The Dimming of the Day
Today, we lost Andrew Wyeth, and yesterday, we lost Patrick McGoohan. Yes, “The Prisoner” has finally escaped for good.
Helga, at least, remains.
However.
On January 12th, we lost something that really sticks in my craw, a beacon whose absence makes me furious and despondent and slack-jawed, all at once. No, it’s not a human being, and it’s not a pet. What the world lost is The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, a sweeping anthology, produced annually, that has been the guiding light and creative locus for the fantasy community for twenty-one years. But now, in an era when publishers are scrambling and perhaps regretting some of their own dodgy acquisitions (I mean, look how much tripe litters the book stores), St. Martin’s Press, in its infinite wisdom, has cancelled what may very well be the best thing it ever produced. As edited over the years by skilled and judicious editors like Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, this was a series whose breadth and depth demanded to be reckoned with. This wasn’t fantasy mired in silly little Hobbit knock-offs and blood-sucking Dracula clones, this was genre as literature: Risk-taking, vital stories that mattered.
So. Gone, then, the mountain to which all short-form fantasy and horror writers aspired. Gone, then, the best summaries, the finest critical overviews, the notes on (gasp) everything from cinema to ‘zines to anime and back again. Gone, then, the outstanding selections, which always, even when I disliked a given entry, did serve to cover the gamut of available work. Gone, then, the single central repository of the best in all things fantastic. No magazine, no matter how ambitious, can replace it. It is not overstating the case to say that we who work and read in this particular pond are left stranded and impoverished, our great North Star suddenly gone dwarf.
And why did St. Martin’s lower the axe, even as the editors were halfway through the work for next year’s release? Well, it’s not even clear that they did lower the axe. Ellen Datlow refers to this as “a mutual parting of ways” (cited from Elizabeth Hand’s blog), and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant offer nothing solid in their announcement (on the website of Small Beer Press’ Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet). So, we are in the dark, left to speculate––which in some way is surely appropriate, given how much horror takes place in the ever-lurking darkness.
It may well be that a cloud will soon roll along with a welcome silver lining, that some similar anthology will leap to the fore. At least one other year’s best annual exists, but it has none of the scope, none of the introductory essays and reviews, no “honorable mentions” list––which I had finally cracked this year, with “His Master’s Voice”––and worst of all, gosh darnit, the typeset is too damn small and I go blind every time I try reading the wretched thing.
So I guess I’m hopeful. But not exactly optimistic.
It is, at the least, the end of an era, and I’m hardly being original here. The number of blogs and postings taking on this topic is ballooning as fast as fan sites for the captain of that downed airliner that made it not to Charlotte, NC, but to the Hudson River. On Lady Churchill’s site alone, http://lcrw.net/wordpress/?p=768, the sad, angry respondents read like a who’s who of fantasy and horror: Andy Duncan, Ellen Kushner, Tim Pratt, Darrell Schweitzer, Patrick Swenson, Greer Gilman, Terri Windling, Peter Straub and Jane Yolen, whom I will take the liberty of quoting: “Damn, damn, damn.”
You tell ‘em Jane. Even an author of her stature and success understands The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror’s essential and central placement within the pantheon.
All things must pass.
But I don’t have to like it.
Rage against the dying of the light, yes?
YES. A thousand times yes.
Finally, a quick note about Illinois politics and The Lord of the Rings. Having just re-watched the first two films in the trilogy, I can safely say that at their center lies the issue of honor. What it is, who has it, how easy it is to lose. The entire story is one massive meditation on giving one’s word, how for some a word given is a word kept, a bond to be trusted. How for others, it is mere breath on the wind. Worthless.
Governor Rod Blagojevich and infant Senator Roland Burris may very well have seen the movies (who hasn’t?), but they took no profit from them. These men seem to me to have no honor whatsoever. True, a man isn’t guilty until he’s proven to be so, but from the minute the Feds charged Blagojevich, and with some pretty damning tapes, too, he has done everything wrong. Instead of turning the government over to his lieutenants and quietly retiring into the background to allow his case to be tried, he has struggled and squirmed and behaved as if he has an elected right to upstage the entire universe. If I’d been caught, as he clearly was, mouthing off about how if certain people won’t play ball then “f*!@ ‘em!” well, I like to think I’d have the decency to admit I had done at least something vaguely inappropriate.
As for Burris, I would not, in his shoes, have accepted a senatorial nomination. Instead, I would have held a respectful press conference stating my certainty that I was a solid, trustworthy candidate for the job, and that I hoped to be tapped for it by Blagojevich’s successor. Refusal, not acceptance, was Burris’ only honorable option.
But, now Burris is a senator and Blagojevich is our national joke du jour.
I will teach my boys better. By all the trees in Fangorn Forest, I swear it.
My Blog
Friday, January 16, 2009
