dagibbs | Year's Best Fantasy

Reading The Economist cover to cover on a weekly basis sure cuts into my other reading time.

I've just finished The Year's Best Fantasy 4, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Before this series started, there was only one "best of" covering fantasy, well actually 1/2 a "best of", the fantasy half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (Datlow & Windling), which I tried, but found had too much horror (yeah, about half...but it's a big book, and didn't seem worth paying that much for only half of what I wanted.) So, when Hartwell and Cramer started this series (a complement to their Year's Best SF series, though I'm pretty sure when I started reading, it was Hartwell's, not Hartwell and Cramer's), I thought I'd give one a try. Assuming this is, actually, a representative sample of the best fantasy from 2003, then I don't think I like a lot of what is happening in the fantasy short-fiction field now. This is not to say I didn't enjoy some of the stories in the book immensely -- e.g. King Dragon by Michael Swanwick -- but far too many just didn't work for me. As I was reading, I was trying to put my finger on what I didn't like, what I was missing. And, I found myself noticing that in the stories I didn't really like, that didn't work for me, the magical stuff wasn't well explained, or well realized, or, to me, understandable. I came to the conclusion that I think I like magic that is technological or scientific, magic that makes sense, magic that has rules, and where it is fairly clear there are rules, even if I (or the characters) don't clearly know or understand them. I also found there was a fair bit of horror, which I wasn't really looking for. Then as I moved onto and read the introduction to The Year's Best SF 9, I noticed a mention of it not including "slipstream". I wasn't sure what that way, but it sounded like what I didn't like from the fantasy collection. I found this definition:

So, thinking about it, I decided that to me slipstream stories feel a bit like magical realism. The key is -- they are unexplained. "Real" fantasy or SF has these elements embedded in the background so that they make sense -- in slipstream they are just there. In a sense, SF tries to make the strange familiar -- by showing SFnal elements in a context that helps us understand them. Slipstream tries to make the familiar strange -- by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal/fantastical intrusions."

Which clarified things nicely -- I don't much like slipstream, and too many of the stories in the collection were slipstream, or slipstream/horror.