Legends of Australian Fantasy Jack Dann

We could quibble about dates and times, about which particular starting point to choose, but for the purposes of this particular book ‘ground zero’ happened some time in early 1961. That year an American editor, Donald A. Wolheim, spotted an opportunity. There was, he believed, a flaw in North American copyright law that would allow him to publish an out-of-copyright edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Wolheim’s mass market paperback editions of Tolkien’s classic might not seem to be particularly important at first glance. After all, Tolkien’s trilogy had been published in England in 1955, had been well-reviewed, and was fairly well-known. But it didn’t become a ‘phenomenon’ until Wolheim published his ‘bootleg’ paperback editions. In large measure Wolheim’s editions turned The Lord of the Rings into the underground pop culture and international literary classic that it is today, with major publishers producing ‘authorised’ hardcover and mass market editions.

So how does all this lead into Legends of Australian Fantasy?

Well, we could argue the details, but The Lord of the Rings was the first enormously successful secondary-world fantasy that sold to young and older readers alike. Tolkien, an ageing English university professor, became the first-ever fantasy bestseller. His work directly inspired Terry Brooks, whose novel The Swords of Shannara — which attempted to create a more widely accessible version of Tolkien’s work — became a runaway bestseller too when it was published in 1977. That book, and its many sequels, went on to sell millions of copies. That same year Stephen R. Donaldson published Lord Foul’s Bane, the first volume in his The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a darker and more challenging book; but still an enormously successful epic fantasy.

Within only a few years writers like Donaldson and Brooks, and later David Eddings, Raymond E. Feist, Terry Goodkind, and Robert Jordan, proved that readers the world over were not only willing to, but were desperately eager to read epic fantasy adventures, and read them in enormous quantity. There’s little doubt that their work inspired millions of readers, some of whom went on to become successful writers themselves.

While Australia has a long tradition of creating wonderful fantasy stories, especially for younger readers — Patricia Wrightson’s stories, the work of P.L. Travers and others immediately come to mind — it took a little while for the epic fantasy phenomenon to hit our fair shores. The stories told by Tolkien, Brooks, Eddings, and Feist seized the imaginations of Australian readers; but it wasn’t until the late 1980s (when Isobelle Carmody’s very successful ‘Obernewtyn’ series debuted) that an Australian writer really attempted to create an epic fantasy adventure on a grand scale.

Novels by Martin Middleton, Tony Shillitoe and Shannah Jay soon followed Carmody’s epic fantasy, but it took until 1995 for Australia to produce its first bona fide bestselling fantasy writer. That year Sara Douglass’s BattleAxe was the first title to come from HarperCollins Australia’s new Voyager imprint. It went on to become a runaway bestseller and was, in turn, followed by wonderful epic adventures from Traci Harding, Sean Williams, Garth Nix and many more.

Each year the fantasy and science fiction community gathers in a city somewhere around the world for the World Science Fiction Convention. The majority of readers picking up this book will most likely be unaware that it is being published on the eve of the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, which is set to be held in Melbourne for the fourth time. The last time WorldCon was held in Australia, in 1999, this book would barely have been possible, and the time before that it would have been completely impossible. Now it seems inevitable.

This book is, we believe, something very special: a collection of eleven stories written especially for this volume by some of Australia’s own legends of fantasy. In these pages bestselling authors Garth Nix, Trudi Canavan, Juliet Marillier, John Birmingham, Isobelle Carmody, Kim Wilkins, Sean Williams, D.M. Cornish, Ian Irvine, Jennifer Fallon and Cecilia Dart-Thornton have created brand new short novels set in their most popular ‘signature’ universe ... or in a brand-new universe they are just starting to create. Here is a chance to settle back into the familiar worlds of your favourite fantasists ... or to sneak a ‘first look’ at the characters and settings that they will be creating in future.

So settle back into your armchair and enjoy these glittering jewels of magic and imagination. These stories will sing to you; they will shock, delight, and amaze you; and they will transport you to dangerous, fabulous and unknown places.

Enjoy the trip.

We certainly did!

Jack Dann & Jonathan Strahan

Melbourne/Perth, June 2010

<<Contents>>