Modern Classics of Fantasy

PREFACE

Fantasy has probably existed ever since the Cro-Magnons told stories around the fire in the deep caves of Lascaux and Altamira and Rouffignac—and perhaps even for considerably longer than that, for who knows what tales the Neanderthals told around their fires during the long Ice Age nights, thousands of years earlier? By the time that Homer was telling stories to fireside audiences in Bronze Age Greece, the tales he was telling contained recognizable fantasy elements—man-eating giants, spells and counterspells, enchantresses who turned men into swine—that were probably recognized as fantasy elements and responded to as such by at least the more sophisticated members of his audience.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, something recognizably akin to modern literary fantasy was beginning to precipitate out from the millennia-old body of oral traditions—folktales, fairy tales, mythology, songs and ballads, wonder tales, travelers’ tales, rural traditions about the Good Folk and haunted standing stones and the giants who slept under the countryside. First these came in the form of Gothic stories, ghost stories, and Arabesques, and later, by the middle of the next century, in a more self-conscious literary form in the work of writers such as William Morris and George MacDonald, who reworked the subject matter of the oral traditions to create new fantasy worlds for an audience sophisticated enough to respond to the fantasy elements as literary tropes rather than as fearfully regarded, half-remembered elements of folk beliefs, people who were more likely to be entertained by the idea of putting a saucer of milk out for the fairies than to actually do such a thing.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most respectable literary figures—Dickens, Twain, Kipling, Doyle, Saki, Chesterton, Wells—had written fantasy in one form or another, if only ghost stories or Gothic stories, and a few, like Thorne Smith, James Branch Cabell, and Lord Dunsany, had even made something of a specialty of it. But as World War II loomed ever closer over the horizon, fantasy somehow began to fall into disrepute, increasingly being considered as unhip, anti-modern, non-progressive, socially irresponsible, even déclassé. By the sterile and unsmiling 1950s, very little fantasy was being published in any form, and fantasy as a genre, as a separate publishing category, did not exist.

Although hardly welcomed to the bosom of the literary establishment with open arms, a grudging, condescending, partial exception was made for a specialized form of fantasy called science fiction, mostly on the grounds that it was rationalistic, modern, progressive, predicted the future, and so forth. In other words, SF had a didactic function, a social teaching function, that partially excused its excursions away from the normal world as it was very rigidly defined in the 1950s. While a faint whiff of raffishness remained, science fiction could be justified as a specialized form of children’s or Young Adult literature—as literature with training wheels on it, something that would teach the kids to be familiar with Science and Technology and to think progressively about The Future (much in the fashion of the famous World of the Future dioramas at the 1939 World’s Fair) until they were ready to put aside childish things and turn to real literature about the real world. SF, then, although it did somewhat distastefully deal with things that were not real, could be tolerated grudgingly as a necessary evil for children and even some weak-minded adults. The idea that this teaching function justified the existence of SF was a note sounded over and over again, sometimes rather shrilly, in the genre magazines of the day. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, used to run endorsements on the back cover from real people, sober respectable adults like Clifton Fadiman and Steve Allen, assuring readers that it was okay, socially respectable (really!), to read SF—a strategy very similar to the current advertising campaign for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes that shows a succession of shamefaced adults, sometimes masked or in darkened rooms, admitting that they like to eat Frosted Flakes even though it’s a kid’s cereal.

Fantasy had no such justification, and even many of those who admitted (usually somewhat defensively) that they read science fiction would often draw the line at admitting that they read fantasy—which not only dealt, by definition, with things that weren’t real, but which had no mitigating didactic function.

This justifying didactic purpose of SF was also strongly emphasized in ads for and the cover copy of the early SF novels and anthologies that slowly began to get published at about the same time … and it seems to have worked, since SF as a commercial genre, as a separate publishing category, was successfully established in the 1950s, largely through the efforts of pioneers such as Ian and Betty Ballantine and Don Wollheim. It grew and flourished throughout the rest of that decade and on through the 1960s, with one publisher after another launching genre SF lines. By the early 1970s, SF was not only an established genre but actually a rather large popular category.

Perhaps because it lacked the sanction of a teaching function, fantasy remained largely despised and disreputable as science fiction proliferated. In the 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s, where it was possible to sell a science fiction novel, it was usually flat-out impossible to sell a fantasy novel, or at least to sell it as a genre product. (Occasionally a Real Writer, an accepted literary figure like John Steinbeck or Roald Dahl, could get away with selling a fantasy, but it would be published as high-end High Art, as literature, with the fact that it was a fantasy either not mentioned or explicitly denied in the cover copy). This led to an odd situation, described by Michael Swanwick and other commentators, where much fantasy was published by disguising it as science fiction. This strategy is clear in L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna series, as well as in much of the work of Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and other regular Planet Stories writers: get your characters to another planet as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, and then, once you’re there, spend the bulk of your time telling a standard fantasy swashbuckler with lots of swordplay and evil wizardry, with the magic disguised as alien technology or, even better, as PSI powers. (Disguised fantasy also shades nearly imperceptibly into rationalized fantasy—where you have, say, a dragon, but you explain its existence in rationalistic, science fictional terms: as a product of genetic engineering, perhaps, or as an alien creature from another planet—and also on into the kind of hybrid of fantasy and science fiction sometimes described as fantasy with rivets, fantasy written from the aesthetic perspective of science fiction, where you have an overt fantasy trope, such as a dragon, but you think up clever rationalizations for its existence under the laws of physics that apply in the real world, or put a lot of thought into working out how those physical laws might constrain the possible actions of such a fantasy creature if it did actually exist; this last is the strategy of Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and Robert Heinlein’s The Devil Makes the Law as well as much other work, almost all of it published as science fiction by established science fiction lines, as Roger Zelazny’s first five Amber books were published throughout the 1970s.)

By the late 1950s, although I was an avid consumer of science fiction, I didn’t know a lot about fantasy. Like most of the audience of the time, especially those of us still in high school or grade school, I didn’t have a lot of money, and so of necessity limited my book buying to cheap mass-market paperbacks—which meant that the occasional high-end literary fantasy was beyond both my purview and my reach. If the work of past masters such as Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and Clark Ashton Smith, was available at all (often it wasn’t), it was available only as expensive hardcover reprints; consequently, I knew nothing of them either, or of the books that J. R. R. Tolkien had already begun to issue in hardcover in Britain. Most of what I knew of fantasy at that point, as opposed to SF, came from fairy tales, Disney cartoon features, and from children’s books such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (which still remains perhaps my favorite children’s book—today it is probably published as Young Adult—of all time, and which is perhaps even more rewarding to the adult reader).

By the early 1960s, this had begun to change. One of the first cracks in the armor, for me, anyway, happened in 1962, when an SF mass-market line named Pyramid Books published a paperback edition of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s The Incomplete Enchanter, with a quote on it from Basil Davenport—one of F&SFs back-cover adults—saying that "you never met anything exactly like it in your life." I agreed—I never had met anything exactly like it in my life, and it made a large impression on me. When Pyramid Books published the sequel, The Castle of Iron, a few months later, I pounced on that as well. In 1963, Pyramid brought out an anthology of stories, edited by D. R. Bensen, from the by-then long extinct fantasy magazine Unknown, where the de Camp and Pratt Harold Shea stories that had gone into making up The Incomplete Enchanter had originally appeared; sensitized by this connection, I bought the anthology, one of the first anthologies I can remember buying. In its pages, encountered for the first time Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, as well as discovering the work of Manly Wade Wellman and H. L. Gold. A few months later, I came across another Pyramid anthology, this one edited by L. Sprague de Camp and called Swords & Sorcery, a deliberate attempt by de Camp to preserve at least, and perhaps revive, a then-Endangered Literary Species called sword & sorcery or heroic fantasy. Here was another Gray Mouser story, and here for the first time I also encountered Robert E. Howard’s Conan and C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, first read the work of Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft, and first read the fantasy work—I was already familiar with his science fiction—of Poul Anderson; a later de Camp anthology, The Spell of Seven, introduced me to Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. (D. R. Bensen, who was the editor of Pyramid Books during this period, and who therefore was responsible for bringing all this material back into print, can be seen, in fact, as one of the unsung and forgotten progenitors of the whole modern fantasy revival.)

Inspired by these books, I began to rummage through secondhand bookstores, and soon had come up with yellowing old back copies of Unknown and Weird Tales and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A bit later, I discovered that new copies, current copies, of F&SF were available on a few newsstands. And at about this time I discovered Cele Goldsmith’s Fantastic, just as she succeeded in coaxing Fritz Leiber to contribute a new sequence of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories to the magazine—and I was hooked. In fact, although I occasionally picked up a copy of Galaxy or F&SF, Fantastic was the first genre magazine I bought regularly, and I would haunt the newsstands waiting for the new issue to appear with an intense impatience I hadn’t known before and have rarely felt since.

More fantasy books began to squeeze through into print. At Ace, Don Wollheim began to re-issue almost the complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in affordable paperback editions with wonderfully evocative covers by Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta of sword-swinging heroes, beautiful princesses in diaphanous gowns, and huge glowering Tharks with a sword in each of their four hands, and somehow these books fit in perfectly to the fantasy gestalt that was growing, even though most of them had been published originally as science fiction. Similarly, Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, although ostensibly historical novels, felt like fantasy, and helped to stoke the growing hunger of the reading audience for fantasy. Somewhere during this period, the success of the Broadway musical Camelot allowed the book which had inspired the play, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, to come out in an affordable (by my standards) mass-market paperback; it was seized instantly and gladly by me and by thousands of others like me. L. Sprague de Camp began writing new Conan stories and novels, building them from fragments and unfinished drafts by the late Robert E. Howard. The first of the Conan imitators, such as John Jakes’s stories of Brak the Barbarian, began to appear. And then we came to Tolkien.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is often cited as having single-handedly created the modern fantasy genre, but, while it is certainly hard to overestimate Tolkien’s influence—almost every subsequent fantasist was hugely influenced by Tolkien, even, haplessly, those who didn’t like him and reacted against him—what is sometimes forgotten these days is that Don Wollheim published the infamous pirated edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (the opening book of the trilogy) in the first place because he was casting desperately around for something—anything!—with which to feed the hunger of the swelling audience for sword & sorcery. The cover art of the Ace edition of The Fellowship of the Ring makes it clear that Wollheim thought of it as a sword & sorcery book, and his signed interior copy makes that explicit by touting the Tolkien volume as a book of sword-and-sorcery that anyone can read with delight and pleasure. In other words, in the United States at least, the genre audience for fantasy definitely predated Tolkien, rather than being created by him, as the modern myth would have it. Don Wollheim, one of the most canny editors who ever lived, knew very well that there was a genre fantasy audience already out there, a hungry audience waiting to be fed—although I doubt if even he had the remotest idea just how tremendous a response there would be to the tidbit of sword & sorcery that he was about to feed them.

After Tolkien, everything changed. The audience for genre fantasy may have existed already, but there can be no doubt that Tolkien widened it tremendously. The immense commercial success of Tolkien’s work also opened the eyes of other publishers to the fact that there was an intense hunger for fantasy in the reading audience—and they, too, began looking around for something to feed to that hunger. On the strength of Tolkien’s success, Lin Carter was able to create the first mass-market paperback fantasy line, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, which brought back into print long-forgotten and long-unavailable works by writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, E. R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, and Lord Dunsany, as well as somewhat more recent but equally unavailable and long out-of-print books such as de Camp and Pratt’s Land of Unreason and Evangeline Walton’s The Island of the Mighty. A few years later, Lester del Rey took over from Lin Carter, and, aided by the matchless marketing savvy of his wife, Judy-Lynn del Rey, began to search for more commercial, less high-toned stuff that would appeal more directly to an audience still hungry for something just like Tolkien. In 1977, he brought out Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and although it was dismissed by most critics as a clumsy retread of Tolkien, it proved hugely successful commercially, as did its many sequels. Del Rey also scored big that year with Lord Foul’s Bane, the beginning of the somewhat quirkier and less derivative trilogy The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson, and its many sequels. At about this time, the Ballantine SF and fantasy lines would be renamed Del Rey Books in honor of the unprecedented success of both del Reys in finding and publishing best-sellers, books that were selling better than any SF or fantasy titles had ever sold before; Lester del Rey would remain editor of Del Rey Fantasy, and, for both better and worse, also remain one of the most influential fantasy editors in the business, until his retirement in 1991.

The floodgates had opened. No longer would fantasy books need to be disguised as science fiction in order to be sold. Fantasy was becoming a genre, and a separate commercial publishing category, of its own.

Sword & Sorcery or Heroic Fantasy was probably the most common form of genre fantasy book at first, but by the 1980s that form had faded (although it’s showing signs of revival in the middle 1990s, with publishers such as White Wolf issuing retrospective collections of core sword & sorcery work by authors like Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock). It was largely replaced by High Fantasy, a somewhat less swashbuckling and more mood-oriented form, closer to Tolkien and the pseudomedieval romances of William Morris than it is to Conan. Ursula K. Le Guin was a pioneer of this form with her Earthsea books (originally published as Young Adult fiction, perhaps because at the time no one knew where else to put them), and other writers who have earned reputations in High Fantasy include (but are no means limited to) Patricia A. McKillip, Robin McKinley, Guy Gavriel Kay, Jane Yolen, Parke Godwin, Judith Tarr, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lisa Goldstein, Susan Cooper, Joy Chant, and many others. In its most common form, sometimes referred to sneeringly by critics as the standard Celtic Fantasy Trilogy, High Fantasy still dominates bookstore shelves. It fades off into Arthurnalia, fantasy books dealing with The Matter of Britain, into what has been called Mannerism (typified by the work of Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Elizabeth Willey, and some of the non-comic work of Esther Friesner), and on into the historical fantasy—and thus also off, sometimes nearly imperceptibly, into both the historical novel and that subcategory of the mystery novel known as the historical mystery (sometimes making for works that are very difficult to categorize: to which genre, for instance, does a mystery novel set in ancient Rome which features historical characters tracking down a vampire belong? Are Mary Stewart’s Merlin books such as The Crystal Cave historical novels with fantasy elements, or fantasy novels set in a strongly developed historic milieu?) On the other end, High Fantasy shades off into what has been called Urban Fantasy (similar to Unknown-style comic fantasy that deals with the interactions between the mundane world and the worlds of fantasy, but in a different key, more somber and lyrical) and which is represented by the work of authors such as Charles de Lint, Megan Lindholm, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Marina Fitch, and others. The work of eccentric, harder-to-classify authors such as Robert Holdstock, Keith Roberts, Mary Gentle, Gene Wolfe, Gwyneth Jones, M. John Harrison, and Tanith Lee is probably related to this central massif in some way, as is the flourishing subcategory of updated fairy tales recently popularized by a series of fantasy anthologies such as Snow White, Blood Red edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The work of eccentrics such as Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock (Powers and Blaylock are sometimes considered to form a sub-category of their own, and are also identified with—see below—steampunk), John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, Howard Waldrop, Terry Bisson, Rebecca Ore, and Neal Barrett, Jr. probably also fits in somewhere on the Urban Fantasy end of the High Fantasy spectrum … or fits in there as well as it fits in anywhere, at least. On the far end, Urban Fantasy also shades off into the literary territory known as Magic Realism, although the distinctions between fantasy and Magic Realism are subjective enough and complex enough to daunt all but the most fearless of critics. (High Fantasy was also the major influence on most fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and, later, on fantasy-adventure computer games, and such mediums have diffused the influence of this type of fantasy throughout the culture far beyond the traditional boundaries of the print genre, but also out of our purview here.)

Sometime in the early 1980s, prompted by the unprecedented commercial success of Stephen King, horror began to separate out from fantasy and establish itself as an individual commercial publishing category of its own, with book lines specializing in horror being launched, and with separately labeled shelves set up for horror in most large bookstores. This trend accelerated throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, and today, while fantasy titles are not always separated from science fiction titles in large bookstores (usually they are not separated, in fact), horror is almost always separated out from both fantasy and science fiction and racked as an individual category of its own. Horror had become a genre in its own right. (Later still, in the early 1990s, horror itself would begin to split, with a variety sometimes called Dark Suspense beginning to be differentiated from the more traditional supernatural horror; closer to the true crime/suspense novel subgenre of mystery than to the work of earlier horror writers such as Lovecraft, the rapidly growing Dark Suspense subcategory is mostly concerned with a seemingly endless parade of serial killers, murderous rapists, and child molesters—horror in the Hitchcockian sense rather than in the supernatural sense—and, since it usually contains no fantastic element, passes quickly beyond our purview here. Erotic Horror—sometimes featuring a supernatural element, sometimes not, but almost always blood-soaked, gore-splattered, and escalatingly grotesque, specializing in depictions of rape, murder, sexual violence, S&M, bondage, and mutilation, all described with relishing, hand-rubbing glee—also seems to be calving from the main body of horror as a subgenre of its own. Vampire stories, once to be encountered largely in fantasy, also show signs of becoming a separate subcategory of horror on their own—22 percent of the horror books published in 1995 were vampire books—but at least they usually retain a fantastic element, almost by definition. Most modern horror, though, has moved so far away from its fantasy roots that it need not be really considered further in this anthology.)

Although horror is increasingly perceived as a separate genre of its own (and mostly feels that way, too), some writers do continue to work both territories, and there is an ambiguous borderland between fantasy and horror, sometimes called Dark Fantasy—work that partakes of the qualities of both forms without being clearly distinguishable as either. Much of Tanith Lee’s work fits into this border country, as do novels like James P. Blaylock’s All the Bells on Earth and some of the work of Tim Powers, Elizabeth Hand, Jonathan Carroll, and others.

There are other subgenres, of course, in almost bewildering profusion. Steampunk, for instance, can be considered a form of Urban Fantasy wherein the modern world depicted is that of the Victorian era, or a fun-house-mirror reflection of an alternative Victorian age, at least; depending on whom you ask, steampunk can be considered to be either science fiction or fantasy, and some of the authors who have been associated with it include Tim Powers, James Blaylock, K. W. Jeter, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson (for one novel in collaboration with Sterling, The Difference Engine), Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Di Filippo, and, perhaps the progenitor of this form, Michael Moorcock. Outlaw Fantasy—gonzo fantasy made up of an eclectic stew of various pop-culture icons—was briefly considered to be a subcategory in the 1980s; best typified by the work of Howard Waldrop, although writers such as Neal Barrett, Jr., Tom Reamy, Joe Landsdale, and Bruce Sterling in his fantasy-writing mode have been associated with it. Outlaw Fantasy later seemed to be evolving into cowpunk, a cross between gonzo fantasy, horror, SF, and the classic Western story, and several cowpunk anthologies were published at the end of the decade. Comic Fantasy, with roots that go all the way back to Unknown, is sometimes considered to be a subcategory of its own; among its most prominent practitioners are Terry Pratchett (one of the best-selling authors in Britain), Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams, Esther M. Friesner, Tom Holt, Christopher Stasheff, Craig Shaw Gardner, and others. Lately, a new subcategory called Hard Fantasy has been proposed, an as-yet only vaguely defined hybrid between Tolkienesque fantasy, technologically oriented hard science fiction, and steampunk, with perhaps a jigger of Outlaw Fantasy thrown in; the best examples of this nascent form to date are to be found in Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Walter Jon Williams’s Metropolitan, and in some of the short work—such as The Giving Mouth—of Ian R. MacLeod, although I suspect that Geoff Ryman’s The Unconquered Country is also ancestral in some way.

Of course, all of these classification schemes are, to a large extent, arbitrary. Authors constantly complicate things by working in more than one form, or by creating not-easily-pigeonholeable works that blur the boundaries between several different categories, and some of the more eccentric and individual authors such as Gene Wolfe, Mary Gentle, and John Crowley don’t really fit in comfortably anywhere. About the best you can do is to perceive vague taxonomic lines and lineages; you can tell that some writers are related somehow, that somewhere down their family trees they share common ancestors, but the species continue to radiate, filling new ecological niches, evolving, specializing, forming new species, and then combining to form new hybrids in bewildering profusion … so that in the end all you can really say is that they all share, say, a common bone in the foot, or the shape of a hip-joint. Making this all even more subjective is the fact that many of these subcategories are distinguishable mainly by Attitude. After all, Leiber’s Smoke Ghost, Gold’s Trouble with Water, Avram Davidson’s The Golem, Waldrop’s God’s Hooks!, Robert Sampson’s A Gift of the People, Harlan Ellison’s Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, Esther M. Friesner’s Blunderbore, Stephen King’s The Mangler, and Bernard Malamud’s The Jewbird (among examples that could be multiplied almost endlessly) could all validly be described as stories wherein the supernatural intrudes into the modern world—but they are all very distinct in tone and mood and emotional color, in flavor, in Attitude. The whale, the bat, and the lemur may have shared a common ancestor, but they are still very different animals today, for all that.

However you try to flense and parse it, the reality is that today, more than twenty years after fantasy initially became a separate marketing category, the fantasy genre has grown into an enormous, varied, and vital industry, rivaling its longer-established cousin science fiction in numbers of titles published and in the amount of bookstore rack space devoted to the form.

By 1995, ironically, one prominent British SF writer was complaining that he could only sell science fiction, in Britain at least, by disguising it as fantasy.

When the last Ice Age started, and the glaciers ground down from the north to cover most of the North American continent, thousands of species of plants and trees, as well as the insects, birds, and animals associated with them, retreated to cove forests in the south, in what would eventually come to be called the Great Smoky Mountains; in those cove forests, they waited out the long domain of the Ice, eventually moving north again to re-colonize the land as the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated. Similarly, the lowly genre fantasy and science fiction magazines—Weird Tales and Unknown in the 1930s and 1940s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantastic, and the British Science Fantasy in the 1950s and 1960s—were the cove forests that sheltered fantasy during its long retreat from the glaciers of Social Realism, giving it a refuge in which to endure until the climate warmed enough to allow it to spread and repopulate again.

Oddly, those fantasy magazines have often been ignored by histories of fantasy and retrospective fantasy anthologies to date, which often choose to focus upon the more respectable high-end literary ancestors of fantasy instead. Since that territory has recently been covered in two excellent retrospective anthologies, David G. Hartwell’s Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Tom Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (both of which do also acknowledge fantasy’s debt to the genre magazines), I’ve decided to concentrate in this anthology on modern fantasy as it developed and cross-fertilized and flourished in the hothouse atmosphere of those cove forests, the genre fantasy magazines of fantasy’s lost period, from the 1930s to the 1960s, taking a look as well at what happened to the form after it was no longer necessary for it to hide in the magazines in order to survive. After the Tolkien Explosion of the late 1960s, it became possible to make a reputation as a fantasist by writing novels alone; in fact, many major modern fantasy writers from Tim Powers to Terry Brooks to Guy Gavriel Kay to Terry Pratchett have established themselves while writing few, if any, short stories. Nevertheless, evolutionarily important work continued to appear in short story form throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in genre magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, as well as in the occasional original fantasy anthology, which functioned in much the same way as the magazines … and it is from those fantasy magazines and anthologies that the majority of the stories in this anthology are drawn.

As was true of my other two retrospective anthologies, Modern Classics of Science Fiction and Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, none of the stories here were selected on ideological grounds, because they help buttress some polemic or aesthetic argument about the nature of fantasy, or because they express some critical theory, or because they grind some particular political axe. Nor were they selected because they are good examples of one type or another of fantasy—although, in retrospect, it can be seen that a few of them are good examples of one subcategory or another of fantasy. That is not why they are here, though.

No, as usual with my retrospective anthologies, the stories here were selected on the appallingly naive basis that I liked them.

These are the stories that stuck in my mind after more than thirty years of reading fantasy, ever since I first picked up that anthology of stories from Unknown in 1963. These are the stories that spoke to something in me, that moved me and shook me, that opened my eyes to new worlds of wonder and enchantment, that made me experience life inside someone else’s—or something else’s—skin. Stories that have been personal friends of mine, friends that have seen me through some of the darkest times and longest nights of my life. Stories that I enjoyed—uncritically, instinctively—as a reader. Stories that I would want to read again. I decided some years ago that this was the only valid way to put together a retrospective anthology—for me, anyway—and that’s the way I’ve assembled this one as well.

Even collecting stories that fit only the above criteria, though, I found that I was still left with enough material to fill an anthology twice as long as this one, longer than was feasible. Some winnowing-screens were needed. After thinking about this, I decided that although stories such as Theodore Sturgeon’s It and Fritz Leiber’s Smoke Ghost were able to coexist comfortably along with stories such as H. L. Gold’s Trouble with Water and L. Sprague de Camp’s The Hardwood Pile in the 1930s in the pages of a fantasy magazine such as Unknown, it was clear in retrospect that It and Smoke Ghost were part of a different taxonomic line, one that lead not to modern fantasy, but instead, on through stories like Harlan Ellison’s Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes and Joanna Russ’s My Dear Emily and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper to the modern horror genre—that, in fact, they would all be more appropriate to a book called Modern Classics of Horror than to a book called Modern Classics of Fantasy. So, arbitrarily, I omitted them, and other similar stories that I decided arbitrarily were better thought of as horror-ancestors rather than fantasy-ancestors. Deciding to concentrate on modern fantasy as it evolved in the genre magazines eliminated a whole range of other stories, including classics by Lord Dunsany, Kipling, Saki, and others. The constraints of a technically feasible book-length dictated the omission of other stories, although I did manage to squeeze in a few of my favorite fantasy novellas. And the practical difficulties involved in assembling an anthology necessitated the omission of still other stories, those, say, which had recently appeared in a competing anthology, or those for which the reprint rights were either encumbered or priced too high for me to be able to afford them on the limited budget I had to work with (which explains why there is no Ray Bradbury story here, so don’t bother to write and ask).

Some critics will no doubt complain that some of the stories I have used here are not really fantasy, but, as I think this anthology demonstrates, the line between fantasy and science fiction is an ambiguous one, and always has been. De Camp’s The Gnarly Man was published in the foremost fantasy magazine of its day, but makes a stab at a rationalistic science-fictional rationale for its fantastic element … although one that was rather weak even in 1939. Damon Knight’s Extempore was published in a science fiction magazine, yet offers no rationalistic explanation for its fantastic element at all, which, stripped of some technobabble, comes down to wishing will make it so, clearly a fantasy trope. Roger Zelazny’s Death and the Executioner, which was later built into one of the most famous science fiction novels of the 1960s, functions perfectly as a fantasy except for a few lines of back-story toward the end. Keith Roberts’s The Signaller was later built into Pavane, which is usually thought of as a science fiction novel—and yet the story features a visitation by Elves. Fritz Leiber’s Scylla’s Daughter is a key story in one of the core fantasy series, a sword & sorcery series at that, and yet a time-traveller from the future comes blundering into the story in the middle of it—and, to complicate things, the time-traveller arrives riding on a dragon! Richard McKenna’s Casey Agonistes and R. A. Lafferty’s Narrow Valley, which I used in my Modern Classics of Science Fiction without a single critical eyebrow being raised, would fit with equal ease into this anthology. And so on.

Much of both modern fantasy and modern horror, it seems to me, still deals with the relationship of the ordinary human world with Faërie, the Land Beyond the Hill, the World Beyond the Wood, that land of ghosts and shadows and unearthly Powers that still flickers just beyond the periphery of our bright, tidy, rational modern world—or so our ancient hindbrain assures us, anyway, no matter how much our skeptical forebrain scoffs. The major difference between the two, I think, is not so much subject matter as Attitude, the prevalent emotional weather or coloring of each. Michael Swanwick has pointed out that the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by rights ought to read like horror, most of the stories bringing the two comrades into conflict with a shuddersome crew of hideous monsters and supernatural menaces in a fictional universe ruled by as cruel and remorseless a pantheon of dark gods as is to be found in anything by Lovecraft. That they do not read as horror, that they are instantly recognizable as fantasy instead, is due to Attitude—to the élan, the gusto, and the great, good-natured humor with which Fafhrd and the Mouser face even the most grisly and gruesome of adversaries. (Humor seems to be a particular dividing line; there’s lots of funny fantasy, but almost no funny horror—in fact, that comes close to being a contradiction in terms.)

Much of modern horror has succumbed to—in fact, wholeheartedly embraced—a numbing sort of nihilism and fashionable designer despair, the message of which seems to be: you can’t win, nothing matters, neither ethics nor morals nor religion are an effective guide to behavior, and none of them will save you; you can survive for a while by turning yourself into a savage predator, devoid of remorse or compassion or pity, but there’s always a bigger predator in wait somewhere; in the end, the grave will get you, and sometimes you will continue to be flayed and tormented even beyond death. The house always wins, you always lose, and nothing you can do has any significance at all.

This perception of the universe may be closer to reality than that of fantasy, but my reaction to it is always, Yeah, well, so what? It’s hardly news, after all, that everyone is bound for the grave; in fact, it’s a rather obvious truism. So what? What can you do with a message that everything is hopeless nihilism and black despair, that nothing you can do matters at all, except to use it as another good reason to commit suicide as soon as possible?

Fantasy instead teaches us that there is something worthwhile you can do on the way to the grave: you can dream. And that maybe that dreaming is not only intrinsically valuable, for its own sake, but that sometimes the dream can take on a life of its own, a life that persists, and that shapes and sometimes even ennobles the lives of others that it touches, sometimes long after the original dreamer is gone from this earth.

So here are many such dreams, some of them pastel and fragile, and yet, in their own way, curiously tough. Such dreams persist, and cross the gulf of generations and even the awful gulf of the grave, cross all barriers of race or age or class or sex or nationality, transcend time itself. Here are dreams that, it is my fervent hope, will still be touching other people’s minds and hearts and stirring them in their turn to dream long after everyone in this anthology or associated with it has gone to dust.

HORACE L. GOLD

Trouble with Water

Although the late Horace L. Gold published seven million words of fiction in every field but sports and air war, he was perhaps best known as the founder and first editor of Galaxy magazine. He edited the magazine throughout its Golden Age in the 1950s, publishing dozens of classic stories by Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, and many others—in fact, Gold was one of the most influential editors in the history of science fiction, rating right up there with editors such as John W. Campbell Jr. and Anthony Boucher. His books include eleven Galaxy anthologies, The Old Die Rich and Other Stories, What Will They Think of Last?, and Ultima Zero. Gold died in 1995.

Long before he assumed the editorial chair at Galaxy, however, Gold had secured his reputation within the field on the basis of the classic story that follows, one of the best stories ever published in the renowned fantasy magazine Unknown, and, in fact, one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written, as bittersweet and funny today as it was in 1939. In it, Gold shows us the wisdom of a simple rule: Never pick a fight until you know exactly who it is you’re fighting with …

Greenberg did not deserve his surroundings. He was the first fisherman of the season, which guaranteed him a fine catch; he sat in a dry boat—one without a single leak—far out on a lake that was ruffled only enough to agitate his artificial fly. The sun was warm, the air was cool; he sat comfortably on a cushion; he had brought a hearty lunch; and two bottles of beer hung over the stern in the cold water.

Any other man would have been soaked with joy to be fishing on such a splendid day. Normally, Greenberg himself would have been ecstatic, but instead of relaxing and waiting for a nibble, he was plagued by worries.

This short, slightly gross, definitely bald, eminently respectable businessman lived a gypsy life. During the summer, he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Rockaway; winters he lived in a hotel with kitchen privileges in Florida; and in both places he operated concessions. For years now, rain had fallen on schedule every week end, and there had been storms and floods on Decoration Day, July 4th and Labor Day. He did not love his life, but it was a way of making a living.

He closed his eyes and groaned. If he had only had a son instead of his Rosie! Then things would have been mighty different—

For one thing, a son could run the hot dog and hamburger griddle, Esther could draw beer, and he would make soft drinks. There would be small difference in the profits, Greenberg admitted to himself; but at least those profits could be put aside for old age, instead of toward a dowry for his miserably ugly, dumpy, pitifully eager Rosie.

All right—so what do I care if she don’t get married? he had cried to his wife a thousand times. I’ll support her. Other men can set up boys in candy stores with soda fountains that have only two spigots. Why should I have to give a boy a regular International Casino?

May your tongue rot in your head, you no-good piker! she would scream. It ain’t right for a girl to be an old maid. If we have to die in the poorhouse, I’ll get my poor Rosie a husband. Every penny we don’t need for living goes to her dowry!

Greenberg did not hate his daughter, nor did he blame her for his misfortunes; yet, because of her, he was fishing with a broken rod that he had to tape together.

That morning, his wife opened her eyes and saw him packing his equipment. She instantly came awake. Go ahead! she shrilled—speaking in a conversational tone was not one of her accomplishments—Go fishing, you loafer! Leave me here alone. I can connect the beer pipes and the gas for soda water. I can buy ice cream, frankfurters, rolls, syrup, and watch the gas and electric men at the same time. Go ahead—go fishing!

I ordered everything, he mumbled soothingly. The gas and electric won’t be turned on today. I only wanted to go fishing—it’s my last chance. Tomorrow we open the concession. Tell the truth, Esther, can I go fishing after we open?

I don’t care about that. Am I your wife or ain’t I, that you should go ordering everything without asking me—

He defended his actions. It was a tactical mistake. While she was still in bed, he should have picked up his equipment and left. By the time the argument got around to Rosie’s dowry, she stood facing him.

For myself I don’t care, she yelled. What kind of a monster are you that you can go fishing while your daughter eats her heart out? And on a day like this yet! You should only have to make supper and dress Rosie up. A lot you care that a nice boy is coming to supper tonight and maybe take Rosie out, you no-good father, you!

From that point it was only one hot protest and a shrill curse to find himself clutching half a broken rod, with the other half being flung at his head.

Now he sat in his beautifully dry boat on an excellent game lake far out on Long Island, desperately aware that any average fish might collapse his taped rod.

What else could he expect? He had missed his train; he had had to wait for the boathouse proprietor; his favorite dry fly was missing; and, since morning, not a fish struck at the bait. Not a single fish!

And it was getting late. He had no more patience. He ripped the cap off a bottle of beer and drank it, in order to gain courage to change his fly for a less sporting bloodworm. It hurt him, but he wanted a fish.

The hook and the squirming worm sank. Before it came to rest, he felt a nibble. He sucked in his breath exultantly and snapped the hook deep into the fish’s mouth. Sometimes, he thought philosophically, they just won’t take artificial bait. He reeled in slowly.

Oh, Lord, he prayed, a dollar for charity—just don’t let the rod bend in half where I taped it!

It was sagging dangerously. He looked at it unhappily and raised his ante to five dollars; even at that price it looked impossible. He dipped his rod into the water, parallel with the line, to remove the strain. He was glad no one could see him do it. The line reeled in without a fight.

Have I—God forbid!—got an eel or something not kosher? he mumbled. A plague on you—why don’t you fight?

He did not really care what it was—even an eel—anything at all.

He pulled in a long, pointed, brimless green hat.

For a moment he glared at it. His mouth hardened. Then, viciously, he yanked the hat off the hook, threw it on the floor and trampled on it. He rubbed his hands together in anguish.

All day I fish, he wailed, two dollars for train fare, a dollar for a boat, a quarter for bait, a new rod I got to buy—and a five-dollar mortgage charity has got on me. For what? For you, you hat, you!

Out in the water an extremely civil voice asked politely: May I have my hat, please?

Greenberg glowered up. He saw a little man come swimming vigorously through the water toward him: small arms crossed with enormous dignity, vast ears on a pointed face propelling him quite rapidly and efficiently. With serious determination he drove through the water, and, at the starboard rail, his amazing ears kept him stationary while he looked gravely at Greenberg.

You are stamping on my hat, he pointed out without anger.

To Greenberg this was highly unimportant. With the ears you’re swimming, he grinned in a superior way. Do you look funny!

How else could I swim? the little man asked politely.

With the arms and legs, like a regular human being, of course.

But I am not a human being. I am a water gnome, a relative of the more common mining gnome. I cannot swim with my arms, because they must be crossed to give an appearance of dignity suitable to a water gnome; and my feet are used for writing and holding things. On the other hand, my ears are perfectly adapted for propulsion in water. Consequently, I employ them for that purpose. But please, my hat—there are several matters requiring my immediate attention, and I must not waste time.

Greenberg’s unpleasant attitude toward the remarkably civil gnome is easily understandable. He had found someone he could feel superior to, and, by insulting him, his depressed ego could expand. The water gnome certainly looked inoffensive enough, being only two feet tall.

What you got that’s so important to do, Big Ears? he asked nastily.

Greenberg hoped the gnome would be offended. He was not, since his ears, to him, were perfectly normal, just as you would not be insulted if a member of a race of atrophied beings were to call you Big Muscles. You might even feel flattered.

I really must hurry, the gnome said, almost anxiously. But if I have to answer your questions in order to get back my hat—we are engaged in restocking the Eastern waters with fish. Last year there was quite a drain. The bureau of fisheries is coöperating with us to some extent, but, of course, we cannot depend too much on them. Until the population rises to normal, every fish has instructions not to nibble.

Greenberg allowed himself a smile, an annoyingly skeptical smile.

My main work, the gnome went on resignedly, is control of the rainfall over the Eastern seaboard. Our fact-finding committee, which is scientifically situated in the meteorological center of the continent, coördinates the rainfall needs of the entire continent; and when they determine the amount of rain needed in particular spots of the East, I make it rain to that extent. Now may I have my hat, please?

Greenberg laughed coarsely. The first lie was big enough—about telling the fish not to bite. You make it rain like I’m President of the United States! He bent toward the gnome slyly. How’s about proof?

Certainly, if you insist. The gnome raised his patient, triangular face toward a particularly clear blue spot in the sky, a trifle to one side of Greenberg. Watch that bit of the sky.

Greenberg looked up humorously. Even when a small dark cloud rapidly formed in the previously clear spot, his grin remained broad. It could have been coincidental. But then large drops of undeniable rain fell over a twenty-foot circle; and Greenberg’s mocking grin shrank and grew sour.

He glared hatred at the gnome, finally convinced. So you’re the dirty crook who makes it rain on week ends!

Usually on week ends during the summer, the gnome admitted. Ninety-two percent of water consumption is on weekdays. Obviously we must replace that water. The week ends, of course, are the logical time.

But, you thief! Greenberg cried hysterically, you murderer! What do you care what you do to my concession with your rain? It ain’t bad enough business would be rotten even without rain, you got to make floods!

I’m sorry, the gnome replied, untouched by Greenberg’s rhetoric.

"We do not create rainfall for the benefit of men. We are here to protect the fish.

Now please give me my hat. I have wasted enough time, when I should be preparing the extremely heavy rain needed for this coming week end.

Greenberg jumped to his feet in the unsteady boat. Rain this week end—when I can maybe make a profit for a change! A lot you care if you ruin business. May you and your fish die a horrible, lingering death.

And he furiously ripped the green hat to pieces and hurled them at the gnome.

I’m really sorry you did that, the little fellow said calmly, his huge ears treading water without the slightest increase of pace to indicate his anger. We Little Folk have no tempers to lose. Nevertheless, occasionally we find it necessary to discipline certain of your people, in order to retain our dignity. I am not malignant; but, since you hate water and those who live in it, water and those who live in it will keep away from you.

With his arms still folded in great dignity, the tiny water gnome flipped his vast ears and disappeared in a neat surface dive.

Greenberg glowered at the spreading circles of waves. He did not grasp the gnome’s final restraining order; he did not even attempt to interpret it. Instead he glared angrily out of the corner of his eye at the phenomenal circle of rain that fell from a perfectly clear sky. The gnome must have remembered it at length, for a moment later the rain stopped. Like shutting off a faucet, Greenberg unwillingly thought.

Good-by, week end business, he growled. If Esther finds out I got into an argument with the guy who makes it rain—

He made an underhand cast, hoping for just one fish. The line flew out over the water; then the hook arched upward and came to rest several inches above the surface, hanging quite steadily and without support in the air.

Well, go down in the water, damn you! Greenberg said viciously, and he swished his rod back and forth to pull the hook down from its ridiculous levitation. It refused.

Muttering something incoherent about being hanged before he’d give in, Greenberg hurled his useless rod at the water. By this time he was not surprised when it hovered in the air above the lake. He merely glanced red-eyed at it, tossed out the remains of the gnome’s hat, and snatched up the oars.

When he pulled back on them to row to land, they did not touch the water—naturally. Instead they flashed unimpeded through the air, and Greenberg tumbled into the bow.

A-ha! he grated. Here’s where the trouble begins. He bent over the side. As he had suspected, the keel floated a remarkable distance above the lake.

By rowing against the air, he moved with maddening slowness toward shore, like a medieval conception of a flying machine. His main concern was that no one should see him in his humiliating position.

At the hotel, he tried to sneak past the kitchen to the bathroom. He knew that Esther waited to curse him for fishing the day before opening, but more especially on the very day that a nice boy was coming to see her Rosie. If he could dress in a hurry, she might have less to say—

Oh, there you are, you good-for-nothing!

He froze to a halt.

Look at you! she screamed shrilly. Filthy—you stink from fish!

I didn’t catch anything, darling, he protested timidly.

You stink anyhow. Go take a bath, may you drown in it! Get dressed in two minutes or less, and entertain the boy when he gets here. Hurry!

He locked himself in, happy to escape her voice, started the water in the tub, and stripped from the waist up. A hot bath, he hoped, would rid him of his depressed feeling.

First, no fish; now, rain on week ends! What would Esther say—if she knew, of course. And, of course, he would not tell her.

Let myself in for a lifetime of curses! he sneered. Ha!

He clamped a new blade into his razor, opened the tube of shaving cream, and stared objectively at the mirror. The dominant feature of the soft, chubby face that stared back was its ugly black stubble; but he set his stubborn chin and glowered. He really looked quite fierce and indomitable. Unfortunately, Esther never saw his face in that uncharacteristic pose, otherwise she would speak more softly.

Herman Greenberg never gives in! he whispered between savagely hardened lips. Rain on week ends, no fish—anything he wants; a lot I care! Believe me, he’ll come crawling to me before I go to him.

He gradually became aware that his shaving brush was not getting wet. When he looked down and saw the water dividing into streams that flowed around it, his determined face slipped and grew desperately anxious. He tried to trap the water—by catching it in his cupped hands, by creeping up on it from behind, as if it were some shy animal, and shoving his brush at it—but it broke and ran away from his touch. Then he jammed his palm against the faucet. Defeated, he heard it gurgle back down the pipe, probably as far as the main.

What do I do now? he groaned. Will Esther give it to me if I don’t take a shave! But how! … I can’t shave without water.

Glumly, he shut off the bath, undressed, and stepped into the tub. He lay down to soak. It took a moment of horrified stupor to realize that he was completely dry and that he lay in a waterless bathtub. The water, in one surge of revulsion, had swept out onto the floor.

Herman, stop splashing! his wife yelled. I just washed that floor. If I find one little puddle I’ll murder you!

Greenberg surveyed the instep-deep pool over the bathroom floor. Yes, my love, he croaked unhappily.

With an inadequate washrag he chased the elusive water, hoping to mop it all up before it could seep through to the apartment below. His washrag remained dry, however, and he knew that the ceiling underneath was dripping. The water was still on the floor.

In despair, he sat on the edge of the bathtub. For some time he sat in silence. Then his wife banged on the door, urging him to come out. He started and dressed moodily.

When he sneaked out and shut the bathroom door tightly on the floor inside, he was extremely dirty and his face was raw where he had experimentally attempted to shave with a dry razor.

Rosie! he called in a hoarse whisper. Sh! Where’s mamma?

His daughter sat on the studio couch and applied nail-polish to her stubby fingers. You look terrible, she said in a conversational tone. Aren’t you going to shave?

He recoiled at the sound of her voice, which, to him, roared out like a siren. Quiet, Rosie! Sh! And for further emphasis, he shoved his lips out against a warning finger. He heard his wife striding heavily around the kitchen. Rosie, he cooed, I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll mop up the water I spilled in the bathroom.

I can’t papa, she stated firmly. I’m all dressed.

Two dollars, Rosie—all right, two and a half, you blackmailer.

He flinched when he heard her gasp in the bathroom; but, when she came out with soaked shoes, he fled downstairs. He wandered aimlessly toward the village.

Now he was in for it, he thought: screams from Esther, tears from Rosie—plus a new pair of shoes for Rosie and two and a half dollars. It would be worse, though, if he could not get rid of his whiskers—

Rubbing the tender spots where his dry razor had raked his face, he mused blankly at a drugstore window. He saw nothing to help him, but he went inside anyhow and stood hopefully at the drug counter. A face peered at him through a space scratched in the wall case mirror, and the druggist came out. A nice-looking, intelligent fellow, Greenberg saw at a glance.

What you got for shaving that I can use without water? he asked.

Skin irritation, eh? the pharmacist replied. I got something very good for that.

No. It’s just-Well, I don’t like to shave with water.

The druggist seemed disappointed. Well, I got brushless shaving cream. Then he brightened. But I got an electric razor—much better.

How much? Greenberg asked cautiously.

Only fifteen dollars, and it lasts a lifetime.

Give me the shaving cream, Greenberg said coldly.

With the tactical science of a military expert, he walked around until some time after dark. Only then did he go back to the hotel, to wait outside. It was after seven, he was getting hungry, and the people who entered the hotel he knew as permanent summer guests. At last a stranger passed him and ran up the stairs.

Greenberg hesitated for a moment. The stranger was scarcely a boy, as Esther had definitely termed him, but Greenberg reasoned that her term was merely wish-fulfillment, and he jauntily ran up behind him.

He allowed a few minutes to pass, for the man to introduce himself and let Esther and Rosie don their company manners. Then, secure in the knowledge that there would be no scene until the guest left, he entered.

He waded through a hostile atmosphere, urbanely shook hands with Sammie Katz, who was a doctor—probably, Greenberg thought shrewdly, in search of an office—and excused himself.

In the bathroom, he carefully read the directions for using brushless shaving cream. He felt less confident when he realized that he had to wash his face thoroughly with soap and water, but without benefit of either, he spread the cream on, patted it, and waited for his beard to soften. It did not, as he discovered while shaving. He wiped his face dry. The towel was sticky and black, with whiskers suspended in paste, and, for that, he knew, there would be more hell to pay. He shrugged resignedly. He would have to spend fifteen dollars for an electric razor after all; this foolishness was costing him a fortune!

That