The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6, edited by Lin Carter
191 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 10 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Here we are, at last, marking not one but two transitions: this is the last YBFS curated by Lin Carter, master of self-promotion, and it's also the last YBFS covering the 1970s. I don't feel nostalgia for the exit of Carter -- his "particular enthusiasms" introduced me to a heap of grognard testosterone fantasy I otherwise would never have encountered, but I hated or at best endured nearly every page of it. I do feel sadness for the end of the '70s, however, because I did like a good handful of stories from these books, most notably George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," but also "Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole, "The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein, "Falcon's Mate" and "Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh, "The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh, "The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp, and "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson, most of which are hard to imagine in the context of any other decade. There's a rough-hewn texture to most of these stories, quite removed from the dark and gritty (and often preposterous) nihilism of the 1980s, mingling the precocious urban fantasy of Unknown with the blood and thunder of the pulp tradition and yielding something distinct and memorable.
The end of the '70s YBFS books means the end, so far as I can tell, of easy-to-locate collections of fantasy fiction from the era. There might be occasional '70s fantasy stories in various F&SF retrospectives, though the collection The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has, at most, a handful of entries from this decade. I have a book called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment that includes one -- one! -- story originally published in the '70s. Once this YBFS is done, there will be slim pickings from here on out.
The two stories marked with a 1980 publication date -- both penned by Lin Carter, naturally -- were originally published in this volume.
"Garden of Blood" by Roger Zelazny (1979). Red-blooded hack-and-slash number that, while enjoyable in a sanguinary way, left me feeling at a disadvantage. This story on its own is intriguing but frustratingly incomplete -- one of the problems of serial fantasy adventure, when your first exposure to a character and a story universe comes toward the end of a long and built-up canon. I want to know more about this Dilvish and his beast/devil/robot/horse thing Black, and why Dilvish was revisiting a village 200 years after he'd last seen it, so it looks like I'll have to buy Dilvish, the Damned off Amazon one of these days.
"The Character Assassin" by Paul H. Cook (1979). Outstanding bit of metafiction prefiguring the 1980s cliche of "The author's creation is a psychotic force with a mind of its own." Like most new things in the days before they become cliche, Cook's tale has a freshness and clarity to it often lacking in the formulaic horror it augurs. Here, a character or a man (the distinction, fittingly, is left blurry) named Faraday slips into the various continuities of fiction to dispense "justice" to villainous or unpunished characters in classic novels. Cook's writer protagonist retains some pulp-age innocence, and Faraday meets literary justice of his own inside the writer's stalled novel, an ending the more nihilistic boundary-pushers of the coming decade would avoid in favor of, I don't know, the writer carrying Faraday's "justice" into the real world or something. Two stories in, and this YBFS already feels like the turning point I built it up to be, a crease between two vastly different decades and schools of fantasy.
"The Things That Are Gods" by John Brunner (1979). An epic narrative so densely concentrated, I found it hard to read at times. A tale of enormous scope and ambition, though the basic narrative -- a Gandalfian demiurge or godling, constrained to grant wishes to the extent permitted by the fabric of past actions across time, finds his work and his world nearly undone by his own power -- is comparatively simple. Brunner, author of Stand at Zanzibar (a novel so dense and avant garde that I took one look at the first page and gave up), has his demiurge keep all the insights and revelations close to his chest, not letting the reader in on what's going on until near the very end, which led to both frustration in the early going as well as a sense of anticlimax when all was revealed. I don't need every detail spelled out to me, but I felt this novelette was hindered by trying so hard to be sly. Nonetheless, this was an evocative tale that lingers in the imagination.
"Zurvan's Saint" by Grail Undwin (1980). The very last of Lin Carter's pseudonymous elf anecdotes, which despite his fulsome self-promotion, and praise for his own verve and originality, never amounted to more than a brief "Meh." This parting installment actually has the germ of an interesting idea -- I know, I'm as surprised as you are! -- with a medieval Irish priest taking a boat to Faerie and, without perceiving it, slowly altering his faith to suit the local conception of deity. But Carter does nothing and goes nowhere with it, concluding, "[Perhaps] it matters little which god you worship, or whether you worship any god at all, so long as you worship" -- which had to have been a stale old chestnut even in 1980.
"Perfidious Amber" by Tanith Lee (1979). A clever little tale of a poison ring, though somewhat musty in the telling. Diverting but, like most Lee stories, ultimately forgettable.
"The Mer She" by Fritz Leiber (1979). After the last two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories in these YBFS volumes, my formerly high expectations have eroded into a species of dismay whenever I see Leiber's byline in the contents. This entry is, at least, better written than the Xanth-esque foolery of the previous two, but Leiber doubles down on the leering and exploitation, with our hero the Mouser tying up a seeming 13 year old girl "spread-eagled" in his cabin for his own sexual gratification, then playing the inevitable "She was actually a demon preying upon his poor defenseless masculine nature the whole time" trick, so obvious and predictable I had the general direction sussed out the moment a girl with green eyes and silver hair showed up at the wharf. A grognard masculist fantasy if ever there was one; even if it isn't as abysmal as the previous two Leiber stories in this series, it wasn't my kind of thing.
"Demon of the Snows" by Lin Carter (1980). What do you do if the magazine that was going to print your story folds and leaves your manuscript unpublished? If you're Lin Carter, why, you stick the story into your anthology of the "Year's Best" fantasy fiction! Not that Carter would have scrupled to include it here regardless, but such is the history of this, our final Lin Carter story -- hopefully, in my case, the last one ever. Braced for the worst, I found this story to be... not the absolute worst. It was still bland, predictable, banal fare, tracking Carter's Lemurian barbarian methodically from a mangled garrison (whose only survivor, naturally, is a young and supple barbarian girl who jumps Thongor's furs within a few days) to the rather prosaic lair of a dead wizard, whose ice worm, freed from its pit, has been hungrily crushing folks. But for whatever reason, I didn't recoil from Carter's prose as strongly as I do normally. Maybe it was because I was expecting worse, or maybe it's because the reading part of my brain is truly broken -- it has been ages, after all, since my reading progress was this sluggish.
"The Pavilion Where All Times Meet" by Jayge Carr (1979). A promising story struggling mightily to extricate itself from the stale morass of '70s sword 'n' sorcery. Like a lesser version of "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," this story pushes the imagery and language of '70s fantasy -- a haughty woman of power chewing her "perfumed lip" and inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon those who serve her; "bought brawn" and bandits; timeless magic contained within a cold, pestilential Waste -- into the shape of something new and bold, something bigger and subtler than the petty and monotonous battles of barbarians and warlocks, but unlike "Laren Dorr," "Pavilion" doesn't quite complete the transmutation. For one thing, the "woman without a future" doesn't transcend her tiresome "haughty woman of power" archetype, and the "man without a past," while an audacious and intriguing creation from the start, has an all-too-prosaic explanation for his plight. Still, this is a fine and absorbing entry, good if not necessarily great.
"Cryptically Yours" by Brian Lumley (1979). Lin Carter calls this "a wacky little yarn," set in a Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith mold of dueling sorcerers on "the Primal Continent at the Dawn of Time." I found it passably entertaining, a quaint and enjoyable trifle, though fairly predictable from the start.
"Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee (1979). Reading this, I was amazed (well, not that amazed, for I've read enough now to know how this works) at how thoroughly this prefigures Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" (reviewed here). Gaiman's retelling of Snow White is more languorous, told in first person by the doomed stepmother; as can be expected, Lee's take, written during a less vigorous era of fantasy fiction, lacks polish, its faux-antique style stilted and occasionally rickety. Yet while Gaiman's version (in my words) "reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now," Lee's feels grander somehow, less bound to the cliches and expectations of its era. It also has a beautiful moment (only a moment) in which Satan is revealed to be the compassionate, eternally suffering son of God, "the left hand, the sinister hand of God's design," which trumps Gaiman's weird-but-trendy incest angle. I might sniff at its Christological ending, but Lee's story is flat-out excellent -- the first truly excellent story of hers I've ever encountered. I'd have to reread "Snow, Glass, Apples" to decide which is better, but for now, let's say I'm leaning in Lee's favor.
"Sandmagic" by Orson Scott Card (1979). Even leaving aside the recent assholery of Card, because this story was published long before he became quite so vocal about his vile ideas, I'm surprised to find I really like this entry. I didn't think I would at first, but the story grew as it progressed, attaining a scale and a sense of loss and humanity one wouldn't suspect from its unpromising opening. Captured on paper here is a true transitional animal, a sword 'n' sorcery tale halfway between the Howard-derived thews-and-sinews species and the more Tolkien-influenced epics of the coming decade. Maybe a little over halfway, actually. Many of the hallmarks of 1980s fantasy are here: the morally suspect antihero, the first crude and simplistic attempts at psychological realism, the "realistic" and "gritty" (but honestly just gratuitous) gore and violence, magic based on love and hate rather than arcane runes and elder gods. The clearest vestige of the '70s is a certain clunkiness of prose style, but if we're honest with ourselves, much fantasy retains clunky prose to this day.
At last, some thirteen days since I last finished a book, we arrive at the end. At least Lin Carter went out on a high note (though my cynical side questions whether this was Carter's organic choice, and not pressure from the publisher to leave out all that grognard shit Carter loved so much in favor of something the new fantasy audiences might want to read). I might have been reading this book with a narrative of transition in mind, but there was definitely something different going on in this volume. I might miss some aspects of '70s fantasy, but I'm looking forward to the sleek and dazzling veneer of the 1980s.
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