For over 25 years the British publishers Constable & Robertson have been publishing the Mammoth series, with compendiums covering history, horror, from true crime to romance. The contents list of The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy reads like a Who's Who of the genre, from William Hope Hodgson, through RA Lafferty, to Leah Bobet.
Andy Duncan's 'Senator Bilbo' takes the reader back to Tolkein's Shire, but shows how even the most idyllic world can be mired by bigotry, as inter-racial laws penalizing orcs and other non-hobbits enter the statute books. It's an interesting concept, but the characters aren't particularly engaging.
Orson Scott Card
'Sandmagic' by Orson Scott Card is one of the writer's oldest stories; a child orphaned by soldiers of a repressive regime seeks revenge through magic of varying sorts. Like 'Lost Wax' by Leah Bobet it's a meditation on the human cost of learning magic, although the Bobet is better.
Peter Crowther's 'Dream a Little Dream for Me...' is the first of the outstanding stories, which starts with a chance meeting between a writer and a mysterious woman and ends with the Devil gaining his revenege. Recommended.
Several other so-so stories follow: Howard Waldrop's 'Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me' features a cornucopia of early Hollywood stars and forgotten rock 'n' roll wannabes, while 'I Am Bonaro' by John Neindorff features a shape-changer who loses some of his humanity, but neither really ignites. Like 'The Fence at the End of the World' by Melissa Mia Hall, the latter is too short to be truly effective.
'The Old House Under the Snow' by Rhys Hughes is one of the few disappointments in the book; a house buried under the snow leads two explorers on a journey to the centre of the earth, but unlike Verne, there isn't enough detail to lend the required suspension of disbelief.
Liz Williams
Better is 'Banquet of the Lords of Night' by Liz Williams which nicely merges fantasy with a future Paris under alien occupation, and boasts striking imagery. Recommended. As is David D Levine's 'Charlie the Purple Giraffe was Acting Strangely,' in which a cartoon character becomes self-aware. Better still is Lawrence Person's 'Master Lao and the Flying Horror,' which mixes kung-fu monks and decapitated vampire heads in the best story of the first half of the book.
In 'Using It and Losing It' by Jonathan Lethen an alienated salesmen begins to systematically unlearn everything that binds him to other people in a deeply subversive meditation on the nature of language. Outstanding.
'The All-at-Once Man' by R A Lafferty marks one of the better stories by a writer who four decades ago dominated the SF and fantasy scene, but who has been largely forgotten, about one man's quest for immortality, characterized by almost a glut of rich language.
William Hope Hodgson
The oldest story in the book by almost half a century is William Hope Hodgson's 'Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani,' in which a scientist investigates the darkness between the sixth and ninth hour of the Crucifixion and seeks to replicate it by artificial means. Given that it touches on similar themes, it's hardly surprising that it's reminiscent of Moorcock's classic 'Behold the Man,' and for nine-tenths of its length it stands up well, only falling away with it's rather Lovecraft-ian denouement.
Like the Crowther, 'Boatman's Holiday' by Jeffrey Ford takes the reader to Hell, this time for a ride with Charon in one of the most inventive stories in the book, as he takes his once a century holiday. Outstanding.
The late Tom Reamy's 'The Detweiler Boy' is one of his too-rare stories, a murder mystery in the Hollywood hills. Reamy's strength was always his characterization, and this 1977 F&SF novelette is no exception. Michael Moorcock's 'Elric at the End of Time' is the longest story in the book, but sadly is also the biggest let-down, with the author re-telling another of his seemingly endless variations on the Eternal Champion sagas.
By contrast, Tim Pratt's 'Cup and Table' starts a run of four of the best stories in the book, an updating of the Round Table seeking the Holy Grail. Junkie Sigmund can see into the past, and under the influence of enough speed can actually travel there for brief periods. Wonderfully poignant.
Christopher Priest's 'I, Haruspex' tells of a man who to keep the beasts of Hell at bay from the world must consume cancerous tumours, while in the grounds of his house a Heinkel bomber is all-but frozen in mid-crash, reprising Priest's classic 'An Infinite Summer.' Outstanding.
Michael Swanwick'Radio Waves' is perhaps Michael Swanwick's finest story, a stylish and original look at the afterlife that is all around humanity, featuring sympathetic protagonists, and with some pertinent points about death. Outstanding. As is Ted Chiang's 'Tower of Babylon,' the author's debut story that deservedly carried off the first of his four Nebulas, in which a bricklayer joins a vast enterprise to build a tower to heaven's vault.
Sadly, 'Jack Neck and the Worry Bird' by Paul Di Filippo is almost unreadable. Editor Ashley compares it Lewis Carroll and Edmund Lear channelled by Roald Dahl, but it has none of the sparkle of any of those authors.
A A Attanasio's 'The Dark One: A Mythograph' takes a standard fantasy story but invests it with a stylish and original take which takes an unexpected turn as it reaches its conclusion, and resonates long after the reader's closed the book. 'A Ring of Green Fire' by Sean McMullen finishes the book on a high with a story of a magical plague in twelfth-century Wiltshire whose perspective shifts and shifts again.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy is heavily biased toward modern fiction; only two of the stories pre-date 1970, and seventeen of the twenty-four stories have appeared in the last twenty years -- ten of them in the 2000s. But it's a fine selection; almost two-thirds of the contents are recommended to outstanding. It's a wonderful smorgasboard that will appeal to new readers as a sampler, and to more experienced readers as well.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
