Epic: Legends of Fantasy Read online

  Praise for John Joseph Adams

  For Wastelands

  “This harrowing reprint anthology of 22 apocalyptic tales reflects the stresses of contemporary international politics, with more than half published since 2000. All depict unsettling societal, physical and psychological adaptations their authors postulate as necessary for survival after the end of the world.”

  —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

  “Arguably my favorite anthology of all time—just packed with speculative masterworks.”

  —Paul Goat Allen, Barnes & Noble.com

  For The Living Dead

  “Believe the hype. The Living Dead is absolutely the best zombie anthology I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many).… If you have even a vague interest in zombie fiction, you MUST buy this book.”

  —HorrorScope

  “A superb reprint anthology that runs the gamut of zombie stories. Great storytelling for zombie fans as well as newcomers.”

  —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

  For By Blood We Live

  “The reigning king of the anthology world is John Joseph Adams.…Yet another masterful—dare I say perfect—anthology.”

  —Barnes & Noble.com

  “As he’s done on Wastelands and The Living Dead, John Joseph Adams has given readers another definitive anthology.”

  —SFF World

  EPIC: Legends of Fantasy

  Copyright © 2012 by John Joseph Adams

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Introduction © 2012 by John Joseph Adams

  Foreword © 2012 by Brent Weeks

  Pages 611-612 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Cover design by John Coulthart

  Interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  BOOK ISBN 10: 1-61696-084-1

  BOOK ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-084-1

  Printed in the United States by Worzalla

  First Edition: 2012

  EPIC

  LEGENDS OF FANTASY

  Tachyon | San Francisco

  Other anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams

  Armored

  Brave New Worlds

  By Blood We Live

  By Blood We Live

  Federations

  The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  Lightspeed: Year One

  The Living Dead

  The Living Dead 2

  Other Worlds Than These

  Seeds of Change

  Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom

  Wastelands

  The Way of the Wizard

  Forthcoming anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams

  Dead Man’s Hand

  The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

  Robot Uprisings (co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson)

  For Robert Barton Bland, the most epic guy I know.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword Brent Weeks

  Introduction John Joseph Adams

  Homecoming Robin Hobb

  The Word of Unbinding Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Burning Man Tad Williams

  As the Wheel Turns Aliette de Bodard

  The Alchemist Paolo Bacigalupi

  Sandmagic Orson Scott Card

  The Road to Levinshir Patrick Rothfuss

  Rysn Brandon Sanderson

  While the Gods Laugh Michael Moorcock

  Mother of All Russiya Melanie Rawn

  Riding the Shore of the River of Death Kate Elliott

  Bound Man Mary Robinette Kowal

  The Narcomancer N. K. Jemisin

  Strife Lingers in Memory Carrie Vaughn

  The Mad Apprentice Trudi Canavan

  Otherling Juliet Marillier

  The Mystery Knight George R. R. Martin

  Acknowledgements and Copyright Information

  Foreword

  Brent Weeks

  All fiction is lies, varying only in scope and audacity. Epic fantasy is lies turned up to eleven. It is the outcast, living in the margins of our literary maps where fearful scribes have written, “Here be dragons.”

  Perhaps this explains the persistent resistance it finds among critics. Have you ever met an inveterate liar, full of sound and fury? Entertaining for ten minutes, twenty maybe. But why would you spend a thousand pages poring over the froth of a fevered imagination? Even Tolkien faced this—critics who wished to hang literature on a wall and bracket it with thick frames that might cover up the embarrassment of that silliness at the edges.

  But every genre is a contract. There are demands made of an audience, and expectations of an author. If you write historical fiction, and you set your story in New York City on September 12, 2001, there are certain events you simply cannot ignore. If you write romance, and the girl decides to become a nun, you’ve betrayed expectations. If you write mystery, and it turns out no one died—that instead, dastardly, twice-divorced CEO Tom is really merely vacationing happily in Fiji—you’ve given your audience a stone when they asked for bread. If you write police procedural, and the suspect is beaten senseless by the cops in a Seattle alley and never read his rights, you’d better have a great reason why this doesn’t get him off the hook. (Whereas the same scene wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, even if set in the same city, if the novel were a Western set in 1860.)

  That contract is simply broadest in epic fantasy: Tell me a great story, the audience says. I’ll work to remember lots of names and foreign terms and odd cultures and strange ways if you sweep me away.

  And these authors oblige.

  There is, as you will see even within this volume, enormous range within epic fantasy. From conciliatory stories that show the good guys winning (though often at great cost) in a Tolkienesque tenor to the challenging “there are no good guys, much less winning” in an Abercrombian argot, all seek to tell moving stories in immersive worlds.

  When an author of grand imagination who is capable of adroit explication meets a perspicacious reader, something magical happens: the scale of the story changes the experience of the story qualitatively. What we worked so hard to digest now swallows us. Epic fantasy is uniquely immersive. We enter a new world, and all too often, we don’t want to leave. (Part of why it tends to such length.)

  But doesn’t that very immersive quality simply prove that fantasy is escapist? Best suited for children and those unable to face the real world?

  In “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien said that those who dismiss fantasy as escapist are confusing “the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter....Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

  The frame focuses the whole painting, and when you set the frame too narrowly, so that the frame covers up that “nonsense” at the edges of the map where it says, “Here be dragons,” you’ve excluded an essential element. Not only would we lose everything from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Beowulf from our literature, but we also would lose some of the range of human creativity. It would be as if we told artists that no True Art could feature violet. Doubtless a lot of great art could be created without violet, but why accept such a limitation?

  If we can accept a map beyond our traditional critical f
rames, fantasy can take us on a journey beyond our traditional frames of reference. It can give us respite and consolation; it can challenge; it can tell us the truth by slipping right past our prejudices. It is often only in hindsight, as we have absorbed a story and been absorbed by it, that we recognize how it is molding us. When we read a story that sticks with us, it becomes part of our frame of reference. A small Jewish kid trying out for a sports team might feel like David facing Goliath—and take consolation from the fact that David won! The Lord of the Rings isn’t a novel about the environment, but Saruman’s defilement of the natural world has struck millions with horror. The Odyssey isn’t about drug abuse, but Odysseus’s encounter with the Lotus Eaters has been warning audiences about the dangers of narcotics for 2,800 years.

  Great stories don’t change minds, they change hearts.

  G. K. Chesterton said it whimsically: “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”

  There are dragons. And here they be. Enjoy.

  Brent Weeks

  Introduction

  John Joseph Adams

  Epic fantasy has become the literature of more. We equate it with more pages than the average book, more books than the average series. There are more characters, more maps, more names, and more dates. The stories and the worlds are bigger to contain all of this more. And when all the books have been devoured, the fans want more.

  Fifty years ago, there was precious little. Modern epic fantasy was non-existent in the early twentieth century until J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings came along. A few scattered classics would be added to the pantheon in subsequent years, but notable exceptions aside, few believed epic fantasy was a viable commercial genre. Publications within this field were rare. That all changed in 1977, when The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks became the first work of fantasy ever to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, and the rest is history.

  But that is only modern history. Epic fantasy has extremely deep roots. Drawing on the traditions of the great extended poems and oral tales that are the origins of literature, epics represent some of the most beloved tales in human culture. Even in these ancient stories, we can see the trappings of the modern epic: exotic fantastical settings peopled with larger-than-life characters, where fates of entire worlds often rest on the shoulders of protagonists who are forced to become heroes or crumble under the pressure.

  The oldest existing written literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia, about a king who uses his power to harm his own people. His adventure causes him heartbreak, conflict with the gods, and even forces him to face his own mortality…until he returns home and realizes the virtue and beauty of the civilization he should have been ruling and protecting. He is changed into a better man by his quest. This cycle, of a simple or flawed man facing peril in order to preserve his world, appears over and over in literature. Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell called this cycle the monomyth, or more aptly, The Hero’s Journey. He argued that stories about figures in many religions and myths all follow the same cycle of the hero rising to the occasion to save his people or his civilization.

  Along with modern epic fantasy’s growth into the all-powerful more, the literature has evolved in ways that would have fascinated Campbell. While the genre exploded during the 1980s, much of that decade’s output—at least in book form—followed the model set down by Tolkien: an ancient all-powerful evil, usually a Dark Lord, is stirring and will destroy a secondary world filled with magic and wonder, unless a small band of heroes can recover a powerful artifact to aid the armies of good in the final battle. This model, right down to the same races of mythical creatures, flooded the shelves as publishers churned out bestseller after bestseller.

  Although epic fantasy exploded in the ’80s, with most of it following the above-described template, there were some other notable earlier entries in the genre that broke the Tolkien mold. Ursula K. Le Guin’s protagonist Ged, in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968),hearkened back to the ancient stories of a prideful, flawed protagonist who causes great harm with his powers, and must learn to master his magic and his values before he can resemble anything like a hero. And then fantasy anti-heroes like Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant (1977) and Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné (1961) were precursors to the morally ambiguous protagonists many twenty-first-century readers have come to prefer in their epic fantasies.

  Tyrion Lannister in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has become the poster-boy for morally ambiguous or “gray” protagonists in the genre, and Martin’s books—consisting of sprawling, thousand-page doorstoppers—are the epitome of the all-powerful more, though it was Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books that first shattered the trilogy model established by Tolkien and was instrumental in shaping the contemporary epic fantasy marketplace.

  In addition to the above-mentioned moral complexity, today’s epics are also usually founded on strong worldbuilding and deep insight into the human condition. Another popular component is the struggle against overwhelming odds and/or an overwhelming power(s), which results in significant changes to the world. While this final element often makes for good epic fantasy, the monumental struggle is not absolutely essential, as some of these stories will demonstrate. Tad Williams’s “The Burning Man,” George R. R. Martin’s “The Mystery Knight,” and Robin Hobb’s “Homecoming” all take place in epic fantasy worlds their respective authors have written about in multiple books; these stories take place on a smaller scale, but setting them in the same world makes them feel just as epic. (Longtime fans of the genre will also note several other stories in the anthology that take place in the same milieus as their respective author’s novel series.) Carrie Vaughn’s standalone tale “Strife Lingers in Memory,” meanwhile, provides another twist to the monumental struggle argument, presenting a tale that begins after such a battle is over. There are also stories in here without connections or allusions to apocalyptic battles, but somehow they are no less epic.

  The stories in this anthology are epic because of exotic worldbuilding and the remarkable humanity of the characters as they struggle with their situations. Every epic begins and ends in the hero’s heart. When we know what forces in the world have formed that heart, and learn what pushes that character to his or her very limit, we learn the shape of his or her own personal crucible.

  Any story that can show us that is truly epic, regardless of page counts or whether or not sweeping battles are rocking the realm…and when we find something truly epic, it should be no surprise so many of us want more.

  Homecoming

  Robin Hobb

  Robin Hobb (a/k/a Megan Lindholm) is the author of The Realm of the Elderlings epic fantasy series, which is comprised of several subseries, including The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders, The Tawny Man, and The Rain Wilds Chronicles. Her most recently published book is City of Dragons, the third volume of The Rain Wilds Chronicles, published in February 2012. Her recent publications include The Inheritance and Other Stories, incorporating shorter pieces of fiction published under both of her pseudonyms. Blood of Dragons is the concluding volume of The Rain Wilds Chronicles. It will be published in March of 2013. Robin Hobb currently resides in Tacoma, Washington.

  Day the 7th of the Fish Moon

  Year the 14th of the reign of the Most Noble and Magnificent Satrap Esclepius

  Confiscated from me this day, without cause or justice, were five crates and three trunks. This occurred during the loading of the ship Venture, setting forth upon Satrap Esclepius’ noble endeavor to colonize the Cursed Shores. Contents of the crates are as follows: One block fine white marble, of a size suitable for a bust, two blocks Aarthian Jade, sizes suitable for busts, one large fine soapstone, as tall as a man and as wide as a man, seven large copper ingots, of excellent quality, three silver ingots, of acceptable quality, and three kegs of wax. One crate contained scales, tools for
the working of metal and stone, and measuring equipment. Contents of trunks are as follows: Two silk gowns, one blue, one pink, tailored by Seamstress Wista and bearing her mark. A dress-length of mille-cloth, green. Two shawls, one white wool, one blue linen. Several pairs hose, in winter and summer weights. Three pairs of slippers, one silk and worked with rosebuds. Seven petticoats, three silk, one linen and three wool. One bodice frame, of light bone and silk. Three volumes of poetry, written in my own hand. A miniature by Soiji, of myself, Lady Carillion Carrock, nee Waljin, commissioned by my mother, Lady Arston Waljin, on the occasion of my 14th birthday. Also included were clothing and bedding for a baby, a girl of four years and two boys, of six and ten years, including both winter and summer garb for formal occasions.

  I record this confiscation so that the thieves can be brought to justice upon my return to Jamaillia City. The theft was in this manner: As our ship was being loaded for departure, cargo belonging to various nobles aboard the vessels was detained upon the docks. Captain Triops informed us that our possessions would be held, indefinitely, in the Satrap’s custody. I do not trust the man, for he shows neither my husband nor myself proper deference. So I make this record, and when I return this coming spring to Jamaillia City, my father, Lord Crion Waljin, will bring my complaint before the Satrap’s Court of Justice, as my husband seems little inclined to do so. This do I swear.

  Lady Carillion Waljin Carrock

  Day the 10th of the Fish Moon