The year’s remaining SF anthologies are considerably more successful as anthologies, more entertaining, more substantial, better buys for your money, although all of them mix fantasy and science fiction to one extent or another. Amazing Stories: The Anthology (Tor), edited by Kim Mohan, is a mixed reprint and original anthology of stories, both SF and fantasy, drawn from the pages of Amazing, some of them that leftover inventory we were discussing up in the magazine section; this is an impressive anthology overall, with good original work by Paul Di Filippo, William Barton, R. A. Lafferty, George Zebrowski, Janet Berliner and George Guthridge, Mark Rich, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Kathe Koja, and strong reprints by Ursula K. Le Guin, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Bloch, and Thomas M. Disch. Warriors of Blood and Dream (AvoNova), edited by Roger Zelazny, is also an entertaining anthology, and contains some surprisingly effective stuff for what at first glance seems like a throwaway junk theme anthology idea (Martial Arts stories), although it suffers from the sameness-of-material problem that affects most theme anthologies if you read the stories in them all in one go. The best story here, by a considerable margin, is Walter Jon Williams’s “Broadway Johnny,” a gorgeously colored romp that blends classical Chinese mythology with the chop-sockey atmosphere of Hong Kong kung fu movies; the result is droll and extremely entertaining. My second favorite, in spite of being totally predictable, is Joe R. Lansdale’s noirish “Master of Misery”—this is a kind of story that’s almost extinct these days, although once they filled the pages of men’s magazines such as Argosy in their thousands, a straightforward noir adventure story, what used to be referred to as “men’s adventure,” with no fantasy element at all, and, as I’ve said, totally familiar in plot, but exciting and very vividly written and plotted; don’t look for profundity here, but it would make a great movie of the week for some TV network. Hard to say how the other stories would have held up if you’d seen them one by one, rather than squeezed in here with stories covering much the same ground; there are a lot of stories dealing with martial arts fighting in VR, for instance, which lose some of their potential impact when read one after the other, and in some stories the level of rather portentous and pretentious Martial Arts Mysticism (of the “Remember, Grasshopper…” school of profundity, where everything sounds like an aphorism found inside a fortune cookie) can get rather thick. The book also contains good work by Dave Smeds, Gerald Hausman, and Steven Barnes—whose story is too long, but which does cover some territory not covered elsewhere here in an interesting way, although at the price of your having to wade through a fairly high Martial Arts Mysticism level. Nothing is really first-rate here, with the exception of the Williams novella, but it is a cheerful and unpretentious book that’s fun to read.
Many of the same comments could be made about Wheel of Fortune (AvoNova), also edited by Roger Zelazny, which is also an entertaining read, although not quite as strong overall as Warriors of Blood and Dream, if only because it doesn’t have a big Walter Jon Williams novella in the middle of it to help anchor it. The best story here is William Sanders’s fast, funny, and fanciful “Elvis Bearpaw’s Luck,” although William Browning Spencer’s imaginative but somewhat more somber “The Oddskeeper’s Daughter” is also in the running; the anthology also features good work by Don Webb, Michael A. Stackpole, John DeChancie, Richard Lupoff, and others. (Unusually, all the “celebrity editors” this year—Zelazny, Peter S. Beagle, David Copperfield—seem to have actually edited their respective anthologies, to one extent or another; certainly Zelazny seems to have done most of the work here himself, and shows a surprisingly adroit touch for a man whose only previous experience as an anthologist was putting together one of the Nebula Award volumes.)
The stream of anthologies edited by Mike Resnick over the past few years seems to be running dry, but there was a Resnick anthology this year, and a fairly good one, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. (Quite a few anthologies this year, including the Zelazny books above and half a dozen others, seem to be sort of “stealth Greenberg” anthologies, where his name shows up only in small print on the inside pages, in the copyright information; but I’m listing as Greenberg-edited anthologies only those books where his name actually appears as editor on the cover. I figure that he himself knows best how to value his contribution to any particular book, and probably will list himself on the cover if he thinks he ought to be there.) There’s nothing terribly profound here, of course, but Sherlock Holmes in Orbit will be a lot of fun for Holmes fans, especially if you read these a few at a time rather than all in one sitting. Of course, some of the writers here have a surer touch at imitating the Master than others, and the knowledge of The Canon possessed by some of the contributors is shaky, but some of them do quite a good job, especially considering that they’re covering territory and dealing with kinds of material that Doyle himself never had to deal with; the best stories here are by Vonda N. McIntyre, Frank M. Robinson, Susan Casper, Mark Bourne, George Alec Effinger, and Robert J. Sawyer.
There were supposedly regional anthologies of stories from Colorado and from Ohio this year, but I didn’t see them, and will try to catch up with them next year. There was a reprint anthology of Canadian science fiction, On Spec: The First Five Years (Tesseract), which reprinted material from the semiprozine.
The relatively few shared-world anthologies this year included The Man-Kzin Wars VII (Baen), no editor listed, which contained some strong material by Gregory Benford, Marlo Martin, and Hal Colebatch; Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (Bantam Spectra), a Star Wars–related anthology edited by Kevin J. Anderson; The Exotic Enchanter (Baen), edited by L. Sprague De Camp and Christopher Stasheff; The Day the Magic Stopped (Baen), edited by Christopher Stasheff; Bolos 2: The Unconquerable (Baen), no editor listed; The Ultimate Spiderman (Berkley), edited by Stan Lee; Swords and Sorceress XII (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; and An Armory of Swords (Tor), edited by Fred Saberhagen.
There was also an interesting Young Adult SF anthology—a type of anthology which seems to be becoming more common—A Starfarer’s Dozen (Harcourt Brace), edited by Michael Stearns.
Turning to the fantasy anthologies, the best fantasy anthology of the year is probably Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn (HarperPrism), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Janet Berliner. Like almost all of this year’s fantasy anthologies, this one contains some horror (the line between them being a fine and often a subjective one), but Immortal Unicorn leans decisively away from horror and toward a more gentle, literate, humanistic sort of fantasy—something I personally approve of, as I have grown tired of the facile nihilism and fashionable designer despair, the gloatingly relished sexual violence, and the ever escalating and ever more grotesque levels of gore and mayhem and splatter that characterize most horror these days. The stories in Immortal Unicorn, however, are much more frequently wise and charming and life-affirming, without being sappy or saccharine, than they are grotesque or despairing, something that’s like a cool breeze on a sullenly hot day in the current blood-spattered market, and this is one of the few big, expensive hardcover anthologies I’ve seen this year that is worth the money. The best story here is probably Peter S. Beagle’s own “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,” a gentle, wry, and whimsical take on a classic fantasy situation, cousin-germane to Thurber’s “The Unicorn in the Garden”; Karen Joy Fowler’s somewhat more hard-edged (although still ultimately gentle) “The Brew” is also a contender. The anthology also features good work by Lisa Mason, Michael Armstrong, George Guthridge, Ellen Kushner, Dave Smeds, Susan Shwartz, Judith Tarr, and others.
The year’s other major Janet Berliner anthology, for some inscrutable reason referred to as a “multi-author collection” instead of an anthology, is David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible (HarperPrism), edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner. David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible is not as strong as Immortal Unicorn overall, and leans much more toward horror, but still contains enough fantasy and hard-to-c
lassify stuff that I’m listing it here with the fantasy anthologies. The best story here, by a considerable margin, is a fast, furious, bizarre, and yet charming extravaganza by S. P. Somtow, “Diamonds Aren’t Forever,” but the book also contains strong and offbeat work by Lisa Mason, Dave Smeds, Dave Wolverton, and others. Berliner also edited an anthology called Desire Burn, a mixed reprint/original anthology which was nowhere near as substantial as the two above.
Another anthology that some commentators might choose to list as a horror anthology, although I’ve decided to list it, on balance, as a fantasy anthology, is The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors (Tor), edited by Terri Windling. However you list it, this is certainly one of the year’s strongest anthologies, and it can be a harrowing book to read, although the horrors encountered here tend more toward emotional abuse (though there are a share of physical horrors as well) than the standard parade of raped and mutilated women and abused and murdered children described with relishing hand-rubbing glee in most modern horror. In a way, though, the emotional/ psychological abuse is sometimes more harrowing, although Windling and her authors do allow some hope to creep in here and there, and the essays that are mixed in with the stories often offer practical advice and encouragement for children in abusive situations, if only as testimony that it is possible to survive such situations and put your life back together in a positive way; the anthology is, after all, directed specifically toward Childhood’s Survivors. There is strong work here by Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner, Munro Sickafoose, Kara Dalkey, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling herself, and others.
The year’s other major fantasy anthology is Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (Morrow AvoNova), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, another strong and enjoyable book that must certainly be in contention for the title of the year’s best fantasy anthology. This is the third in a series of anthologies of “updated” fairy tales told with modern sensibilities, mixing fantasy with mild horror, and another of those anthologies that, because of the similarity of tone of some of the stories, is better read one story at a time than all at one sitting. The best story here is probably John Brunner’s “The Emperor Who Had Never Seen a Dragon,” although the book also has good work by Tanith Lee, Nancy Kress, Lisa Goldstein, Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, Kathe Koja, Nancy A. Collins, and others.
Fantasy’s only continuing original anthology series, Xanadu, is reported to have died, a major blow to the genre. The last volume in the series, Xanadu 3 (Tor), edited by Jane Yolen, delivers the series’s trademark mix of different styles of fantasy, over a nicely eclectic range of moods, and features strong work by Susan Palwick, Astrid Julian, Claire Parman Brown, Bruce Holland Rogers, Jo Clayton, Josepha Sherman, and others. This series will be missed. It bewilders me that original fantasy anthology series don’t seem to be able to succeed—Elsewhere and Other Edens didn’t survive, either—at a time when dozens of fantasy novels crowd the bookshelves and climb the bestseller lists, one-shot fantasy anthologies often do very well, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror is an established institution of the field, and even fantasy magazines seem to be flourishing. You’d think that a continuing fantasy anthology series would be a natural—but so far nobody has been able to make one work. I have no idea why.
Turning to the year’s other fantasy anthologies, somewhat less substantial than the ones listed above, Heaven Sent (DAW), a (mostly) fantasy anthology edited by Peter Crowther, is somewhat weaker overall than his 1994 anthology Blue Motel: Narrow Houses Volume 3, but still contains interesting work, and features an eclectic mix of fantasy, horror, and even SF. My favorite here, in fact, is a science fiction (sort of) story by Ian McDonald, “Steam,” yet another story (there were several this year) that tries to out-Bradbury Bradbury, this one not so much in the nostalgia/evocativeness of the setting as in the sheer audacious headlong bravura prose-poetry of the writing itself; does a pretty good job of it, too, although, as with Bradbury himself, even at his prime, the singing prose can also come to seem overheated and overdone if you fall out of the spell for a moment and look at it with a coldly critical eye. There is also strong work here by John Brunner, Judith Moffett, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and others. Sisters in Fantasy (Roc), edited by Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg, is a bit weaker overall, and tends to lean a bit away from traditional fantasy toward the literary/metafictional end of the spectrum, but does contain strong work by Nancy Kress, Judith Tarr, Jane Yolen, Katharine Kerr, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (Penguin), edited by Larry McCaffery, leans even further in that direction, qualifying more as a “slipstream” anthology and not as a fantasy/SF anthology at all, although there are some names here that will be familiar to the genre audience. The Ultimate Dragon (Dell), edited by Byron Preiss, John Betancourt, and Keith R. A. DeCandido, is filled with pleasant but mostly minor material. Much the same could be said of Adventures in the Twilight Zone (DAW), edited by Carol Serling, and Witch Fantastic (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. Fantastic Alice (Ace), edited by Margaret Weis, is mostly disappointing, only serving to prove that Lewis Carroll’s whimsical magic casts a fragile and subtle spell that is not easy to duplicate, and which shreds and tatters in less skilled and cunning hands, leaving little behind; the best attempts here at handling the idiosyncratic Alice material are by Roger Zelazny, Esther M. Friesner, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Peter Crowther—although I don’t think Carroll himself would have liked any of them. Chicks in Chainmail (Baen), edited by Esther M. Friesner, is a one-joke anthology—satiric takes on the “woman warrior” motif—and the joke quickly wears thin, although you’ll enjoy the stories more if you read them one at a time, spaced widely apart. Considerably more substantial than the two immediately above are Ancient Enchantresses (DAW), edited by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch, Martin H. Greenberg, and Richard Gilliam, Enchanted Forests (DAW), edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg, and Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Aspect), edited by Katharine Kerr. The themes in each of these cases are specialized enough that some of the stories come to seem too similar, and some of the work in each of these rather large anthologies is flat and dull, but each also contains strong stories, notably by Gregory Feeley, Lois Tilton, Nancy Etchemendy, and Karawynn Long in Enchanted Forests, Susan Shwartz, William F. Wu, and Deborah Wheeler in Ancient Enchantresses, and Elizabeth Moon and (especially) Poul Anderson in Tales of the Knights Templar.
There were a whole bunch (that, of course, is a precise technical term used in criticism: “a whole bunch”) of fantasy anthologies about King Arthur and the Matter of Britain this year, including: The Camelot Chronicles (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley; The Merlin Chronicles (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley; The Book of Kings (Roc), edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg; Excalibur (Warner Aspect), edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer; and Return to Avalon (DAW), edited by Jennifer Roberson. Although they are at times rather heavy textured, your best bets here are probably the two Ashley anthologies, which also contain good reprint material. There were also Arthurian stories in Ancient Enchantresses and Enchanted Forests, as well as in most of the other fantasy anthologies, in almost all of the fantasy magazines, and even in the SF magazines—the Matter of Britain has certainly been getting a workout lately, with several more Arthurian anthologies on the way for next year.
Another anthology which blended fantasy with mild horror, noted without comment, is the mixed reprint/original erotic ghost story anthology Killing Me Softly (HarperPrism), edited by Gardner Dozois.
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