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John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories
John M. Ford is a highly distinctive and imaginative writer floating around the borders between mythic science-fiction and technophile fantasy. He's a little bit like Howard Waldrop, but at the same time not at all like him, and more elusive. What he likes to do that's like Waldrop is to mix things up, but he mixes them differently. Werewolves and space wars. Precognition and film-making. A Midsummer Night's Dream and concentration camps. Gothic novels and psychic researchers. And, more whimsically, Ernest Hemingway and shopping malls:
[Mythprint, June 2004]
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, ed. New Magics: An Anthology of Today's Fantasy.
Most anthologies with titles like this contain all-new stories, but this one reprints 12 stories first published between 1986 and 2001. So what, in this editor's view, is "today's fantasy" like? It's written in very plain, straightforward language, for one thing. Not an elevated or poetic diction in the lot, though in the hands of some of the authors, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Andy Duncan, that plain language can sing. Singing, too, there's a lot of: four stories center on musicians. Most of all, many of these stories are attached to some larger project. Orson Scott Card's is the prelude to his Alvin Maker series. Ellen Kushner's is set in the Borderlands shared universe, Charles de Lint's in his city of Newford. Le Guin's is a pendant to her Earthsea series, Emma Bull's to her War for the Oaks, Susan Palwick's to Alcott's Little Women. It really helps if you already know the backgrounds, because most of these authors aren't in a mood to explain much in stories this short.
Two stories treat the Holy Grail in the modern world. Both explain what the Holy Grail is, but their definitions undercut each other, so it's a good thing three other stories separate them. Both also undercut the Grail with their plain telling. Neil Gaiman has an old woman find the Grail in a thrift shop and be utterly unimpressed by it, even after Sir Galahad comes looking for it. It's very funny in a deadpan way, if you read it aloud with Monty Python Pepperpot voices for the old ladies. Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald tell their Grail tale as a detective story with the flattest affect I've ever read. Two Knights Templar meet. "What's up?" asks the narrator of the other knight. Then he tells the reader they spoke in Latin. I wonder: is it idiomatic in Latin to say "What's up?"
Apart from Gaiman's, the most memorable stories are the most stand-alone. Jane Yolen's disturbing vampire story works much better here than it probably did in an anthology of vampire stories. Andy Duncan's tale of 1930s Appalachian folk singers is touching and colorful. Harry Turtledove's parable of a werewolf and the milk of human kindness is swift and powerful. And if there's one story here that's on the way to becoming a minor classic, it's our own Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad at the Home Front", a parents'-eye view of what happens when children vanish into a fantasy world. The reader is just as puzzled as the parents are by the details of that fantasy, but unlike the series authors in this volume Smith wants you to be mystified. That's the point. The startlingly different perspective on a standard trope is what makes this story, as it makes Gaiman's.
I'm sorry that "today's fantasy" doesn't include anything like the prose poems that drew me to fantasy short fiction. There are still writers like that. But there are some good stories here nonetheless.
[Mythprint, July 2004]
John M. Ford is a highly distinctive and imaginative writer floating around the borders between mythic science-fiction and technophile fantasy. He's a little bit like Howard Waldrop, but at the same time not at all like him, and more elusive. What he likes to do that's like Waldrop is to mix things up, but he mixes them differently. Werewolves and space wars. Precognition and film-making. A Midsummer Night's Dream and concentration camps. Gothic novels and psychic researchers. And, more whimsically, Ernest Hemingway and shopping malls:
It was nearly sunset before I found my car in the big lot. It was not always so, when a man would drive all day in a car with the big fins and the name of a jungle animal. Now the cars have no fins and names like the old ones give to poodles.All these are in stories here; so is his most famous mixture, Camelot and railroads, in the World Fantasy Award-winning poem, "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station." Yes, poem. Half the items in the book are verse, mostly narrative, at which Ford excels. I particularly enjoyed reading the Three Musketeers meet ... wait, I think it's supposed to be a surprise; the sonnet cycle on science-fiction cliches; and "110 Stories", Ford's response to September 11th:
I hugged the stranger sitting next to me.This is a thinking reader's collection of the unusual and thoughtful.
So this is what you call a second chance.
One turn aside, into eternity.
This is New York. We'll find a place to dance.
[Mythprint, June 2004]
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, ed. New Magics: An Anthology of Today's Fantasy.
Most anthologies with titles like this contain all-new stories, but this one reprints 12 stories first published between 1986 and 2001. So what, in this editor's view, is "today's fantasy" like? It's written in very plain, straightforward language, for one thing. Not an elevated or poetic diction in the lot, though in the hands of some of the authors, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Andy Duncan, that plain language can sing. Singing, too, there's a lot of: four stories center on musicians. Most of all, many of these stories are attached to some larger project. Orson Scott Card's is the prelude to his Alvin Maker series. Ellen Kushner's is set in the Borderlands shared universe, Charles de Lint's in his city of Newford. Le Guin's is a pendant to her Earthsea series, Emma Bull's to her War for the Oaks, Susan Palwick's to Alcott's Little Women. It really helps if you already know the backgrounds, because most of these authors aren't in a mood to explain much in stories this short.
Two stories treat the Holy Grail in the modern world. Both explain what the Holy Grail is, but their definitions undercut each other, so it's a good thing three other stories separate them. Both also undercut the Grail with their plain telling. Neil Gaiman has an old woman find the Grail in a thrift shop and be utterly unimpressed by it, even after Sir Galahad comes looking for it. It's very funny in a deadpan way, if you read it aloud with Monty Python Pepperpot voices for the old ladies. Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald tell their Grail tale as a detective story with the flattest affect I've ever read. Two Knights Templar meet. "What's up?" asks the narrator of the other knight. Then he tells the reader they spoke in Latin. I wonder: is it idiomatic in Latin to say "What's up?"
Apart from Gaiman's, the most memorable stories are the most stand-alone. Jane Yolen's disturbing vampire story works much better here than it probably did in an anthology of vampire stories. Andy Duncan's tale of 1930s Appalachian folk singers is touching and colorful. Harry Turtledove's parable of a werewolf and the milk of human kindness is swift and powerful. And if there's one story here that's on the way to becoming a minor classic, it's our own Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad at the Home Front", a parents'-eye view of what happens when children vanish into a fantasy world. The reader is just as puzzled as the parents are by the details of that fantasy, but unlike the series authors in this volume Smith wants you to be mystified. That's the point. The startlingly different perspective on a standard trope is what makes this story, as it makes Gaiman's.
I'm sorry that "today's fantasy" doesn't include anything like the prose poems that drew me to fantasy short fiction. There are still writers like that. But there are some good stories here nonetheless.
[Mythprint, July 2004]
