Customer Reviews

Bending the Landscape: Fantasy

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book features some of the finest short fiction I've seen in fantasy literature. While sexuality is an important underlying theme, it does not overpower the force of most of these excellent stories. The characters are people, not political statements or stereotypes. I hope this book finds its way into the hands of many mainstream readers.

This book is the first in a series of collections of genre fiction featuring gay and lesbian characters. Although some might pass it by assuming that the contents are either pornographic or pulp, this is a serious mistake. The stories are overall of high quality, and the subject matter is quite wide-ranging. Many of the authors will be familiar to readers of fantasy literature, and Thieves World fans will be pleased to hear that one of the stories takes place in that universe

Because of its diverse bouquet of erotic undercurrents, BTL: Fantasy is especially adept with wry, bittersweet fantasies - not the swords-and-sorcery type, but touching tales with a modern-supernatural slant. There are all sorts of uplifting motifs here - getting over midlife crises (Antieau's "Desire"), revisiting childhood places ( Thrower's "The Home Town Boy"), dealing with the deaths of friends (Shepherd's "Gary, in the Shadows") and loved ones (Silverthrorne's "The Sound of Angels"), release and spiritual freedom (What's "Beside the Well"), turning back the clock on painful memories (Verona's "Mahu"), and so on.

As far as the subgenres represented in this volume, you'll find very few traditional hack-and-slash stories ("The Stars Are Tears," "Magicked Tricks," and "In Mysterious Ways" being the only three, and they're all comedic). Especially numerous are gritty-dark-urban-modern fantasies along the lines of Don Bassingthwaite's "In Memory of," a tale of two vengeful dragon-brothers vying for fragile human lovers in a city setting. Also numerous are fringe stories that don't quite belong to any single genre because they have so few fictional elements - Matter's "Water Snakes" is an example.

Unfortunately, the settings aren't a very original lot: many stories are set in generic urban environments; there are a couple bare-bones Oriental stories; even the purely imaginary settings (such as the one in Sherman and Kushner's "The Fall of Kings") didn't strike me as especially original.

The writing, however, is uniformly good, if totally unexceptional, fitting well with the characters that behave interestingly but almost never transcend their two-dimensionality. The sexual elements hardly ever seem over the top (though Sheppard's "There Are Things Hidden from the Eyes of the Everyday" is just too much), even if most stories do seem identical from this perspective.

Together with its science fiction counterpart, I consider BTL: Fantasy a quintessential resource for alternative genre fiction.

The stories are a mixed bag but well worth a look. All I really want to add to other readers' comments, though, is that the book was poorly proofread -- it is riddled with typos. If as a collector that kind of thing bothers you, you should be aware of this.

We live in a word where definition delimits. How exciting to come across a collection of stories that expand, rather than confirm, my preconceptions. These stories all wrestle with queerness, granted, but from such a spectrum of perspectives. The pleasure of the anthology is, the stories are all enjoyable as story (many great; almost all good); and then so many of them are engagingly expansive around their gender themes. Go read this. It's the best fantasy anthology I've seen for years....

I just finished this book. The nice part is that you can read one or two stories in a relatively short time. The bad part is that you keep saying "just one more and I'll hit the sack". As with all good books, you lose a little sleep. The stories are from the current and the past, our world and fantasy worlds. The characters and situations fall into the standard categories but with the twist of being fantasy along with many surprise endings.

As a writer and a long-time fan of fantasy literature, I was thrilled to see this collection. Overall, the quality is good. This is a solid, entertaining read. But more, it is a ray of hope for an under- and often mis-represented group of people in genre literature. Hopefully, with the publication of this collection, and it's companion science fiction anthology, we will be seeing more gay and lesbian representation in the "mainstream" markets.

As a writer and a long-time fan of fantasy literature, I was thrilled to see this collection. Overall, the quality is good. This is a solid, entertaining read. But more, it is a ray of hope for an under- and often mis-represented group of people in genre literature. Hopefully, with the publication of this collection, and it's companion science fiction anthology, we will be seeing more gay and lesbian representation in the "mainstream" markets.