Continuing the review of Year's Best Fantasy 3 - part 2

So let's see what other wonders this book of "the best" fantasy stories of 2002 has for us.

"A Book by Its Cover" by P.D. Cacek - In Nazi Germany, shortly before the Holocaust begins in earnest, a Jewish bookshop owner finds his store, which the Nazis had raided and burned all his books, can turn people into a copy of their favorite book, from which state they can be recalled. He uses this to help Jews escape the e-e-e-evil Nazis.

I found this story annoying at first, but after a while, it was actually pretty funny. Once you've grasped that the event in question simply did not happen, the propaganda about it can be humorous. In this case, you have to accept that the Germans this boy knew, for no reason at all, became seized by an insane hatred. They are literally cartoonishly evil. The author does not have the main character's former friend, now Nazi, actually twirl his mustache while cackling maniacally, but he may as well have.

The only reason stories like this get by is because they are coasting on a huge swell of emotional manipulation. But if you're free of that, it's quite funny how empty they are.

"Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box" by Charles de Lint - Holy crap! It's an actual, unambiguous fantasy story...and there's not some wicked political message thinly disguised...and it feels like a fairy tale, with the same kind of dangers of fairy land that stories all the way back to the brothers Grimm might warn of. I'm shocked.

Good story. This is the first good unambiguous fantasy story I've seen here so far, and I'm almost a quarter of the way through the book.

"The Pyramid of Amirah" by James Patrick Kelly - Fantasy? Check. Good? It's interesting and well-written, at least. For a late-twentieth century atheist, this is a pretty good take on religion. So, yeah, it works.

"Our Friend Electricity" by Ron Wolfe - A middle-aged low-level book editor has a whirlwind romance mostly at Coney Island with a pretty twenty-ish young woman. The main character may murder someone with a skee ball. Near the end, he either has a vision of the past or travels back in time briefly for no clearly explained reason.

There are some genuinely poetic passages here, but by the end, it feels self-indulgent, writers writing about writers, for one thing. Also, the "fantasy" element enters late, and is vague and poorly integrated with the rest of the story. This is not a bad story, but it's terrible fantasy.

Again, I grow weary of being sold "It might be fantasy if you squint and look at it from a certain angle." Writers and editors, if you don't want to write fantasy or science fiction, that's fine. You don't have to. Don't write it. But please do not write mundane "literary" fiction, barely dress it up, and try to sell it to me as "fantasy."

I am now about 1/3 of the way through this book and I have found 2 stories, only 2, that are actually good, and actually fantasy. I get the impression Hartwell knows better and I can only attribute this disaster to the co-editor Kathryn Cramer.

Hmmm, Cramer? Oh, every single time.

I will soldier on and complete this review, possibly by the end of this year.

A rolling review of Year's Best Fantasy 3 - Part I

  

In an ongoing effort to be as irrelevant as possible, I'm going to review the anthology I'm currently reading, Year's Best Fantasy 3 edited by David Hartwell...which was published 20 years ago. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm going to do a rolling review of the individual stories as I go.

These stories were first published in 2002. If these were, indeed, the best fantasy stories published that year, then the fantasy genre was almost entirely dead. They weren't, of course. They were just the ones most politically fashionable. It was not nearly as bad then as it is now, but SJW corruption of science fiction and fantasy was already well underway.

I have no doubt that with money and time, I could create an equally long collection (~490 pages) of actually good, actually fantasy stories that would sustain an actual fanbase. Of course, if I understand correctly, Amazon has destroyed the ebook market, but that's a separate question.

So, on to the stories.

First thing I did was browse the table of contents. I saw "Cecil Rhodes in Hell" by Michael Swanwick near the end. It was only a single page. I had an idea what I was in for, and I was curious, so I skipped to that.

This could barely be called a story. It is basically an encyclopedia entry (Wikipedia before that existed, kiddies) with a "white people bad" moral tagged on at the end. I am not kidding. It is garbage and the only reason anyone would publish it is because of a sick, seething hatred of white people.

Also, for anyone who wants to engage with the real world, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is not doing well at all since they decided to kick out all of their white farmers, confiscate their land, and hand it over to blacks. Good. I hope they starve.

Going for a more standard reading experience, I returned to the beginning of the book for Kage Baker's "Her Father's Eyes." This is a story told from the point of view of a young girl on a train ride in post-World War II America. It is atmospheric and tense, and...debatably fantasy. There is nothing here that is absolutely distinct from our own world. It might be a fantasy story, but it could very well be just...bad people.

I hate these it-might-be-fantasy stories. If you're going to sell it as fantasy, make it fantastic, not, "might be fantasy, might be mental illness or a child's misunderstanding of the world."

It's not a bad story, but is it fantasy? Is it the best fantasy?

Next up "Want's Master" by Patricia Bowne, which is about academic politics and fundraising and growing old slightly dressed up in magical terms. Instead of taking us out of our own world into something exciting and fresh, Patricia opted to make magic boring and petty as office politics and gladhanding to raise money.

"October in the Chair" by Neil Gaiman - The months of the year convene to share stories. It's a cool setup. The personifications of the months are interesting. The story October ends up telling is a self-indulgent gamma poor-persecuted-me fantasy...in the worst sense of that word.

"Greaves, This Is Serious" by William Mingin - A send-up of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. He makes a fair point, but it's fundamentally a mean-spirited shot at a much, much better writer, and, once again, barely qualifies as fantasy.

"Shift" by Nalo Hopkinson - Before I get to the story, I want to quote a bit from the author bio, "She is on the steering committee of the Carl Brandon Society, which promotes the involvement of people of color in speculative fiction." So yeah, you know what to expect.

In fairness, this is actually pretty well-written. It is, however, vile poison. It takes up the story of Shakespeare's Caliban centuries later. Caliban is a black man. When she arrived at the island, Miranda was so taken by this black man that she immediately decided to have sex with him, and then her father caught them and she accused him of rape.

Literally the entire point of the story is that white girls are desperate to get with black men, and somehow, it's white girls' fault that black men abandon those children. And black men are poor, persecuted victims of white people's perceptions who never did nothing wrong.

On behalf of the tens of thousands of white women in the U.S. raped by black men since this story was written, burn in Hell, Nalo. Burn in Hell.

And that's what I've read so far. It's gotten far worse since, but as you can see, our culture has been in deep trouble for some time now. There are also stories by Tanith Lee and Gene Wolfe in here, so there may be other worthwhile ones. I'm going to keep going, but, geez, this is bad.