Arthur W. Saha (1923-1999) was editor for DAW’s Year’s Best Fantasy #7-14 (1981-1988). The previous editor had been Lin Carter, whose selections leaned towards Sword & Sorcery. It may have been a change in the times, but I suspect it was a change of editor that made the later collections less heroic in its fantasies. For instance, Carter wrote a lengthy summation of the year’s achievements (almost worth the price of the book) but Saha gave only a slight version of this, like it was a chore. While Carter’s choices were quirky and sometimes self-serving, Saha’s picks more fair and less interesting for the fan of Sword & Sorcery.
Saha was an old friend of Donald A. Wollheim, so when DAW created his own line of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror paperbacks, Saha was a logical choice. As a fan of Science Fiction, he edited World’s Best SF from 1972 to 1990. Taking over Lin’s Fantasy annual was not a big jump. (Why Lin left I don’t know.) Saha was one of Pohl’s Futurians, a life-long fan, a member of First Fandom, a collector and commentator. He was the man who coined the word “Trekkie” in 1967 in an interview for TV Guide. Saha wasn’t just some guy off the street.
I suppose my ire with this series of books first comes from the covers. Two with Elric, all showing clearly Sword & Sorcery style images by Sanjulian, Segrelles and even a Gor cover. The packaging promises a wide selection of heroic fantasy but the reality is something else.
Here are the contents of these eight volumes:
“The George Business” by Roger Zelazny
“The Princess and the Bear” by Orson Scott Card
“Proteus” by Paul H. Cook
“Spidersong” by Susan C. Petrey
“The Narrow House” by Phillip C. Heath
“Wolfland” by Tanith Lee
“Melpomene, Calliope … and Fred” by Simon Hawke (as Nicholas Yermakov)
“Kevin Malone” by Gene Wolfe
“Lan Lung” by M. Lucie Chin
“Keeper of the Wood” by Caradoc A. Cador
“The Sleep of Trees” by Jane Yolen
“When the Clock Strikes” by Tanith Lee
“Midas Night” by Sam Wilson
“Unicorn Variations” by Roger Zelazny
Gillian
“The Quickening” by Michael Bishop
“The River Maid” by Jane Yolen
“Skirmish on Bastable Street” by Bob Leman
“A Pattern of Silver Strings” by Charles de Lint
“A Friend in Need” by Lisa Tuttle
“Pooka’s Bridge” by Gillian Fitzgerald
“The Belonging Kind” by William Gibson and John Shirley
“Influencing the Hell Out of Time and Teresa Golowitz” by Parke Godwin
“Mirage and Magia” by Tanith Lee
“’Other’” by Jor Jennings
“The Horror on the #33” by Michael Shea
“Another Orphan” by John Kessel
“Lest Levitation Come Upon Us” by Suzette Haden Elgin
“Sentences” by Richard Christian Matheson
“Square and Above Board” by R. A. Lafferty
“The Malaysian Mer” by Jane Yolen
“Djinn, No Chaser” by Harlan Ellison
“Blue Vase of Ghosts” by Tanith Lee
“She Sells Sea Shells” by Paul Darcy Boles
“Green Roses” by Larry Tritten
“Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu
“Huggins’ World” by Ennis Duling
“The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars” by Fritz Leiber
“The Silent Cradle” by Leigh Kennedy
“Into Whose Hands” by Karl Edward Wagner
“Like a Black Dandelion” by John Alfred Taylor
“The Hills Behind Hollywood High” by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
“Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree, Jr.
“Draco, Draco” by Tanith Lee
“Harvest Child” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“Love Among the Xoids” by John Sladek
“Stoneskin” by John Morressy
“Unmistakably the Finest” by Scott Bradfield
“The Foxwife” by Jane Yolen
“Golden Apples of the Sun” by Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
“My Rose and My Glove” by Harvey Jacobs
“Strange Shadows” by Clark Ashton Smith
“A Little Two-Chair Barber Shop on Phillips Street” by Donald R. Burleson
“Taking Heart” by Stephen L. Burns
“The Storm” by David Morrell
“A Cabin on the Coast” by Gene Wolfe
“Unferno” by George Alec Effinger
“Dinner in Audoghast” by Bruce Sterling
“Fortunes of a Fool” by Simon Hawke (as Nicholas Yermakov)
“Preliminary Notes on the Jang” by Lisa Goldstein
“The Red House” by Robert R. McCammon
“Flight” by Peter Dickinson
“The Castle at World’s End” by Chris Naylor
“The Persistence of Memory” by Gaèl Baudino
“The Face in the Cloth” by Jane Yolen
“The Last Dragon Master” by A. A. Attanasio
“Paladin of the Lost Hour” by Harlan Ellison
“Beauty Is the Beast” by Tanith Lee
“Something in the Blood” by Richard L. Purtill
“Pièce de Résistance” by Judith Tarr
“Long, Long Ago” by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
“The Old Man and the Cherry Tree” by Kevin J. Anderson
“Phone Repairs” by Nancy Kress
“The Tale and Its Master” by Michael Rutherford
“Sanctuary” by Kim Antieau
“The Uncorking of Uncle Finn” by Jane Yolen
“A Place to Stay for a Little While” by Jim Aikin
“The Boy Who Plaited Manes” by Nancy Springer
“Night’s Daughter, Day’s Desire” by Tanith Lee
“The Little Magic Shop” by Bruce Sterling
“Transients” by Darrell Schweitzer
“The Snow Apples” by Gwyneth Jones
“The Glassblower’s Dragon” by Lucius Shepard
“The Apotheosis of Isaac Rosen” by Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Waiting for a Bus” by John Whitbourn
“Happy Hour” by J. N. Williamson
“Ever After” by Susan Palwick
“A Little of What You Fancy” by Mary Catherine McDaniel
“Inky” by Jayge Carr
“Maxie Silas” by Augustine Funnell
So where is the Sword & Sorcery? (That term was already becoming the pejorative it would be in the 1990s. Authors wrote Epic Fantasy, or Dark Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy, anything but S&S.) The choice in authors (which I have no fault in terms of writing quality) include Tanith Lee, who Carter also selected. Her work is lyrical and enchanting but never really gritty enough to be called S&S. “Draco Draco” comes closest. Jane Yolen brings her wonderful talent to telling stories that feel like fairy tales even when they are new, as does M. Lucie Chin, Charles de Lint, Peter Dickinson and Lucius Shepard. Again, not heroic fantasy.
Many names are known from Science Fiction including Harlan Ellison (not a fan of S&S), Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Ian Watson, George Alec Effinger, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, John Sladek, Gene Wolfe and Avram Davidson. Many of these authors had written heroic fantasy in the past but not here. Like Karl Edward Wagner, who created Kane, and was featured in an earlier volume, not here. Richard L. Purtill and C. J. Cherryh are DAW authors, which gets me thinking many of these writers are included first because they have novels published by DAW and not because they are the best of the year. Those Elric covers become easier to understand too: DAW was reprinting Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Hawkmoon novels at this time.
Also becoming more and more frequent are the horror stories, another form of Fantasy. Robert R. McCammon, Michael Shea, Richard Christian Matheson, J. N. Williamson, are not S&S writers and should probably have been in Year’s Best Horror (edited by Wagner) instead. Darrel Schweitzer writes in both genres (as does Shea) but I find more Cthulhu Mythos than S&S with writers like Don Burleson. There is a long-lost Clark Ashton Smith tale but it isn’t one of his fantasies. It feels like Saha can’t make up his mind what kind of anthology he is creating.
What actual heroic fantasy does make it? One Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tale by Fritz Leiber, “The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars” from Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Heroic Visions anthologies. “The Castle at World’s End” by Chris Naylor from Fantasy Tales, and “The Tale and Its Master” by Michael Rutherford, “Taking Heart” by Stephen L. Burns from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress, “Stoneskin” by John Morressey from F&SF also please. Not much for eight anthologies.
Looking at where Arthur W. Saha pulled these stories things makes things clearer: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, Interzone and many other anthologies, both SF and Horror predominate. Unlike Carter, Saha ignores smaller fan publications and role-playing game magazines like The Dragon. At this time the Thieves’ World shared worlds are happening, Marion Zimmer Bradley had Sword & Sorceress, Andre Norton had Ithkar, etc. but Saha chooses very little from these places.
The series ended after 1988. Was this because there was no market for short Fantasy anymore? Certainly not. DAW wasn’t finding the series promoted their books enough? Maybe. Probably just poor sales, as heroic fantasy fans learned their lesson not to buy these books anymore, no matter the cover art. It’s too bad there aren’t more of them, but other publishers picked up the torch into the 1990s. But it wasn’t the same. Most were Horror-oriented when picked by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling or Science Fictional from David Hartwell. Lin Carter, we miss you.
NB. Robert Silverberg’s A Century of Fantasy 1980-1989 (1996) pretty much confirms my thinking here. Silverberg is collecting the very best stories of the decade and his picks are very familiar. Four are the same as Saha, and most of the others are by the same authors but different stories. None of them are from my short sword & Sorcery list. (He does give a good summation of the best of the 1970s including J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, the Ballantine Fantasy series, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks, Katherine Kurtz, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny,and then the 1980s…) He also pulls a Lin Carter and includes his own “Not Our Brother”.
I had one reader of this article respond with “Bummer!” and I admit this is a complaint piece. But it also begs a question I should try to answer in another post: why did Fantasy transition away from heroic fantasy in short fiction after 1980 and into the 1990s?
I don’t recognize a GOR cover on any of them. Oddly the GOR novels were hugely popular in my high school with both the guys and girls.