Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 2
There are other subgenres, of course, in almost bewildering profusion. “Steampunk,” for instance, can be considered a form of Urban Fantasy wherein the “modern world” depicted is that of the Victorian era, or a fun-house-mirror reflection of an alternative Victorian age, at least; depending on whom you ask, steampunk can be considered to be either science fiction or fantasy, and some of the authors who have been associated with it include Tim Powers, James Blaylock, K. W. Jeter, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson (for one novel in collaboration with Sterling, The Difference Engine), Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Di Filippo, and, perhaps the progenitor of this form, Michael Moorcock. “Outlaw Fantasy”— gonzo fantasy made up of an eclectic stew of various pop-culture icons—was briefly considered to be a subcategory in the 1980s; best typified by the work of Howard Waldrop, although writers such as Neal Barrett, Jr., Tom Reamy, Joe Landsdale, and Bruce Sterling in his fantasy-writing mode have been associated with it. Outlaw Fantasy later seemed to be evolving into “cowpunk,” a cross between gonzo fantasy, horror, SF, and the classic Western story, and several “cowpunk” anthologies were published at the end of the decade. “Comic Fantasy,” with roots that go all the way back to Unknown, is sometimes considered to be a subcategory of its own; among its most prominent practitioners are Terry Pratchett (one of the best-selling authors in Britain), Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams, Esther M. Friesner, Tom Holt, Christopher Stasheff, Craig Shaw Gardner, and others. Lately, a new subcategory called “Hard Fantasy” has been proposed, an as-yet only vaguely denned hybrid between Tolkienesque fantasy, technologically oriented “hard” science fiction, and steampunk, with perhaps a jigger of Outlaw Fantasy thrown in; the best examples of this nascent form to date are to be found in Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Walter Jon Williams’s Metropolitan, and in some of the short work—such as “The Giving Mouth”—of Ian R. MacLeod, although I suspect that Geoff Ryman’s “The Unconquered Country” is also ancestral in some way.
Of course, all of these classification schemes are, to a large extent, arbitrary. Authors constantly complicate things by working in more than one form, or by creating not-easily-pigeonholeable works that blur the boundaries between several different categories, and some of the more eccentric and individual authors such as Gene Wolfe, Mary Gentle, and John Crowley don’t really fit in comfortably anywhere. About the best you can do is to perceive vague taxonomic lines and lineages; you can tell that some writers are related somehow, that somewhere down their family trees they share common ancestors, but the species continue to radiate, filling new ecological niches, evolving, specializing, forming new species, and then combining to form new hybrids in bewildering profusion … so that in the end all you can really say is that they all share, say, a common bone in the foot, or the shape of a hip-joint. Making this all even more subjective is the fact that many of these subcategories are distinguishable mainly by Attitude. After all, Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” Gold’s “Trouble with Water,” Avram Davidson’s “The Golem,” Waldrop’s “God’s Hooks!,” Robert Sampson’s “A Gift of the People,” Harlan Ellison’s “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” Esther M. Friesner’s “Blunderbore,” Stephen King’s “The Mangier,” and Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” (among examples that could be multiplied almost endlessly) could all validly be described as stories wherein the supernatural intrudes into the modern world—but they are ail very distinct in tone and mood and emotional color, in flavor, in Attitude. The whale, the bat, and the lemur may have shared a common ancestor, but they are still very different animals today, for all that.
However you try to flense and parse it, the reality is that today, more than twenty years after fantasy initially became a separate marketing category, the fantasy genre has grown into an enormous, varied, and vital industry, rivaling its longer-established cousin science fiction in numbers of titles published and in the amount of bookstore rack space devoted to the form.
By 1995, ironically, one prominent British SF writer was complaining that he could only sell science fiction, in Britain at least, by “disguising” it as fantasy.
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When the last Ice Age started, and the glaciers ground down from the north to cover most of the North American continent, thousands of species of plants and trees, as well as the insects, birds, and animals associated with them, retreated to “cove forests” in the south, in what would eventually come to be called the Great Smoky Mountains; in those cove forests, they waited out the long domain of the Ice, eventually moving north again to re-colonize the land as the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated. Similarly, the lowly genre fantasy and science fiction magazines— Weird Tales and Unknown in the 1930s and 1940s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantastic, and the British Science Fantasy in the 1950s and 1960s—were the “cove forests” that sheltered fantasy during its long retreat from the glaciers of Social Realism, giving it a refuge in which to endure until the climate warmed enough to allow it to spread and repopulate again.
Oddly, those fantasy magazines have often been ignored by histories of fantasy and retrospective fantasy anthologies to date, which often choose to focus upon the more respectable high-end literary ancestors of fantasy instead. Since that territory has recently been covered in two excellent retrospective anthologies, David G. Hartwell’s Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Tom Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (both of which do also acknowledge fantasy’s debt to the genre magazines), I’ve decided to concentrate in this anthology on modern fantasy as it developed and cross-fertilized and flourished in the hothouse atmosphere of those “cove forests,” the genre fantasy magazines of fantasy’s “lost period,” from the 1930s to the 1960s, taking a look as well at what happened to the form after it was no longer necessary for it to hide in the magazines in order to survive. After the Tolkien Explosion of the late 1960s, it became possible to make a reputation as a fantasist by writing novels alone; in fact, many major modern fantasy writers from Tim Powers to Terry Brooks to Guy Gavriel Kay to Terry Pratchett have established themselves while writing few, if any, short stories. Nevertheless, evolutionarily important work continued to appear in short story form throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in genre magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov ‘s Science Fiction magazine, as well as in the occasional original fantasy anthology, which functioned in much the same way as the magazines…and it is from those fantasy magazines and anthologies that the majority of the stories in this anthology are drawn.
As was true of my other two retrospective anthologies, Modern Classics of Science Fiction and Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, none of the stories here were selected on ideological grounds, because they help buttress some polemic or aesthetic argument about the nature of fantasy, or because they express some critical theory, or because they grind some particular political axe. Nor were they selected because they are good examples of one type or another of fantasy—although, in retrospect, it can be seen that a few of them are good examples of one subcategory or another of fantasy. That is not why they are here, though.
No, as usual with my retrospective anthologies, the stories here were selected on the appallingly naive basis that I liked them.
These are the stories that stuck in my mind after more than thirty years of reading fantasy, ever since I first picked up that anthology of stories from Unknown in 1963. These are the stories that spoke to something in me, that moved me and shook me, that opened my eyes to new worlds of wonder and enchantment, that made me experience life inside someone else’s—or something else’s—skin. Stories that have been personal friends of mine, friends that have seen me through some of the darkest times and longest nights of my life. Stories that I enjoyed—uncritically, instinctively—as a reader. Stories that I would want to read again. I decided some years ago that this was the only valid way to put together a retrospective anthology—for me, anyway—and that’s the way I’ve assembled this one as well.
Even collecting stories that fit only the above criteria, though, I found that I was still left with enough material to fill an anthology twice as long as this one, longer than was feasible. Some winnowing-screens were needed. After thinking about this, I decided that although stories such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” and Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” were able to coexist comfortably along with stories such as H. L. Gold’s “Trouble with Water” and L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Hardwood Pile” in the 1930s in the pages of a fantasy magazine such as Unknown, it was clear in retrospect that “It” and “Smoke Ghost” were part of a different taxonomic line, one that lead not to modern fantasy, but instead, on through stories like Harlan Ellison’s “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and Joanna Russ’s “My Dear Emily” and Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” to the modern horror genre—that, in fact, they would all be more appropriate to a book called Modern Classics of Horror than to a book called Modern Classics of Fantasy. So, arbitrarily, I omitted them, and other similar stories that I decided arbitrarily were better thought of as horror-ancestors rather than fantasy-ancestors. Deciding to concentrate on “modern” fantasy as it evolved in die genre magazines eliminated a whole range of other stories, including classics by Lord Dunsany, Kipling, Saki, and others. The constraints of a technically feasible book-length dictated the omission of other stories, although I did manage to squeeze in a few of my favorite fantasy novellas. And the practical difficulties involved in assembling an anthology necessitated the omission of still other stories, those, say, which had recently appeared in a competing anthology, or those for which the reprint rights were either encumbered or priced too high for me to be able to afford them on the limited budget I had to work with (which explains why there is no Ray Bradbury story here, so don’t bother to write and ask).
Some critics will no doubt complain that some of the stories I have used here are not “really” fantasy, but, as I think this anthology demonstrates, the line between fantasy and science fiction is an ambiguous one, and always has been. De Camp’s “The Gnarly Man” was published in the foremost fantasy magazine of its day, but makes a stab at a rationalistic “science-fictional” rationale for its fantastic element… although one that was rather weak even in 1939. Damon Knight’s “Extempore” was published in a science fiction magazine, yet offers no rationalistic explanation for its fantastic element at all, which, stripped of some technobabble, comes down to “wishing will make it so,” clearly a fantasy trope. Roger Zelazny’s “Death and the Executioner,” which was later built into one of the most famous science fiction novels of the 1960s, functions perfectly as a fantasy except for a few lines of back-story toward the end. Keith Roberts’s “The Signaller” was later built into Pavane, which is usually thought of as a science fiction novel—and yet the story features a visitation by Elves. Fritz Leiber’s “Scylla’s Daughter” is a key story in one of the core fantasy series, a sword & sorcery series at that, and yet a time-traveller from the future comes blundering into the story in the middle of it—and, to complicate things, the time-traveller arrives riding on a dragon! Richard McKenna’s “Casey Agonistes” and R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” which I used in my Modern Classics of Science Fiction without a single critical eyebrow being raised, would fit with equal ease into this anthology. And so on.
Much of both modern fantasy and modern horror, it seems to me, still deals with the relationship of the ordinary human world with Faërie, the Land Beyond the Hill, the World Beyond the Wood, that land of ghosts and shadows and unearthly Powers that still flickers just beyond the periphery of our bright, tidy, rational modern world—or so our ancient hindbrain assures us, anyway, no matter how much our skeptical fore-brain scoffs. The major difference between the two, I think, is not so much subject matter as Attitude, the prevalent emotional weather or coloring of each. Michael Swanwick has pointed out that the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by rights ought to read like horror, most of the stories bringing the two comrades into conflict with a shuddersome crew of hideous monsters and supernatural menaces in a fictional universe ruled by as cruel and remorseless a pantheon of dark gods as is to be found in anything by Lovecraft. That they do not read as horror, that they are instantly recognizable as fantasy instead, is due to Attitude—to the élan, the gusto, and the great, good-natured humor with which Fafhrd and the Mouser face even the most grisly and gruesome of adversaries. (Humor seems to be a particular dividing line; there’s lots of funny fantasy, but almost no funny horror—in fact, that comes close to being a contradiction in terms.)
Much of modern horror has succumbed to—in fact, wholeheartedly embraced—a numbing sort of nihilism and fashionable designer despair, the message of which seems to be: you can’t win, nothing matters, neither ethics nor morals nor religion are an effective guide to behavior, and none of them will save you; you can survive for a while by turning yourself into a savage predator, devoid of remorse or compassion or pity, but there’s always a bigger predator in wait somewhere; in the end, the grave will get you, and sometimes you will continue to be flayed and tormented even beyond death. The house always wins, you always lose, and nothing you can do has any significance at all.
This perception of the universe may be closer to “reality” than that of fantasy, but my reaction to it is always, Yeah, well, so what? It’s hardly news, after all, that everyone is bound for the grave; in fact, it’s a rather obvious truism. So what? What can you do with a message that everything is hopeless nihilism and black despair, that nothing you can do matters at all, except to use it as another good reason to commit suicide as soon as possible?
Fantasy instead teaches us that there is something worthwhile you can do on the way to the grave: you can dream. And that maybe that dreaming is not only intrinsically valuable, for its own sake, but that sometimes the dream can take on a life of its own, a life that persists, and that shapes and sometimes even ennobles the lives of others that it touches, sometimes long after the original dreamer is gone from this earth.
So here are many such dreams, some of them pastel and fragile, and yet, in their own way, curiously tough. Such dreams persist, and cross the gulf of generations and even the awful gulf of the grave, cross all barriers of race or age or class or sex or nationality, transcend time itself. Here are dreams that, it is my fervent hope, will still be touching other people’s minds and hearts and stirring them in their turn to dream long after everyone in this anthology or associated with it has gone to dust.
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HORACE L. GOLD
Trouble with Water
Although the late Horace L. Gold published seven million words of fiction in every field but sports and air war, he was perhaps best known as the founder and first editor of Galaxy magazine. He edited the magazine throughout its “Golden Age” in the 1950s, publishing dozens of classic stories by Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, and many others—in fact, Gold was one of the most influential editors in the history of science fiction, rating right up there with editors such as John W. Campbell Jr. and Anthony Boucher. His books include eleven Galaxy anthologies, The Old Die Rich and Other Stories, What Will They Think of Last?, and Ultima Zero. Gold died in 1995.
Long before he assumed the editorial chair at Galaxy, however, Gold had secured his reputation within the field on the basis of the classic story that follows, one of the best stories ever published in the renowned fantasy magazine Unknown, and, in fact, one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written, as bittersweet and funny today as it was in 1939. In it, Gold shows us the wisdom of a simple rule: Never pick a fight until you know exactly who it is you’re fighting with …
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Greenberg did not deserve his surroundings. He was the first fisherman of the season, which guaranteed him a fine catch; he sat in a dry boat—one without a single leak—far out on a lake that was ruffled only enough to agitate his artificial fly.
The sun was warm, the air was cool; he sat comfortably on a cushion; he had brought a hearty lunch; and two bottles of beer hung over the stern in the cold water.
Any other man would have been soaked with joy to be fishing on such, a splendid day. Normally, Greenberg himself would have been ecstatic, but instead of relaxing and waiting for a nibble, he was plagued by worries.
This short, slightly gross, definitely bald, eminently respectable businessman lived a gypsy life. During the summer he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Rockaway; winters he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Florida; and in both places he operated concessions. For years now, rain had fallen on schedule every week end, and there had been storms and floods on Decoration Day, July 4th and Labor Day. He did not love his life, but it was a way of making a living.
He closed his eyes and groaned. If he had only had a son instead of his Rosie! Then things would have been mighty different.
For one thing, a son could run the hot dog and hamburger griddle, Esther could draw beer, and he would make soft drinks. There would be small difference in the profits, Greenberg admitted to himself; but at least those profits could be put aside for old age, instead of toward a dowry for his miserably ugly, dumpy, pitifully eager Rosie.
