The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2, edited by Lin Carter
192 pages
Published 1976
Read from December 4 to December 6
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, already. With chastened expectations (not that my expectations had been stratospheric for the first YBFS volume), I set out once more into what Wikipedia mildly calls Carter's "idiosyncratic" picks and "particular enthusiasms." In addition, Carter already seems confused about what "Year's Best" implies: much like a fading band releasing a couple new songs on a greatest hits compilation, two stories in this volume -- Tanith Lee's and Paul Spencer's -- appear in print for the first time here. Every story aside from those two, I should note, was published in 1975.
"The Demoness" by Tanith Lee. I know I've read a couple stories (or more) by Tanith Lee, but they've never left much of an impression. The first part of this story read like something I'd read somewhere before: an alabaster-pale vampire woman waiting at the top of a white tower, draining male adventurers of their minds and their lives by means of her magical vagina. Then one man escapes from her, so of course she falls in love with him, in a ravenous sort of way. This next part of the story reads more like a fairy tale, with the vampire woman drawn after the man fleeing before her, past helpful demon-women and into a Good Kingdom with a Good King and Noble Warriors and suchlike furniture. Slap a Thomas Canty painting on the cover and you could likely fool me into thinking it was from the '80s. Which, despite the growth and improvement of the genre during that decade, is not necessarily a good thing. I'd say this is an adequate example of its type, this New Gothic sexual horror fantasy whatever, but it isn't my kind of thing.
"The Night of the Unicorn" by Thomas Burnett Swann. I've only read one prior story by Swann ("The Manor of Roses," reviewed here), and it, by contrast, has lingered in my memory. I don't want to expect too much of this piece -- goodness knows I've been disappointed by every Howard Waldrop story after his sensational "God's Hooks!" -- so I tried to put that connection way back in my mind. I needn't have worried so much. This is a charming bit of exotica, a too-brief fable that, while nowhere near as excellent as "Manor of Roses," is better than any story in the first YBFS (except, possibly, "Falcon's Mate"). (Incidentally, SF set in modern-day Mayan country seems to have been a bit of a fad in the mid-'70s. There's this story in 1975, "The Women Men Don't See" in 1976, and "Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" in 1977. A distinct trend, given how little short SF I've read from this period.)
"Cry Wolf" by Pat McIntosh. Speaking of "Falcon's Mate," this is the second installment of the adventures of Thula, spunky young war-maid evidently fated to break all the rules of her order (doubtless only to discover her order had the rules wrong all along). I don't have much experience with serialized short stories; I like the ones that tell complete, discrete adventures within a larger continuity, but this, sad to say, is the other kind, the sort that read like travel chapters in longer narratives and serve merely to move our hero into position for the next exploit. This entry introduces a possible Love Interest character -- a suave but presumably dangerous werewolf, pursued by his cousin who happens to be an Evil King -- whom Thula aids in a minor scuffle at an inn, before he rides off on the summons of a wizard, and that's it everybody, be sure to tune in next time. I wanted a good, meaty story, so I'm dissatisfied with what appears to be a salad course before the meal. I'm oddly taken with Thula and her world, though, so I'll just hope the next episode is more fulfilling.
"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" by Fritz Leiber. Speaking of lesser installments of serialized adventures, this is a bit of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fluff, almost as bad as "Trapped in the Shadowland" in the previous volume. There's a definite Pratchett vibe to the three gods roused to displeasure by the boastings of the Twain -- more properly, one should say Pratchett has been known to exhibit a definite Fritz Leiber vibe, I suppose -- but there's a disquieting whiff of Piers Anthony to the Twain's current adventures, belt-unbuckling rather than swashbuckling. "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser can't get laid because some gods are peeved" is hardly the sort of action I pictured. I'm no prude, but this sort of leering PG-13 titillation is neither sexy nor entertaining, especially when it gets unhinged and goes into a nightmare gallery of all the man-hating cliches of some Archie Bunker's idea of feminism -- climaxing with one "Alyx the Pick-lock," Joanna Russ' feminist adventurer, intoning "All men are enemies..." Yikes.
"The Guardian of the Vault" by Paul Spencer. Stale, rote stuff about a titanic evil summoned by one Atlantean wizard and sealed away by another, and the guard left to maintain the seal getting predictably tricked into relaxing his vigilance. I still don't know what the broader fantasy world was like in the mid-'70s, but Lin Carter sure loved him some titanic evils summoned by wizards (driven by evil or hubris, they're interchangeable really). Lin Carter, I should remind you, selected this previously unpublished tale for his Year's Best compilation, he thought it was that amazing.
"The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp. Perhaps it's merely the contrast with the previous two stories, but I really like this one. There's a whiff of Beagle's quiet humanity to this piece, that lingering sense of mood and dignified determination Beagle does so well, yet the characters have that ineffable de Camp quality to them, a sort of foolish scrappiness, faintly comedic figures bunching their fists at a world that wants to laugh at them. This may be the first explicitly Lovecraftian story I've ever enjoyed. Not surprisingly, it was first published in F&SF; perhaps even less of a surprise, it originally had the more fitting and dignified title of "The Lamp" before Lin Carter got his hands on it for this collection.
"Xiurhn" by Gary Myers. This little blip of a thing so condenses pulp fantasy that it almost -- almost -- metamorphoses into a kind of poetry, or at least something that takes time to disentangle. Stylistically it's odd, and creaky at times, but overall a good effect.
"The City in the Jewel" by Lin Carter. One interesting thing about reading old forgotten stories from this era is discovering trends and fads long since forgotten. These YBFS books have introduced me to what appears to be a now-defunct subgenre: the lost continent fantasy. In all my reading, I've never once come across a story set in Atlantis or Lemuria or Mu, yet if these collections are to be believed, they were frigging everywhere in mid-'70s fantasy. Most likely, of course, this represents selection bias -- one of Lin Carter's "particular enthusiasms," given that his tales are set in Lemuria. It's just striking that three of the last four stories have involved Atlantis or Lemuria in some capacity, while not one short story I've read after this period so much as hints at this sunken subgenre. This bit of historical trivia is more interesting by far than this story, a self-indulgent epic that takes up more pages than any other tale in this book yet remains utterly inessential. I was churning out superior prose by the time I was 15 -- and my prose has never been good, so that's saying something.
"In 'Ygiroth" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr. The concept of Neandertal-esque "beast men" learning to hunt from an ancient interdimensional horror intrigues me -- I'd like to read Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle if it has more of this sort of thing. But I'm bored of Lovecraft's imitators packing this book with pastiches of dense Cosmicist pulp. De Camp's story, above, demonstrates a way to tell actual stories and do original things within a Lovecraftian context; mood pieces, like this and "Xiurhn," seem by contrast stilted imitations and belated copycats of a setting some five decades old at this point. I mean, I guess I can't say "In 'Ygiroth" is a bad story; rather, I just don't understand the continuing fixation, not only on the setting but also on the antiquated voice and unvarying esthetic that blurs together each of these entries, not to mention the repetition of the same damn plotline (ambitious adept hopes to gain power by meddling with unspeakable cosmic entities, gets owned by his own hubris) in this story, in "Xiurhn," in "The Double Tower" in the first YBFS, even (albeit in a somewhat disguised form) in "The Lamp."
"The Scroll of Morloc" by Clark Ashton Smith. Ah yes, a posthumous completion, with Lin Carter pawing through a dead author's papers and dealing them around. I should be thankful this is the only such carrion bird story in this collection; there were only three in the first YBFS, but there seemed to be more. Clinking together the rustier components of the thesaurus to tell a tale of -- you guessed it -- a disgruntled shaman permitting himself the hubris of violating the sacred "adytum" of his vile and unfathomable deity, and paying the usual price for his transgression, this story isn't technically Lovecraftian, but inhabits the same general idiom and offers the same lack of novelty.
"Payment in Kind" by C. A. Cador. Originally published in an "occult newspaper" -- that seems so damn '70s to me, a glimpse into the heyday of zines and early sci-fi conventions and the underground press. This is a straightforward fairy tale with an interesting magical concept supporting it, and the prose is comparatively vigorous and modern after the last several tales. Not a classic by any means, but it's tolerable, and a welcome change after the last several stories.
"Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson. As much as I hate to look forward to any given story in one of these Lin Carter-curated anthologies, good ol' Avram Davidson has never let me down (though, admittedly, I've only read two of his stories before now). Lin Carter's intro to this story extols at length its setting, claiming that, heretofore, the majority of secondary world fantasies had been set in "prehistoric or legendary" milieus, the "only major exception" being The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt -- a glimpse of how creatively impoverished fantasy had been up to this point. (The diverse literature of alternate history, I suppose, Carter shoehorns into science fiction, not fantasy.) Davidson's Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania is a pleasantly podunk kingdom (fourth largest in Europe) that serves well as the scene for a sly and charming drawing room comedy. The character of Doctor Eszterhazy is something of a cipher, but the rest of the cast is vividly caricatured and the story itself moves briskly toward a satisfactory wrap-up.
While this edition of YBFS was rough going for a while, "Milord Sir Smiht," "The Lamp," and "The Night of the Unicorn" were all worthwhile readings, and "Cry Wolf," while unsatisfactory on its own, was a fragment of a storyline I'm eager to continue. I don't know if the book as a whole deserves the generous rating of two entire stars, but I want to acknowledge a slight improvement -- very slight -- over the first volume.
No comments:
Post a Comment