by Mike Ashley
Everard Jack Appleton (1872–1931) is not a name remembered today. In fact he was not that well known for much of his life. He was essentially a poet and journalist who also wrote occasional humorous pieces for magazines including several madcap invention stories which were the vogue in the early 1900s. However during the First World War he had a sudden surprise bestseller on his hands with the volume of poetry With the Colors (1917) which praised the American soldiers and castigated the Germans. The story here came from slightly simpler days.
Anthony Armstrong (real name George Willis, 1897–1976) was a regular contributor to Punch and similar humour magazines especially in the 1920s and 1930s. He produced a number of books including several pastiches on fairy tales of which the best are The Prince Who Hiccupped (1932) and The Pack of Pieces (1942). The story reprinted here comes from the former title.
Tony Ballantyne is an IT teacher who has been selling science fiction to the magazines since 1998 and his first novel, Recursion appeared in 2004 followed by Capacity (2005). Tony is something of a hero. Years ago, when he was walking through Middlesborough with his mother he heard a gunshot. He threw his mother to the ground, with himself on top of her. Looking up, he saw everyone in the street staring at him in disbelief. A bus tyre had exploded. He has since put his paranoia to work in his fiction.
John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) was one of America’s leading humorists at the end of the 19th century, best known for his satirical A House-Boat on the Styx (1895), which mixes together the ghosts of people from throughout history. He was editor of Harper’s Weekly from 1898–1901 and briefly of the humour magazine Puck, from 1904–5. A prolific writer, he wrote many humorous fantasies. Many of the best will be found in The Water Ghost and Others (1892), Over the Plum Pudding (1901) and Jack and the Check Book (1911) from which the story here is reprinted. My thanks to Mark Owings for bringing the story to my attention.
James Bibby is the author of the Conanesque spoofs Ronan the Barbarian (1995), Ronan’s Rescue (1996) and Ronan’s Revenge (1998) plus Shapestone (1999), which was set in the same world. Long before that, he was contributing jokes to various TV series such as Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Lenny Henry Show. Shapestone introduced the character of the bungling Midworld detective Inspector Heighway, fantasy’s answer to Inspector Morse. Heighway reappeared in “Pale Assassin” which I included in The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy whilst the story here is his latest misadventure.
Damien Broderick (b. 1944) is one of Australia’s leading science-fiction writers. He’s also a senior research Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia and holds a multi-disciplinary PhD from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature, but don’t let that worry us. He’s been writing for over forty years and his novels include the award-winning The Dreaming Dragons (1980) and Striped Holes (1988) from which the story here has been adapted.
Molly Brown is a Chicago-born writer long established in Britain. Her books have included the historical mystery Invitation to a Funeral (1995) and the novelization of the TV series Cracker, To Say I Love You (1994). “Bad Timing” was her first published story and went on to win the British Science Fiction Association’s award for that year’s best short story. It also formed the basis for her collection Bad Timing and Other Stories (2001). I included her Ruella stories in the first Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy. Also check out The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures for another of her witty stories.
Paul Di Fillipo (b. 1954) is one of the best of the current generation of American humorists. His stories and columns appear regularly in the science fiction and fantasy magazines and his books include The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), Ribofunk (1996), Lost Pages (1998) and Fractal Paisleys (1997). The title story of the last volume, included here, originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction whose editor at the time regarded it as one of the funniest stories he had read. Di Fillippo also says that “The Li’l Bear Inn actually exists in Tiverton, Rhode Island. I’ve never dared set foot inside, for fear of ending up on its walls.”
Esther Friesner (b. 1951) is a prolific writer of both humorous and serious stories. Check out The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales for a powerful example of the latter. On the lighter side, her work includes the novels Here be Demons (1988), Hooray for Hellywood (1990) and Majyk by Accident (1993) plus the humorous anthology series that began with Chicks in Chainmail (1995).
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) is the author of the renowned Sandman series of graphic novels but he has done much else besides. His first book explored the depths to which sf can sink, Ghastly Beyond Belief (1985), compiled with Kim Newman; he collaborated with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens (1990), and is the author of the award-winning novels American Gods (2001) and Coraline (2002), the latter a delightfully strange tale for young adults. His short stories and articles can be found in Angels and Visitations (1993) and Smoke and Mirrors (1998).
Craig Shaw Gardner (b. 1949) has written many humorous fantasies including a series in which the very worst B-movie sets exist as a reality, which includes Slaves of the Volcano God (1989), Bride of the Slime Monster (1990) and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies (1990). His earliest books, though, featured the well-meaning sorcerer’s apprentice, Wuntvor, and his master Ebenezum who is allergic to magic, both of whom appear in the story here. The series began with A Malady of Magicks (1986) and includes A Multitude of Monsters (1986) and A Night in the Netherhells (1987).
Tom Gerencer (b. 1969) has undertaken a remarkable range of activities from being a guide on Whitewater river trips to producing audiotapes of Thora Hird reading Bible stories. He has sold stories to Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy and several anthologies.
Ron Goulart (b. 1933) is the dean of comic fantasy, science fiction and mystery fiction having been a prolific contributor to all three fields for over fifty years. His recent books have included a series featuring Groucho Marx as detective. Goulart has a particular passion for the frustration of man versus machine, especially robots, of which the story here is but one example. Others will be found in Broke Down Engine (1971), What’s Become of Screwloose (1972) and Nutzenbolts (1975).
Tom Holt (b. 1961) has been producing wildly funny comic fantasies since Expecting Someone Taller (1987). Other titles include Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (1988), Faust Among Equals (1994), Paint Your Dragon (1996) and Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (2005). Holt is also an expert in ancient history and amongst his recent books is the thought-provoking novel Alexander the Great at the World’s End (1999).
Rhys Hughes (b. 1966) is a master of the surreal and has written scores of short stories noted for their magical word play. A sampling will be found in his collections Worming the Harpy (1995), The Smell of Telescopes (2000) and Stories from a Lost Anthology (2002) from which the story here is taken. Hughes has also written a series of stories featuring the surrealist sportsman Engelbrecht the Dwarf who was created by Maurice Richardson and who appears elsewhere in this anthology – twice!
Gary Jennings (1928–99) is best known for his blockbuster novels set in the Aztec Empire which began with Aztec (1980), but he has also written novels about Marco Polo in The Journeyer (1984), life in a 19th century circus troupe in Spangle (1987), and the last days of the Roman Empire in Raptor (1992). He is less well known for his short and often wildly funny fantasies which include a series about a hopeless and very accident-prone missionary Crispin Mobey. The first story in the series is included here. The full series was subsequently published as The Lively Lives of Crispin Mobey (1988) under the alias Gabriel Quyth.
David Langford (b. 1953) has won well over twenty awards for his fan writings in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. He always has so many projects on the go – often helping others in their research into matters literary or scientific – that he hasn’t written as much fiction as we’d all like. An early novel, taking the lid off the world of nuclear physics, was The Leaky Establishment (198
4), whilst Earthdoom! (1987) with John Grant, was a spoof on the disaster novel. Some of his shorter works will be found in The Silence of the Langfords (1996) and He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003) plus slightly more serious stuff in Different Kinds of Darkness (2004).
Laird Long (b. 1964) is a prolific Canadian writer with stories having appeared in a wide range of print or on-line magazines, including Blue Murder, Handheldcrime, Futures Mysterious, Hardboiled, and Albedo One. His story “Sioux City Express” from Handheldcrime was listed amongst the top 50 mystery stories of 2002 by Otto Penzler in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories – 2003.
Robert Loy is an American writer primarily of mysteries, most of which have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine though many of them verge on that borderline between fantasy and reality. By day he works in the mail-room/printshop of a large governmental bureaucracy which, he tells me, “is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds.”
John Morressy (1930–2006) was an American professor of English who had been writing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years. He was perhaps best known for his series of stories about the wizard Kedrigern, who has appeared in all four of these comic fantasy anthologies. Stories have been collected in A Voice for Princess (1986), The Questing of Kedrigern (1987), Kedrigern in Wanderland (1988), Kedrigern and the Charming Couple (1990) and Remembrance for Kedrigern (1990) and have been repackaged as The Kedrigern Chronicles.
Steven Pirie lives in Liverpool with his wife and their small son. His short fiction has appeared in a number of print and web-based magazines, and his first novel, the comic fantasy Digging up Donald, was published in 2004 by Immanion Press.
Steve Redwood (b. 1943) most definitely does not look his age which makes one wonder about such things as pacts with dark forces, a subject not entirely unconnected with his first novel Fisher of Devils (2003). He is clearly one of those “sleepers” since his first work was published when he was 12 and just forty years later he burst upon the fantasy scene with scores of stories in magazines and anthologies. The story here includes reference to Engelbrecht the Dwarf for which more, read on.
Maurice Richardson (1907–78) is one of those unfairly neglected British writers. He wrote stories and columns for various British magazines and newspapers from the 1930s to the 1970s and published several books including Little Victims (1968), The Fascination of Reptiles (1972) and Fits and Starts (1979). He also compiled a collection of the best strange stories by William Fryer Harvey, Midnight Tales (1946). However none of this, not even the last, prepares you for Richardson’s tour-de-force, The Exploits of Engelbrecht (1950), a collection of stories about Engelbrecht the Dwarf Boxer and his fellow members of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club. They take on all manner of challenges. Engelbrecht boxes a grandfather clock and an “electronic brain”, there is a witch-shooting party, and a one-hole golf course (par 818181) which covers most of the known world. The stories first appeared in Lilliput in the immediate post-war years, and were then published in book form in 1950, but thereafter languished in obscurity. They were rescued by Savoy Books who published a deluxe edition, with original illustrations, in 2000 and is well worth checking out. The story here, in which most of the human race (living and dead) take on a football match with the Martians, is just a taster. Rhys Hughes, represented elsewhere in this anthology, has also written an as yet unpublished book of new Engelbrecht stories whilst you will encounter Engelbrecht again in the story by Steve Redwood.
Adam Roberts (b. 1965) is a lecturer in literature and culture at the University of London and has written several academic books including a study of science fiction, called simply Science Fiction (2000) and a study of postwar Arthurian fantasy Silk and Potatoes (1998). His first novel was Salt (2000), about the colonization of a new planet, and he has since written On (2001), Stone (2002), Polystom (2003) and The Snow (2004), notable for doubling the number of words in the title. He has also written several parodies of popular fantasy including The Soddit (2003), The McAtrix Derided (2003) and The Sellamillion (2004).
Grey Rollins claims that he became a writer by accident, though since it required six “accidents” before his first sale, to Analog, it strikes me that he’s a little accident prone! A qualified geologist, who has also attained degrees in psychology and electronics, Rollins has a wide base of skills for the extensive future-history writing programme he has set himself. He started his series about Victor when he felt he wanted to write a traditional style detective series but featuring an alien detective. But what an alien! Shaped like a banana with a long and very adept tongue and who only eats putrefied food, he’s not exactly who I’d like picking my lock.
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) was arguably the greatest of all sf satirists and ought to be on everyone’s list of their favourite writers. He wrote sf and fantasy for over fifty years and his story collections include Untouched by Human Hands (1954), Citizen in Space (1955), Pilgrimage to Earth (1957), Shards of Space (1962), Can You Feel Anything When I do This? (1971) and Is THAT What People Do? (1984). Amongst his novels, one of my favourites is Mindswap (1966) a wonderful odyssey throughout the Galaxy. Sheckley has been an inspiration to many – both Damien Broderick and Tom Gerencer in this anthology openly profess their acknowledgement to the master.
Frank R. Stockton (1834–1902) need have written nothing else besides “The Lady, or the Tiger?” (1882) and he would be remembered. It’s one of those classic puzzle stories where the reader has to decide the outcome and it causes as much debate today as it did 120 years ago. Stockton was immensely popular in his day. Although most of his work was aimed at younger readers, with some of the best appearing in St. Nicholas Magazine, he was also appreciated by adult readers who could see the subliminal messages in his stories. He also wrote two early science-fiction novels, The Great War Syndicate (1889) and The Great Stone of Sardis (1898). Amongst his many collections of stories is A Story-Teller’s Pack (1897), which included the story reprinted here, Stockton’s parody of “A Christmas Carol”.
Marilyn Todd (b. 1958), who has recently moved to France, is best known for her amusing chronicles of ancient Rome featuring that vixen Claudia Seferius who appears in I, Claudia (1995), Virgin Territory (1996) and others. Her story “A Bad Day on Mount Olympus” appeared in The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy.
Cynthia Ward (b. 1960) has been selling stories to the magazines and anthologies since her first, “The Opal Skull” in 1989. Born in Oklahoma, she has lived in Maine and Spain – but alas nowhere else that rhymes. Her story “Dances with Elves” was included in The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy.