Bending the Landscape: Fantasy

Presents fantasy fiction from gay writers, including Mark Shepherd, Lisa S. Silverthorne, Leslie What, Simon Sheppard, and Jeff Verona

Amazon.com Review

Bending the Landscape will be a series of anthologies focused on homosexual issues in genre fiction, but this one isn't so neatly pigeonholed as all that. Gayness, or someone's discovery of his or her gayness, is indeed a common motif to all the stories, but in some it is central; in others, it's just a quality a character has--they happen to be having or have had a relationship with someone of the same sex. It's generous in size, 22 stories, and generous in its embrace, ranging in tone from sitcom-like light entertainment ("In Mysterious Ways," by Tanya Huff, and "Magicked Tricks" by K. L Berac), to realism ("Gestures Too Late on a Gravel Road" by Mark W. Tiedemann, and "Full Moon and Empty Arms" by M. W. Keiper), to realistic horror ("The House of the Man in the Moon" by Richard Bowes). Mythic fantasy, fairy tales, and ghost stories are all here too, so this is more like reading a survey than a tightly thematic anthology. The variety is appropriate. Neither fantasy nor sex comes in just one flavor. If you're at all interested in anything besides vanilla, sample this.

From Library Journal

In this collection of commissioned stories, gay and straight writers?including Mark W. Tiedemann, Kim Antieu, and Ellen Kushner?incorporate gay themes into fantasy stories. Many have explicit homosexual sex scenes. This first of a proposed trilogy (the others will cover science fiction and horror) brings a new perspective to the genre. For lesbian, gay, and bisexual literature collections as well as larger sf collections.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

From the Seattle-based Griffith (Slow River, 1995, etc.) and White Wolf publishing executive Pagel, the first of a gender- bending series of anthologies (a volume of sf stories and another of horror are projected) whose purpose is to have ``some queer writers write fantasy for the first time, and for some genre writers to explore queer characters,'' not to mention a table of contents set in a typeface so bizarre as to be almost indecipherable. Here, then, are 23 fantasies with gay/lesbian characters or themes. Carolyn Ives Gilman's splendid ``Frost Painting'' explores ancient spirits, love, and dazzling new forms of art. Leslie What's ``Beside the Well'' describes a Korean family's implacable clash of wills. In ``The King's Folly,'' James A. Moore pursues the downfall of a foolish and arrogant monarch and the strange fate of his faithful advisor. Two stories derive from the shared-world setting of Thieves' World. Others feature ghosts, folktales, why things fall from the sky, singing whales, a diner with immortality on the menu, a vampire painter, the Magicians of Fez, noblesse oblige, vengeance, Japan, lighthouses, mysterious deaths, Louis XIV, Pearl Harbor, and more. Well and confidently crafted and often sexually challenging, but in other respects neither particularly original nor surprising. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Nicola Griffith's novels include Ammonite, Slow River, Stay and The Blue Palace. She has been awarded the Lambda Award numerous times as well as the Nebula Award. Stephen Pagel is an award-winning editor, president and co-owner of Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc., and a former national buyer for science fiction and fantasy for Barnes & Noble.

Reviews

News