Because there is so much fantastic fiction published each year, both within the fantasy genre and without, it is the purpose of this anthology to seek out stories and poems from as many different sources as possible: newsstand magazines, literary journals, anthologies and collections, mainstream books, small-press books, children’s books, poetry journals, foreign works in translation, and any other publication in which a magical story might be found. The best of these are gathered together in this volume along with a brief overview of fantasy in the contemporary arts in 1992.
This anthology ranges, like the field of contemporary fantastic literature, from the dark magics of horror fiction to the luminous poetics of pure fairy tale. This range shows the many, many ways fabulous elements can be used in modern fiction to explore the shadows of the world we live in, or the shadows of the psyche, or of the human heart. We do not expect every story to be to every reader’s taste, but they all share one important trait: the assertion that an appetite for wonder and mystery is not irrelevant in our modern lives.
In the last several years, the works of the late folklore scholar Joseph Campbell (popularized by the Bill Moyers’ TV interview series The Power of Myth) have done more than even Jungian psychology or the efforts of fantasy fiction writers to bring our world heritage of myth and folklore back into modern consciousness. The mythopoetic men’s movement spawned by Robert Bly’s Iron John is another area in which myth and magical stories are used as metaphors to explore the complexities of modern society—and while one may agree or disagree with Bly’s particular ideas on the subject of gender relations, he has certainly tapped, like Campbell, into the late-twentieth-century hunger for the pan-cultural traditional stories that connect us to the centuries of men and women who have walked the earth before us.
In 1992, Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s mythopsychological study Women Who Run with the Wolves hit the best-seller lists. Touted by some as a woman’s answer to Iron }ohn, it is in fact a book written not only for women but for the men who live and work beside them, and for the feminine aspects within every man as well. In addition to her psychological credentials, Dr. Estes is an experienced oral storyteller, and the book is full of magical tales gathered from many cultures—including cultures native to our American continent. Written in the personal, poetic language of a traveling storyteller rather than a clinician, Women Who Run with the Wolves makes a compelling case for the importance of honoring Story, Myth, and Dream in daily life.
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell states: “A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and myth is the society’s dream. . . . Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.”
Susan Cooper, in her essay “Fantasy in the Real World,” elaborates upon this idea:
[Campbell is] saying that artists have inherited the mythmaking function of the shaman and the seer, and of course he’s right. Where the art of writing is concerned, his point applies most of all to the p oets and to the writers of fantasy. Both deal with images, and with their links to and within the unconscious mind. And the fantasist—not one of my favorite words— deals with the substance of myth: the deep archetypal patterns of emotion and behavior which haunt us all whether we know it or not.
It is interesting to note that in late-twentieth-century American society, the collective myths and symbols that are most pervasive in our culture are the dark ones: vampires, ghosts, demon children, supernatural serial killers, and ghouls risen from the grave. The steady popularity of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and his successors is greatly overshadowed by the vast multimedia popularity of darker fantasies in the form of horror fiction, comics, and films.
In mass-market publishing, horror fiction is usually published under a separate imprint from fantasy fiction—yet much of the best work written in the last couple of years in the fantasy genre is dark fantasy, falling somewhere in that twilight realm that lies between the two fields. It is interesting that works with a dark, horrific edge are automatically considered by some critics to be more adult, more serious, more sophisticated than even the most poetic and well-written magical fantasy tale. Is it a product of human nature, or merely the times we live in, that as a society we are quicker to believe in and take interest in the portrayal of violence and evil? Or that these things are hip and sexy, while tales of wonder and the miraculous are pushed to the children’s shelves?
Fiction is a place where all things can be faced, all issues explored; dark fantasy and horror are important in this regard, and I mean no disrespect to the makers of those arts. But it is of interest to me how much more difficult it is to persuade the modern reader to “suspend disbelief” (to use Coleridge’s phrase) for the miraculous in life as well as for the horrific. And how difficult it is to write mythic or magical fantasy that is as complex and as vivid as the world around us.
Ursula K. Le Guin commented ten years ago (in a 1982 symposium talk titled “Facing It,” published in her 1989 collection of essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World):
I see much current fantasy and science fiction in full retreat from real human needs. Where a Tolkien prophetically faced the central fact of our time, our capacity to destroy ourselves, the present spate of so-called heroic fantasy, in which Good defeats Evil by killing it with a sword or staff or something phallic, seems to have nothing in mind beyond instant gratification, the avoidance of discomfort, in a fake-medieval past where technology is replaced by magic and wishful thinking works.
The worst of the fantasy books published today are just such simplistic tales. Critics decry the endless series books published in the genre—yet dividing a story into several books is merely a form, a device, neither inherently good nor bad. It is what the author does with the form that counts. Unfortunately, what some writers choose to do is merely attempt to mimic Tolkien or some other favorite writer, rather than crafting stories out of their own experience, their own history and heart. As readers we should expect more—and support those attempts to offer us more. We sometimes forget that we are not the passive recipients of whatever the publishing industry chooses to send to us; we have vital input into the publishing process every time we put our money down for a well-written book rather than a shoddy one, or give a new and unfamiliar author a try.
It is a truism among genre editors that a bad fantasy story is one of the easiest things to write (as the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in publishing offices can attest) and a good one is one of the hardest. Nonetheless there are many writers using the fantasy form to tell complex, thought-provoking, and thoroughly adult tales—although to find them you must sometimes stray beyond the genre shelves. The modern English-language Magic Realists (inspired by such foreign writers as Isabel Allende, Italo Calvino, Naquib Mahfouz, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who have never felt themselves constrained by a need for strict realism) are proliferating in the literary mainstream. Fantasy is flourishing outside of the genre; now, what does this mean for the genre?