Susan Lawson,” read the obituary, “beloved author of Pip and the Fairies, Pip Meets the Thorn King, Pip Makes Three Wishes, and other Pip books, of ovarian cancer. Ms. Lawson, who was sixty-four, is survived by a daughter, Philippa. In lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to the Susan Lawson Cancer Research Fund.” Anne had written that.
“Would you like me to sign something?” she asks.
White hair, reading glasses on a chain around her neck—too old to be a mother. Perhaps a librarian? Let her be a librarian, thinks Philippa. Once, a collector asked her to sign the entire series, from Pip and the Fairies to Pip Says Goodbye.
“That would be so kind of you. For my granddaughter Emily.” A grandmother, holding out Pip Learns to Fish and Under the Hawthorns. She signs them both “To Emily, may she find her own fairyland. From Philippa Lawson (Pip).”
This is the sort of thing people like: the implication that, despite their minivans and microwaves, if they found the door in the wall, they too could enter fairyland.
“So,” the interviewer asked her, smiling indulgently, the way parents smile at their children’s beliefs in Santa Claus, “did you really meet the Thorn King? Do you think you could get me an interview?”
And she answered as he, and the parents who had purchased the boxed set, were expecting. “I’m afraid the Thorn King is a very private person. But I’ll mention that you were interested.” Being Pip, after all these years.
Maintaining the persona.
Her mother never actually called her Pip. It was Pipsqueak, as in, “Go play outside, Pipsqueak. Can’t you see Mommy’s trying to finish this chapter? Mommy’s publisher wants to see something by Friday, and we’re a month behind on the rent.” When they finally moved away from Payton, they were almost a year behind. Her mother sent Mrs. Payne a check from California, from royalties she had received for the after-school special.
Philippa buys a scone and a cup of coffee. There was no café when she used to come to this bookstore, while her mother shopped at the food co-op down the street, which is now a yoga studio. Mrs. Archer used to let her sit in a corner and read the books. Then she realizes there is no cup holder in the rental car. She drinks the coffee quickly. She’s tired, after the long flight from Los Angeles, the long drive from Boston. But not much farther now. Payton has stayed essentially the same, she thinks, despite the yoga studio. She imagines a planning board, a historical society, the long and difficult process of obtaining permits, like in all these New England towns.
As she passes the fire station, the rain begins, not heavy, and intermittent. She turns on the windshield wipers.
There is Sutton’s dairy, where her mother bought milk with cream floating on top, before anyone else cared about pesticides in the food chain. She is driving through the country, through farms that have managed to hold on despite the rocky soil. In the distance she sees cows, and once a herd of alpacas. There are patches too rocky for farms, where the road runs between cliffs covered with ivy, and birches, their leaves glistening with rain, spring up from the shallow soil.
Then forest. The rain is heavier, pattering on the leaves overhead. She drives with one hand, holding the scone in the other (her pants are getting covered with crumbs), beneath the oaks and evergreens, thinking about the funeral.
It was not large: her mother’s co-workers from the Children’s Network, and Anne. It was only after the documentary that people began driving to the cemetery in the hills, leaving hyacinths by the grave. Her fault, she supposes.
The interviewer leaned forward, as though expecting an intimate detail. “How did she come up with Hyacinth? Was the character based on anyone she knew?”
“Oh, hyacinths were my mother’s favorite flower.”
And letters, even contributions to the Susan Lawson Cancer Research Fund. Everyone, it seems, had read Pip and the Fairies. Then the books had gone out of print and been forgotten. But after the funeral and the documentary, everyone suddenly remembered, the way they remembered their childhoods. Suddenly, Susan Lawson was indeed “beloved.”
Philippa asked Anne to drive up once a week, to clear away the letters and flowers, to take care of the checks. And she signed over the house. Anne was too old to be a secretary for anyone neater than Susan Lawson had been. In one corner of the living room, Philippa found a pile of hospital bills, covered with dust. She remembers Anne at the funeral, so pale and pinched. It is good, she supposes, that her mother found someone at last. With the house and her social security, Anne will be all right.
Three miles to Payne House. Almost there, then. It had been raining too, on that first day.
“Look,” her mother said, pointing as the Beetle swerved erratically. If she looked down, she could see the road though the holes in the floor, where the metal had rusted away. Is that why she has rented one of the new Beetles? Either nostalgia, or an effort to, somehow, rewrite the past. “There’s Payne House. It burned down in the 1930s. The Paynes used to own the mills at the edge of town,” now converted into condominiums, Mrs. Archer’s successor, a woman with graying hair and a pierced nostril, told her, “and one night the millworkers set the stables on fire. They said the Paynes took better care of their horses than of their workers.”
“What happened to the horses?” She can see the house from the road, its outer walls burned above the first story, trees growing in some of the rooms. She can see it through both sets of eyes, the young Philippa’s and the old one’s. Not really old of course, but— how should she describe it?—tired. She blames the documentary. Remembering all this, the road running through the soaked remains of what was once a garden, its hedges overgrown and a rosebush growing through the front door. She can see it through young eyes, only a few weeks after her father’s funeral, the coffin draped with an American flag and the minister saying “fallen in the service of his country” although really it was an accident that could have happened if he had been driving to the grocery store. And through old eyes, noticing that the rosebush has spread over the front steps.
As if, driving down this road, she were traveling into the past. She felt this also, sitting beside the hospital bed, holding one pale hand, the skin dry as paper, on which the veins were raised like the roots of an oak tree. Listening to the mother she had not spoken to in years.
“I have to support us now, Pipsqueak. So we’re going to live here. Mrs. Payne’s going to rent us the housekeeper’s cottage, and I’m going to write books.”
“What kind of books?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to start writing and see what comes out.”
How did it begin? Did she begin it, by telling her mother, over her milk and the oatmeal cookies from the food co-op that tasted like baked sawdust, what she had been doing that day? Or did her mother begin it, by writing the stories? Did she imagine them, Hyacinth, the Thorn King, the Carp in the pond who dreamed, so he said, the future, and the May Queen herself? And, she thinks, pulling into the drive that leads to the housekeeper’s cottage, what about Jack Feather? Or did her mother imagine them? And did their imaginations bring them into being, or were they always there to be found?
She slams the car door and brushes crumbs from her pants. Here it is, all here, for what it is worth, the housekeeper’s cottage, with its three small rooms, and the ruins of Payne House. The rain has almost stopped, although she can feel a drop run down the back of her neck. And, not for the first time, she has doubts.
“One room was my mother’s, one was mine, and one was the kitchen, where we took our baths in a plastic tub. We had a toaster oven and a crock-pot to make soup, and a small refrigerator, the kind you see in hotels. One day, I remember having soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of course, when the electricity was turned off, none of them worked. Once, we lived for a week on oatmeal cookies.” The interviewer laughed, and she laughed with him. When they moved to California, she went to school. Why doesn’t she rememb
er going to school in Payton? She bought lunch every day, meatloaf and mashed potatoes and soggy green beans. Sometimes the principal gave her lunch money. She was happier than when the Thorn King had crowned her with honeysuckle. “Young Pip,” he had said, “I pronounce you a Maid of the May. Serve the May Queen well.”
That was in Pip Meets the May Queen. And then she stops—standing at the edge of the pond—because the time has come to think about what she has done.
What she has done is give up The Pendletons, every weekday at two o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, before the afternoon talk shows. She has given up being Jessica Pendleton, the scheming daughter of Bruce Pendleton, whose attractive but troublesome family dominates the social and criminal worlds of Pinehurst.
“How did your mother influence your acting career?”
She did not answer, “By teaching me the importance of money.” Last week, even a fan of The Pendletons recognized her as Pip.
She has given up the house in the hills, with a pool in the backyard. Given up Edward, but then he gave her up first, for a producer. He wanted, so badly, to do prime time. A cop show or even a sitcom, respectable television. “I hope you understand, Phil,” he said. And she did understand, somehow. Has she ever been in love with anyone— except Jack Feather?
What has she gained? She remembers her mother’s cold hand pulling her down, so she can hear her whisper, in a voice like sandpaper, “I always knew they were real.”
But does she, Philippa, know it? That is why she has come back, why she has bought Payne House from the Payne who inherited it, a Manhattan lawyer with no use for the family estate. Why she is standing here now, by the pond, where the irises are about to bloom. So she can remember.
The moment when, in Pip and the Fairies, she trips over something lying on the ground.
“Oh,” said a voice. When Pip looked up she saw a girl, about her own age, in a white dress, with hair as green as grass. “You’ve found it, and now it’s yours, and I’ll never be able to return it before he finds out!”