Women in SF&F Month: Samantha Mills
Apr
06
2026

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Women in SF&F Month continues today with a guest post by Samantha Mills, plus a chance to win a copy of her upcoming book (whether you live in the US or not)! She is the author of the science fantasy novel The Wings Upon Her Back, a Compton Crook Award winner and World Fantasy Award finalist—as well as one of my own favorite books published in 2024 for its uniqueness and exploration of a variety of subjects, particularly its protagonist’s relationship with her mentor and the complications of walking away from her life’s work. Rabbit Test and Other Stories, her collection coming out on April 21, contains both fantasy and science fiction, including the eponymous winner of the Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards. I’m thrilled she is here today sharing about her experiences going from writing novel-length fiction to these stories with “Epic Worldbuilding in Short Fiction.”

Enter Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway

Cover of Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills

About Rabbit Test and Other Stories:

This subversive debut short-fiction collection comes from one of the hottest talents in speculative fiction: 2025 Compton Crook Award and Pushcart Prize nominee Samantha Mills (The Wings Upon Her Back). The central story of the collection is Mills’s pivotal Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Award–winning story “Rabbit Test,” which interrogates the past, present, and future of abortion rights in America.

A time-traveling fisherwoman keeps landing on the right shore, but at the wrong time. A pair of witches fight over the gate between life and death. A new consciousness, intent upon seeing all the wonders of the universe, visits a floating library. A rock-and-roll legend squares off against a town full of devils. Humanity makes first contact but falters when put in charge of selecting the world’s representatives.

These riveting stories run the gamut of the genre, transitioning from fantasy to contemporary, and then into the farthest reaches of space. They take place in strange and emotional worlds, with stakes ranging from the epic to the personal, with ample room for humor and hope amid tragedy.

Epic Worldbuilding in Short Fiction
Samantha Mills

I learned how to write novels long before I learned how to write short stories. Book structure was imprinted on my brain after decades of reading, so while my first attempts were clumsy, at least the results were recognizably book-shaped! My first attempts at short stories, on the other hand, were complete failures. They were too long, they were too loaded with dialogue, and they didn’t have enough story. I was writing scenes that I would write for a book, with no chance of getting anywhere good before I ran out of pages.

It was worldbuilding in particular tripping me up, because I love fantasy. I love immersive settings, I love exploring the ramifications of speculative elements, I love big endings. So how do you get the feel of an epic without the length of an epic? In novels, you get however much room you need to fit however much plot you desire. A book can be 250 pages or 1,000. A story can span one book or a dozen. It doesn’t make them easy, but it does make them flexible.

In fact, I’d posit that one of the strongest tricks a novel has is sheer time spent reading. If you can entice a reader to follow your characters for several hundred pages, then even a simple ending can land with the weight of a long journey behind it. People spend hours, days, weeks immersed in the world of a book. They can spend literal years of their lives anticipating and engaging with a series. There’s room to breathe there. There’s room to indulge in detailed character studies, lengthy conversations, blossoming and evolving relationships, dazzling action set pieces or long, beautiful ruminations on anything really.

Whereas a short story is trying to evoke big feelings in ten to twenty pages, give or take. (Don’t ask me how flash fiction writers do it—they’re wizards!)

To write short fantasy, I had to learn how to be extremely judicious in my choice of detail. I had to learn to write montages and how to ruthlessly skip time. To my surprise, I realized that the brevity of a short story is exactly what gives it the potential to be read expansively. You can dive straight into the climax of a bigger story, and if you sprinkle in tidbits of backstory and worldbuilding in just the right way, readers will fill in the gaps on their own. Some authors have done that literally—the climax of Seth Dickinson’s debut novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, was first published as a short story, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds.” It’s a great example of how the same epic story can be told in long form versus short form.

All of my study of short fiction came via reading. I discovered the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which specializes in high fantasy with a literary bent. A goldmine of research and great fun! I discovered short story collections by authors like Catherynne Valente and Kij Johnson, and was dazzled by their structural experimentation and the beauty of their prose. Short stories were finally beginning to make sense to me as an art form almost wholly separate from that of the novel.

My big craft breakthrough was with a story called “Anchorage.” I had a good-sized cast of characters, a space crew visiting an anchoress walled up inside a floating library. To give it a more expansive feel, I wrote an extremely enthusiastic narrator who could gush about the many wonders they’d seen so far, sketching out a vibrant universe without ever leaving their small ship. I was learning to pack my sentences with detail and letting nothing go to waste.

Emboldened by that success, I wrote “Strange Waters.” It is about a fisherwoman who is lost in time, struggling to get home to her children. The story follows her many attempts to return to her original era. She haunts the same stretch of coastline for more than a decade, jumping forward and back, witnessing more than a thousand years of her city’s history. It’s a world that could fill a novel, but by keeping the narrative tightly tied to the main character’s quest, I could explore that world in a series of brief snapshots that, collectively, built up something bigger.

After that, I was fairly mad with power. I got more experimental with “The Limits of Magic,” a story about a women’s revolution in a fantasy world, in which the first half of the plot unspools in reverse, each brief scene going back in time through the main character’s life, until the thread snaps and the story moves forward again. I mashed science fiction and fantasy together with wild abandon in “Spindles,” in which a fairytale princess and her faithful bear fight an alien invasion. In “Rabbit Test,” I applied all of my techniques to the real world in another story spanning thousands of years, this time through the lens of abortion rights and pregnancy testing. And in “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care For the End of Days,” I wrote a love letter to my husband which spirals out into all sorts of potentially catastrophic timelines when you’re living under a doomsday cult. (Clearly, I like to play with the element of time.)

I finally understood that if you have a hinge upon which to hang the story, some central throughline—a character arc, an emotion, a personal revelation, a point—then you can sketch as big a world around it as you want, purely through off-hand narrating. In the battle of show versus tell, you can get away with telling a whole hell of a lot as long as the parts you are showing are precise enough, evocative enough—as long as they make you feel something.

That’s the beauty of the short story, for me. It is different than a novel, where the journey is the point, and the destination is the reward for tagging along. A short story is the destination. It can be a dissection of a single moment in time, or it can be a whirlwind through all known history, but either way you are stepping in at the culmination point. Short stories are a beautiful collaboration between creator and audience, in which the author has a scant number of sentences to make their case, and the reader is asked to imagine the rest.

Between us, we dream up entire worlds.

Photo of Samantha Mills Samantha Mills’s critically acclaimed first novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, won the Compton Crook Award for the year’s best debut and is a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 2023, she received the Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards for her short story “Rabbit Test.” Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and others and was included in The New Voices of Science Fiction from Tachyon Publications and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023. She is a librarian and trained archivist specializing in primary documents. Mills grew up in Southern California, where she still lives with her family and cats.

Book Giveaway

Courtesy of Tachyon Publications, I have two copies of Rabbit Test and Other Stories to give away: one trade paperback copy for a reader in the US and one ebook for a reader outside the US!

Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway Google form, linked below. One entry per household and the winner will be randomly selected. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Monday, April 20. Each winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them after 24 hours has passed, a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).

Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winners. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.

Enter Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway
Women in SF&F Month: Week 2 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
05
2026

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The fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month continues with three new guest posts this week, starting tomorrow with an essay and book giveaway (with one print copy for a US reader and one digital copy for someone outside the US). Thank you so much to last week’s guests for a wonderful start to the month!

The new guest posts will be going up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, but before announcing the upcoming schedule, here are last week’s essays in case you missed any of them.

All guest posts from April 2026 can be found here, and last week’s guest posts were:

And there are most guest posts coming up, starting with one accompanied by a book giveaway tomorrow! This week’s essays are by:

Women in SF&F Month 2026 Schedule Graphic

April 6: Samantha Mills (Rabbit Test and Other Stories, The Wings Upon Her Back)
April 8: Shay Kauwe (The Killing Spell)
April 10: Veronica G. Henry (The People’s Library, Bacchanal)

Women in SF&F Month: Elaine Ho
Apr
03
2026

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is artist and author Elaine Ho! Her illustrations, which can be found on her website and Instagram, include “Bones to the Wind” from the eponymous book cover jacket, “Harmony” from the Gen Con 2024 program cover, “Wall of Roses” from Uncanny Magazine Issue 46, and scenes from her debut novel. Her dark political fantasy book released late last year, Cry, Voidbringer, explores “how identity is reshaped under empire” and the question “Why do post-colonial societies perpetuate the same crimes as their oppressors?” I’m excited she’s here today, where she is discussing the latter of these topics.

Cover of Cry, Voidbringer by Elaine Ho

About Cry, Voidbringer:

In a broken system, do you save yourself or fight for the people you love?

With the godspower waning, the queen of Ashvi has had to find another way to bolster her fight against her imperialist oppressors. The solution: wrenching children of other cultures from their homes and conscripting them into service.

Hammer was one of those children. Now, she’s a jaded soldier waging Ashvi’s perpetual war, thinking only of her own survival. But when she accidentally rescues Viridian, a child with rare and potentially devastating powers, her priorities shift. The girl appears to be the answer to the queen’s prayers—the perfect weapon to restore her kingdom’s ancient borders, even if the colonized cities they reconquer don’t want her version of liberation. Can Hammer protect Viridian from the system that broke her . . . before the girl’s power is unleashed on the world?

Cry, Voidbringer is a gripping saga of how far one will go for freedom and control—and how easily it can all be taken away.

Arguably we live in a post-colonial world. The cruelty of the colonial era is well documented—Amritsar, Mỹ Trạch, the Banda Islands. But those who have unburdened ourselves of European power have a dichotomy of shame and pride when discussing our colonialist past.

There is an anger reflecting on this part of our history. It’s a deeply human part of us: a need to make sense of our suffering, and if there isn’t, then it is unjust. We’ve invented entire religions to exact revenge. We comfort ourselves that criminals will get their due on a spiritual plane beyond human sight.

This anger is wholly justified: a rape of one’s homeland, an invader stealing all and leaving little for us, being relegated to a second-class citizen of the very land we were born in. We learn these horrors and we find community who share this grief with us. We collectively go “never again”, and a national identity is birthed from the spume of this national humiliation.

But shame is a funny thing. It’s an admittance of weakness, and in a post-colonial world where we’re already poor and vulnerable, weakness is an open invitation for further subjugation. To protect ourselves, we erase this part of our history. We pretend this colonial past didn’t happen. We go back to “the good ol’ days”, whatever that is, and one can arbitrarily pick any point in history and romanticize it. Oh, let’s pick 600AD, because that was the era where we were in power before the Europeans came. A great, glorious time, when we had all this land and all these countries, and we were the kings that oppressed others.

What results is a refusal to acknowledge that colonization has affected people, in the way they view themselves in relation to each other, and their relationship to the land they live on. The narrative doesn’t allow for that. It ruins the fantasy that the oppression never existed. To keep this lie alive, we wind up using the tools of our oppressors to construct a memory of a past that most likely never existed. This dream must discard the true cost of war. After all, if your romanticized history meant your country won every single battle, then fighting shouldn’t be too hard, right?

We’ve lost institutional memory in this post-colonial world. War has spawned countless pieces of literature documenting the savagery and fruitlessness of it, and yet we never learn. I see genocide after genocide, war after war, fought over the same reasons as a thousand years ago, but now with better guns and better bombs. We joke that time is a flat circle. It’s true. We fall into the same mistakes over and over again for a simple human reason: we cannot look weak, because someone, somewhere, will hurt us again.

Is there a solution to this? I don’t know.

I’m not holding out hope for it.

Photo of Elaine Ho Elaine Ho is an award-winning Asian American illustrator and author. She bounces between the US and Singapore, belonging to both and neither. Ho’s work primarily explores themes of identity and home, while also being drawn to the broken and the beautiful. She originally received a degree in psychology before pivoting into art full-time. Find her work at artofelaineho.com.
Women in SF&F Month: Lorraine Wilson
Apr
01
2026

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Women in SF&F Month 2026 officially starts today with a guest post by Lorraine Wilson! Her short fiction includes “Bathymetry” (winner of the British Fantasy Award) and “Mhairi Aird” (published in the British Fantasy Award–nominated anthology Nova Scotia: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Volume 2). Her first novel, This Is Our Undoing, won the SCKA for Best Debut and was a finalist for the Kavya Prize as well as the British Fantasy Awards for Best Novel and Best Newcomer. Her latest novels are the science fantasy books We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle, the latter of which is a finalist for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Award and a Locus Recommended Reading List selection for Science Fiction. I’m thrilled she’s here today with her essay “Finding hope — writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures.”

Cover of We Are All Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson Cover of The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson

About We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle:

The internet has collapsed, leaving the world haunted by digital ghosts that infect books, people and nature itself. Blending climate fiction, folklore, and a smidge of the spooky, these two critically acclaimed science fantasies are standalones in the same eerie future.

BSFA Longlisted WE ARE ALL GHOSTS IN THE FOREST follows a healer whose carefully solitary life on the edge of the woods is upturned when a scarred and silent teenage boy is left in her care, and a mysterious digital plague spreads unrest across the land.

Current BSFA finalist, THE SALT ORACLE, is a locked boat murder mystery with a dash of second chance romance and a post fall-of-civilisation dark academia. A giant floating college has been built around an uncanny girl who can commune with the digital ghosts of the sea, but is she a monster, or a victim?

Finding hope —
writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures
– Lorraine Wilson

This is a hard time to be a creative. The tech companies are stealing our work in order to burn the world faster while they line their pockets with economic lies. The publishing industry is starving its mid-list, investing in narrower and narrower genre-brackets, and stripping publishing houses for parts. And the world — oh the world — it is so full of darkness and hurt and injustice. How, amidst all that, do you sit at your computer and create beauty?

It feels frivolous to write about imaginary people having imaginary crises when there is just so much work to be done to fix everything that is broken, and we all (the non-politicians, non-millionaires) individually have so little ability to create that change. We are fiddling while Rome burns, or shouting our own name into an abyss filled with weeping. It feels self-indulgent if you are writing about anything other than world events, and futile if you are. And yet we have all seen the quotes from wiser women than me saying that in difficult times, writing matters.

‘Books are a form of political action,’ Toni Morrison said. ‘Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.’ Ursula Le Guin said, ‘Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.’ She also said this: ‘I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.’

So who am I to disagree with such icons? And I don’t disagree, but I do think the gap between believing these statements to be true, and having the necessary creative energy to do the work is wide and hard to cross. Particularly for those of us writing around the socio-political issues that are so overwhelmingly in our news — far-right violence, the dismantling of democracy and human rights, the climate crisis — thus making our work not escapist, not something we can compartmentalise away from the real world. And it is particularly hard again for those of us who are struggling to stay afloat within publishing — financial hardship, insecurity and industry disinterest are not, funnily enough, conducive to creativity.

So how do we, as authors who are trying to speak to the hard times, and envisioning change, guard the flame of our creativity when the world seeks to blow it out?

I have always said to my daughter that whenever something terrible is happening, we must ask ourselves what is within our capacity to do, and then we must do it. Whether that’s donating, signing petitions, marching, uplifting other voices, or just being in community with others, there is almost always some small direct action we as normal citizens can do even for issues that are not on our doorstep. I think finding that small direct action frees up a lot of the mental energy consumed by powerlessness — it allows our brains to let out a breath of relief and say ‘right, I’ve done something, so now what else can I do?’ And it becomes easier for that next something to be art.

So then, once we come to the art, we can use that powerlessness we feel, along with the anger and the desperate hope, to fuel our writing. Having done something tangible, the intangibility of art-as-resistance feels more deeply nurtured and nurturing. With my most recent two books — We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, and The Salt Oracle — I was very consciously exploring the power of individual choices, and individual compassion. I was looking at community, and what it takes to build community and hold it together in the face of apocalyptic world events. That exploration was a way of reminding myself that I believe in community as the force that can resist the megalomaniac destructiveness we are surrounded by. I don’t believe in heroes or chosen ones, but I do believe in normal people – just look at the Twin Cities, and the awe-inspiring power of a community brought together against hate.

Recently though, I have taken a break from novel projects to focus on short fiction. Partly because publishing is brutal and I needed to step away from the fear of failure, but also partly because I wanted, with everything going on in the world, to take some time to focus on generating hope on the page. Not just hope within dystopian worlds, but actively hopeful futures.

Anger and catharsis for our fears are extremely important in our fiction, and I will die on the hill that we need those narratives just as much as we need escapism, hope or joy. But having written several books that contemplate those fears head on, I wanted to do something different. Genre-labels like ‘solar-punk’ and ‘hope-punk’ have been drifting around the SFF conversations for a while now, but intentionally diving into those narrative forms meant I had to have a good think about what they are really doing. The key word, to me, is the ‘punk’. We are fond of appending that word to pretty much anything that’s a bit edgy, but if this is me trying to do as the great Le Guin bid me — envisioning larger realities — then my stories need to be doing more than that.

Punk, to me, is a political stance. It is active movement against the status quo, a dismantling of hegemonic structures of power, ownership and personhood. And not just that — it isn’t enough to resist exploitative systems; to be truly envisioning freedom, we need to be creating something better. It is also not enough to be cosy or gentle or free from conflict — that is escapism, not hope, and it definitely isn’t punk. If I wanted to write ‘hope-punk’ then I needed to be saying ‘this is who we might be, this is how we’d get there, this is why it matters.’

This mini-project has taken me to speculative climate mitigation work, collective restoration and future folklores. It has been a powerful exercise in testing my storytelling skills, my imagination, and my capacity to dream better realities that are still tangibly linked to where we are now. But it has also done something unexpected — it’s made me better at looking for the light.

I thought I was already quite good at looking for the people doing the good work, at believing that there is always someone creating a light in any darkness. But in specifically seeking to create that light in my stories, I’ve found myself seeing it in more places than before. In some ways, that only adds to my general frustration at the people in power — the solutions are right there. It would, bluntly, be so damn easy to fix all of the horrors facing us, the only thing in our way is the greed of rich men.

But it has also been rejuvenating — this retraining to look for solutions rather than pending disaster. In remembering freedom, I have found it in more places than I thought, and I will be carrying that determined, eyes-wide-open hopefulness back into my novels. There is so much I cannot influence, but I can do this.

It is a hard time to be a creative. But we are creatures built on storytelling, and anyone who has hung on in publishing for any length of time is stubborn down to their bones. So we build community, we tell stories that shape hope out of ashes, and we don’t give up until that hope becomes truth.

Photo of Lorraine Wilson

A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of several books, most recently the connected science fantasies We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and The Salt Oracle. Winner of two British Fantasy Awards and the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize, her books have also been finalists for the BSFA, BFA, Kavya and Saltire Awards, and twice winners of the SCKAwards. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and befriended pythons, but she now sticks to herding cats.
Introducing Women in SF&F Month 2026
Mar
30
2026

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This April will be the fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month here at Fantasy Cafe, starting on the 1st! For the last several years, this month has been dedicated to highlighting some of the many women doing wonderful work in fantasy and science fiction, and the site will be featuring guest posts by some of these writers throughout April. There will be new posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout the month, and there will also be a book giveaway next week (with one print copy for a US reader and one digital copy for someone outside the US!).

As always, guests will be discussing a variety of topics—the stories and narratives that help them see the world around them more clearly, the ideas and types of characters they explore in their work, the questions and points they keep in mind when writing, the power of asking “What if?” when creating fiction, the ways they find hope and continue to get words on the page, and more. I’m excited to share their essays with you this month, and I hope that these both give you some things to think about and help you find some new authors and books to read.

The Women in SF&F Month Origin Story

In case you are unfamiliar with how April came to be Women in SF&F Month here: It started in 2012, following some discussions about review coverage of books by women and the lack of women blogging about books being suggested for Hugo Awards in fan categories that took place in March. Some of the responses to these—especially the claim that that women weren’t being reviewed and mentioned because there just weren’t that many women reading and writing SFF—made me want to spend a month highlighting women doing work in the genre to show that there are a lot of us, actually.

So I decided to see if I could pull together an April event focusing on women in science fiction and fantasy, and thanks to a great many authors and reviewers who wrote pieces for the event, it happened! I was—and continue to be—astounded by the fantastic guest posts that have been written for this series. And I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to it.

If you’ve missed the series before and want to check out some of the previous posts, you can find some brief descriptions and links for the past few years on the following pages:

This Week’s Schedule

I’m looking forward to this year’s Women in SF&F series, which starts in a couple days! There will be guest posts on Wednesday and Friday with more to come on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout April. This week’s guests are as follows:

Women in SF&F Month 2026 Schedule Graphic

April 1: Lorraine Wilson (The Salt Oracle, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest)
April 3: Elaine Ho (Cry, Voidbringer; “Harmony” and More Artwork)

Michael Swanwick Guest Post and Book Giveaway
Feb
23
2026

I’m thrilled to have a guest post by science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick to share with you today—and to be giving away a copy of his new SFF collection! His previous work includes the World Fantasy Award–winning novella “Radio Waves” and the additional stories collected in Tales of Old Earth; the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, which includes the Hugo Award–winning short story of the same name; and the Nebula Award–winning novel Stations of the Tide.

His latest book, The Universe Box, is described as containing “tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend.” Containing an introduction by the author and 19 short stories total—including two brand new ones!—this came out in trade paperback and ebook earlier this month. More information on the book and how to win a copy is below, along with the essay “A Thumbnail History of Twentieth-Century Fantasy” by Michael Swanwick!

Cover of The Universe Box by Michael Swanwick

About THE UNIVERSE BOX:

Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction’s most prestigious award five times in six years. In his dazzling new collection, the master of speculative short stories returns with tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend. With two stories original to this collection, Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.

[STARRED REVIEW] “Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection.
—Publishers Weekly

In engaging stories, Mischling the thief races through time to defeat three trolls before the sun rises for the first time and turns the inhabitants of her city into stone. A scientist is on the run from assassins, because her research in merging human intelligence with sentient AI is too dangerous. An aging veteran obtains a military weapon from his past: a VR robotic leopard in which he rediscovers the consequences of the hunt. In the biggest heist in the history of the universe, a loser Trickster (and the girlfriend who is better than he deserves), sets out to violate every trope and expectation of fiction possible.

Table of Contents

Introduction
“Starlight Express”
“The Last Days of Old Night”
“The Year of the Three Monarchs”
“Ghost Ships”
“The White Leopard”
“Dragon Slayer”
“The Warm Equations”
“Requiem for a White Rabbit”
“Dreadnaught”
“Grandmother Dimetrodon”
“The Star-Bear”
“Nirvana or Bust”
“Reservoir Ice”
“Artificial People”
“Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After”
“Cloud”
“Timothy: An Oral History”
“Annie Without Crow”
“Universe Box”

A Thumbnail History of Twentieth-Century Fantasy
by Michael Swanwick

Every history of fantasy I’ve read—and there are far from enough of them—starts at some carefully-chosen literary work in the distant past and proceeds to trace a line of influence and inevitability from that point to the present moment.

But I was there. I saw it happen. And I’m here to tell you that they all got it wrong.

Fantasy was born the day a neolithic spear-fisher exclaimed, “Did you see the size of the one I missed?” held hands apart, and on impulse doubled the separation. In that instant, storytelling was born. Fantasy has been an essential element of it ever since.

But modern fantasy—by which I mean fantasy as a thing apart, a genre—began the day the Ace Books legal-but-unauthorized edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy hit the streets. The excitement this caused cannot be exaggerated. Editor David Hartwell reported that entrepreneurs laid down blankets on Harvard Square piled high with pyramids of paperbacks and sold them all the same day.

I was in high school, but my sister Patty, attending nursing school in Manhattan, sent home a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. I stayed up all night reading it. The next day, I launched a long, quixotic attempt to write the stuff myself.

Not coincidentally, I began frantically searching for more books like the trilogy.

As did every publisher in New York City.

Nobody, it transpired, was writing like Tolkien. So publishing houses reissued early twentieth century fantasies. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan books rose from the grave. In a drugstore spinner rack in Richmond, Virginia, I saw a paperback cover obviously meant to evoke the trilogy. It was E. R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses. I asked my mother for a loan so I could buy it. To my intense embarrassment and the visible amusement of the pharmacist, Mom examined the book to make sure it wasn’t smut.

The gold standard of these reissues was Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy line, edited by Lin Carter. Carter was a terrible writer, but a reader/fan possessed of a deep knowledge of forgotten fantasy. He restored to print 65 books, including Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, several James Branch Cabell volumes, and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. More regrettable (but how many fantasies were there to be mined from the past?) were works by George MacDonald and William Morris better suited for scholars than readers. A generation of writers was kindled by them.

They were not, however, numerous enough to satisfy compulsive readers. So, many writers (again, me included) shifted loyalty from fantasy to science fiction.

This was not the betrayal it looks like.

Long before Tolkien, there were natural fantasists with no market for their work. They found workarounds. Some wrote Arthurian fantasies, which could be sold as historical novels. Others wrote romantic novels involving ghosts or time travel. Many found science fiction.

Alien worlds could look a lot like the lands of fantasy. Mars could substitute for Faerie.

Writers like C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett wrote adventures which began with a brawny Earth hero riding away from the (never shown) spaceport on his eight-legged horse. Suddenly, an eight-legged snake causes the horse to rear, throwing its rider and losing his zap gun. From which point, he has to smite with sword and fist native Martians who are too proud to use Earthian firearms. Though not too proud to stab him in the back.

This sounds dismissive. But, often, the fantasists driven into SF by market forces were superbly talented. Science fiction learned from them. They, in turn, took from science fiction lessons which later, when they felt free to leave, they took with them. This was what Theodore Sturgeon would describe as syzygy—an exchange of genetic material without the intent of offspring.

Then came Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara.

Though criticized at the time as a slavish imitation of Tolkien, it was what publishers had been lusting after for years—proof that high fantasy could be created by living writers. And it made money. A lot of it.

At the same time, the broad scope of Lin Carter’s Adult Fantasy line meant that by comparing sales figures, it was possible to discover exactly what fantasy readers wanted. The numbers confirmed that the more like Tolkien’s work a book was, the better it sold.

A predictable result was the rise of the multi-volume fantasy series. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time ran to fourteen volumes, three of them, sadly, written after his death. And it was far from the longest such.

Meanwhile, any emerging writer who could slap together a plot involving dragons, elves, or other recognizable fantasy tropes could get published, even if the result wasn’t very well written. They didn’t have to be solemn tales of war and destiny either. I vividly remember a fantasy editor bragging about how much money she was making with what she condescendingly called “silly little fantasies.”

This is not to say that there weren’t artistically ambitious fantasists forty years ago. There were. But their work could be easily lost in a flood of merely publishable books.

For the first time in human history, there were enough fantasy books to satisfy even the most devoted reader. Some bookstores even put fantasy and science fiction on separate shelves, a division that resulted in many ironies of placement. (Where does Anne McCaffrey belong? Or Jack Vance?)

Earlier, if you will grant me permission to go back a decade or two, Dungeons and Dragons remade everybody’s expectations of fantasy. A Dork Tower cartoon made fun of how little magic there was to be found in The Lord of the Rings, imagining its gamers using Gandalf as a battering ram in response to that lack. Magic underwent an Industrial Revolution because gaming required lots and lots of the stuff to be playable. And this bled into fiction. In my own The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and its sequels everyone employed magic as casually as we do technology. To understand the literature, full credit must be given to the game.

Which is not to say that commerce trumped art. In the early 1980s, whenever I found myself chatting with newmade fantasists, I did my best to promote literary ambition, citing writers like Greer Gilman and Tanith Lee, whom they invariably admired. I have no idea if I made any difference at all. But with or without me, the fantasy realm expanded to include pretty much anything you can imagine. High or low, here or there, go to the store and you could find what pleases you.

Which brings us to the end of the century.

In the quarter century since then, fantasy has undergone further transformations. People of color, who long felt excluded from the genre, took their rightful places within it, often at the very front. Writers from other continents found a warm welcome in North America. Natural historical novelists (remember the natural fantasists who took refuge in science fiction?) found a safe haven in fantasy. And then…

But that is a story best left for a later essay. Perhaps to be written by you. But if not, then surely by somebody who loves fantasy with a passion equal to yours.

Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy short-story writers of his generation, having received an unprecedented five Hugo Awards in a six year period. He is also the winner of the British Science Fiction and World Fantasy Awards. Swanwick’s stories published in such collections as Gravity’s Angels, Tales of Old Earth, and Not So Much, Said the Cat, have also appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including OMNI, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions. Swanwick’s novels include The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, the Nebula Award–winner Stations of the Tide, the Darger & Surplus series, Dragons of Babel, and City in the Stars. His work has also been translated into more than ten languages. Swanwick lives in Pennsylvania.

Book Giveaway

Courtesy of Tachyon Publications, I have one finished copy of The Universe Box to give away!

Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out Fantasy Cafe’s The Universe Box Giveaway Google form, linked below. One entry per household and the winners will be randomly selected. Those from the US are eligible to win. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Friday, March 6. The winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them after 24 hours has passed, a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).

Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winner. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.

Note: The giveaway link has been removed since it is now over.