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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
Robert Silverberg
THE WHEEL OF TIME: NEW SPRING
Robert Jordan
EARTHSEA: DRAGONFLY
Ursula K. Le Guin
MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN: THE BURNING MAN
Tad Williams
DISCWORLD: THE SEA AND LITTLE FISHES
Terry Pratchett
Praise
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
FOR MARTY AND RALPH
who certainly know why
INTRODUCTION
Here is a book of visions and miracles—the third volume in a set of three containing eleven rich, robust new stories by the best-known and most accomplished modern creators of fantasy fiction, each one set in the special universe of the imagination that made that writer famous throughout the world.
Fantasy is the oldest branch of imaginative literature—as old as the human imagination itself. It is not difficult to believe that the same artistic impulse that produced the extraordinary cave paintings of Altamira and Chauvet, fifteen and twenty and even thirty thousand years ago, also probably produced astounding tales of gods and demons, of talismans and spells, of dragons and werewolves, of wondrous lands beyond the horizon—tales that fur-clad shamans recited to fascinated audiences around the campfires of Ice Age Europe. So, too, in torrid Africa, in the China of prehistory, in ancient India, in the Americas: everywhere, in fact, on and on back through time for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. I like to think that the storytelling impulse is universal—that there have been storytellers as long as there have been beings in this world that could be spoken of as “human”—and that those storytellers have in particular devoted their skills and energies and talents, throughout our long evolutionary path, to the creation of extraordinary marvels and wonders.
We will never know, of course, what tales the Cro-Magnon storytellers told their spellbound audiences on those frosty nights in ancient France. But surely there were strong components of the fantastic in them. The evidence of the oldest stories that have survived argues in favor of that. If fantasy can be defined as literature that depicts the world beyond that of mundane reality, and mankind’s struggle to assert dominance over that world, then the most ancient story that has come down to us—the Sumerian tale of the hero Gilgamesh, which dates from about 2500 B.C.—is fantasy, for its theme is Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life.
Homer’s Odyssey, abounding as it does in shape-shifters and wizards and sorceresses, in Cyclopses and many-headed man-eating creatures, is rich with fantastic elements, too, as are any number of other Greek and Roman tales. As we come closer to our own times we meet the dread monster Grendel of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Midgard serpent and the dragon Fafnir and the apocalyptic Fenris-wolf of the Norse sagas, the hapless immortality-craving Dr. Faustus of German legend, the myriad enchanters of The Thousand and One Nights, the far-larger-than-life heroes of the Welsh Mabinogion and the Persian Shah-Nameh, and an infinity of other strange and wonderful creations.
Nor did the impulse toward the creation of the fantastic disappear as the modern era, the era of microscopes and telescopes, of steam engines and railway systems, of telegraphs and phonographs and electric light, came into being. Our fascination with the unseen and the unseeable did not end simply because so many things previously thought impossible now had become realities. What is more fantastic, after all, than having the sound of an entire symphony orchestra rise up out of a flat disk of plastic? Or to speak into a device that one holds in one’s hand, and be heard and understood ten thousand miles away? But the same century that gave us the inventions of Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell gave us Lewis Carroll’s two incomparable tales of Alice’s adventures in other realities, H. Rider Haggard’s innumerable novels of lost civilizations, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Nor did the twentieth century—the century of air travel and atomic energy, of television and computers, of open-heart surgery and sex-change operations—see us losing our taste for tales of the extraordinary. A host of machine-age fantasists—James Branch Cabell and A. Merritt and Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and Mervyn Peake and L. Frank Baum, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few of the best-known ones—kept the world well supplied with wondrous tales of the fantastic.
One change of tone did occur in the twentieth century, though, with the rise to popularity of science fiction—the branch of fantasy that applies immense ingenuity to the task of making the impossible, or at least the implausible, seem altogether probable. As science fiction—which was given its essential nature well over a hundred years ago by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and developed in modern times by such writers as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Aldous Huxley—came to exert its immense appeal on the atomic-age reading public, “pure” fantasy fiction (that is, fantasy that makes no attempt at empirical explanation of its wonders) came to be thought of as something largely reserved for children, like myths and fairy tales.
The older kind of fantasy never disappeared, of course. But in the United States, at least, it went into eclipse for nearly fifty years. Science fiction, meanwhile, manifested itself to the reading public in the form of magazines with names like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction and readerships composed largely of boys and earnest young men with an interest in gadgets and scientific disputation. The only American magazine dealing in the material we define as fantasy fiction was Weird Tales, founded in 1923, but that magazine published not only fantasy but a great many other kinds of genre fiction that might not be thought of as fantasy today—tales of pure terror, for example, with no speculative content.
The separation between fantasy and science fiction is not always easy to locate, but some distinctions are fairly clear-cut, if not entirely rigid. Stories that deal with androids and robots, spaceships, alien beings, time machines, viruses from outer space, galactic empires, and the like usually can be described as science fiction. These are all matters that are conceptually possible within the framework of scientific law as we currently understand it. (Although such things as time machines and faster-than-light vehicles certainly stretch that framework to its limits, and perhaps beyond them.) Fantasy, meanwhile, uses as its material that which is generally believed to be impossible or nonexistent in our culture: wizards and warlocks, elves and goblins, werewolves and vampires, unicorns and enchanted princesses, efficacious incantations and spells.
Fantasy fiction per se did not have a real magazine of its own until 1939, when John W. Campbell, Jr., the foremost science-fiction editor of his time, brought Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds) into being in order to allow his writers greater imaginative latitude than his definitions of science fiction would permit. Many of the same writers who had turned Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction into the most notable magazine of its type yet published—Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, Jack Williamson—also became mainstays of Unknown, and the general structural approach was similar: postulate a far-out idea and develop
all its consequences to a logical conclusion. The stories about being nasty to water gnomes or selling your soul to the devil wound up in Unknown; those about traveling in time or voyaging to distant planets were published in Astounding.
But Unknown, though it was cherished with great fondness by its readers and writers, never attained much of a public following, and when wartime paper shortages forced Campbell to choose between his two magazines in 1943, Unknown was swiftly killed, never to reappear. Postwar attempts by nostalgic ex-contributors to Unknown to recapture its special flavor were largely unsuccessful; H. L. Gold’s Beyond lasted ten issues, Lester del Rey’s Fantasy Fiction managed only four. Only The Magazine of Fantasy, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, succeeded in establishing itself as a permanent entity, and even that magazine found it wisest to change its name to Fantasy and Science Fiction with its second issue. When science fiction became a fixture of paperback publishing in the 1950s, fantasy once again lagged behind: few fantasy novels were paperbacked, and most of them—Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and the early reprints of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard are good examples—quickly vanished from view and became collector’s items.
It all began to change in the late 1960s, when the sudden availability of paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (previously kept from paperback by an unwilling hardcover publisher) aroused a hunger for fantasy fiction in millions of readers that has, so far, been insatiable. Tolkien’s books were such an emphatic commercial success that publishers rushed to find writers who could produce imitative trilogies, and the world was flooded with huge Hobbitesque novels, many of which sold in extraordinary quantities themselves. Robert Howard’s Conan novels, once admired only by a small band of ardent cultists, began to win vast new readers about the same time. And a few years later Ballantine Books, Tolkien’s paperback publisher, brought out an extraordinary series of books in its Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter, which made all the elegant classic masterpieces of such fantasists as E. R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, and Mervyn Peake available to modern readers. And, ever since, fantasy has been a dominant factor in modern publishing. What was a neglected stepsibling of science fiction fifty years ago is, today, an immensely popular genre.
In the wake of the great success of the Tolkien trilogy, newer writers have come along with their own deeply imagined worlds of fantasy, and have captured large and enthusiastic audiences themselves. In the late 1960s, Ursula Le Guin began her searching and sensitive Earthsea series, and Anne McCaffrey co-opted the ancient fantastic theme of the dragon for her Pern novels, which live on the borderline between fantasy and science fiction. Stephen King, some years later, won a readership of astounding magnitude by plumbing the archetypical fears of humanity and transforming them into powerful novels that occupied fantasy’s darker terrain. Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, has magnificently demonstrated the comic power of satiric fantasy. Such writers as Orson Scott Card and Raymond E. Feist have won huge followings for their Alvin Maker and Riftwar books. More recently, Robert Jordan’s mammoth Wheel of Time series, George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, and Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth tales have taken their place in the pantheon of modern fantasy, as has Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series.
And here is the whole bunch of them, brought together in one huge three-volume collection in which fantasy enthusiasts can revel for weeks. A new Earthsea story, a new tale of Pern, a new Dark Tower adventure, a new segment in Pratchett’s playful Discworld series, and all the rest that you’ll find herein—there has never been a book like this before. Gathering such an elite collection of first-magnitude stars into a single volume has not been an easy task. My gratitude herewith for the special assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Ralph Vicinanza, Stephen King, John Heifers, and Virginia Kidd, who in one way or another made my editorial task immensely less difficult than it otherwise would have been. And, too, although it goes without saying that I’m grateful to my wife, Karen, for her inestimable help in every phase of this intricate project, I think I’ll say it anyway—not just because she’s a terrific person, but because she came up with what unquestionably was the smartest idea of the whole enterprise.
—Robert Silverberg
December, 1997
THE WHEEL OF TIME
Robert Jordan
THE EYE OF THE WORLD (1990)
THE GREAT HUNT (1990)
THE DRAGON REBORN (1991)
THE SHADOW RISING (1992)
THE FIRES OF HEAVEN (1993)
LORD OF CHAOS (1994)
A CROWN OF SWORDS (1996)
The world of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time lies both in our future and our past, a world of kings and queens and Aes Sedai, women who can tap the True Source and wield the One Power, which turns the Wheel and drives the universe: a world where the war between the Light and the Shadow is fought every day.
At the moment of Creation, the Creator bound the Dark One away from the world of humankind, but more than three thousand years ago Aes Sedai, then both men and women, unknowingly bored into that prison outside of time. The Dark One was able to touch the world only lightly, and the hole was eventually sealed over, but the Dark One’s taint settled on saidin, the male half of the Power. Eventually every male Aes Sedai went mad, and in the Breaking of the World they destroyed civilization and changed the very face of the earth, sinking mountains beneath the sea and bringing new seas where land had been.
Now only women bear the title Aes Sedai. Commanded by their Amyrlin Seat and divided into seven Ajahs named by color, they rule the great island city of Tar Valon, where their White Tower is located, and are bound by the Three Oaths, fixed into their bones with saidar, the female half of the Power: To speak no word that is not true, to make no weapon for one man to kill another, and never to use the One Power except as a weapon against Shadowspawn or in the last extreme of defending her own life, or that of her Warder or another sister.
Men still are born who can learn to channel the Power, or worse, who will channel one day whether they try to or not. Doomed to madness, destruction, and death by the taint on saidin, they are hunted down by Aes Sedai and gentled, cut off forever from the Power for the safety of the world. No man goes to this willingly. Even if they survive the hunt, they seldom survive long after gentling.
For more than three thousand years, while nations and empires rose and fell, nothing has been so feared as a man who can channel. But for all those three thousand years there have been the Prophecies of the Dragon, that the seals on the Dark One’s prison will weaken and he will touch the world once more, and that the Dragon, who sealed up that hole, will be Reborn to face the Dark One again. A child, born in sight of Tar Valon on the slopes of Dragonmount, will grow up to be the Dragon Reborn, the only hope of humanity in the Last Battle—a man who can channel. Few people know more than scraps of the Prophecies, and few want to know more.
A world of kings and queens, nations and wars, where the White Tower rules only Tar Valon but even kings and queens are wary of Aes Sedai machinations. A world where the Shadow and the Prophecies loom together.
The present story takes place before the first volume of the series. The succeeding books should be read in order.
NEW SPRING
Robert Jordan
The air of Kandor held the sharpness of new spring when Lan returned to the lands where he had always known he would die. Trees bore the first red of new growth, and a few scattered wild-flowers dotted winter-brown grass where shadows did not cling to patches of snow, yet the pale sun offered little warmth after the south, a gusting breeze cut through his coat, and gray clouds hinted at more than rain. He was almost home. Almost.
A hundred generations had beaten the wide road nearly as hard as the stone of the surrounding hills, and little dust rose, though a steady stream of oxcarts was leaving the morning farmers’ markets in Canluum and merchant trains of tall wagons, surrounded by mounted guards in st
eel caps and bits of armor, flowed toward the city’s high gray walls. Here and there the chains of the Kandori merchants’ guild spanned a chest or an Arafellin wore bells, a ruby decorated this man’s ear, a pearl brooch that woman’s breast, but for the most part the traders’ clothes were as subdued as their manner. A merchant who flaunted too much profit discovered it hard to find bargains. By contrast, farmers showed off their success when they came to town. Bright embroidery decorated the striding country men’s baggy breeches, the women’s wide trousers, their cloaks fluttering in the wind. Some wore colored ribbons in their hair, or a narrow fur collar. They might have been dressed for the coming Bel Tine dances and feasting. Yet country folk eyed strangers as warily as any guard, eyed them and hefted spears or axes and hurried along. The times carried an edge in Kandor, maybe all along the Borderlands. Bandits had sprung up like weeds this past year, and more troubles than usual out of the Blight. Rumor even spoke of a man who channeled the One Power, but then, rumor often did.
Leading his horse toward Canluum, Lan paid as little attention to the stares he and his companion attracted as he did to Bukama’s scowls and carping. Bukama had raised him from the cradle, Bukama and other men now dead, and he could not recall seeing anything but a glower on that weathered face, even when Bukama spoke praise. This time his mutters were for a stone-bruised hoof that had him afoot, but he could always find something.
They did attract attention, two very tall men walking their mounts and a packhorse with a pair of tattered wicker hampers, their plain clothes worn and travel-stained. Their harness and weapons were well tended, though. A young man and an old, hair hanging to their shoulders and held back by a braided leather cord around the temples. The hadori drew eyes. Especially here in the Borderlands, where people had some idea what it meant.