That definition sets out ground rules without clarifying much. A fantasy is a story set in a world where impossible things happen. Like fantasy itself, it’s romantic and appealing but more than a little hazy at the edges. In fairness to Clute and Grant, they go on to devote a lengthy entry and, eventually, an entire encyclopedia to defining and understanding fantasy.
More recently, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn note that “the major theorists in the field – Tzetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, Kathryn Hume, W.R. Irwin, and Colin Manlove – all agree that fantasy is about the construction of the impossible whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely, but is always grounded in the scientifically possible”. While critics like Clute, Grant, James, Mendlesohn and most interestingly Brian Attebery, whose Strategies of Fantasy I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the academic discussion of fantasy, have a great deal of interesting things to say about the nature of fantasy and how it constructs the impossible, this book started from much more humble beginnings.
As many books I have worked on do, and in fact as many stories that I read happen to, this book started in a bar. I was at World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, California in the late fall of 2011 engaged in a passionate discussion about favourite writers and books, something I think every reader does when they find a like mind, and the subject turned to the work of the great Fritz Leiber. I had recently edited a collection of Leiber’s work and was pontificating (the failing, perhaps, of having the discussion in a bar) on the depth and breadth of his work, from the beloved sword and sorcery adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in Lankhmar to the humorous tales of a superkitten called Gummitch to dark and disturbing urban slices of fear like ‘Smoke Ghost’. His collected fiction amounted, I argued, to nothing less than a library of fantasy that encompassed almost all of its possibilities.
While the convivial atmosphere of that bar no doubt encouraged some subtle exaggeration on my part, it also started me thinking about a book of new stories that might encompass as wide a range of types of fantasy story as possible, from ‘traditional fantasy’ to ‘military fantasy’ to quirky, strange tales of the impossible. The idea stayed with me and, when I was discussing possible new projects with Jonathan Oliver, my editor at Solaris, I mentioned doing such a book. He shared my enthusiasm and before I knew it we’d agreed that I’d edit a new anthology for Solaris that tentatively was to be called Reap the Whirlwind and would bring together a selection of all new ‘mainstream’ fantasy stories, for want of a better term, by some of today’s best and most exciting writers.
It wasn’t long, though, before we realised that title didn’t really describe what we were attempting, and when the wonderful cover art from Tomasz Jedruszek arrived early in 2012 we knew the title had to change. After some discussion we came up with Fearsome Journeys, which I think aptly describes the beginnings of so many fantasy stories, including the ones that ended up in this book. Happily Jonathan also suggested that we should subtitle the book ‘The New Solaris Book of Fantasy’. Fearsome Journeys was to be the first in a series of anthologies, not of ‘new fantasy’ but simply of fantasy, covering all of its many variations.
As the stories came in, first from Trudi Canavan, then K.J. Parker, Kate Elliott, Daniel Abraham, Glen Cook, and more, it became clear this first New Solaris Book of Fantasy was going to exceed my expectations. Those stories, and the ones from Saladin Ahmed, Jeffrey Ford, Robert V S Redick, Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Ellen Kushner and Ysbeau S. Wilce, and Ellen Klages have been a joy to read and I think make for a wonderful start to this new series. I’m already at work on volume two, which should be out late in 2014, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy these fine stories as much as I have.
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
January 2013
THE EFFIGY ENGINE:
A TALE OF THE RED HATS
SCOTT LYNCH
11th Mithune, 1186
Painted Sky Pass, North Elara
“I TOOK UP the study of magic because I wanted to live in the beauty of transfinite mathematical truths,” said Rumstandel. He gestured curtly. In the canyon below us, an enemy soldier shuddered, clutched at his throat, and began vomiting live snakes.
“If my indifference were money you’d be the master of my own personal mint,” I muttered. Of course Rumstandel heard me despite the pop, crackle, and roar of musketry echoing around the walls of the pass. There was sorcery at play between us to carry our voices, so we could bitch and digress and annoy ourselves like a pair of inebriates trading commentary in a theater balcony.
The day’s show was an ambush of a company of Iron Ring legionaries on behalf of our employers, the North Elarans, who were blazing away with arquebus and harsh language from the heights around us. The harsh language seemed to be having greater effect. The black-coated ranks of the Iron Ring jostled in consternation, but there weren’t enough bodies strewn among the striated sunset-orange rocks that gave the pass its name. Hot lead was leaving the barrels of our guns, but it was landing like kitten farts and some sly magical bastard down there was responsible.
Oh, for the days of six months past, when the Iron Ring had crossed the Elaran border marches, their battle wizards proud and laughing in full regalia. Their can’t-miss-me-at-a-mile wolf skull helmets, their set-me-on-fire carnelian cloaks, their shoot-me-in-the-face silver masks.
Six months with us for playmates had taught them to be less obvious. Counter-thaumaturgy was our mission and our meal ticket: coax them into visibility and make them regret it. Now they dressed like common officers or soldiers, and some even carried prop muskets or pikes. Like this one, clearly.
“I’m a profound disappointment to myself,” sighed Rumstandel, big round florid Rumstandel, who didn’t share my appreciation for sorcerous anonymity. This week he’d turned his belly-scraping beard blue and caused it to spring out in flaring forks like the sculpture of a river and its tributaries. Little simulacra of ships sailed up and down those beard strands even now, their hulls the size of rice grains, dodging crumbs like rocks and shoals. Crumbs there were aplenty, since Rumstandel always ate while he killed and soliloquized. One hand was full of the sticky Elaran ration bread we called corpsecake for its pallor and suspected seasoning.
“I should be redefining the vocabulary of arcane geometry somewhere safe and cultured, not playing silly buggers with village fish-charmers wearing wolf skulls.” He silenced himself with a mouthful of cake and gestured again. Down on the valley floor his victim writhed his last. The snakes came out slick with blood, eyes gleaming like garnets in firelight, nostrils trailing strands of pale caustic vapor.
I couldn’t really pick out the minute details at seventy yards, but I’d seen the spell before. In the closed ranks of the Iron Ring the serpents wrought the havoc that arquebus fire couldn’t, and legionaries clubbed desperately at them with musket-butts.
As I peered into the mess, the forward portion of the legionary column exploded in white smoke. Sparks and chips flew from nearby rocks, and I felt a burning pressure between my eyes, a sharp tug on the strands of my own magic. The practical range of sorcery is about that of musketry, and a fresh reminder of the fact hung dead in the air a yard from my face. I plucked the ball down and slipped it into my pocket.