Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

INTRODUCTION

FANTASY. FANTASTIKA. CALL it what you will, almost any story can be made to fit within its boundaries and, like many of its finest texts, it’s almost impossible to pin down or to define. As John Clute and John Grant rightly pointed out in their essential The Encylopedia of Fantasy, fantasy is “a most extraordinarily porous term, and has been used to mop up vast deposits of story which this culture or that – and this era or that – deems unrealistic.” Trying to home in on a usable definition, they wrote that:

A fantasy text is a self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though stories set there may be possible in its terms.

That definition sets out ground rules without clarifying much. A fantasy is a story set in a world where impossible things happen. Like fantasy itself, it’s romantic and appealing but more than a little hazy at the edges. In fairness to Clute and Grant, they go on to devote a lengthy entry and, eventually, an entire encyclopedia to defining and understanding fantasy.

More recently, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn note that “the major theorists in the field – Tzetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, Kathryn Hume, W.R. Irwin, and Colin Manlove – all agree that fantasy is about the construction of the impossible whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely, but is always grounded in the scientifically possible”. While critics like Clute, Grant, James, Mendlesohn and most interestingly Brian Attebery, whose Strategies of Fantasy I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the academic discussion of fantasy, have a great deal of interesting things to say about the nature of fantasy and how it constructs the impossible, this book started from much more humble beginnings.

As many books I have worked on do, and in fact as many stories that I read happen to, this book started in a bar. I was at World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, California in the late fall of 2011 engaged in a passionate discussion about favourite writers and books, something I think every reader does when they find a like mind, and the subject turned to the work of the great Fritz Leiber. I had recently edited a collection of Leiber’s work and was pontificating (the failing, perhaps, of having the discussion in a bar) on the depth and breadth of his work, from the beloved sword and sorcery adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in Lankhmar to the humorous tales of a superkitten called Gummitch to dark and disturbing urban slices of fear like ‘Smoke Ghost’. His collected fiction amounted, I argued, to nothing less than a library of fantasy that encompassed almost all of its possibilities.

While the convivial atmosphere of that bar no doubt encouraged some subtle exaggeration on my part, it also started me thinking about a book of new stories that might encompass as wide a range of types of fantasy story as possible, from ‘traditional fantasy’ to ‘military fantasy’ to quirky, strange tales of the impossible. The idea stayed with me and, when I was discussing possible new projects with Jonathan Oliver, my editor at Solaris, I mentioned doing such a book. He shared my enthusiasm and before I knew it we’d agreed that I’d edit a new anthology for Solaris that tentatively was to be called Reap the Whirlwind and would bring together a selection of all new ‘mainstream’ fantasy stories, for want of a better term, by some of today’s best and most exciting writers.

It wasn’t long, though, before we realised that title didn’t really describe what we were attempting, and when the wonderful cover art from Tomasz Jedruszek arrived early in 2012 we knew the title had to change. After some discussion we came up with Fearsome Journeys, which I think aptly describes the beginnings of so many fantasy stories, including the ones that ended up in this book. Happily Jonathan also suggested that we should subtitle the book ‘The New Solaris Book of Fantasy’. Fearsome Journeys was to be the first in a series of anthologies, not of ‘new fantasy’ but simply of fantasy, covering all of its many variations.

As the stories came in, first from Trudi Canavan, then K.J. Parker, Kate Elliott, Daniel Abraham, Glen Cook, and more, it became clear this first New Solaris Book of Fantasy was going to exceed my expectations. Those stories, and the ones from Saladin Ahmed, Jeffrey Ford, Robert V S Redick, Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Ellen Kushner and Ysbeau S. Wilce, and Ellen Klages have been a joy to read and I think make for a wonderful start to this new series. I’m already at work on volume two, which should be out late in 2014, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy these fine stories as much as I have.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Western Australia

January 2013