EDITED BY
PETER S. BEAGLE
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Introduction by Peter S. Beagle . . . .
Maureen F. McHugh
Ancestor Money . . .
2
Gregory Maguire
Scarecrow . . . . . .
3
Patricia A. McKillip
Lady of the Skulls . . .
4
T. C. Boyle
We Are Norsemen . . .
5
Steven Millhauser
The Barnum Museum . .
6
Stephen King
Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut . .
7
Terry Bisson
Bears Discover Fire . .
8
Francesca Lia Block
Bones . . . . . . .
9
Neil Gaiman
Snow, Glass, Apples . .
10
Aimee Bender
Fruit and Words . . .
11
Jeffrey Ford
The Empire of Ice Cream.
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Michael Swanwick
The Edge of the World .
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31
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55
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Jonathan Lethem
Super Goat Man . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
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Susanna Clarke
John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner 215
15
Octavia E. Butler
The Book of Martha . . . . . . . . . . 225
16
Yann Martel
The Vita Æterna Mirror Company. . . . . . 245
17
Peter S. Beagle
Sleight of Hand . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
18
Robert Holdstock
Mythago Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
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Kij Johnson
26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss . . . . . . . . 341
APPENDIX 1:
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists . .
355
APPENDIX 2:
David G. Hartwell
The Making of the American Fantasy Genre . . 367
INTRODUCTION
Peter S. Beagle
I have written elsewhere that there was a time when all literature was
fantasy. How could it have been otherwise, when a bad corn crop or a
sudden epidemic among the new lambs could only have been caused
by the anger of some god, or the spiteful sorcery of the people in the
next village, eight miles over the hill, who were all demons, as everyone
knew? Story then, in every part of the world, was a means of keeping the
inhabited dark at bay, and of making some kind of sense out of survival.
Even the best and most ambitious of post-Tolkien multi-volume epics inevitably miss that air of great art being first born of terror and ignorance.
Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and the Popol Vuh were all created in darkness.
Much of what I glance over in the following pages is covered in greater and more knowledgeable detail further on by David Hartwell. David
is a walking history of fantasy in general, and of American and European
fantasy publication in particular. If I’m the Reader’s Digest version, he’s
the Oxford University Press all by himself, and I’m both proud and
grateful to include his contribution in the appendix to this book, along
with Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic essay “The Critics, the Monsters, and
the Fantasists.” Together, they make transparent, once and for all, the
simple — yet long-disregarded — truth that the best fantasy is as much
art as the best of any other form of storytelling. The critical bars on no
account need to be lowered.
The segregation of fantasy from actual literature is a comparatively
recent business, certainly no older than I am, and I’ll be seventy-one
in April. Genre fiction, as we understand the term — mystery stories,
Gothic horror tales, and romances (Westerns came along a bit later)
— appeared as early as the eighteenth century, along with the earliest
INTRODUCTION
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stories written specifically for children; even so, writers today regarded as
classic fantasists, like Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, Lord Dunsany,
James Branch Cabell, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard,
and William Hope Hodgson, were all recognized as serious mainstream
artists in their time. Cabell’s novel Jurgen, in particular, was the target
of a two-year obscenity trial, brought by the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice; it did wonders for sales, and remains his best-known
book today.
Later, despite the continued flowering of pulp magazines with titles
in the vein of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding, Amazing, Captain
Future, and Comet Stories, such utterly diverse writers as Thorne Smith,
Robert Nathan, E. R. Eddison, Clark Ashton Smith, John Collier, Jack
Finney, and T. H. White were considered and discussed in major critical venues, like anyone else. In 1954, the New York Times devoted the
front page of its Sunday Book Review to W. H. Auden’s laudatory essay
on The Lord of the Rings; and similar space, in 1958, to White’s The Once
and Future King. As late as the 1960s, my own novels A Fine & Private
Place and The Last Unicorn both received serious individual reviews, just
as though they were real books, worthy of such attention. I took it for
granted then — I wouldn’t today.
The above doesn’t mean, incidentally, that all of the writers I’ve mentioned found commercial success, or even made a decent living from their
work. When they did strike it rich, it was most often due to a fortunate,
usually irreproducible circumstance, as with Cabell’s obscenity trial. The
Lord of the Rings, for instance, was no sort of a bestseller when Houghton
Mifflin first published it in this country; nor did it become one for more
than ten years. I remember being unable to find it in any bookstore until,
in 1958, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh, I ran the books to
earth at the Carnegie Library, and disappeared into my dorm room for
three days. It was the more affordable paperbacks (first published in the
“pirate” edition by Ace Books; then, with Tolkien’s formidable sanction,
by Ballantine), that set off the great LOTR craze, still as yet unmatched,
in the long term, even by Harry Potter. We’ll consider the full effect of
this phenomenon further in a moment.
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THE SECRET HISTORY OF FANTASY
My early fascination with fantasy (and my tastes ranged from Cabellian
elegance to Robert E. Howard’s thud-and-blunder sagas, to Algernon
Blackwood’s deadpan English manner of showing you cold horror without a vampire or a shoggoth in sight) at least saved me from spending my
youth chasing the images of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It’s probably hard today to imagine a time when young male American
writers gathered commonly in pubs, university lounges, and party kitchens
to debate in all seriousness — I give you my solemn word — whether one
ought to shoot lions, run with bulls, or report on wars and revolutions,
like Hemingway, or frolic in nightclub fountains, drunk as skunks, like
Scott and Zelda. But I’d already discovered Collier and James Stephens
in high school, Robert Nathan in college (along with such playwrights
as Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Alejandro Casona, whose works were always
touched by the fantastic); and I can’t remember not knowing the work of
Dunsany and White. Neither death in the afternoon nor the beautiful and
damned of New York society were my problem.
Robert Nathan, with whom I became friends for the last twenty-odd
years of his life, said to me once, “I read Dunsany and Machen when I
was young, and I met Cabell once or twice, in the twenties, but I never
considered them a literary school or generation of any sort. They didn’t
especially write alike, didn’t meet regularly for lunch — if they have anything in common, I’d say it’s that they were a remarkably individual lot
who mostly went their own ways.” When I asked if he thought of himself
as a fantasy writer, he answered, “No — I work around the edges, if you
like, but in the end I write what I like to read, like the rest of us. Your boy
Bradbury, that windbag Tolkien, they’re fantasy writers.”
Maybe what I’m getting at — and what Robert meant — is that the
division between fantasy writers and writers who wrote fantasy wasn’t
nearly as distinct during most of his publishing career as it has become
in recent decades. Kipling wrote fantasy stories; so did Hawthorne,
Dickens, and his buddy Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Saki
— yet none of them are today thought of as genre fantasists. By contrast,
Tad Williams, Patricia McKillip, Guy Gavriel Kay, or Charles de Lint
would be forever branded fantasy writers if they devoted the rest of their
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lives to novels about the emotional travails of aging Congressmen, or
footnote-heavy academic studies of the later work of Coventry Patmore.
So, for that matter, would I, and I’ve got a couple of plain historical
novels I’m still planning to get to. Well, for Americans, history’s largely
fantasy anyway, so maybe that’s all right.
I personally trace the turning point, the specific moment when commercial fantasy abandoned the realm of literature to the day in 1977 when
Judy-Lynn Del Rey, my editor at Ballantine Books, whom I’d known
and been fond of since she was Judy-Lynn Benjamin, not all that long out
of college, working at Galaxy magazine, sent me a massive manuscript of
a book called The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, asking for comment and, if I would be so good, a jacket quote. David Hartwell goes
into much greater detail concerning the significance of this action: I can
only relate my minuscule part in it. After getting no more than a couple
of chapters into the manuscript, I called Judy-Lynn in New York, and
told her that the book was not only a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings, but
a tenth-rate rip-off at that, and that she must know it herself. Judy-Lynn
loved good writing, and she was no fool.
“Never mind,” Judy-Lynn said firmly over the phone. “I know what
I’m doing, and Ballantine’s going to make a million with this book.” (A
million dollars was actual money way back then.) “This one’s for people
who’ve read the Tolkien books forty times, and can’t quite get it up for the
forty-first — but they still want the mixture as before. Watch, watch, you’ll
see. I know what I’m doing.”
She did, of course. Judy-Lynn almost always did. My sole contribution
was to propose that the novel’s gnomes — nasty equivalents of Tolkien’s
orcs — not be continually identified by the epithet “little yellow men.” I
have no idea whether or not my suggestion was ever accepted.
The astonishing success of The Sword of Shannara meant not only that
Ballantine/Del Rey Books would dominate all publishers of fantasy for at
least a literary generation, but that the systematic production of what was
officially dubbed “sword-and-sorcery” fiction would come to overwhelm
the field almost altogether. I can still recall being in Forbidden Planet,
the well-known New York City science-fiction bookstore, with my best
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THE SECRET HISTORY OF FANTASY
friend in the late 1980s, peering dazedly down rows of unfamiliar paperbacks, most with mock-Frazetta covers featuring muscular, barechested
northern-barbarian types rescuing similarly muscular barechested damsels from assorted monsters, and hearing my friend whisper in utter bewilderment, “Peter, who are these people?” I couldn’t tell him.
In the wake of the success of The Lord of the Rings, and of other fantasy
novels (disclosure: these included The Last Unicorn and A Fine & Private
Place), in 1969 Del Rey Books hired Lin Carter as a consultant, to select
and present their new “Adult Fantasy” line. I have extremely mixed feelings
about this series: not about the books themselves — Carter brought some
superb old stylists, from Dunsany, William Morris and Machen, to
William Beckford, Ernest Bramah, and George MacDonald, as well as
younger writers like Katherine Kurtz and Joy Chant, and overlooked gems
like Hope Mirrlees and the great Evangeline Walton, back into the public
eye — but about his introductions, and his full-length studies of Tolkien
and H. P. Lovecraft. In all of them, he gets so many facts embarrassingly
wrong, so many attributions misquoted, that the entire commentary is
essentially worthless. Further, although the Adult Fantasy series lasted
only five remarkable years, ending in 1974, when Ian and Betty Ballantine
sold their company to Random House, Carter’s Tolkien-derived theories
of secondary worlds created a blueprint for modern fantasy that paved the
way for the coming, a few years later, of “Shannara”-esque genre fiction.
Overall, his influence on the field has to be regarded as, if not malign…
unfortunate.
(And yet, he praised my brilliant, unique, and vastly undervalued old
friend, Avram Davidson, at great length — however inaccurately — and
he introduced me to the work of John Bellairs, whom I’d never heard of
before, and came to know and admire before his death. He did get some
things right, and I owe him for those.)
But I read a lot less fantasy than I used to in those days. Without
wishing to offend, or to name names, Gresham’s Law applies in popular
art, as in economics: the bad, or the mediocre, drives out the good, if
only because there’s so much more of it produced that the good goes
either unrecognized, unpublished, or — in time — unproduced. I offer
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the work of Barry Hughart as a perfect example: his three classic novels
about Master Li (a sage with “a slight flaw in his character”) and his loyal
disciple and Watson, Number Ten Ox, appearing in the 1980s, were so
completely ignored by his publishers — who never bothered to inform
him when the first, Bridge of Birds, won the World Fantasy Award in
1985 — that Hughart simply gave up on fiction from that point. Our
loss, and a major one.
Yet in an age full of its own fear and ignorance, its own distances and
superstitions, the cold and the darkness still generate legendry. Despite
the decades-long deluge of imitations of his work that I’m always grateful
Tolkien didn’t live to see, there are still representatives of an older, eclectic
fantasy tradition to be found within reach, and, miraculously, even within
print. Leaving the masters of Latin-American “magical realism” out of the
discussion, which I do with great reluctance, books like Yann Martel’s Life
of Pi, Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of
Babel, and a growing number of others suggest that inventive, imaginatively written tales that require neither High Elves nor Dark Lords, nor
endpaper maps, kings’ genealogies, and programmed sequels are thriving
elsewhere than the airport bookstore racks. You have only to look.
I am immensely proud and vain of the authors assembled in this anthology, not only for their stories themselves, but for what their presence
proves: that Frodo may well live, as the New York subway graffiti of the
1960s defiantly insisted, but that other worlds and quests and heroes do
too, and not all of them have a thing to do with Armageddon and magic
rings.
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THE SECRET HISTORY OF FANTASY