The Big Book of Science Fiction by Ann VanderMeer

But even recent efforts to catalog the best of fantasy have been blinkered by Anglophilia and limited by editors who were just after a good yarn - and found there was no need to leave home (or speak to a woman) to get it. Like their 2016 effort The Big Book of Science Fiction, it is a thorough attempt to broaden and update the classics, making them altogether more reflective of a diverse, multifarious precedent, and quite a bit stranger in the bargain.Īll anthologists wrestle with difficult questions of methodology, with issues of inclusion and representation. But all of them, whether their editors will admit it or not, have something to say about the canon: what belongs, what doesn’t, and why.Īnn and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, by challenging the limited perspective of Anglo supremacy still common in the genre, easily outclasses its recent peers.

They can be introductions, taxonomies, or crusades. These are the fantastical realms created by writers like Tolkien and Lewis, those 20th-century colonizers of the imagination.Īn anthology of fantasy literature can serve a dizzying number of aims, from the moral and the political to the academic. It’s the world we watch on TV, where distances are measured in leagues and the East is always exotic. That is classic fantasy in the popular imagination, the broad strokes of its limited canvas.

Evildoers crave power, and the good reliably shrink from it. Ugly sub-humans, often dark-skinned, offer diabolical bargains or, in an indistinguishable horde, hang out until the good guys stab them to death. Pale women with fine blonde hair are chosen for a special fate.

The Big Book of Science Fiction by Ann VanderMeer