Stratofanatic's Emporium

What's the gender of genre fantasy during the 1980s, you might ask? Luckily for you, I've spent the last few weeks researching  exactly that question! So, I've lately been studying Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, the founders of Del Rey books, to see how exactly they achieved their extraordinary success. To that end, I've compiled a spreadsheet exhaustively analyzing every fantasy title Del Rey Books published during their hegemony. Of the many things I'm studying, one is gender. Long story short: a large part of mainstreaming genre fantasy relied on the del Reys realizing that, in order to find a mass audience for fantasy fiction, a genre then-current consensus considered unsellable, Lester and Judy-Lynn had to target an audience that was (a) young, and (b) mostly male. Mind you, this isn't necessarily a ground-breaking revelation. Still, it's one thing to appeal to popular perception ... and another thing to draw conclusions based on hard data. And the data ...

If I've never previous heard of David Anthony Durham before this, does that make me a bad fantasy person? Maybe! I did learn about him, though, a few months back after reading an interview by Charles R. Saunders, who mentioned Durham as a good black writer producing recent fantasy. So I ordered  Acadia: The War with the Mein  (2008), and I was deeply impressed with Durham's thematic ambition and his world-building. Notably, it's probably the single most  diverse  fantasy world I've yet encountered .... all kinds of skin colors in the provinces of the "Known World," from white to brown to dark black, and each gets some narrative playing time. The oddest (best?) thing is that you don't know quite whom to root for, at least initially. On one hand, yeah, you root for Emperor Leodan Akaran. While he's not a terribly good ruler, he super loves his kids, who all have distinct personalities and seem like decent chaps, at least for pampered princes and prin...

Well, this is amusing. I randomly had a reason to delve into Anthology of Children's Literature (5th edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1977), edited by Edna Johnson, Evelyn R. Sickels, et al, and I thought, "Well, this is odd! They have an excerpt from The Hobbit ... the 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter, no less." So I had a quick look-see .... and discovered they were reprinting the original first edition text of that chapter! Never you mind that the revised 2nd edition of The Hobbit came out in 1951, or that The Lord of the Rings had firmly cemented Gollum's reputation as a sneaky sneaking sneakster in the popular imagination. No, they reprint the first edition text where Gollum, after losing the riddle context, apologizes profusely for having somehow lost the "present" Bilbo had won (i.e., the One Ring already in Bilbo's pocket), and so meekly leads Bilbo out of the Misty Mountains in recompense. Given that this anthology is from Tolkien's America...