From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:44:05 2004 Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 21:08:11 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Re: Summary: Anthologies, 2003 On Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:07:37 -0600, Rich Horton wrote: >2. "Out of Genre" anthologies > >This is a convenient grouping of three anthologies that seemed more >out of our genre than the other books -- though just because the >stories in Album Zutique (particularly) are unusual or exotic doesn't >mean we need to banish them from the genre -- perhaps what I really >mean is that it seemed unimportant to the editors of these anthologies >where one might pigeonhole any particular story. > >The books: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Album >Zutique #1, Trampoline > >Subtotals: 3 books, 55 new stories (3 novellas, 11 novelettes, 41 >short stories), about 390,000 words. I found each of these three books pretty exciting in different ways. The first, edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, opened with a manifesto in favor of stories with plots, arguing that so-called "literary fiction" was ignoring plot, and that the relative emphasis on plot is a strength of genre fiction. The book included selections >from genre writers (SF writers like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, and Carol Emshwiller; mystery writers like Elmore Leonard; writers of "bestsellers" like Stephen King and Michael Crichton) as well as from "literary" writers like David Eggers, Rick Moody, and Chabon himself; all supposedly trying to write "Thrilling Tales", in a variety of genres. The overall results were mixed -- some of the stories are downright poor, some merely pedestrian -- but the best stories were quite good indeed. My favorites were a novella, "The Albertine Notes" by Rick Moody; a novelette, "The Bees", by Dan Chaon; and a short story, "Otherwise Pandemonium" by Nick Hornby. It is perhaps of significance that all three of those writers are non-genre writers. Moody's story is an evocative look at New York several decades in the future, after a terrorist nuclear attack, when many people use a drug to travel in time (in a way). Chaon's story is horror, about a man who abandoned his family. Hornby's is oddly funny, in that it is about the end of the world, as predicted by a strange VCR. I also liked stories by Kelly Link, Carol Emshwiller, Chris Offutt, Karen Joy Fowler, and Chabon himself. Album Zutique #1 is the first of a planned series of books, not necessarily all anthologies, from the Ministry of Whimsy, and focusing on surrealistic fiction. This book, edited by Jeff VanderMeer, seems above all playful in nature, though the stories aren't necessarily funny (some are, some aren't). My favorite story was Rhys Hughes's "Eternal Sunset", one of the funnier ones, about a guitar player rescued than redrowned by a dolphin, after which he falls in love with an underwater goddess. Which doesn't really describe it -- I won't bother to try. Hughes had another good story, "The Toes of the Sun". Jeffrey Ford's "The Beautiful Gelreesh" is an effective and mordant tale of a monster who, in a way, offers psychiatric services. Ursula Pflug's "Python" (a reprint from infinity plus in 2002) is a fine fantasia about two Canadian girls visiting New Orleans. There was also good work from Brendan Connell, Jay Lake, "Christina Flock" (i.e. Richard Calder), and K. J. Bishop. Trampoline came from Small Beer Press, home of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and was edited by Kelly Link. The contents, then, were genre-wise similar to those of LCRW: plenty of "slipstream", some fairly straightforward mainstream stuff, some horror, some science fiction, some fantasy. Undeniably fantasy, though quite individual to the author, is the best story, and easily one of the best novellas of the year, Greer Gilman's "A Crowd of Bone". This is told in Gilman's difficult but rewarding allusive, poetic style, sheer joy to read but knotty work to unravel meaning from. A witch's daughter and a young man flee the witch across a rural landscape that seems to resemble the North of England some centuries ago. The images are striking, the prose rhythms are perfect, and the slowly emerging story is moving and starkly bittersweet. I also liked John Gonzalez' "Impala", his first story : about a father driving across country with his son, trying to build a relationship and hoping to strike it rich in Vegas and thus win the boy's mother back. ANd despite what it sounds like, it's pure SF, complete with spaceships and AIs. Susan Mosser's "Bumpship" is also SF, about a woman charged with evacuating the colonists from a failed terraformation attempt. (I've just seen that my editor at Locus, Jonathan Strahan, and Karen Haber have picked this story for their SF Best of the Year.) Carol Emshwiller's "Gods and Three Wishes" is a whimsical fable, about a young woman sent by her tribe to visit the gods and demand better treatment from them. These above are clearly SF or Fantasy, but Trampoline featured slipstream too. I liked best Alan DeNiro's "Fuming Woman", an offbeat piece about a trapeze artist; Shelley Jackson's "Angel", a disturbing story about a sort of amateur taxidermist, whose ambitions expand from rats to humans when he finds a dead body; Jeffrey Ford's "The Yellow Chamber", which could truly be called "surrealistic", about an isolated group of "scientists" studying an alternate reality by means of an unusual machine and some decidedly unusual methods; and Richard Butner's "Ash City Stomp", about a flaky young woman and her staid older boyfriend, and a hitchhiker who might be the devil. I thought Maureen McHugh's "Eight-Legged Story" and Karen Joy Fowler's "King Rat" pure mainstream, but that's no reason not to read them -- particularly McHugh's, about a woman trying to cope with a difficult stepson. It's really a fine anthology.