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Tehani Wessely of Australia reviews the new edition of Black Thorn, White Rose. She mostly likes the stories and overall gives the book a very good review, but this paragraph struck me:
"Fourteen years is a long time, and these stories first saw print in 1994. So much has changed in the world since then: the ways we perceive good and evil not the least, but also the things that have the power to shock us, to scare us, and to permit us to suspend our disbelief. Hence, there were stories in this anthology that felt old, dated, tired. It is possible to envisage them as fresh and groundbreaking when first published, but the intervening years, and many similar collections (including a number produced by the same editors, some of which I will review soon), have left this anthology feeling a little stale."
Dragonkat@LJ
Once I edit an anthology I rarely reread the stories in print. I've already read them a number of times during the editing process. So I'm not a good judge of this.
Is it true that an anthology series such as the adult fairy tale anthologies, all published in the mid-to late 90s can become dated? I'd think it would completely depend on each individual story. (this is for any fiction written after traumatic current events such as post Vietnam war, post 9/11, et al).
If the story is tied to a particular sensibility or for example, air travel is depicted more innocently than now in our time of terrorism fear does this necessarily date the story or merely make it a snapshot of time?
Because my head is a complete muddle of stuffiness and I'm feeling kind of wretched, I'm not sure if this makes sense, but I'd love some opinions.
"Fourteen years is a long time, and these stories first saw print in 1994. So much has changed in the world since then: the ways we perceive good and evil not the least, but also the things that have the power to shock us, to scare us, and to permit us to suspend our disbelief. Hence, there were stories in this anthology that felt old, dated, tired. It is possible to envisage them as fresh and groundbreaking when first published, but the intervening years, and many similar collections (including a number produced by the same editors, some of which I will review soon), have left this anthology feeling a little stale."
Dragonkat@LJ
Once I edit an anthology I rarely reread the stories in print. I've already read them a number of times during the editing process. So I'm not a good judge of this.
Is it true that an anthology series such as the adult fairy tale anthologies, all published in the mid-to late 90s can become dated? I'd think it would completely depend on each individual story. (this is for any fiction written after traumatic current events such as post Vietnam war, post 9/11, et al).
If the story is tied to a particular sensibility or for example, air travel is depicted more innocently than now in our time of terrorism fear does this necessarily date the story or merely make it a snapshot of time?
Because my head is a complete muddle of stuffiness and I'm feeling kind of wretched, I'm not sure if this makes sense, but I'd love some opinions.
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But I love the OLD, original fairy tales, before they were disney-fied, before they were seetened up for children. The original ones that WERE written for adults.
so for me, they will never become tired, old or stale.
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I think they're both ways of saying the same thing, and that one is more polite than the other. The pieces that get the "snapshot of time" designation are the ones people will be reading some time into the future, and looking at those dated elements and seeing them as unique, windows into a time long past.
I think the film "Dog Day Afternoon" is a pretty good example of that: a snapshot of time from the seventies. That movie certainly wouldn't have been made today.
In other words, a snapshot into time gives us insight into an era while still being a story that speaks to you, rather than having the artifacts of that time make the tale incomprehensible to contemporary sensibilities.
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To shock and scare" are what I might aim for with a horror anthology. However, if the reader can't suspend disbelief while reading any kind of fantasy because of a jarring intrusion of a current reality, that's a problem.
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For me (and I'm showing precisely how young I am here :), Harlan Ellison's work is a really good example of that principle at work.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "after traumatic current events." Artists in all fields are still dealing with the cultural aftershock of 9/11. Frankly, I think they'd still be dealing with Vietnam if 9/11 hadn't replaced it.
I don't know if that's particularly detrimental to this particular one. I have to admit that I've only read certain stories from the series while in the bookstore, since I'm young and indigent, but what I did read didn't strike me as such. But, well, like I said, I didn't get the whole picture.
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I love reading a lot of Harlan Ellison's work. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" still packs a wallop.
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of course.
in this particular case, i can see how one or two of the stories might be (i'm thinking specifically of the beckett and cole stories), but i think that reviewer is rather overstating the case and that the bulk of the book has aged quite well.
i also very much disagree that the social perception of 'good' and 'evil' has changed markedly over the past fourteen years and am a bit puzzled by that statement.
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Urban fantasy before Buffy, for instance, might be considered dated by current readers who began reading after the post-buffy UF snark and wit became almost imbedded.
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Argh. I'm sorry =/. It was thrown out as a possible explanation for why some readers might find the work dated -- but it wasn't meant to be an "all readers will find this dated". I think our entry points into the genre as readers are always going to affect the way we feel about what we read when we do come to it because some of the tropes will trickle down and become much more common in later works, but I honestly didn't mean to cause more stress.
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I think not. Fairy tales and myths inform readers of human psychological dynamics through use of metaphor. History itself is just that: history. But describing social evolution through the art forms will never be passe.
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Truth be told, there are quite a few stories in it that I didn't like sooo much, but on the other hands, there are some that I still DO love. And BLACK THORN, WHITE ROSE was one of the anthology editions that did have GREAT stories, as - for example "Stronger than Time" (Wrede), "The Black Swan" (S. Wade" or "The Goose Girl" (Wynne-Jones).
I can re-read them and still love them.
And I am not saying that *just* because I am a fan.
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Right now, I'm rereading lots of stories that I remember loving (horror stories) because of the 25 years of modern horror reprint anthology I'm editing...I'm finding that some of the stories I loved loved loved twenty years ago, do nothing for me. Others are still transgressive/shocking/disturbing/just plain readable.
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Then again, I LOVED some novels back when I was a teenager. This is similar to what you said. I tried to read some of them as a grown-up (at least as grown-up as I am *g*) and some of them I still liked - others I just couldn't understand what I loved on them.
The story didn't change. But the reader did.
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OTOH, I could never get through Sartre's nonfiction volume Being and Nothingness ;-)
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Terri and I have occasionally tossed up the idea of creating a new anthology of adult fairy tales, but I worry that the sub-genre has been played out. I know we can get writers (our regulars and new ones) to write excellent new stories, but I think the market may be gone... We are working up a few more proposals for one offs...adult, ya, and middle grade.
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Stories don't have to fit the world as it is right now, I think. Part of the importance of stories is capturing what's important to people - and what's important to people tends to change only slightly, and the small ways in which it has changed, well, part of the importance of stories is keeping a record of that, too.
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I originally bought your anthologies in the 1980's and when I re-read them, I simply enjoy the stories. I don't try to squeeze them into a 21st century sensibility. The same with any classic authors I read, Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury.
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Just checked my biblio and the OMNI anthos published by Zebra were out in the 80s and my first half original antho, Blood is Not Enough was published in 1989 in hc.
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That paragraph strikes me as the equivalent of making conversation about the weather while thinking of something meaningful to say.
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However, it also depends on the theme of the anthology. Like if you were going to make a 9/11-inspired anthology, it'd probably become dated 40 years from now.
My caveat of course is also what the story is attempting. For me, when I read Black Thorn, White Rose, I found it still quite an impressive read, mainly because the stories were well-written so much so that they stand well on their own and aren't like some stories which only rely on delivering a punch line (whether it's to horrify or to make readers laugh for example). Or a better an analogy might be something like Gulliver's Travels wherein the political satire might be lost to modern readers, but because it was written in such a way that it's still a good story despite the satire.
But then again, there are also times that because of a work's popularity, they themselves do get outdated. Like E.E. Docsmith pioneered many space opera elements that if you read his work nowadays, it'll sound cliche. Unless of course as a reader, that's the first space opera work you've read.
And then there's expectations. When you mentioned "adult fairy tales", what was the reader expecting? Did it mean well-crafted stories that goes beyond the didactic flow of today's stories? Or perhaps something more sexual, more taboo? I suspect the reviewer was expecting more of the latter in this case and so there's a different way in which the book was approached.
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"I adore anything that even comes close to being a retelling of one of my beloved fairytales. Silly, sentimental...I don't care I just love fairytales. I eagerly picked this book up at the library for a little light reading between exams and papers. Boy, was I disappointed! I felt horrid reading this stuff. I just could not finish it. I'm sorry, but I do not find it entertaining in the least to read about adults lusting after children...a theme found in several of the stories. Sleeping with the mother while attempting to seduce the young daughter. Feeling up a child who is clinging to you because she is afraid of the woods. Raping children!!!! This book makes me sad. I only gave it one star because I had to."
and another:
"Then there's "Snowdrop" by Tanith Lee, a totally pointless story which seems little more than a spiffed-up Snow White with a lesbian sex scene to make things more "adult." Such a preoccupation with graphic, pointless sex is not adult; it is adolescent. The end result is that this anthology performs the rather dubious task of removing fairy tales from the nursery and putting them in the adult novelty store instead."
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Ironically, fairy tales were not generally intended to calm children, but often to terrorize them. Snow White's stepmother being made to dance in red hot iron boots until she died, for example.
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I read fantasy extensively, in the short and long form, and am perhaps overfond of fairy tale retellings. If I had read this book fourteen years ago, my palate for such tales would not have been as (for want of a better word) jaded. I would not have experienced so many and varied retellings of the stories as have been produced over the years, and would not have had the same feeling about the book.
As I said, "It is possible to envisage them as fresh and groundbreaking when first published", because Ellen and Terri would have ensured that they were. However, over fourteen years of publishing, others have done and redone - in myriad forms - similar tales, so it is harder feel the freshness in the collection from such a distance.
I did enjoy reading the anthology, as I have enjoyed others in the series. I recently picked up "Swan Sister" and devoured it. I now have "A Wolf at the Door" in my 'to read' pile, because I believe in the editorial credibility inherent in the anthologies. And I certainly respect the right of others to read the anthology in a different way, and NOT see it the way I did. As with any review, it is only a reflection of the tastes and background of the person reading it. I always try to see the book from a broad perspective and not completely from my own point of view, but essentially, all reviews are written from one person's experiences. So that was mine, with "Black Thorn, White Rose". I enjoyed it, I had no problems READING it, I just found reviewing it more difficult because I could see the intervening years.
Thanks Ellen for inviting me to comment here, and for permitting me to read the collection in the first place!
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Like the Datlow/Windling anthologies, those books will never get old for me. }:)
This is, after all, the person who spent nearly 16 years hunting down a series of books based only on the title of the last book, and a rememberance of what they were about, and literally cried when I not only found all 4, but in first edition, hardcover as well (Geraldine Harris, Seven Citadels series), and has original paperback copies of Jane Yolen's White Jenna series as well, as many, many other, older books that I reread and reread and reread... }:P
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I think the only time something might seem dated to me would be if I'm reading a book written in, say, 1990, predicting what things were going to be like in 2000, and they got it all wrong or made it way too futuristic or whatever. So books that predict a future that has now passed might bring out that feeling a bit. Even so, it's fun to read them and see what people thought would happen.
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review of Black Thorn, White Rose