Dozens upon dozens of seminal fantasy stories, some well-known and others delightfully rescued from obscurity.
The VanderMeers follow up The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) with this counterpart anthology focusing on “classic” fantasy.
Ninety stories are selected to represent the roots of genre fantasy, from the 1800s to World War II. Familiar names such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, and E. Nesbit are present, but so are authors not primarily remembered in literature as fantasists—Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others. As in the SF anthology, stories never before translated into English have been included, such as Aleksandr Grin's “The Ratcatcher,” Der Nister's “At the Border,” and others. That said, the majority of the stories come from Europe or America—the few contributions from other parts of the world seem more a dash of seasoning to avoid homogeneity than indicative of a truly diverse spread. Some stories are more recognizable as fantasy to the modern reader, some less so (Paul Scheerbart's “Dance of the Comets” barely reads as a narrative; Melville's “The Tartarus of the Maids” contains nothing fantastical that could not be read as the narrator's own pitying-but-skewed perceptions; and Nikolai Gogol's “The Nose” is a cynical fable more absurdist than fantastic). Highlights include the wry observational humor of Stella Benson's “Magic Comes to a Committee,” the meticulous creepiness of Edogawa Ranpo's “The Man Traveling With the Brocade Portrait,” and G.K. Chesterton's unsettling “The Angry Street: A Bad Dream.” Like its SF counterpart, this dense and exhaustive collection would serve as an admirable survey course for the genre—though some stories feel included out of just such a didactic sensibility.
Dozens upon dozens of seminal fantasy stories, some well-known and others delightfully rescued from obscurity.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-43556-3
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
