Product Description

They are extraordinary characters living outside the bounds of reality. But you will recognize them... It's about being gay, being straight, falling in love, sorrowful partings, death, and fantastic circumstances. Bending the Landscape stretches the standard fantasy genre. In the groundbreaking anthology, queer writers write fantasy for the first time, and genre writers explore queer characters. But don't expect the usual fantasy backdrops-these stories will give you a frisson, a thrill, as they fizz off the page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1949035 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding Writing
This book features some of the finest short fiction I've seen in fantasy literature. While sexuality is an important underlying theme, it does not overpower the force of most of these excellent stories. The characters are people, not political statements or stereotypes. I hope this book finds its way into the hands of many mainstream readers.

Collection's range wider than one might expect
This book is the first in a series of collections of genre fiction featuring gay and lesbian characters. Although some might pass it by assuming that the contents are either pornographic or pulp, this is a serious mistake. The stories are overall of high quality, and the subject matter is quite wide-ranging. Many of the authors will be familiar to readers of fantasy literature, and Thieves World fans will be pleased to hear that one of the stories takes place in that universe

Mind-bending fantasy
Because of its diverse bouquet of erotic undercurrents, BTL: Fantasy is especially adept with wry, bittersweet fantasies - not the swords-and-sorcery type, but touching tales with a modern-supernatural slant. There are all sorts of uplifting motifs here - getting over midlife crises (Antieau's "Desire"), revisiting childhood places ( Thrower's "The Home Town Boy"), dealing with the deaths of friends (Shepherd's "Gary, in the Shadows") and loved ones (Silverthrorne's "The Sound of Angels"), release and spiritual freedom (What's "Beside the Well"), turning back the clock on painful memories (Verona's "Mahu"), and so on.

As far as the subgenres represented in this volume, you'll find very few traditional hack-and-slash stories ("The Stars Are Tears," "Magicked Tricks," and "In Mysterious Ways" being the only three, and they're all comedic). Especially numerous are gritty-dark-urban-modern fantasies along the lines of Don Bassingthwaite's "In Memory of," a tale of two vengeful dragon-brothers vying for fragile human lovers in a city setting. Also numerous are fringe stories that don't quite belong to any single genre because they have so few fictional elements - Matter's "Water Snakes" is an example.

Unfortunately, the settings aren't a very original lot: many stories are set in generic urban environments; there are a couple bare-bones Oriental stories; even the purely imaginary settings (such as the one in Sherman and Kushner's "The Fall of Kings") didn't strike me as especially original.

The writing, however, is uniformly good, if totally unexceptional, fitting well with the characters that behave interestingly but almost never transcend their two-dimensionality. The sexual elements hardly ever seem over the top (though Sheppard's "There Are Things Hidden from the Eyes of the Everyday" is just too much), even if most stories do seem identical from this perspective.

Together with its science fiction counterpart, I consider BTL: Fantasy a quintessential resource for alternative genre fiction.