My life in books

And now, for a quick look at my recent anthology reading.

Sword and Sorceress III, Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.)

I’d originally bought this because I wanted to collect all of Charles Saunders’ short stories about Dossouye, the Abomeyan woman warrior, most of which were first published in the early Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley. But that’s hardly the only reason to read (or re-read) the anthology. It’s great fun to go back and revist the early stories of other favourite fantasy writers, like Jennifer Roberson, Diana Paxson, Elizabeth Moon and Mercedes Lackey.

The Sword and Sorceress anthologies played a significant role in the development of a new kind of woman-centred fantasy , and a new generation of writers, mostly women, who knew how to write it. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to travel back and look at where some of the great female characters of heroic fantasy, and the people who created them, had their beginnings.


Sword and Sorceress XXIII, Elisabeth Waters (ed.)

From the retrospective to the modern day – this is the second volume of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies to be edited by Elisabeth Waters and released by Norilana Books (by publisher Vera Nazarian). Featuring stories by well-established writers who have been part of the Sword and Sorceress phenomenon from the beginning, like Patricia B. Cirone, Mercedes Lackey and Deborah J. Ross, as well as relative newcomers such as Pauline Alama, Leah Cypress, and others.


Tesseracts Q, Jane Brierley & Elisabeth Vonarburg (eds.)

One of the biggest disadvantages to being monolingual– and worse, being a monolingual speaker of English – is that it’s hard to really read globally. Many works in English are translated into many other languages (can you spell cultural imperialism? I thought you could.), but only a small percentage of the interesting writing, in any genre, in languages other than English gets translated into English.

And so, much thanks to Jane Brierley and Elisabeth Vonarburg, who have selected some of the interesting work that Quebecois(e) writers have been producing, and publishing it in translation for the benighted monolingual English to read. There are some very interesting stories in this anthology, and in addition, it offers the chance for the reader to immerse herself in a different tradition – science fiction with a different set of working assumptions about treatment and style. Many of the stories here are more “literary” than much English-language science fiction, and ask different questions. And that makes the experience of reading works in translation doubly engaging.


Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss (eds.)

What, you may be asking yourself, is interstitial writing? For the long answer, you can read this Wikipedia article or this essay by Delia Sherman, one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation and co-editor of this anthology.

For a short answer, it is writing that exists in between. In between what, you may ask. In between something that you think you have all neatly boxed up and categorised, and something else (or several somethings else) that you think is different from the first something. It’s work that colours outside the lines. And it’s interesting to explore – which is exactly what this anthology is all about. Many of the writers whose work appears in this anthology are known primarily as science fiction or fantasy writers, including Catherynne Valente, K. Tempest Bradford, Christopher Barzak, Holly Phillips, Vandana Singh, Rachel Pollock and Leslie What – and in fact, many of the stories are ones that would not seem particularly out of place in an anthology of fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or the other genres that fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction. And yet – there is something extra about each of these that harkens to something else even as it seems to be, when looked at in a certain light, something you think you can clearly identify.

So what, you may ask. Read the anthology and find out, I may answer.