Hub - Issue 34 by Marianne de Pierres / Scott Harrison / Lee Harris / Paul Kane / Andrew Edwards

Author:Marianne de Pierres / Scott Harrison / Lee Harris / Paul Kane / Andrew Edwards
Format: epub

New Writings in the Fantastic

Edited by John Grant

Published by Pendragon Press

£12.99, www.pendragonpress.co.uk

Pendragon is one of the most consistently impressive small press publishers in the country. Though their output is modest in terms of quantity, where quality is concerned, they almost always score impressively high.

New Writings is a collection of over 40 short stories by over 40 authors, linked only by their genre. Editor John Grant states in his introduction that the book is “an attempt to show the full scope of what the literature of the fantastic can do when it isn’t being crammed into that preconceived, primarily non-fantastic marketing niche [perpetrated by the publishers of “doorstop fantasy”]”.

He has a point.

Any collection of this size that doesn’t rely on being the year’s “Best of” is going to have a hard time of it. It is difficult to commission forty plus stories without running into some weaker works. Thankfully, Grant has chosen wisely, and there are very few tales within the anthology that are not worth reading. The quality of the stories tends to run from the very good (Derek J Goodman’s An Incomplete Palindrome Alphabet for Dyslexic Deliverymen) to the excellent (Greg Story’s The Transmissionary).

Like many small press publications, the cover price seems, at first glance, a little on the high side, but the quality of the work makes New Writings worth every penny. This is quite possibly the most important and most interesting collection in the oft-maligned fantasy genre to be published this year. Buy it.

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