SF is unique among America's low-flying lits in that it is almost one-fourth humor: 23.45 percent funny, to be precise. This is considerably less than Romantic Sports which is almost 30 (29.23) percent funny, but well above both Romance (18.24) and Sports (15.32). Humor itself, the flagship as it were, is only 51.76 percent funny, and that average is artificially inflated by Mark Twain, who would be a SFWA member if he weren't so dead.

  Much of SF's considerable smile factor is due to the high-spirited young writers it attracts. SF and Fantasy together induct an average of almost sixteen new scribblers a year (15.42), of whom more than six (6.19) are funny. Let's look at a typical year--2001. Nationally, 118 writers went pro that year, an above-average eighteen of whom were picked up by SFWA, which handles the draft for the related fields of SF, Fantasy and Low Slipstream. Of these rookies, seven were funny, four almost funny, and two were just weird. By way of comparison, the mainstream gained forty-one new pros, of whom only six were a little funny and two were actually depressing.

  Who says you can't tell a book by its cover? The high risibility-index of SF is due in large part to appearances. Many (254 total) SF writers dress funny, often intentionally. There are no gender distinctions here with the women being fully (99.44 percent) as funny-looking as the men. Author photos are of course the "wings" that bring these laughs to the readers, which is why trade books are not as funny as hardcovers, and mass market paperbacks get less funny every day.

  It's not all personnel, however. The impressive display of humor in modern SF is due in large measure to tradition. From the high comedy ofFrankenstein to the rollicking chase scenes ofDune (who can forget those goofy worms?), humor has played an important role in SF. And it's becoming more rather than less important: of the 1,786,873 dialogue interchanges added to the literature sinceApollo 11 , fully 987,543 have contained puns, jokes, or wry rejoinders, and this is discounting the narrative drollery (more troublesome to quantify) that is a staple of the field.

  But tradition, though honored, can play only a supporting role in an innovative genre. Many of the laughs in SF (33.78 percent of the total) have to do with the material itself. SF is quite correctly considered a literature of ideas, and ideas are funny, at least some of them; and even the ones that aren't funny are funnier than manners, morals, or money, the mainstream obsessions that still (go figure!) account for 64.87 percent of America's printed matter.

  It must be noted that within the linked fields of Fantasy and SF, the playing field is far from level. Robots and rocket ships are almost always funny (68.98 percent of the time), but monsters? Not! Elves are not funny at all (perhaps because they try so hard). Aliens are funnier than unicorns by a factor of ten, and castles are funny only to those who have not lived in them for five or more consecutive days.

  Of course, a career in SF doesn't automatically bring laughs, except from the immediate family. If a robot whines in the forest and no one laughs, is it funny? The SF humorist needs an agent, and SF agents are a special breed (65.67 percent special, in fact) known for their ability to laugh at as well as with their clients. The best of them (32.65 percent) actively seek sarcastic rejections, and the worst (27.87 percent, allowing for overlap) like to receive small dead animals in the mail.

  These agents can't afford to waste their time on the trade mags likeLocus andSF Chronicle , which rarely print humor (1.456 laughs per page, not counting ads), nor on the all-humor mags likeThe New Yorker andAnalog , which are written in-house by lunatics. For speedy, top-penny sales, SF deal-makers go straight for the prestige 'zines likeAsimov's ,F&SF , andSciFiction, whose editors are so eager to please that they have been known (987 documented incidents) to laugh at their own jokes.

  Agents can't do it all, though, which brings us to the most powerful weapon in any SF writer's arsenal: the personal touch. Successful SF and Fantasy pros understand that the best time to make an editor laugh is after midnight. Between ten and two a.m. is best, when all but the most hopeless (three at last count) are home in bed. Remember to keep it light: the last thing an editor wants is a collect call from a writer who runs out of funny stories after only twenty minutes on the phone!

  So now you know the ropes. Isn't it about time you put on your funny hat, powered up your word processor, and joined the ranks of the SF pros who are turning laughs into dollars at the rate of pennies a day?

  CONTEMPORARY FANTASY

  Andy Duncan

  Andy Duncan's story "The Chief Designer" won the 2002 Sturgeon Award.

  For me, the great lure of fantasy as a reader and as a writer, is the chance to explore the trulyweird --weirder even than the most way-out science fiction stories, which must necessarily ride, in relative comfort, the rails of scientific, technological, and social extrapolation. By contrast, the fantasy story is free to set off on foot without a map, whistling a jaunty tune as dark clouds roll in from the west, shadows reach out from alleyways, street signs become few and far between, and the first fat drops splash down the back of the neck: unnerving, yes, but exhilarating, too.

  The two great fantasy magazines of the early twentieth century got it right in their very titles:Weird Tales andUnknown . The titles of three terrific recent collections nail it, too:Stranger Things Happen, Tales of Pain, andWonder, andMagic Terror . And all of the above exemplify a relatively new approach to fantasy, finding the uncanny not just in the pastoral long ago and far away but also next door, down the street, around the corner, the day before yesterday.

  Today, the field of contemporary fantasy is full of wild talents, visionaries, writers of the marvelously and necessarily weird--and in lo, what numbers!Never before have first-rate contemporary fantasists so many and so varied written at the peak of their powers simultaneously . To name a few favorites among them is to leave out too many, but even the most preliminary list indicates that these are extraordinary times in the field of contemporary fantasy, as in the world at large.

  Consider the past few years. Kelly Link's marvelous and indescribable collectionStranger Things Happen declares a new genre, one so far occupied only byStranger Things Happen and perhaps by nothing else, ever, at least until Link's next book comes along. FromThe Sandman throughAmerican Gods , Neil Gaiman has demonstrated an uncanny ability not only to channel and revive old myths but to create new ones. The novels of Jonathan Carroll--The Wooden Seabeing a recent example--never stop opening doors in the reader's head, not even after the book itself is closed.

  The artists, aesthetes, and angst-ridden adolescents who compellingly people Elizabeth Hand'sBlack Light andLast Summer at Mars Hill are as fabulous as gryphons and as timely as the tabloids. John Crowley, who tempts even the hardheaded to retrieve the wordgenius from the dustbin, wroteLittle, Big and then, instead of resting on the seventh day, just kept going, into the majestic series that includes, most recently,Daemonomania . Tim Powers'sDeclare reads like an Indiana Jones vehicle written by John Le Carre or, in other words, like nothing else in this world, but it also manages to be an epicZhivago -style love story chockablock with jaw-dropping notions, my favorite being the revelation of a sinister second Ark that shadowed Noah's. How's that for High Concept?

  Peter Straub is the best horror writer since Herman Melville. "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," the highlight of his collectionMagic Terror , demonstrates anew that fantasy need not include a single supernatural element. Don't ask me; askhim . Caitlin R. Kiernan, author ofTales of Pain and Wonder , is a mesmerizing stylist with an unerring sense of place;Anne Rice's New Orleans has nothing on Kiernan's Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan is also a Goth queen and a mosasaur expert. How cool is that? Another prose magician is Jeffrey Ford, who managed to get his collectionThe Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories and his novelThe Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque published at the same time, the show-off.

  See what I mean? I'm running out of space, and I haven't even mentioned Graham Joyce, Nalo Hopkinson, Ray Vukcevich, Glen David Gold, Philip Pullman, China Mieville, Ted Chiang, Alan Moore, Louise Erdrich, Steven Millhauser, Lisa Goldstein . . .

  (many more names go here)

  . . . or J. K. Rowling, whose multivolume Harry Potter saga, when complete, will make all the grumblers, potshotters, and naysayers look even sillier than they look now.

  Whence this explosion of cutting-edge contemporary fantasy, this embarrassment of riches? Well. Tolkien famously argued that a chief function of "fairy-stories" was Escape, which he both lauded as a heroic act and capitalized, as he did "its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt." Most of us don't share Tolkien's Disgust at the modern world; he went on, in the next paragraph of that famous essay, to Condemn electric streetlamps. But as I write this in summer 2002, I can think of any number of things we writers and readers might justifiably be Escaping from these days--into the pastoral long ago and far away, no doubt, but also into more contemporary realms: our world, straight up, with a twist. The long-term benefits of this literary and psychological trend, if it continues, are interesting to contemplate, but it's late, and I'm sleepy. After a good night's rest and a great many dreams, informed by all those writers named above, I will rise and mow the lawn, and then come inside and do my part: I will write a fantasy story.

  TRADITIONAL FANTASY

  Mindy L. Klasky

  Relative newcomer Mindy L. Klasky has been making a splash in fantasy with herGlasswright series.

  "Traditional fantasy": Readers outside of the speculative fiction crowd often regard the phrase with suspicion, their reactions ranging from polite confusion (from people who have no idea what is included in the genre) to knowing leers (from people who assume that "fantasies" are hidden in plain brown wrappers, available only behind the sales counter). Nevertheless, the past few years have introduced millions of people to traditional fantasy through the cinematic blockbusters ofHarry Potter andThe Lord of the Rings . As if in reaction to those media visions (and, in some cases, the traditional novels on which they were based), written traditional fantasy has pushed new boundaries, exploring intimate relationships between characters and focusing on sexual identity and power as major tools of storytelling.

  The juggernaut of traditional fantasy rolls onward, continuing to appeal to children (both chronological youngsters and nostalgic adults). The first four books in theHarry Potter series proved so popular that theNew York Times Bestseller list created a new category of "Children's Literature" to open up slots for some other--any other--novels.The Lord of the Rings and its prequel,The Hobbit , have occupied four of the top ten slots onLocus magazine's mass market paperback bestseller list for the majority of the past few years. People who have never dreamed of reading in the speculative fiction ghetto have proudly boasted of their literary excursions into cinematic "novelizations"--novels that have, in some cases, been available for more than half a century.

  The public seems to embrace these media fantasies for the archetypes they present--the struggles of good against evil, the stories of growth from childhood to adulthood, the hope of magic in our daily affairs. And yet many adults have a desire to push beyond those childhood dreams, to edge past the old struggles. There is a movement in print fantasy to confront new challenges, to address more complex problems, to create new solutions. Many of these novels address the uniquely adult world of complex sexuality to explore their new parameters.

  Anne Bishop'sBlack Jewels Trilogy exemplifies the new, adult aspect of traditional fantasy. The dominant race of her world, the Blood, are virile vampires, humanlike creatures whose sexuality is central to their means of communication. Women often control men, holding them as sexual slaves and forcing them to serve as unpaid gigolos. Men can be controlled by magical rings--channels that convey great pain--placed directly on their genitals. Witches--the strongest and most dangerous of women--can be destroyed if they are deflowered by brutal or careless men. Throughout the novels, sexuality is the currency of power, a driving force that sweeps up characters, the plot, and the author's themes.

  Similarly, in Lynn Flewelling'sThe Bone Doll's Twin sexuality is twined about the core of power. In that well-received novel, a prophesied princess is hidden from her murderous royal uncle, disguised as a boy. The disguise, however, goes far beyond the traditional fairy-tale vision of a girl wearing pants and clipping her hair. Flewelling's princess is physically transformed into a male child; in a blood rite, her body is manipulated through magic. The resulting tale traces the confused princess's friendships and feudal relationships, yielding a complex and fascinating examination of gender politics, all wrapped up in an ostensibly traditional fantasy story of succession, usurpation, and feudal loyalty.

  Even fiction that is generally marketed to children in the United States has been shaped by the examination of sexual roles and mores. Phillip Pullman's acclaimed trilogy, which began withThe Golden Compass and continued withThe Subtle Knife , concluded withThe Amber Spyglass . In that novel, an alien race is dying because it has lost the secret of its reproduction. Two human children are enlisted in a battle between good and evil that spans several worlds. Their innocent discovery of their own sexual natures is crucial to the resolution of the novel's intertwined plots.

  In each of the examples cited above, sexuality is a major element of the story, woven into the plot, the characters, and even the physical setting. It is not a fillip added to a tale to otherwise attract adult readers. It is not a lurid sidelight, designed to bring in a few prurient purchasers. Rather, it is a crucial element, vital and essential to the storytelling.

  As in the past, traditional fantasy provides readers a chance to explore the meaning of their worlds through very different societies. Some aspects of the genre remain stable: the vast majority of novels are published in series. The vast majority of fantasy works contain magic, with strict rules about its application and usefulness. The vast majority of traditional fantasy explores essential conflicts between forces of good and forces of evil.

  And yet the field is expanding, growing, defining itself to exist in a field separate from the media, separate from the exuberant--if occasionally simplistic--youthful audience attracted by cinema. Traditional fantasy is growing up, shaping itself for grown-up readers with grown-up concerns.

  DARK FANTASY

  Ellen Datlow

  Venerable SF editor Ellen Datlow currently edits the online magazine SCI FICTION.

  I've been interested in dark literature all my life. As a child I read everything around the house fromBulfinch's Mythology to Guy de Maupassant's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction. I watched the originalTwilight Zone television series as soon as my parents would let me stay up late. Later, I readThe Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural with stories by Ray Russell, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Gahan Wilson, and a host of other names familiar to horror readers, and Richard Matheson'sShock collections. Those are the books that hooked me on horror.

  I still read a lot of dark fiction--horror/dark fantasy--as my reading for the annualYear's Best Fantasy and Horror , of course, but also because I love this subgenre of fantastic literature. Just as in science fiction, there are arguments as to what constitutes " horror"--is itonly supernatural fiction, or does it encompass psychological horror? And what about terror fiction, crime fiction? I and other aficionados of the dark literary tradition embrace a dictum comparable to Damon Knight's: "If I as an editor point to it, it's SF." My personal rule of thumb is, if it's dark enough--if I as a horror reader and editor read a piece of fiction that gives me a certain frisson, promotes a specific unease or feeling of dread while reading it--I'll call it horror. Horror is the only literature that is defined by its effect on the reader rather than on its subject matter. Which is why great science fiction classics such asFrankenstein by Mary Shelley, "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, and great psychological horror works by Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson (both of whom also have published supernatural fiction) fit comfortably into the horror field.

  Horror has gone through growing pains similar to SF's, although unlike SF it originally began as part of the mainstream, and in the 1980s, as a result of Stephen King's popularity, it was made into a marketing category. And because many publishers decided they needed a horror line with a set number of slots to fill, a lot of bad horror was written and published, saturating a market that really wanted more Stephen King but not necessarily more horror. The horror lines crashed and burned relatively quickly, and soon few commercial publishers would touch horror--overtly--although a flurry and then an avalanche of literary/crime/psychological horror novels were published throughout the nineties.

  But unlike SF, horror has never really had more than one or two professional magazines.Weird Tales , although publishing dark fantasy for many years, does not publish what I consider horror. The difference? A matter of degree.Twilight Zone Magazine and its sisterNight Cry existed for relatively short periods of time. Some of the SF magazines have published and continue to publish a bit of horror. But out of this vacuum the small press grew.

  The proliferation of desktop publishing and the Internet have made it possible for anyone to self-publish or publish their friends on a shoestring budget. This innovation has produced some quality magazines and webzines and a lot of dreck. The worst problem facing the horror field today is being able to distinguish between quality and junk. I don't mean entertaining junk. I mean stuff like hairballs caught in a cat's throat. A lot of small-press horror magazines are just abominable, though I know the editorsmust believe in what they're doing. But not everyone can or should be an editor. Editing is a calling--not something you just dabble in--if you want to produce anything of consistent quality. I think that the young and clueless are too caught up in the gore of it.

 

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