This afternoon, more than two months after buying the thing, I FINALLY finished reading Epic: Legends of Fantasy, the epic fantasy anthology edited by John Joseph Adams. I’m sure I would have finished reading it earlier but for the great tsunami of grad school work that washed over my life this semester. Yet even with all that work I still chugged through it, story by story whenever I could spare the time, because it was fantastic. Five stars overall!
The anthology did exactly what I hoped it would do: introduced me to some big names (as well as some not-quite-as-big, yet very talented names) in epic fantasy and revived my interest in a genre that I once loved and from which I’ve since grown estranged. If anyone’s looking to start reading fantasy and needs a place to begin, this is what I would recommend. I read a review in which someone complained that almost none of the stories could stand alone (without the reader being familiar with the worlds the stories came from), but I beg to differ. It certainly helps to have that knowledge already, but reading fantasy and sci-fi requires you to be able to take the cues the author gives you and figure things out as you go along. (I believe this was called “abeyance” in Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.) If you’re willing to be patient and use your head a little bit, you’ll do fine.
I loved nearly all of the stories, except of course a few notables, like “While the Gods Laugh” (Moorcock), “Riding the Shore of the River of Death” (Elliott), and “The Narcomancer” (Jemisin). To be completely honest, I actually did like Kate Elliott’s story by the end, but only because I forced myself through the first part; the world-building just didn’t hook me until then, although that’s purely a matter of taste, not of Elliott’s talent. The world-building of “The Narcomancer” was pretty fascinating, but the story I found personally distasteful. “While the Gods Laugh” was the only story that stood out to me as being simply…bad. It was creative, but I just couldn’t stand the 1D characterization.
My favorite stories were many, but I want to give a special mention of “As the Wheel Turns” (Aliette de Bodard), “The Alchemist” (Paolo Bacigalupi), “Sandmagic” (Orson Scott Card), “The Road to Levinshir” (Patrick Rothfuss), and “The Mystery Knight” (George R. R. Martin). The world-building in all five of these stories was superb, the characters were engaging and memorable, and the storylines themselves were the kind that make you sit in your chair reading long after the tea has gone cold and the clock says time for bed. Robin Hobb’s “Homecoming” was also great, the first story in the collection and one that will stick with me, though for slightly different reasons than the others.
Overall this was an excellent and inspiring collection — excellent for the quality of the stories and inspiring for the range of worlds to get the imagination of other fantasy writers flying. Time to go read more from these authors!
