The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3, edited by Lin Carter
237 pages
Published 1977
Read from December 12 to December 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Furthering a trend begun in the second YBFS, four of the eleven stories included in this ostensible retrospective were originally published here. I'll skip repeating my thoughts on how silly that is, and merely note that the first-time-in-print stories are labeled 1977, and everything else is labeled 1976, because I get persnickety about such details.
"Eudoric's Unicorn" by L. Sprague de Camp (1977). The cleverest detail in this piece is the conceit that unicorns are the last surviving species of the Entelodontidae. It makes me wish de Camp had gone whole hog (heh) and set a secondary world fantasy in the Miocene, because the rest of this story isn't especially memorable. It's broad comic fantasy built around one joke (girls these days don't stay virgins for long!), although perhaps the hapless and distinctly venal merchant "hero" is ahead of his time here, as unremarkable as he would be today.
"Shadow of a Demon" by Gardner F. Fox (1976). The key to reading stories like this, I've decided, is to shut off your brain to the best of your ability, to ignore the cliches and stock props coming at you as thick as the arrows at Thermopylae, to not even blink at the Xeroxed barbarian swordsman or at the requisite scanty costume of the seeming young woman in distress (or at the many repetitions the author makes to insist that, dude, her tattered tunic barely conceals the curve of her breast or the supple length of her leg). Even adopting this strategy, however, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering away from the words in front me at least once each page. At one point I caught myself literally watching kitten videos instead of reading another word of our hero scouting his way into the palace of the standard-issue evil sorcerer (who, not content with holding demons in thrall, was on the verge of summoning "megademons" to do his bidding!). Even with my brain switched off, I can't find this sort of thing anything but boring. How is it that so many people were so eager to consume this for so many years?
"Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh (1976). The odd thing is, it takes such a small tweak in the formula to make sword 'n' sorcery wholly palatable to me. McIntosh's light, sensitive touch is a breath of spring air after the jock-strap fantasy of "Shadow of a Demon." The idea of a witch's Power being a thing so strong that, should she fail to pass it on before she dies, it animates her bones after death until it finds someone "with the courage to take it from the dead," is stranger, more exotic, more unsettling, more creative than whole volumes of standard sword 'n' sorcery fare -- and McIntosh develops the idea in scarcely half a page of dialogue. The landslide-elemental creature, granting a wish once it's tasted blood, reminds me variously of the Dying Earth, the myth-fantasy of Valente, and the Demon Doors of Fable. This story as a whole feels oddly modern, as if, aside from the simplicity of the climax, it could have been written in the mid-'00s (if anyone worth reading were writing sword 'n' sorcery serials at that point). I'm happy to see the disappointing "Cry Wolf" in the last YBFS was an anomaly; this ably lives up to the promise of "Falcon's Mate."
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" by George R. R. Martin (1976). A nice time-capsule oddity for you from Lin Carter's introduction to this story: "Chances are, if you know Martin's work at all, you know him as a science fiction novelist of the gritty realism school...." I thought that was funny. Anyway, I'll get right to the point: I dig this story. Not to get effusive or anything, but I think this story may be the apotheosis of what could be fashioned with the vocabulary of 1970s high fantasy. There's more than a hint of science fiction in the infinite universes and the gates Sharra traverses between them, there's a flavor of the Dying Earth in Laren Dorr's world and its sputtering sun, there are stray props and set-dressings from heroic fantasy here and there in Sharra's crown and Laren's castle -- all recognizably '70s. But Martin (younger than I am now when he published this) fits this vocabulary to a precocious new framework that hints at the artsier, more finely crafted story structures of the decades to come. Rather than stalling the story right at the beginning to dish out background detail on who the Seven are or how Sharra obtained her crown, Martin takes the more recent approach, opening with an evocative line and drawing out the explanations, enlivening the early pages with crumbs and background details but saving the worldbuilding dumps for (relatively) organic conversations between the two leads. It's not wholly modern -- there's a mustiness to the prose, not enough to really detract from the tale but sufficient to date it. And, since this is GRRM, the story does dawdle to describe meals and the juiciness of meat. But all in all, this is an unexpectedly excellent contribution.
"Two Suns Setting" by Karl Edward Wagner (1976). After two great tales, we're back to trudging across an archetypal desert with yet another generic "brooding, doom-fraught adventurer," in a world mixing the two thesaurus-busting styles of heroic fantasy and prehuman elder lore. And the hero is named Kane. I mean, seriously, Kane. He's a dispossessed hero-wizard-swordsman cast out from his city and wandering the deserts of the "eastern continent." Of fucking course he's named Kane. At 30 pages, this story is way overlong, but (I must grudgingly admit) it isn't as bad as it could be. It's actually passably entertaining. In part this is due to some unexpected story beats -- in a genre where you can predict almost every plot turn from page one, I was not expecting a giant to go on a fireside rant about the evils of technology and mankind's fatal inability to live within his natural environment, before reminiscing about the "heroic age" when his kind grappled with sabre-tooths and mammoths and cave bears. "Two Suns" isn't good -- there are just too many eyes "blazing feral hatred" for my tastes -- but it's surprisingly painless. I almost -- almost -- wouldn't mind reading more of this Kane's adventures, if they're consistently in this vein.
"The Stairs in the Crypt" by Clark Ashton Smith (1976). Yet another posthumous completion by Lin Carter, who's gone from merely adding a few hundred words to cap a mostly finished tale to "weaving bits and pieces" of Smith's "unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots" together "in as close a style to Smith's as I can create." At this rate, by the next YBFS Carter will be totting up Smith's old cleaner bills and grocery lists just to keep making a profit off the guy's byline. I haven't read much Clark Ashton Smith, obviously, but I can't help but feel Lin Carter did a poor job of imitating his voice after all. This lacks the doleful rhythm and morbid inevitability of "The Scroll of Morloc" and "The Double Tower." Maybe this is because "Crypt" is an attempt at comic incident -- a deceased necromancer reanimates in his tomb and delivers wry soliloquies, then craves a snack -- but honestly this doesn't seem to fit with those other two stories. It reads more like Carter threw the thesaurus at his typewriter and said "Close enough."
"The Goblin Blade" by Raul Garcia Capella (1977). A guy who cut his teeth writing imitations of Robert E. Howard set in Conan's universe here goes boldly into a world of his own devising -- and it's a sword 'n' sorcery pastiche as uninteresting and unoriginal as you could imagine. The standard mismatched warlock and warrior, bickering at first, exchanging awkward globs of backstory and scene-setting, gradually coming to an understanding and working well as a team to defeat a guy who is totally not blue-eyed Genghis Khan, and who turns out to be a djinn. Yawn. I think it's meant to be comic to some degree -- at least, I'm pretty sure the words that the main pair pronounce to each other are meant to be some form of banter -- but it's just not doing it for me.
"The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh (1977). Half of Lin Carter's introduction to this story is him perving over how Cherryh is a "young and very attractive woman" -- a statement repeated, with less emphasis, before seemingly every story written by an up-and-coming female author in these books. Oh, traditional gender values.... Anyway, this is a slight but sweet mythological fairy tale, with Sisyphos manipulating the pity and compassion of Death in order to return to the world, then with further trickery binding Death and thereby discovering the usual moral of this sort of thing, viz. that Death is necessary for life to flourish. An unsurprising tale but a lovely one.
"Black Moonlight" by Lin Carter (1976). Time to gird up my loins and slog through another protracted interlude with What's-His-Face the Not-Viking from Lemuria. This time he's a pirate or something, but the beats of the tale are the same: seeking riches, Thongor runs afoul of degenerate beast men and a priest on loan from Clark Ashton Smith. An eldritch abomination gets summoned, there's some easy fighting, everyone has a good laugh afterward, the end. What bugs me about Lin Carter, aside from his questionable taste in stories and his relentless self-regard and so on, is how he's labeled "Master of Adult Fantasy" (by himself or by his publisher, no doubt, but it gets plastered all over these books just the same), yet his prose springs from the boys' adventure school of the 1930s. The only difference between them is Carter's heroes get their way with "Red Steel!" rather than good, clean American fists. How an adult could enjoy this pap is beyond me.
"The Snout in the Alcove" by Gary Myers (1977). Never having read Clark Ashton Smith undiluted, and never having read Lovecraft in any form, I must make a comparison with a parallel figure: Olaf Stapledon, who produced a lot of ideas and set-dressings science fiction still employs, but couched them in dry, treatise-like summations that aren't much fun to read. Along those lines, this story takes a potentially intriguing incident (drawn from a commingling of Smith's Hyperborea and Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and maybe stuff from Lord Dunsany I'm not yet acquainted with) and squashes it flat. A Zelazny-esque narrator (über-competent and quick-witted but essentially a blank slate) gets summoned into the Dreamlands by mistake by priests of the Elder Ones; a daemon, the intended object of the summoning, is on the loose; a red-robed stranger drifts from city to city in a rotting vessel, and all who hear him flee screaming, their cities melting under the moon behind them; in the de rigueur final twist, the narrator turns out to be the demon, thwarting the last hope of the Dreamlands. The ingredients are there for something juicy and spectacular, but this compressed and lifeless presentation just doesn't work for me. (The part about the red stranger, especially, put me in mind of Stephen King in his prime: that's what the Crimson King should have been like.)
"The Pool of the Moon" by Charles R. Saunders (1976). The novelty of the first Imaro story (in the first YBFS) has dulled somewhat; this feels much more like a generic heroic fantasy, sad to say, featuring what I believe is a completely serious use of the term "hot barbarian embrace."
To sum up: "Ring of Black Stone" and "The Dark King" were excellent, and "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" was the best story in the YBFS series to date, but disappointing entries from Saunders and de Camp added to the usual assortment of dull and/or terrible stories so beloved by Lin Carter. While there is noticeable improvement in individual stories, then, the series as a whole continues to labor under the "particular enthusiasms" of its editor. I eagerly await the Saha-edited years, if only for a change of direction.
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