In 1996, David Hartwell joined Gardner Dozois in
collecting what he felt were the best science fiction stories of the
previous year. While Dozois
published a thick trade paperback filled with novellas and stories which
have covered the entire range of speculative fiction, Hartwell has focused
his smaller books on what could be considered hard science fiction at
shorter lengths. With his tastes in science fiction firmly established before
the public after six outings, Hartwell has elected to turn his attention
to science fiction’s sister-genre, fantasy, with the first installment
of the Year’s Best Fantasy, co-edited with frequent partner
Kathryn Cramer. The result is
a book as different from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as Hartwell’s science fiction
anthologies are from Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
While acknowledging fantasy’s more literary
practitioners (and including a story by, for instance, Gene Wolfe
doesn’t let Hartwell ignore that branch), Hartwell’s focus seems to be
more on the traditional elements of fantasy fiction.
Although sword and sorcery has recently been relegated, it
sometimes seems, to between the covers of massive tomes, Hartwell is able
to include stories set in George R.R. Martin’s “Song
of Ice and Fire” realm and Terry Goodkind’s “Wizard’s First
Rule” series to provide the sense of the great fantasy epics which have
been appearing in stores for the last several years, although Goodkind’s
tale was originally published in 1998.
Sword and
sorcery is only one subgenre of fantasy, however, and Hartwell seems to
want to be as inclusive of the traditional styles of fantasy as possible.
Constantine Storm’s “The Face of Sekt” is a story which looks
at the mixture of politics and religion in ancient times.
The story serves as a cautionary tale, not to those politicians who
wish to mix religion into politics, but those religious members who want
to mix the two.
Several stories, such
as Nicola Griffith’s “A Troll’s Story,” Brian Stableford’s “Chantarelle,”
Naomi Kritzer’s “The Golem,” and Greg Costikyan’s “And Still She
Sleeps” have their roots in folklore and fairy tales.
While the latter term frequently conjures up images of Disneyesque
fables, as any reader of Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s long-running
fairy tales series know, these stories can be as dark in tone and outcome
as anything written by H.P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft serves as
the inspiration for Don Webb’s “The Prophecies of Newfane Asylum,”
one of three included stories which was originally published in the more
science fictionally oriented Interzone.
Webb has written a period piece which combines the glamour of the
regency period with the sinister atmosphere of Lovecraft’s
nineteenth-century New England. Interzone
is also represented by Sarah Singleton’s “Ebb Tide” and Zoran
Zivkovic’s “The Window.”
Many of the stories
included in Year’s Best Fantasy will be readily available to
genre readers, however not all are. The
year 2000 seems to have been a good year for fantasy readers who needed to
fly. Although not included,
Harlan Ellison’s “Incognita, Inc.” was originally published in the
United Airlines in-flight magazine (and later reprinted in Realms of
Fantasy), while Scott Bradford’s “The Devil Disinvests,” which
is included here, was originally published in the Swissair magazine (and
later in F&SF). Both
of those stories take clichés of the field and look at them in a
refreshing light.
Just as David Hartwell presented his own vision of
science fiction with his annual collection six years ago, so, too, does he
take a look at fantasy and present a vision of the field which adheres to
the traditional forms and concepts of the field.
His impression of fantasy fiction seems to be more inclusive than
his vision of science fiction (for the purposes of these anthologies), but
it remains a vision which is recognizable to the literature which has
grown out of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Sprague de Camp, Unknown
and Weird Tales.
