The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, edited by Lin Carter
175 pages
Published 1975
Read from December 2 to December 4
Rating: ★½ out of 5
My love of fantasy fiction cross-fertilizes with my love of history and antecedent to birth a fascination with the evolution of the genre. Collections like The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Modern Classics of Fantasy provide that crucial dimension of time-depth, but can't offer more than a cursory skim of any given period, and there are so few of them around. Yearly anthologies are less immediately satisfying, but become more interesting when stacked one atop the last. Until recently the oldest fantasy anthology series I knew was the one that began with the fantasy (and horror, ugh) of 1987, and no one I asked seemed to have any idea what I was talking about, let alone leads on finding anything earlier. Browsing Amazon, of all things, introduced me to the Lin Carter/Arthur W. Saha curated Year's Best Fantasy Stories series. A bunch of $4 purchases later, I now possess the first four annuals of the series (and, handily, the 13th, which brings the series to 1986 and the beginning of the Fantasy & Horror years).
The fantasy of the 1970s is more interesting in theory than in practice. I say this before having read word one of this book -- though, admittedly, my opinion is colored by a look at the contents page. (Our humble editor and guide includes one of his own stories as well as a second story he "completed" on behalf of an author who croaked over ten years previously.) Modern fantasy was still very much entangled in the afterbirth of Tolkien and Robert E. Howard; to mix the metaphor, '70s fantasy was a fragile thread (Carter's introduction seems to imply that the "adult fantasy" press consisted of a single publishing house by the end of 1974, namely DAW, the publishers of this series) without any hint of the '80s resurgence and revitalization at its nether end. My intent is to explore the evolution of fantasy from these dim times to the more familiar environs of the late '80s, at which point I'll resume my read of the Datlow-Windling Fantasy & Horror series, which, with patience, will bring me to the start of Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy (in 2001) and the modern fantasy renaissance. In sum, grim as this starting point may seem, by the time I'm done I'll have a nearly complete record of annual fantasy anthologies from 1974-ish to the present, forty years of evolutionary trajectory. Biased, obviously, by the tastes of the editors -- which is why, eventually, I'd love to get my hands on bulk back issues of the likes of F&SF, Weird Tales, Asimov's, and whatever short-lived '80s and '90s fantasy 'zines I might find. But that's a far more expensive hobby.
Enough of that. One bit of bookkeeping: Carter's definition of "year" seems fanciful, so I'll include the copyright dates and assume they fall close to the original publication.
"The Jewel of Arwen" by Marion Zimmer Bradley (no copyright date). It all begins with this, then. Literal Tolkien fan-fiction. Not even the wink-wink type of fanfic, with your myrddraals and your Swords of Shannara -- actual, unapologetic Tolkien fanfic, originally published as a limited-print-run pamphlet, and written by a child molester at that. Does it get any more '70s? An unpromising start, no matter how painless the story itself is (though I must use "story" loosely). Aping the stilted briskness of The Lord of the Rings' appendices, Bradley sketches the history of the Phial of Galadriel from when a Boromir (not the Boromir, just a Boromir) remembers his family holds it as an heirloom to when it finds its way into the hands of Arwen Evenstar. Bradley apes Tolkien's voice well, and the "story" is over with quickly enough; that's all that can be said about this -- except that, again, this is literally fanfic written by a child molester.
"The Sword Dyrnwyn" by Lloyd Alexander (1973). A simple moralistic fable of a king's slide into evildoing and the enchanted sword that does what it says on the label. Painless but oh so familiar and predictable.
"The Temple of Abomination" by Robert E. Howard (1974). I don't know the precise dates of fantasy's dark ages. They dissolved into the '80s resurgence with the likes of Mythago Wood and the Fionavar Tapestry, but the decline from the Golden Age of Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, Weird Tales, and Unknown is trickier to pin down, largely because of the anomalous success of Tolkien and the persistent efforts of survivors like de Camp and Leiber. Whenever the dark ages began, during this period fantasy publishers seemed to operate on one directive: Give 'em more of the same old shit. The exhumation of Tolkien's minor works continues to this day, but during the decades of the dark ages, editors dug into the unfinished, unpublished papers of the Golden Age greats, spackling together "complete" stories and throwing them out there to see what stuck. "The Temple of Abomination" is one such posthumously unearthed tale, finished by one Richard L. Tierney; further, it is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, so what we're dealing with is someone in 1974 finalizing an unpublished tale written by a dead guy and set in the story universe of a second dead guy, in an attempt to coast on the popularity of an intellectual property made popular fifty years prior. This, then, is the "best" 1974's fantasy literature had to offer. The story itself is red-blooded pulp, hyper-masculine and racist as shit, with bloodthirsty but still (somehow) noble Celts and Norsemen easily vanquishing an unholy temple brought to post-Roman Britain from the perfidious Orient, and learning that all white men are brothers when it comes to standing against Elder horrors (and people from the Orient, apparently). If you like that sort of thing, this story is adequate, a businesslike adventure that lays out its characters with bold, single strokes and never bothers with subtlety.
"The Double Tower" by Clark Ashton Smith (1973). Another posthumous completion (this time finished by Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, himself) of a deceased author's papers, once again set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. So far in this book we've had one original but derivative fable, one piece of brand new fan-fiction, and two exhumed stories written decades previously and set in the world of another dead guy -- and after this, there are only seven more stories to go. The best of the year, ladies and gentlemen. This tale is as dry as Olaf Stapledon filtered through an especially purple thesaurus; the texture of prose is, in essence, all there is to this vignette, which lacks any other form of substance. Moderately entertaining once you get into its rhythm, but as soon as you reach that point, it ends.
"Trapped in the Shadowland" by Fritz Leiber (1973). The only other Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story I've read so far was "Scylla's Daughter" (reviewed here), which at the time I found "entertaining in a corny way"; since then I've grown fonder of the Twain, even seeking out and purchasing the complete books of Lankhmar, which I plan to read next year. This, then, was one of two stories I looked forward to after a glance at the contents page (Jack Vance's Dying Earth entry at the end is the other). Sadly, even Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, admitted this story was "a minor effort." I'll go a step further and say "Trapped in the Shadowland" is half-assed. It's as if Leiber were experimenting to see how little effort he could put into a story and still see it snapped up for publication, stringing words together without concern over sense or flow or tension or anything writers might want to care about. Some alcohol and two whole hours seem to have sufficed for its completion. A minor effort; a major disappointment.
"Black Hawk of Valkarth" by Lin Carter (1974). I looked ahead in the years of this series to come, and saw that our humble editor, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes sure to include one of his own stories in every volume I bought so far. Carter's prose here resembles that of a modestly successful self-published ebook writer -- or rather, it's the other way around; far too much of today's amateur and indie fantasy prose still harks back to this primitive stage of the genre's development. Some might call the style pulp; I call it pap. This is a Northern barbarian's origin tale, as cliched as they come, and as dull as that implies.
"Jewel Quest" by Hannes Bok (1974). Another dead author, though this one was dead for merely one decade before 1974, and Carter makes no mention of any carrion birds "completing" the newly discovered manuscript (though he does own the copyright on the story, I observe). Carter calls this story "sly drollery"; I call it Orientalist fluffery, uninspired and lazy in its satire. It isn't as painful as, say, Piers Anthony (always the nadir of my personal metric), but at times it comes close, and overall it gave me scant enjoyment. Perhaps the preceding stories have set me against enjoying anything in this book. More likely, none of these stories have been very good.
"The Emperor's Fan" by L. Sprague de Camp (1973). Slightly more clever (and slightly less broad) Orientalist fantasy, essentially a fairy tale (of two hapless rulers and one magical item) delivered in an expanded, more naturalistic narrative. An indifferent piece, really, except for the memorable detail of court figures zipping about on roller skates -- deliberately goofy, yes, but undeniably practical.
"Falcon's Mate" by Pat McIntosh (1974). Carter's introduction to this piece notes that this is McIntosh's first published story, and gushes that she's "bound to go places in the years to come!" Naturally I had to look her up and see what became of her career; a modestly successful series of medieval mystery novels aside, all that Wikipedia lists is "a string of fantasy short stories published in the series of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies in the late 1970s." So much for the rise of a new voice in heroic fantasy, I guess; Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, got it wrong this time. And yet I... I like this? I like this! After all the tales told by dead men, this brisk and naturalistic low fantasy and its quiet, sturdy feminism feels fresh, invigorating. (That's a lot of paired adjectives but I don't care.) This story hints at the more literate fantasy to come in the next few years, while retaining some DNA from the pulp fantasy before it -- the characters' fates are decided by strategic board game, for example. A solid story, easily the best thing in the book.
"The City of Madness" by Charles R. Saunders (1974). In the introduction to this story, Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes a revealing statement: "Charles Saunders does something so original and so ingenious and yet so obvious, that it surprises me that no one ever thought of it before" -- namely, writing a sword 'n' sorcery fantasy set in a non-Eurasian milieu. It's almost as if a bunch of white guys regurgitating the same Conan mythos for decades suffered a lack of imagination and diversity of perspective, and never once thought to make their heroes anything other than Nordic demigods. This story suffers from its purple pulp style, but from the moment our hero Imaro happens upon three seeming conquistadors (actually dissipated white Atlanteans) tormenting a Bambuti pygmy in the jungle and proceeds to cut them down without breaking a sweat, I knew I was in for a rip-roaring fun time. It's kind of funny how the only two good stories in this collection so far were by brand new authors who weren't aging white men. This is the sort of genre evolution I was hoping to see in these books, the changeover from the stuck-in-past-glories old guard to the new voices of coming decades (and the ever so gradual progress toward diversity and new perspectives).
"The Seventeen Virgins" by Jack Vance (1974). Here we are at last, the second story I had looked forward to from the beginning. Expecting a disappointment similar to the half-assed Fritz Leiber piece, I was mollified to find this one mildly amusing, a Bugs Bunny-esque escapade in which charming rogue Cugel, beset by a belligerent bureaucrat in a strange town, performs a series of schemes to gain advantage, pay his tavern bill, and escape on the next caravan out of town, in the company of said seventeen virgins -- whose fate on the caravan is, of course, unsurprising. This story is adequate enough, I suppose. I'm just happy to be done with this collection.
Halfway through the book I visited the Wikipedia page for the series and found confirmation of something I'd already begun to suspect: "Carter's picks [in his years as the series' editor] tended to be idiosyncratic, concentrating on
long-established authors in the field and reflecting his own particular
enthusiasms. He also habitually padded out the volumes he edited with
his own works, whether written singly, in collaboration, or under
pseudonyms." I didn't suspect the pseudonym part, but the rest was clear after just a few stories (though "his own particular enthusiasms" is putting it more gently than I would). I already own the next three Carter volumes, so I feel obligated to power my way through those, but I'm tempted now to skip ahead to the first Saha year, 1981. Tempting, tempting -- but what other sources for late '70s fantasy might I find?
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