Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), The Time Traveler's Almanac

"Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?"

"We guarantee nothing," said the official, "except the dinosaurs."  He turned.  "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He'll tell you what and where to shoot.  If he says no shooting, no shooting.  If you disobey instructions, there's a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return." (Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder," pp. 342-343 iPad iBooks e-edition)

At least since the publication of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in 1895, there have been a plethora of stories about time travel.  The premise of traveling backwards and forwards in time has long had great appeal to readers' imaginations:  What would happen if X occurred in time Y and not Z?  If we could change the past, would our present and futures be better or worse?  If only... if only... 

This premise, however, allows for a wide range of styles and approaches to this very broad concept.  There have been at least thousands of stories that utilize some aspect of time travel, therefore it would be a daunting task for any anthologist to select a set number of time travel stories and publish them.  Editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in The Time Traveler's Almanac have tackled this issue with a sound approach:  select a range of stories, conceding that several reader favorites will have to be left out due to size or duplicate theme issues, and group them into four broad themes:  Experiments, Reactionaries and Revolutionaries, Mazes and Traps, and Communiqués.

This thematic division allows for some interesting pairings.  By having a section devoted to Experiments, for example, it is much easier to compare and contrast various approaches to the issue of Time as a scientific endeavor.  What manipulations can be effected if X is done in time Y?  The various ways authors such as Richard Matheson, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, and Douglas Adams, just to name a few of the authors appearing in this section, approach the idea of time travel as a scientific experiment creates a sense of iterations unfolding before us, leading to a larger appreciation of time travel as a series of variations on our own imagined and understood pasts and presents.

Readers who favor a more "political" approach to time travel, particularly in how it comes close to alt-history, will find several stories in the Reactionaries and Revolutionaries section appealing.  The Ray Bradbury story that I quoted above, which birthed "the butterfly effect" term for how seemingly trivial effects in the past can affect the future, is perhaps the best-known of the stories included here, but there are several others that caught my attention.

And so it goes for the remaining sections.  The VanderMeers' grouping by theme allows readers to pick and choose which stories that interest them most.  While it is nigh impossible to treat within the confines of a ~1000 word review each individual story at length, what I can note is that as I read these stories over a period of weeks, the stories within the four sections began to feel more like a series of overheard conversations about what time travel would/should mean.  Although there is some blurring of stories (as I glance at the table of contents, several titles fail to elicit more than a vague recollection of their contents) due to there being over sixty stories and authors selected read from April-June, I do not recall there being any story that I felt definitely should not have been included in the collection.  As for stories that otherwise could have been included, perhaps there will some time machine in the future invented that will rectify this, creating multiple iterations of The Time Traveler's Almanac for those who loved all but X and wanted Y to replace it.  As for myself, The Time Traveler's Almanac works as a very good sampler of the wide range of time travel stories published in English over the past 120 years.

Table of Contents for The Weird released

The ToC for The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, was just revealed on Jeff's blog.  Now, I'm going to be biased due to a translation of mine, "Mister Taylor" by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, appearing there, but I do think this 750,000 word reprint anthology will be one of those anthologies that readers of all stripes, particularly those who like one or more iterations of weird fiction, ought to own.  There are authors who have fallen from the limelight, authors from non-Anglo-American literary traditions, stories that are classics and those who just might surprise you.  Even if I didn't have a story appearing here, I'd want to own this one (it comes out in the UK in mid-October, with a possible US publication some time later) as soon as it was on the market due to the high probability that I would discover several outstanding writers/stories.

Also, when the associated Weird Fiction Review site launches near release date, expect some content related to this ToC there.  I am quite excited about this and hopefully there will be others excited as well. If you want to weigh in with your thoughts on the ToC or just to express your interest (or even disinterest, if that suits you more) in the stories, please leave a comment below.

Want to read an original anthology that'll contain new and exciting voices?

I just saw this posted over at Jeff VanderMeer's site:  He and his wife Ann are going to be reviving the Leviathan original anthology series, one of the best genre/weird/surrealist/etc. anthology series of the past dozen years or so.  They want Leviathan 5, which will consist of around 100,000 words (think somewhere around 400-450 pages) of original fiction, none of which would be by authors who have had more than two books published in English.  In addition, the goal is to have up to 30,000 of those 100,000 words be devoted to authors whose stories would be translated into English.  Envious of those who rave about how good this story is in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Japanese, etc., while you know you have a snowball's chance in hell of being able to read it because you don't know the language?  This anthology would serve those who have ever found themselves wishing that they could get at least a hint of the rich treasure of stories being produced outside of the Anglo-American publishing sphere, in addition to the promotion of new and exciting voices writing in English.

There's a catch, however.  Translators have to be paid, along with others associated with collating and producing these things, so VanderMeer is pledging to take 100% of the royalties received from his latest works, 2010's story collection The Third Bear and 2011's non-fiction collection Monstrous Creatures, and apply them to funding those extra expenses that make translated fiction anthologies/collections a difficult venture.  More details are found at the link above. 

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly towards the western sky.  She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison's electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs.  This is the city where her mother grew suddenly ill with miner's fever and where all her father's liniments and ministrations could not restore his wife's failing health or spare her life.  In his grief, he drank a vial of either antimony or arsenic a few days after the funeral, leaving his only daughter and only child to fend for herself.  And so, she grew up here, an orphan, one of a thousand or so dispossessed urchins with sooty bare feet and sooty faces, filching coal with sooty hands to stay warm in winter, clothed in rags, and eating what could be found in trash barrels and what could be begged or stolen.

Caitlín R. Kiernan, "The Steam Dancer (1896)", p. 66

In Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's second steampunk anthology, Steampunk II:  Steampunk Reloaded, the editors continue their exploration of the question "What is steampunk and how is it presented?" in a 420+ page sequel that expands in scope what they had covered in their first steampunk anthology, Steampunk (2008).  For readers who are still new to this vibrant and vivacious subculture, Steampunk Reloaded provides a snapshot of the many divergent strands that collectively are labeled "steampunk fiction."  Whereas Steampunk was completely a reprint anthology that concentrated on early examples of steampunk fiction (including some excerpts from novels from the 1970s and 1980s that are often considered to be the progenitors of steampunk), Steampunk Reloaded reprints (with an original fiction translation, a collaborative mash-up, two original fictions, and three new non-fiction pieces) steampunk short fiction pieces from the past decade.  Some will find the diversity of styles and motifs within this steampunk umbrella to be excellent, while others may find themselves cleaving to one particular type or another.

In both anthologies, the VanderMeers do not attempt to provide a definitive description of what constitutes "steampunk"; it would be a Sisyphean task.  Instead, what they do is cull a selection of representative short stories (and in addition, a steampunk comic and steampunk-inspired layout) and present these to the readers.  Some fictions, such as the Kiernan story I quote above, tackle the social inequalities inherent in the 19th century societies from whence most steampunk fiction draw their inspiration.  I quote Kiernan's first paragraph to her excellent "The Steam Dancer (1896)" because I found her story to be exemplary of the particular subtype of steampunk fiction I prefer most:  the social commentary that uses the dressings of alt-steam to explode myths from the Victorian and Edwardian eras of Anglo-American history.  Behind the mixture of the familiar and exotic found in Kiernan's story lies a shrewd commentary on social and gender stratification, one that is all the more effective because of its alt-world setting.

Another steampunk strand can be found in Jeffrey Ford's "Dr. Lash Remembers," which is published here for the first time.  Ford's story is more nightmarish than "real," utilizing mechanical objects as means to explore a feverish, hallucinogenic setting.  This dreamlike story is an example of the appropriation of alt-steam era machines in service to stories that might otherwise be considered to be "surreal" or "ethereal" rather than alt-histories or social commentaries of the sort depicted in Kiernan's story.  As a story, Ford's tale took a few reads before I was comfortable with its placement in this anthology, as at first it stood out like a sore thumb.  Even now, I dither a bit in praising it, because as interesting of a tale that it is, I am uncertain if it really "fits" with the rest of the stories to create a unified whole.

Several other stories in this collection utilize the costume trappings of the steampunk culture (the brass goggles, the corsets, the monocles, and the like) to set up their stories.  These stories as a whole constitute a mixed bag for me.  Some worked well due to these elements, while others felt so shallow as a result of a perceived over-dependence on the material trappings of steampunk culture to tell stories that otherwise would be at home in several other subgenres.  This, I believe, is not as much the fault of the editors, who have aimed to showcase the main strands of steampunk fiction, as it is a commentary on the limitations of that particular style of steampunk that emphasis the trappings of steam over the exploration of the social conflicts inherent in the time period most often used as the starting point for steampunk fiction.  Other readers, however, will likely find that these stories will appeal more to them than they did for me.

In addition to the reprints and original fictions, Steampunk Reloaded also includes an extended mashup of various writings and illustrations called "The Mecha-Ostrich, 'A Secret History of Steampunk.'"  It is a clever and often amusing tale, weaving in fragments of other stories into a seemingly-paranoid tale of a person hiding from "the Eye."  Other readers, however, may not enjoy it as much as I did, but I do believe that this mashup serves to illustrate potentials in utilizing steampunk tropes to tell inventive stories. 

Steampunk Reloaded concludes with two non-fiction pieces by Gail Carriger and Jake von Slatt as well as a roundtable interview discussion of the "future of steampunk."  This for me was the weakest section of the book, weighted down largely by the vapidity of Carriger's piece, which underwhelmed me after reading the fictions that preceded this piece.  von Slatt's piece on the intersection of technology and romance, however, was much better in comparison and the roundtable on steampunk's future was decent, but with nothing groundbreaking about it.

On the whole, Steampunk Reloaded manages to improve upon the strengths of its predecessor, but it was not a uniformly great read for me.  This is likely due to my preferences as a reader, which trend toward the social commentaries, but some of the stories felt more like fluff pieces after some of the weightier stories that appeared before or after them.  Yet despite this, Steampunk Reloaded largely succeeds in its goal of presenting the wide array of steampunk fictions for readers to explore and for that I recommend this anthology to those who want to see what this steampunk fuss is all about.

Review of Best American Fantasy

Fantasy is a strange bird, with an etymology that stretches back at least as far as the Greeks and with more shifts and changes than what poor Proteus himself ever could manage to do. From its earliest roots of phainein (to show) through phantasia (appearance, imagination) to its current bifurcating pathways of meaning today, the word 'fantasy' haunts us, filling us with images and visions of things that could have been, should have been, might never have been, and what thankfully cannot ever be - yet we cannot pin it down with a single, pithy expression.

In 1988, Ursula Le Guin wrestled with trying to describe all of these possible meanings ascribed to the word 'fantasy' when she was asked to write the Introduction to the English translation of a quaint 1940 anthology that Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares edited, a volume called The Book of Fantasy. That collection, which was revised in the 1960s, contained all sorts of stories involving imagined horrors, what-ifs, things we would today call "magic realism," and every sort of miscellanea that often gets crammed into that little box called 'fantasy.' Borges and his friends did not agonize over any real definition of what constitutes 'fantasy' - they just sat at a dinner table and added to a list the types of stories that they enjoyed which couldn't have happened.

Fast-forward to 2007. There is a new anthology series being released called Best American Fantasy. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, with Matthew Cheney serving as the series editor, this collection of 29 tales begins with an echo of sorts to Le Guin's introduction to the Borges, Ocampo, Bioy Casares anthology. Each of them notes the difficulty in trying to define what fantasy is (if such things could ever be defined, of course), instead focusing on what these stories of the fantastical does.

I mentioned this earlier collection because in many ways this new anthology reminds me of the spirit of this older one. Good anthologies tend to have some sense of purpose or unifying theme behind them and while Best American Fantasy differs from The Book of Fantasy in many ways, each has this perception of fantasy as being more than just "child's play" or "worlds in which dragons, elves, and orcs roam." Harking back to the Greek etymology, phainein is in full display, showing us via imagined tales and dreamscapes some elements about ourselves and our hopes and dreams that "realist fiction" cannot accomplish.

In reading these tales, I was struck by how many of the tales contained elements of separation from family, how there were hurts and pains that existed within the stories, and how the resulting sense of alienation played a major, albeit largely unspoken, role in the development of stories such as Nik Houser's "First Kisses Beyond the Grave" or Julia Elliot's "The Whipping." This is not to say this theme occurs in the vast majority of the stories, only that it is something that occurs from time to time to highlight how fantasy can serve to illustrate our own deep social problems and fears in a way that doesn't scream preachiness at the reader.

Another thing that I noticed about this collection (if I'm scrimping on analyzing each of these stories, it is because I'm focusing on looking at the very broad picture here, as it would take multiple reads of each of the stories to outline each of their own unique perspectives) is that one is not going to find a single preferred story style here. Some authors will use a juxtaposition of the mundane with the extraordinary to highlight the tensions contained within their stories, while others will bury this tension within a fairy tale-like mode, as Geoffrey Landis does with "Lazy Taekos." Still others, such as Peter LaSalle, might opt for a Borgesian approach of constructing their stories. Regardless, in virtually all of these tales, I felt this underlying sense of play, between images, words, and assigned meanings.

As an anthology, Best American Fantasy was a pleasure to read. The stories were dissimilar enough in style and approach as to avoid boring the reader with repetitiveness, while the perceived themes of disassociation, alienation, and exploration of the boundaries of our relationships with each other are strong enough to make this anthology unified enough to work. High recommendation.

Release Date: August 15, 2007 (US), tradeback

Publisher: Prime