I'm under the weather, and working. Yes, it's that kind of month, and I'm that stupid. But never let it be said that I don't want to give the people what they want, so here are two of the most popular FFB entries I've done:
So,
I've made a very preliminary pitch of a suspense-fiction anthology to a
publisher. It's one of several projects I've been mulling for years,
and no one's quite done the book I envision, albeit the following
volumes have some of the flavor of what I'm after, a compilation of
notable stories about characters under the most dire threat of
extinction, but not horror stories in that they're essentially realistic
fiction (in the sense of actually possible in our world as we currently
understand it, leaving aside for this purpose the varying degrees to
which some of We might believe in one sort of supernatural force or
another). The Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies and their fellow-travelers (and here, here, here and here)
leaned in the direction of what I'm after with my potential book
(although they were also very eclectic, including horror, black humor,
mystery, fantasy and science fiction, and sometimes some things not
classifiable among these)...as did a number of Bill Pronzini's anthologies, edited in collaboration and solo.
A few more interesting examples of what I refer to:
Great Tales of Action and Adventure edited by George Bennett (Dell, 1959)
The Bamboo Trap by Robert S. Lemmon
Leiningen Versus The Ants by Carl Stephenson
The Blue Cross by G.K. Chesterton
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
The Fourth Man by John Russell
The Interlopers by Saki
The Adventure of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke
August Heat by W.F. Harvey
To Build A Fire by Jack London
Action by C. E. Montague
--Interestingly
to me, given the title of this ubiquitous anthology from Dell's Laurel
Leaf line, ineluctable for a good two decades, at least, that some of
the eclectic selections were not only rather straightforward horror
fiction (obviously, "August Heat") but in that case a story almost
completely lacking in adventure or action, albeit some serious, ugly
action was likely to ensue just after the text ended. But this was the
book that introduced perhaps millions of young readers in the '60s and
'70s to some of the great chestnuts in the suspense-fiction field,
notably the Stephenson, the Connell (the most plagiarized story of the
last century), the Saki, the Poe and the London (not that the latter
three weren't already chestnuts...and the Connell, too, already
repeatedly imitated by 1959).
Suddenly
edited by Marvin Allen Karp and Irving Settel
Publisher: Popular Library, New York
Publication Date: 1965
Binding: Paperback
144 pp. PL SP351.
Cover art by A. P. Ryder.
contents:
Heartburn by Hortense Calisher
The Jar by Ray Bradbury
Torch Song by John Cheever
Decadence by Romain Gary
Pillar of Salt by Shirley Jackson
The Final Performance by Robert Bloch
The White Quail by John Steinbeck
The Aftertaste by Peter Ustinov
23 Pat O'Brien Movies by Bruce Jay Friedman 
--A
far more obscure volume, which I've just purchased, offering an
interesting mix of some of the best relevant writing of the previous
decade-plus (in 1965), albeit it includes some straightforward horror
fiction (the Calisher) and arguably borderline stuff (the Bradbury and
the Bloch, and in another direction, the Friedman). I'm wondering about
the back-stories of the two editors, whose bylines I don't think I've
come across before...Charles Gramlisch, in GoodReads, wasn't too
impressed by the volume, but he also mistook the Bradbury for being a
much more modern story than the others...I suspect I like more of the
stories here I've read (more than half) than Charles did.
The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, edited by Ed Gorman (Black Lizard, 1987)
Table of Contents
The Used / Loren D. Estleman —
Cold foggy day / Bill Pronzini —
Swamp search / Harry Whittington —
Take care of yourself / William Campbell Gault —
A matter of ethics / Robert J. Randisi —
Tough / John Lutz —
This world, then the fireworks / Jim Thompson —
Soft monkey / Harlan Ellison —
Yellow gal / Dennis Lynds —
The Scrap / Max Allan Collins —
Set 'em up, Joe / Barbara Beman —
Shut the final door / Joe L. Hensley —
Death and the dancing shadows / James Reasoner
Killer in the dark / Robert Edmond Alter —
Perchance to dream / Michael Seidman --
Horn man / Clark Howard —
Shooting match / Wayne Dundee —
The Pit / Joe R. Lansdale —
Turn away / Edward Forman -
The second coming / Joe Gores.
The Second Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, edited by Ed Gorman (Black Lizard, 1988)
Description:xiii, 664 p. ; 22 cm.
Table of Contents
Who lives by the sword / Robert Edmond Alter --
The gun next door / Michael Avallone --
The dreadful lemon pie / Timothy Banse --
Water's edge / Robert Bloch --
Good for the soul / Lawrence Block --
The candy skull / Ray Bradbury --
Streak to death / Jon Breen --
The little woman / Max Allan Collins --
Blood and moonlight / William R. Cox --
A cabin in the woods / John Coyne --
Death of an iron maiden / Wayne D. Dundee --
Free with this box! / Harlan Ellison --
Bad blood / Loren D. Estleman --
The collector comes after payday / Fletcher Flora --
Jode's last hunt / Brian Garfield --
Blood of the innocent / William Campbell Gault --
A long day's night in the naked city / Barry Gifford --
Goodbye, Pops / Joe Gores --
False idols / Ed Gorman --
The home / Joe L. Hensley --
The god of the razor / Joe R. Lansdale --
Eats / Richard Laymon --
High stakes / John Lutz --
Still life / Ed McBain --
Death blues / Steve Mertz --
The girl who jumped the river / Arthur Moore --
Merrill-go-round / Marcia Muller --
The pattern / Bill Pronzini --
Down the long night / William F. Nolan --
Fall guy / Ray Puechner --
Murder me for nickels / Peter Rabe --
The equine theft / Robert Randisi --
Rendezvous / Daniel Ransom --
The affair with the dragon lady / Mickey Spillane --
Horse laugh / Donald Westlake --
The glass alibi / Harry Whittington --
Give the man a cigar / Charles Willeford --
A Christmas story / Will Wyckoff --
Lapses / Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
--The
brilliant Ed Gorman anthologies here (and they not alone among
brilliant Gorman anthologies) might be the closest among those cited
here to what I aim to do with my proposed book, though Ed does include
more from the mystery end of crime fiction, or at least its borders,
than I intend to. Otherwise, these are monuments to the kind of noir the
Black Lizard line wished to publish, and given the megabooks that BL is
issuing as edited by Otto Penzler these days, an omnibus reprint is
more than called for for these two compilations.
A Century of Great Suspense Stories edited by Jeffery Deaver
(Berkley Prime Crime, 2001)
The Gentleman in the lake / Robert Barnard --
Life in our time / Robert Bloch
Batman's helpers / Lawrence Block
The Girl who married a monster/ Anthony Boucher --
The Wench is dead / Fredric Brown
Cigarette girl / James M. Cain --
A Matter of principal / Max Allan Collins --
The Weekender / Jeffery Deaver --
Reasons unknown / Stanley Ellin --
Killing Bernstein /Harlan Ellison --
Leg man / Erle Stanley Gardner --
One of those days,one of those nights / Ed Gorman --
Missing: Page thirteen / Anna Katharine Green --
Voir Dire / Jeremiah Healy --
Chee's witch/ Tony Hillerman --
Interpol: The case of the modern Medusa / Edward D. Hoch --
Quitters, Inc. / Stephen King --
So young, so fair, so dead / John Lutz --
Nor iron bars / John D. MacDonald --
The Guilt-edged blonde / Ross Macdonald --
Red clay / Michael Malone --
Poetic justice / Steve Martini --
A Very merry Christmas / Ed McBain --
Among my souvenirs / Sharyn McCrumb --
The People across the canyon / Margaret Miller --
Benny's space / Marcia Muller --
Heartbreak house / Sara Paretsky --
Stacked deck / Bill Pronzini --
The Adventure of the dauphin doll / Ellery Queen --
Burning end / Ruth Rendell --
Carrying concealed / Lisa Scottoline --
The Little house at Croix-Rousse / Georges Simeonon --
The Girl behind the hedge / Mickey Spillane --
The Fourth of July picnic / Rex Stout --
Lady Hillary / Janwillem van de Wetering --
This is death / Donald E. Westlake.
--The
Deaver isn't a bad anthology, and it would probably take someone of
Deaver's or Lawrence Block's commercial clout to get such a book
published a decade after this one from a major commercial house, but
apparently Berkley wasn't completely behind Deaver on this book,
released in that unlucky year 2001...as Otto Penzler noted in his review
of the book, Patricia Highsmith's name is on the cover, with no story
in the book, and not a few of the most notable writers of suspense
fiction are also absent...while a number of fairly recent stories by
best-selling "names" are included...many of these not the stories by
their authors I would've included (particularly in the cases of Bloch,
Block, and Hoch...or "blok" "blok" and "hoke" if you were wondering).
The Best American Noir of the Century
edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler (Mariner Books; Oct 4, 2011)
Description: xiv, 731 p. ; 24 cm.
Contents:
Spurs / Tod Robbins --
Pastorale / James M. Cain --
You'll always remember me / Steve Fisher --
Gun crazy / MacKinlay Kantor --
Nothing to worry about / Day Keene --
The homecoming / Dorothy B. Hughes
Man in the dark / Howard Browne --
The lady says die! / Mickey Spillane --
Professional man / David Goodis --
The hunger / Charles Beaumont --
The gesture / Gil Brewer --
The last spin / Evan Hunter --
Forever after / Jim Thompson --
For the rest of her life / Cornell Woolrich --
The dripping / David Morrell --
Slowly, slowly in the wind / Patricia Highsmith --
Iris / Stephen Greenleaf --
A ticket out / Brendan DuBois --
Since I don't have you / James Ellroy --
Texas city / James Lee Burke --
Mefisto in onyx / Harlan Ellison --
Out there in the darkness / Ed Gorman --
Hot spings / James Crumley --
The weekender / Jeffery Deaver --
Faithless / Joyce Carol Oates --
Poachers / Tom Franklin --
Like a bone in the throat / Lawrence Block --
Crack / James W. Hall --
Running out of dog / Dennis Lehane --
The paperhanger / William Gay --
Midnight emissions / F.X. Toole --
When the women come out to dance / Elmore Leonard --
Controlled burn / Scott Wolven --
All through the house / Christopher Coake --
What she offered / Thomas H. Cook --
Her lord and master / Andrew Klavan --
Stab / Chris Adrian --
The hoarder / Bradford Morrow --
Missing the morning bus / Lorenzo Carcaterra.
--this
book has a remit that stretches to straightforward horror (the Beaumont
and to some extent the Ellison) and some more-mystery fiction, and the
story that was adapted for film in a more fantasticated way than the
story runs (the Robbins, the basis for the film Freaks)...only
three women contributors make the cut, which seems less surprising when
we remember that James Ellroy is co-editor. But also a fairly close
approximation to what I'm hoping to achieve, though like the Deaver it
might err on the side of too much too-recent work, perhaps giving space
to talented friends of the editors, but having to leave out some
important relevant older material to do so--both books seem better
representations of the last two decades of their centuries than the
rest, albeit the Deaver is more guilty in that wise.
And then we have, of late, along with the large new organization International Thriller Writers, who among other things produce impressive anthologies of new fiction, the Top Suspense Group,
leaning toward ebook productions of some impressive quality (and made
up mostly of friendly and fleeting acquaintances of mine)...as soon as I
get proficient on my new tablet, and get the Kindle ap up and running, I
hope to start reading their ebook productions, and have also just
bought the POD hard-copy version of their initial anthology, Top Suspense...a
pity, except from the trees' point of view, that this (pictured) and
most (all?) of their subsequent releases seem to be unavailable as
non-virtual books.
Contents of Favorite Kills:
Archie's Been Framed by Dave Zeltserman
Night Nurse by Harry Shannon
Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine
Number 19 by Naomi Hirahara
Sweet Dreams by Vicki Hendricks
House Rules by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Angie by Ed Gorman
Knife Fight by Joel Goldman
Jack Webb's Star by Lee Goldberg
Restraint by Stephen Gallagher
Top of the World by Bill Crider
A Matter of Principal by Max Allan Collins
--And I can't resist including this:
...the 1959 volume which helped launch the series aimed at adults and running parallel to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
television series, with the volumes ghost-edited by Robert Arthur till
his death, and by Harold Q. Masur after till Hitchcock's death;
this one, with its UK cover given here, was ghost-edited by Arthur under the pseudonym Patricia
O'Connell (to ward off complaints about including his own work?). And...the Wells, the Finney and at least arguably the du
Maurier, Boucher and Sambrot are all fantasticated...unsurprisingly, really, in
the cases of all five writers...
Contents:
Alfred Hitchcock - Introduction (ghost-written? possibly not)
Daphne du Maurier - The Birds
Donald Honig - Man With A Problem
Anthony Boucher - They Bite
Charlotte Armstrong - The Enemy
H. G. Wells - The Inexperienced Ghost
Thomas Walsh - Sentence of Death
Dorothy Salisbury Davis - Spring Fever
Matthew Gant - The Crate At Outpost 1
Gay Cullingford - My Unfair Lady
Hilda Lawrence - Composition For Four Hands
Carter Dickson - New Murders For Old
C. B. Gilford - Terrified
Joan Vatsek - The Duel
Price Day - Four O'Clock
Paul Eiden - Too Many Coincidences
Jack Finney - Of Missing Persons
William Sambrot - Island Of Fear
Robert Arthur - Getting Rid Of George
F. Tennyson Jesse - Treasure Trove
Wilbur Daniel Steele - The Body Of The Crime
Mann Rubin - A Nice Touch
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding - The Blank Wall
This was meant to be a quick set of pointers for
Jackie Kashian,
whom I promised some advice as to whose work to look for for
non-Tolkien-derivative work in fantasy and related fiction (particularly
science fiction by the same people, since often she prefers sf),
inasmuch as she (like most of us) never really needs to read
FNORD OF THE THINGS
and other heavily derivative work again...there's plenty of Tolkien for
that purpose...and while she's familiar with a number of impressive
writers who've worked in this and similar modes, it's still entirely too
easy to miss entirely too much, given the Well-Organized and Thorough
Book Publishing and Distribution Industries, etc. I encourage
suggestions of what and where I've completely overlooked someone or
something major...you can rest assured that Stephen Donaldson and Terry
Brooks have mostly been overlooked on purpose.
Fantasy, as with
such arguably later related developments as science fiction and
surrealist fiction, of course comes out of mythic traditions, but also
requires at least some distance from full immersion in those
myths...while there are certainly believers in the supernatural
(Tolkien, obviously, was no dithering Christian, and C. S. Lewis even
less so; Arthur Conan Doyle is probably only the most famous
spiritualist to write a lot of fantasy, even if his most famous
character was an utter, if addicted, rationalist) who've written the
great works, they almost invariably employ a certain metaphoric distance
even in their most blatant allegories and parables (Tolkien doesn't
have "traditional" demons running about, but does have at least one
hugely famous character who is essentially possessed, among other
obvious parallels). So, basically, as fantasy fiction was coalescing as
a self-conscious mode of prose fiction, after all the centuries of
Homer's and others' poetic epics and folktales of all sorts (including
what we often call "fairy tales" and such collections as the
Arabian Nights),
we see the emergence of satiric fantasy (among the most obvious,
Jonathan Swift), and the employment of fantastic tropes as strong
vehicles for Transcendence (19th century folks such as William Morris
and his literary heirs such as David Lindsay and William Hope Hodgson
followed in the paths broken by William Blake, as well as reaching into
the folklore of their cultures), for the Decadents (as the knot of folks
around Huysmans and Baudelaire in France, and clustering around
The Yellow Book and similar productions in England...where, for example,
Aubrey Beardsley would publish his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction)--also
children of Blake, in many ways!--and including such fellow-travelers
as Oscar Wilde, who preferred the term "Aesthete" for himself, and the
continuing tradition of satirists (such as Samuel Butler with
Erewhon,
or Twain with his Connecticut Yankee and his Adam and Eve) and those
who submerged their satiric or similar messages rather more deeply into
their texts or were writing at least some of their fantasies rather
blatantly for kids, or both, such as Hawthorne and Kipling and, of
course, "Lewis Carroll" and the
Alice books and more, and L. Frank Baum, of the
Oz
series. H. G. Wells, like Mary Shelley before him doing pioneering work
in no-bones-about-it sf in this (frequently satirical and/or
cautionary) mode, was also particularly fond of writing the kind of
fantasy where magical things are happening within the context of
otherwise everyday reality..."The Man Who Could Work Miracles" being a
rather obvious title in this mode...a mode rather akin to horror fiction
and to tall-tale traditions and hoax-stories. So, by the early 1900s,
one could find the likes of James Branch Cabell, E. R. Eddison, Lord
Dunsany, Virginia Woolf (even if only occasionally, with the likes of
Orlando)
and such adventure-fantasists as H. Rider Haggard all drawing on these
traditions and more. Among the best and most popular writers of the
fantastic popping-up-in-the-everyday mode was Thorne Smith.
And so, H. P. Lovecraft and his friends, who clustered around the magazine
Weird Tales
and formed an extended correspondence network, "the Lovecraft Circle,"
featured such influential folks as HPL (who wrote some early fantasies
very imitative of Dunsany's work before settling in to write his
existential horror and borderline sf in his more typical quasi-1780s
prose), Robert Howard (Conan, and much else), and Clark Ashton Smith,
perhaps the best of the three in many ways, a visual artist as well as
poet and fiction writer very influenced by the Decadents, who is his
turn was the great model (though many of the others above were also
strong influences on his work) for my first recommendation for a Tolkien
peer,
Jack Vance.
Jack Vance
has written some of the most deft and acerbic of fantasy,
science-fantasy and sf (among other work) to be published over the last
century; his first great work might be that which is collected into a
sort of novel,
The Dying Earth, which saw sequels of sorts in
The Eyes of the Overworld,
Cugel's Saga and
Rhialto the Marvellous.
These might be the places to start with Vance, though it's hard to go
too wrong with his work, particularly such arguably overlooked sf novels
as
The Languages of Pao, his massive
Lyonesse trilogy, or such award-winning work as "The Dragon Masters" and "The Last Castle."
Michael Moorcock's
work in the fantasy field draws on many of the same influences, though
his early fantasies were too often written hastily and that is sometimes
obvious in the result; later fiction he could take more time with, such
as
Gloriana, gives a better indication of what the admittedly more mature Moorcock could achieve.
Fritz Leiber
was both a member of the Lovecraft Circle, joining with his wife
Jonquil on her initiative not long before Lovecraft's death (and it's
notable that Leiber and the other most junior member of the Circle,
Robert Bloch,
were the most innovative and important writers to pick up on
Lovecraft's development of existential horror fiction, and explore its
implications in many ways better than Lovecraft himself could), and an
occasional professional actor whose parents owned a touring
Shakespearean company; Leiber was thus particularly influenced by such
Jacobean playwrights as John Webster as well as the folks already cited.
He began publishing in the pages of
Unknown Fantasy Fiction (a magazine devoted particularly to the H.G. Wells/Thorne Smith mode of fantasy, but by no means exclusively),
Weird Tales, and
Astounding Science Fiction,
the most influential and sophisticated of fantasticated pulp magazines
of their time, and his work from the beginning was challenging,
innovative, and influential.
His fantasy series, begun as almost a role-playing mail game with his
old friend Harry Fischer, the stories of Fafhrd (the Leiber character)
and the Gray Mouser (the Fischer), became a consistent thread in his
work throughout his long life; some of the F&GM stories are weaker
than others, but the three included in the "origin" volume, which verges
on a novel,
Swords and Deviltry
(in its original Ace editions with the Jeff Jones cover; the White Wolf
repackage, with the Mike Mignola cover, takes its title from the third
story, "Ill Met in Lankhmar"), are among the more brilliant. He wrote
three horror novels, one at the beginning of his career (
Conjure Wife, 1943, in one issue of
Unknown), one a little less than a decade later, when his influence was already being widely felt,
You're All Alone (short form in
Fantastic Adventures magazine, 1950), and one toward the end of his career,
Our Lady of Darkness (a short form, entitled
The Pale Brown Thing, was serialized in two issues of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in 1977). And he wrote a number of good to brilliant sf novels, though
perhaps none of those had quite the impact of such short stories as
"Smoke Ghost" (
Unknown, 1940) or "Coming Attraction" (
Galaxy sf magazine, 1950), which can be reasonably said to have revolutionized their respective fields. His play in prose,
The Big Time, might be the best of his science fiction novels.
Avram Davidson began publishing fiction in the Jewish-American magazines in the early '50s, first appearing in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
with the superb "My Boyfriend's Name is Jello" in 1954. He would
contribute extensively to the fantasy, sf, and crime-fiction fields, and
occasionally to other fictional traditions, as well as becoming one of
the premiere writers of true-crime histories in the country, work which
garnered him awards and also served as the contemporary setting for his
great, very funny early sf novel
Masters of the Maze,
in which a more typical "men's sweat" writer finds himself responsible,
in part, for foiling an invasion of the Earth by a kind of
crustacean-like aliens, the Chulpex, who in their turn are very well
drawn, as one of a long line guardians of a sort of gateway between
worlds, the maze of the title, which has been traditionally been guarded
by a sort of Masonic organization throughout history. Davidson thus
lightly touches on the kinds of conspiracies of history Robert Anton
Wilson, among many others since, have churned out megabookery about.
Davidson's most ambitious work, a fantasy sequence about Vergil Magus
(the folkloric reimagining of the poet Vergil) that begins with
The Phoenix and the Mirror,
is sadly less fully-realized than Davidson clearly wanted, though it is
magisterial in its own right; far more fully-evocative of what Davidson
could do are the series of linked stories collected first as
The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and later, with newer stories (some a bit lesser) added, as
The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy,
which I think will satisfy anyone who tends to prefer novels, even in
its necessarily episodic structure. Eszterhazy is a polymathic
troubleshooter in a section of what very much resembles the collapsing
Austria-Hungary of the turn of the 20th century, who is usually brought
in to deal with the fantastic and outre threats and difficulties faced
by and within the kingdoms; the stories are so brilliantly witty,
erudite and elegant at their best that they almost beggar description.
As with Jorge Luis Borges, Davidson relished scholarship for its own
sake without stuffiness or any sort of turf protection; he was here to
show us all the world's wonders, and those apparently beyond he could
find. Further examples of Davidson's work, aside from the brilliant
short fiction (including such crime fiction as "The Lord of Central
Park" which will nonetheless reward any fantasy reader who seeks it
out), that come close to these peaks include his first novel (a
collaboration with the undersung
Ward Moore), the historically rich fantasy
Joyleg; and his last to be published during his lifetime, a collaboration with his ex-wife and executor,
Grania Davis (an accomplished fantasist in her own right),
Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, and the collection of fantasticated essays,
Adventures in Uhhistory.
Jorge Luis Borges
never wrote a novel, nor as far as I recall attempted to, but his short
fiction helped revolutionize world literature at least as much as all
the other 20th century folks mentioned so far, and he actually got some
credit for that (it perhaps helped that he wrote primarily in Spanish,
and while first published in English in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
in the 1940s, was more flashily published in bulk by the university and
avant-garde presses of the earliest 1960s, which made his excursions
into the fantastic "safer" to admire among the literary establishment of
the time. And well they might admire the work collected in such volumes
as
Dreamtigers and particularly
Labyrinths,
which play with literary form and reintroduce more sophisticated forms
of the literary hoax as well as playing with mind-expanding concepts
("The Library of Babel," for obvious example, the infinitely vast
library which includes volumes that include all the possible
combinations of letters and words, and what the implications of that
are...); and, even more than any of the others here save Davidson,
Borges was drawn to worldwide traditions to explore, very much including
the
Arabian Nights and other
related material. As with Leiber, Borges also was frequently willing to
fantasticate his own life in fruitful and challenging ways; he embarked,
as a fluent English speaker, on a program of translation of his own
works for Dutton in the late '60s with Norman Thomas DiGiovanni which
are, for the most part, the definitive translations of his work, and the
best of those volumes is probably the one with the long
autobiographical essay,
The Aleph, and Other Stories: 1933-1969;
unfortunately, some financial shenanigans with the contracts for these
translations, giving DiGiovanni a disproportionate share of the revenue,
has led to the Borges heirs keeping these out of print in recent
decades, and the comparably atrocious current Penguin editions of new
translations, in such volumes as
Collected Fictions,
average much worse than both the Borges versions and the early
translations by James Irby and others in the early volumes such as
Labyrinths.
Joanna Russ, as I've noted earlier in this blog (
in eulogizing her and otherwise),
had a career which in many ways paralleled that of her friend Fritz
Leiber; they both began their professional writing careers, having had a
strong grounding in dramatic arts (Leiber primarily as an actor, Russ
primarily as a playwright and scholar of drama at university), as mostly
writers of horror fiction, though by no means exclusively; they soon
added important science-fictional work to their resumes, often
controversial work that, particularly in the case of Russ's best novel,
the playful, innovative, yet devastatingly satirical
The Female Man,
managed to find audiences well beyond frequent sf readers; Leiber was a
pacifist and pro-feminist even as his career began, if usually not too
stridently so, while Russ became a strong voice for feminist thought
from early in her career, becoming perhaps the most prominent voice for
such in fantastic fiction, or at least alongside such others as Ursula
Le Guin,
Angela Carter,
Judith Merril and eventually
Alice "James Tiptree, Jr." Sheldon, along with such folks at the periphery of fantastic fiction as
Marge Piercy and
Margaret Atwood.
And, like Leiber, Russ had among her personal analog figures in her
writing a fantasy (near anti-) hero, the thief and troublemaker Alyx, in
a series of short fiction and a novel,
Picnic on Paradise, which has been collected in the omnibus
The Adventures of Alyx,
which I can recommend to any fantasy reader...along with such major
fantasies as "My Boat" (and such deft horror as "Come Closer" and "There
is Another Shore, You Know, On the Other Side") from her three other
collections of short stories (Alyx and Fafhrd, the Leiber analog from
his series, each appear in one story by the other writer, as well, in
their respective series; at least as charming a grace note as when
Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft wrote stories in which each had the
other killed, many years before, published in issues of
Weird Tales magazine.)
Ursula K. Le Guin,
of course, is probably the best-selling (at least in English) and the
most widely-respected (probably after Borges) of the writers I've chosen
to highlight in this post, and probably needs little introduction for
almost anyone likely to see this...but (as she notes in the essay
included in the Beagle-edited anthology pictured at the head of this
post, which I finally got around to reading this morning, or after
writing all up through the Leiber passage) she is not above a little
irritation at the remarkable notion that a novel aimed at young adult
readers and easily readable by adults as well, about a school for young
wizards, might be taken for a remarkably new vision when offered by
J. K. Rowling when it's also the matter for the first in Le Guin's most famous series of novels,
A Wizard of Earthsea.
If Russ was perhaps the most devoted feminist among the writers I
highlight, Le Guin vies with Atwood as the most famously so in fantastic
fiction (setting aside for the moment such foremothers as
Mary Shelley and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman),
as well as the most famous anarchist, which are among the factors which
have helped shape the fantasies she has written, relating to Earthsea
and otherwise, as well as such major sf novels as
The Left Hand of Darkness and
The Dispossessed.
Le Guin, also like Russ (and Leiber, though his work thus remains
mostly uncollected, and of course Tolkien and Lovecraft), has also been a
major essayist about fantasy fiction, with such collections as
The Language of the Night
being necessary reading (and it's amusing, as I hope to note further in
a future review here, the small degrees to which Le Guin's essay
disagrees with the other collected in the Beagle anthology, by David
Hartwell, though both are matched in insight by Beagle's own
introduction). Such other occasional fantasists as
Algis Budrys,
Barry Malzberg,
Damon Knight and
James Blish
have published similar collections of reviews and related essays,
theirs usually more focused on sf (as their writing careers were, as
well).
Also worth mentioning in this context is the literary-historical and biographical work of
L. Sprague de Camp,
as controversial as some of the latter is, which he began in the early
1970s as supplement to his work about folklore and history (such as
Lost Continents) and his own fiction, which on his own and in collaboration with
Fletcher Pratt
is also at least as impressive as that of many of the folks cited so
far...though I've enjoyed his posthumous collaborations with Robert
Howard less (though he was better at this than such other pickers at the
scraps of Howard's work as Lin Carter, with whom De Camp also
collaborated thus);
Fletcher Pratt on his own also produced notable historical nonfiction (the Civil War history
Ordeal by Fire, most obviously) and epic fantasies such
The Well of the Unicorn and
The Blue Star which can stand alongside such other midcentury work as
Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast trilogy and
T. H. White's Arthurian fantasies, collected eventually as
The Once and Future King, and that of Tolkien's fellow Inklings
C. S. Lewis,
Roger Green and
Charles Williams--among the work I'm slighting here!
Jane Yolen,
more than any of the other folks mentioned so far, has been a serious
scholar of folkloric traditions in a way that rivals such folks as
Jack Zipes and
Italo Calvino;
like
Calvino, but perhaps to not as wide acclaim, she has also been a
first-rate writers of fantastic fiction, often drawing heavily on the
folkloric traditions but bringing to them fresh insights and contexts;
among her best work at novel length for adults (for she has been one of
the most important of children's writers over the last several decades
as well, for a while the head of her own imprint) being the jarring,
elegant
Briar Rose, which takes
interesting liberties with story structure (thus not too different thus
with Calvino, famous for doing similar things in his more personal work,
and like Yolen's often set as if being orally told to the reader) as it
mixes the Sleepy Beauty folktale with the experiences of a survivor of
the Polish WW2 extermination camps and her family in the present day.
Along with her collections and anthologies of folktales, she has also
published at least one sf novel,
Cards of Grief (which, as she notes, still "feels like fantasy").
The similarly brilliant writer
William Kotzwinkle has had a somewhat parallel career, with a large following in children's literature (not least for his antic
Walter the Farting Dog books), seemingly straddled borders with his grim animal fantasy
Doctor Rat and lighter, satirical
The Bear Went Over the Mountain, and work that despite accessibility to younger readers is thoroughly adult, ranging from the grim timeslip fantasy
The Exile to the charming, heavily illustrated The Midnight Examiner and such collections as
The Hot Jazz Trio.
And then, as I note below, there are such other major creators in the field as
Sylvia Townsend Warner (who in addition to her own impressive work in novels starting with
Lolly Willowes and in short fiction, notably collected in
Kingdoms of Elfin, also wrote a biography of T. H. White),
the foremothers of science fantasy in the pulps,
Leigh Brackett and
C. L. Moore, with Brackett augmenting her basically serious and graceful space opera (such as that collected in
Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories) with more soberly extrapolative sf, such as
The Long Tomorrow, and several crime fiction novels, the first of which,
No Good from a Corpse, led directly to her being hired to adapt Raymond Chandler's
The Big Sleep
for film as part of a team including Jules Furthman and a bitter,
drunken William Faulkner), the beginning of screen career that would
include the solo adaptation of
The Long Goodbye and one of her last works, the first draft of
The Empire Strikes Back, the least bad of the
Star Wars films. Moore, initially on her own and then in partnership with her writer-husband
Henry Kuttner,
produced the Jirel of Joiry series of female freebooter science
fantasies, and the Northwest Smith series (leaning a bit more, with its
male protagonist, into traditional sf adventure), but also such
definitive sf work as "No Woman Born" (almost certainly a key influence
on
Anne McCaffrey's work) and
"Vintage Season." Moore and Kuttner were so enmeshed as writing
partners that it has become both a parlor game and a scholarly grail to
try to tell where one left off and the other began in such major stories
under their joint pseudonym "Lewis Padgett" (best known for the classic
story "Mismy were the Borogoves"), and even the work each signed just
their own name to, that such matters are unlikely to ever be clearly
settled. Brackett, too, was married to a major sf/fantasy writer,
Edmond Hamilton, but their literary careers were rather more distinct, though they did collaborate on occasion.
Gene Wolfe
has been one of the most productive of the more complex writers of
science-fantasy, since getting his start professionally in fiction in
1966, lavishing his frequently dense and allusive prose on matters of
moral ambiguity and the state of humanity, most clangorously in
The Book of the New Sun, a novel published in four volumes that has now seen both pendant books and sequelization at nearly as great length. And
Peter Beagle
was perhaps the "purist" of US fantasists to not be shunted into
category publication throughout the first decade of his career, at
least, as he began with
A Fine and Private Place (1960), and his shorter work was published in
The Atlantic Monthly
and other relatively, if not actually hostile, than often
fantasy-indifferent markets. Perhaps his most famous novel remains his
second,
The Last Unicorn (1968). His career since has ranged from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
scripting to Tolkien biography to further award-winning fantasy, though
rather as with the adult work of William Kotzwinkle, much if not most
of his publications over the last two decades have been tagged and
marketed as fantasy fiction. Among other major writers of the era to
mostly work in short form, mention must be made of
John Collier (
Fancies and Goodnights),
Roald Dahl (
Kiss, Kiss),
Joan Aiken (
The Green Flash),
Harlan Ellison (
Deathbird Stories),
Ray Bradbury (
Dark Carnival),
Keith Roberts (
Pavane and
Anita) and
Theodore Sturgeon (
E Pluribus Unicorn),
all of whom have done brilliant work in fantasy and horror fiction, and
all of them have produced novels, though aside from Collier's three
fantasticated novels, most of the relevant work by all these writers has
been in novels for young readers, crime-fiction novels, or in Roberts
and Sturgeon's cases sf novels (with only Sturgeon's last, controversial
work,
Godbody, being a straightforward fantasy).
And as I noted when I had to break off previously:
Wow...this was meant to be a short take, a briefly annotated list, but
the work will take over (I'll have to edit it down, eventually!). And I
meant to cite some particularly undersung examples by each writer,
though that's pretty tough for Leiber...a collection such as
Shadows with Eyes or
Night Monsters might have to be the example here (though certainly even
The Book of Fritz Leiber
has been out of print too long...it was notable how Leiber was perhaps
the only writer in fantastic fiction to have three, arguably four career
retrospectives published in the 1970s with little if any overlap:
The Best of FL,
The Worlds of FL,
The Book of FL and its sequel,
The Second Book of FL...and all of these have been out of print for far too long, not quite supplanted by further retrospective volumes since.
This will have to be continued, with the following writers to be particularly highlighted:
Joanna Russ
Ursula K. Le Guin
Avram Davidson
Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Yolen, with many others cited...
...or, at least, that's my plan...
Here's what I ended up posting on Friday over at
Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest, in response to Maria Bamford's interview of Jackie (the second of two turnabout episodes):
At
my blog, I finally tried to get down today the Quick and Dirty list of
fantasy (and at least some sf) from people who were comparable to, and
not imitative of, Tolkien, only to find myself beginning to write a long
essay...but the writers I chose to suggest boil down to:
FRITZ LEIBER...book
to start with, SWORDS AND DEVILTRY (or ILL MET IN LANKHMAR, in its
revised edition); alternate/sf novel to start with: THE BIG TIME
(borderline horror/fantasy to start with, in the Kafka/Philip Dick mode,
only before Dick started publishing: YOU'RE ALL ALONE).
JOANNA RUSS...book to start with: THE ADVENTURES OF ALYX; alternate/sf novel to start with: THE FEMALE MAN.
AVRAM DAVIDSON...book
to start with: THE ENQUIRIES OF DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY (or THE ADVENTURES OF
DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY, in its expanded edition). Alternate/sf novel to
start with: MASTERS OF THE MAZE. Alternate historical fantasy, written
with his ex-wife Grania Davis, MARCO POLO AND THE SLEEPING BEAUTY.
JANE YOLEN...novel
to start with: BRIAR ROSE. Alternates to start with...nearly any of her
collections (she does tend to excel in short forms).
JACK VANCE...book
to start with: THE DYING EARTH and its three loose sequels, starting
with THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; alternate sf novel to start with: among
so many, THE LANGUAGES OF PAO. The LYONESSE trilogy is definitely worth
looking into.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
(seems particularly unlikely you haven't given her a spin, but just in
case)...book to start with: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA. Alternate sf to start
with: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. Alternate science-fantasy border
straddler: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN.
JORGE LUIS BORGES...book
to start with: well, the closest things to novels this extraordinarily
influential writer offered were the collections of linked stories in THE
UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY and, with Adolfo Bioy-Casares, SIX CASES
FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI (the latter parodic, slightly fantasticated crime
fiction). But the stories in such collections as LABYRINTHS and THE
ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES: 1933-69 are often mindblowing.
I should at least add Leigh Brackett and Gene Wolfe...(Ms.) C. L. Moore and Peter Beagle...Sylvia Townsend Warner and Italo Calvino...you know how it goes.
For more conventional book-recommendation essays, please see the links and examples at Patti Abbott's blog
