The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Read online

  Inasmuch as fantasy seeks out or naturally accretes wonder and a particular kind of strangeness—like a pollinating bee becoming dusted with pollen—“fey” is a key indicator in fantasy fiction. The “kind of strangeness” emanates from the associations generated by elements like fairies, elves, talking animals, and the like, rather than ghosts or outright monsters.

  In considering the “rate of fey,” we must acknowledge that fantasy has baggage similar to certain modes of horror fiction. For example, just as vampires and werewolves tend to bring with them centuries of associations, so too fairies, mermaids, and talking animals bring along familiar symbolism—the comfort of a known baseline. Similarly, a modern discipline like psychology, especially Freudian dream interpretation, tends to want to “civilize” that which should remain wild, to confine and constrict symbolism into narrow dead-end channels—not unlike how Christianity sought to colonize pagan rituals and symbols.

  This comfort level can be subverted, weakened, strengthened, or presented as a familiar element in opposition to something else much stranger in the text, or, in a modern context, such stories can simply reinforce the status quo (for better or worse).

  Another way of stating this is to say that “fey” has a concrete meaning or manifestation—“hey, presto, fairy!”—but that the fey (and thus fantasy) contains a streak of welcome irrationality that is quite logical because it reflects the dominant state of the human mind. It also harkens back to elements from our premodern past that trigger a visceral response in our reptile brain. (“Hey, presto, bear! Run!”) For this reason, fantasy often produces a feeling akin to wonder or an ecstatic realignment of the spiritual, which can be felt deep in the body.

  Fey can be elastic. Sometimes varying “rates of the fey” occur within the oeuvre of the same author. The work of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen provide good examples because, in theory, they created versions of the same type of story over and over again: the classic modern fairy tale. Yet some of these tales prop up conservative values and outdated ideas about human and animal behavior—while others remain wild, unpredictable, hard to pin down as to their moral compass. They have retained a deep vein of the true fey.

  As this thinking suggests, “the fey” in a story can have a half-life, undermined or reinforced by new science and new societal realizations. For this reason, what might have seemed revolutionary in even staid fairy tales—for example, portraying an animal sympathetically that was once thought of as predatory—can become stale, regardless of liveliness of plot. Repetition can also dilute the rate of fey. The glut of stories about mermaids doesn’t mean a writer can’t create a strikingly original mermaid story. But it does mean it becomes harder, because of all the past fictional, mythic, and pop-culture associations that readers bring with them when encountering the word “mermaid” in a text. (This is itself a kind of magical spell placed upon the reader—to create narrative from a single word.)

  In general, we as editors wanted to foreground as much “fey” or as much “wildness” as possible, even as we recognize that in this effort we must include material that is, for lack of better words, pragmatic or logical or traditional. However, in doing so, we gently reject the trap of creating a more formal taxonomy for the inchoate, or to make claims for fantasy’s origins that become so broad that they, for example, go all the way back to Gilgamesh, and become meaningless. Nor do we find it useful to engage in the thankless task of convincing readers or reviewers of the legitimacy of fantasy and thus of non-realist fiction. Too much time and energy has been expended by well-meaning editors of past anthologies invoking arguments such as the “Nathaniel Hawthorne Defense” to establish fantasy’s bona fides. Such a position works to delegitimize the true power of fantasy via a “cultural cringe” that insists on claiming authors in the literary canon rather than suggesting that a narrow literary canon is itself already flawed and to some extent rigidly ideological. (Most variations on this defense are also too Anglocentric for an impulse that exists worldwide, across many cultures.)

  Instead, we hope you simply enjoy the energy of a chaotic, miasmic period—one in which the fantastical is often playful and sui generis as it shakes off the expectations of the past. Far from being conservative, the best fantasy from before World War II was a bit like an overgrown garden rich and fertile with wildflowers, weeds, and odd nocturnal animals, under a full moon.

  EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE

  The best prior sources for an eclectic and inclusive selection of fantasy have been The Book of Fantasy (1940), edited by Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, and A. Bioy Casares; Alberto Manguel’s two Black Water volumes, and Eric S. Rabin’s Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories. All three anthologies rely on excerpts overmuch and include a fair number of traditional ghost stories and horror stories, but they remain highly recommended benchmarks in the fantasy field.

  Many other fantasy reprint anthologies have skewed Anglocentric in their selections, even when there was work with a higher rate of fey available. This excluded works in translation from other literary traditions and rendered invisible some works by African Americans and Native Americans—a problem compounded by very strict definitions of the term “fantasy.” These kinds of editorial decisions were also often predicated on looking only at work published by genre imprints or magazines dedicated to fantasy stories, rather than casting a wider net.

  For this reason, we have no qualms about letting the “fey” manifest where it will—to, in essence, look at the evidence rather than predetermine what that evidence might consist of. Beyond our usual remit of ignoring whether a story or author exists within the “genre” or “literary” world, we have also interrogated existing canon, dispensing with some oft-reprinted material, such as the heroic fantasy of William Morris, that seemed an echo of a bygone era as opposed to a precursor to the modern. Yet, we also tried to be objective about classic authors we have not included in anthologies before; for example, the inclusion herein of a superior example of Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery stories.

  Fiction from the more iconic authors in this anthology (including Carroll and Baum) benefits from being placed in conversation with the works of more obscure writers with similar themes or tendencies. From a historical perspective, this approach provides a more comprehensive context for stories that are more widely known—for example, compare Carroll’s Alice to aspects of the Nesbit story in this collection or even “The Debutante” by Leonora Carrington. We hope readers will appreciate the resulting richness of certain time periods, while still enjoying that warm comfortable feeling of nostalgia of rediscovering classics last read in their childhood.

  In the case of famous authors such as the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we purposefully selected more obscure stories. We did this because, quite frankly, it’s boring to reprint “The Swan” or “Red Riding Hood” one more time. But we also wanted to showcase the extraordinary depth of these writers and to again emphasize the phantasmagorical wildness of pre–World War II fantasy. The brothers Grimm’s “Hans-My-Hedgehog,” for example, isn’t just a complex and weird fairy tale—it is also a more interesting entry in the category “animal fables” than some of their better-known work. Andersen’s “Will-o’-the-Wisps” cleverly provides several nested tales in one, but also comments on the idea of fairy tales in general, managing to be both earnest and meta at the same time.

  GENERAL AREAS OF INTEREST

  In creating this feast, we have tried to find a balance between the sprawling chaos of some medieval banquet and the refined curation of a tasting menu. A satisfying experience should feature both surprises and recurring motifs or themes.

  For example, an animal tale can take any form and reflect any number of concerns, and this is not in any rigorous sense a “category.” However, we do want to acknowledge the special attention we paid to the idea of animal (and human!) stereotypes in selecting material that features anim
als in a significant way. We did not want to perpetuate the worst of these clichés, which have led to gross misunderstandings of animal behavior and intelligence. Unique creations, like Franz Blei’s remarkable bestiary of writers, displays another impulse with regard to use of animal characteristics: to emphasize a highly subjective view of biographical data in a satirical mode.

  Other loose “categories” may exist at different levels of hierarchy but are still useful to mention to give an idea of the scaffolding of our curation. Many stories fall into multiple categories because, like most good fiction, they cannot be defined as just one thing.

  Mysticism/Spiritualism—We have resisted the impulse to reclassify as “fantasy” those stories that are actually religious tales and thus sacrosanct among various cultures. We have also resisted reprinting, for the most part, overtly Christian texts in which the moral is too scriptural and thus didactic. However, a general spirituality or mysticism inhabits some of the best fantasy of the period. Some of this material comes from a utopian impulse, as in Paul Scheerbart’s “The Dance of the Comets” (originally conceived of as a ballet) or otherworldly, as in E. M. Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus” or Maurice Renard’s “Sound in the Mountain.” Most exciting in this vein is the discovery of works in unexpected places. For example, H. P. Blavatskaya’s excellent “The Ensouled Violin,” originally written as a kind of advertisement for her spiritualist beliefs.

  Satire/Humor—Fantasy lends itself readily to satire and absurdist humor because of the propulsive nature in such a tale to tumble head over heels through a “and then and then and then” approach. Oscar Wilde’s “The Remarkable Rocket,” a tale of braggadocio, is a good example of the kinetic energy in such works. Stella Benson’s brilliant “Magic Comes to a Committee” showcases the humorous element in a more realist mode, while Marcel Aymé’s “The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls” falls somewhere between with its understated approach.

  Secondary World Fantasy—Any work of fiction set in a place not recognizable as a version of Earth can be considered “secondary world fantasy.” Overlapping subsets of secondary world fantasy include “swords and sorcery” (focus on individual heroics of ragtag antiheroes, with or without quest), “heroic fantasy” (more likely to include broader societal context and upper classes, almost always with quest), and “science fantasy” (another way of saying the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have been breached, with the uses of technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic). The Oz novels and stories fit the broad definition of exploring a secondary world, while Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” and Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar tales fit the criteria of swords and sorcery, and E. R. Eddison’s “Ouroboros” represents a retro-modernist take on heroic fantasy. Alongside episodic novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and David Lindsay, “Friend Island” by Francis Stevens, the Night Land excerpt from William Hope Hodgson, and “The Princess Steel” by W. E. B. Du Bois could be considered “science fantasy.”

  Science fantasy’s blurring allows for hybrid effects in describing the fantastical (frequently employing the mythic alongside the empirical) and expresses itself most potently in the post–World War II fantasy of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium cycle. A strict definition of fantasy might exclude this impulse, but in fact such tales tend to use fantasy tropes, not SF tropes, and are more recognizable to a fantasy reader as “fantasy” than to a science fiction reader as “science fiction.” (Reluctantly but inevitably, see: Star Wars.)

  Surrealism—Given our own love of surrealist fiction, we expected to include a number of examples. However, few full-on surrealists wrote fiction that seemed to fit even a wide definition of “fantasy.” Some surrealist experiments, similar to formative Dadaist and Futurist writings, have not aged well; indeed, a definition of “painful” should include a reference to the fictions of Salvador Dalí. Therefore, the surrealists are directly represented by just two stories: Carrington’s “The Debutante,” and “The Influence of the Sun” by the obscure but often brilliant Belgian writer Fernand Dumont. A surrealist impulse may occur in aspects of other stories—for example Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats” (also classified as Japanese Modernism)—but not in the formal sense of being by self-identified surrealists. Even so, surrealism directly informed the works of such major post–World War II fantasists as Angela Carter.

  Decadent Literature—The decadent movement manifested strongly in England, France, and Germany in the late 1800s, reaching its apogee in poetry and prose that celebrated artifice and ritual while also grappling with the tactile nature of the body (in a pre-vaccine world). Although decadent fiction could be subversive and very much push back against middle-class sensibilities in a way similar to the Beat era in the United States, very few decadent-era stories fit our brief. Among those included are the aforementioned story by Oscar Wilde, two tales by Marcel Schwob (sometimes considered a symbolist); the completely over-the-top Meyrink story, “Blamol”; and “Sowbread” by the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda. Yet, similar to our experience of exploring surrealism, decadent themes dealing with the decay of the body and ritualistic exploration of the darker sides of the human psyche do occur within these pages, even if not formally identified as decadence.

  Within any or all of these categories, the form oft favored by writers is one that takes the apparatus of the folktale or fairy tale, even if updated to a modern context and delinked from place-specific culture. “Fairy tale,” then, is not so much a category herein as a narrative strategy that allows effects like suspension of disbelief despite continual stacking of ever-more ridiculous situation atop absurdity; a devotion to the powerful engine of plot, relying on believable but two-dimensional characters; allusions to and symbolism that borrows from more religious or mystical times; and access to fantasy archetypes using a shorthand familiar to most readers.

  SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE

  International fiction, in translation and originally written in English, is an indispensable part of any conversation about literature, and fantasy is no exception. While it is true that the issue of translation isn’t as important for writers or readers in traditions that exist originally in non-English languages with large audiences, we English speakers are impoverished when we do not attempt to provide the widest possible survey. Dedicated to this principle, we aggressively pursued, through our many hardworking overseas contacts (including translators), information on fantasy fiction that may have been unknown to prior English-language anthologists, even little known in the countries of origin.

  The result was astonishing: this volume contains more translations into English than any other anthology we have edited, and more, we believe, than any other general reprint fantasy anthology ever published. This did not occur by quota, but simply by looking at the whole landscape.

  Statistics are perhaps not the most exciting things to discover in an anthology introduction, but it is worth noting that almost half of the stories in this anthology are translations, representing twenty-six countries. Seven come from writers never translated into English before, and two from writers with only one prior story in English. Fourteen are stories never before published in English. Six additional stories are new versions of previously translated stories, where we felt a new translation was long overdue.

  The highlights are too many to mention here, but it is worth noting such significant stories as the underrated Aleksandr Grin’s classic long story “The Ratcatcher” (translated by Ekaterina Sedia), the novella-length Korean tale “The Story of Jeon Unchi” (translated by Minsoo Kang), and the Yiddish philosopher Der Nister’s “At the Border.” This is Der Nister’s second published story in English from his collection Gedakht, and to our knowledge his fiction is not widely known. It was unearthed by translator Joseph Tomaras while studying Der Nister’s philosophical works.

  Other notable stories include María Teresa León’s “Rose-Cold, Moon Skater,�
�� which appears here in English for the first time. (Perhaps in part, León’s late debut can be attributed to a terrible husband who had her committed so he could marry a younger woman, who then controlled León’s estate.) The stories of the little-known Louis Fréchette capture a French Canadian impulse that is interesting to compare to the Paul Bunyan tales. Finally, we must again mention Franz Blei’s remarkable “Bestiary,” which has never appeared in English before, either. In some cases, his entry may provide the most information English-language readers will have on writers killed or murdered during World War II and long forgotten.

  In no sense is this anthology a coherent, organized exploration of non-Anglo fantasy. However, it does, by our count, constitute the most extensive exploration of non-Anglo fantasy in a reprint anthology to date. We hope that this record will be broken by some other anthologist sooner rather than later.

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  Given that the “rate of fey” in this introduction is low and that the value of a good host is sometimes in being invisible, we will not keep you overlong. Instead, we now abandon you to the banquet: the sweet and the savory, in a vast and opulent dining room, from the corners of which the fairies blow raspberries and talking animals wait for you to finish that they may have their turn. We hope by the time you rise from your place you’re sated and feel well served. Mind not that it is all enchantment, that the walls will fall away to reveal the dark forest beyond. Mind not the curious monsters staring from the shadows. Mind not the glint in the eyes of the fairies; they cannot hurt you this night.