Possibly the UK's second longest-running sf/f fiction zine.
FantasyCon 2023 took place from 15 to 17 September 2023, at the Leonardo Royal Hotel Birmingham. The same hotel (then called Jurys Inn) was the location for FantasyCon 2021, and I was glad it was back there. The suite of smaller rooms is perfect for hosting several strands of events, the bar is downstairs out of the way so no need to wade through boozy blokes to get to anything, and best of all it’s in Birmingham so we (Mrs Theaker and I) can get home in a taxi at the end of the night.
Reading it was an odd experience, then, because I was on the alert for clues as to why successive chairs declined to publish a print anthology that members had been promised so long ago, and to which members had been asked to contribute, especially when the society's publishing programme has been so threadbare. (I'm writing in May 2022, and this is the only BFS publication, ebook or otherwise, to have been released since July 2021, and that one (BFS Journal #22) was the only print publication the society has released in the 17 months since December 2020. Were the stories in this terrible? Was it badly edited? (Obviously not, with the ever-conscientious Allen Ashley in charge, but I knew that certain other BFS publications had been delayed for that reason.) Was there something problematic about the book?
Now obviously I'm biased, as a contributor, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The premise of the anthology is that all the authors are at the beginning of their fiction writing careers, including me (I've written and published quite a lot of fiction, but only in my own magazines, and for the purposes of this anthology self-publishing didn't count), but the stories are, on the whole, as good as anything I've read in other BFS publications. None of the stories offered any clues as to why the anthology hasn't seen print.
The only story I could imagine anyone classing as problematic was "The Hanging Tree" by Kim Gravell. It's about hanged witches and the desire of their descendants for justice, but I suppose that, looked at from another angle, you might say it's about a woman who realises she is in love with the man strangling her to death and afterwards says to him that "love and hope are strong enough to conquer anything". But it's still an interesting story and I can't imagine anyone would think it so problematic as to compromise the anthology.
I suppose there isn't much sword and sorcery for a fantasy anthology, but "The Uninvited" by Nicola Gifford offers some as valkyrie battle the Devil, his wyvern and an army of zombies. The sword in "The Giant's Rib" by Elliott Simpson only ever gets used against a couple of trees, rather than the half-giants the protagonists encounter. Another story that leans more towards the fantastical end of fantasy is "The Mysterious Mister Fox" by Liz Tuckwell, a fairy tale about Betsy Heysham, who can see through the wiles of a handsome soldier, while her smitten sisters cannot.
"Wayland" by Mark A. King is written in an unusual, declamatory style that I found rather appealing. It's about a magical place where children who died young get to live for a lifetime in the course of a single day. "The Return of the Zookeeper" by Robin Lupton is about a chap with psychic powers who uses them to control his troupe of performing animals; it all starts to go wrong after he wears them out and finds himself in a pool with two uncontrollable crocodiles. "Archon Joe's Creation" by Nigel Robert Wilson is another story with mythical and biblical elements, this time about the guy who kept working on what seems to be our planet after the original Creator left.
Darker stories include "Skin" by Suzy A. Kelly, about mother and daughter selkies held captive by a drunken man, and "The Conveyor of Souls" by Dolly Garland, about Maithli, who almost died and can now communicate with troubled souls to uncover the grievances still binding them to our world. In "The Darkness Inside" by Michael J. Nicholson a curtain-twitcher and her husband see something peculiar happening out on the street. A good story, but I wasn't sure about its characteristation of a "typical marriage" as one in which the husband fantasises about killing his wife! "Eyeballs" by Michael Button is about two chaps whose favourite hobby is to pick a person each to stalk for the day and then meet up to compare notes. Although it is very good – perhaps my favourite in the book – and extremely creepy, it's not a fantasy story so far as I could tell, so perhaps an odd inclusion in a fantasy anthology.
My story, "The Reader-Queens of Tranck", is wisely placed at the end. I say wisely for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the goofy tone of it is completely different to the rest of the book, which tends to be very serious, whatever the subject matter. I think it's also the only story that doesn't take place on Earth. And secondly, because the premise of the story is that as typos start to creep into the text, the protagonists notice and realise that the integrity of their world is crumbling. If it had been the first story in the book, readers might have assumed from the first few typos that the book was poorly edited, but by the end of the anthology it will have earned their trust.
I submitted the story for the anthology so long ago that (a) I have since written three entire novels about the main characters and (b) I had forgotten about the deliberate typos myself. So as I reached the first one I thought, oh my god, how did I miss this? How did Allen Ashley miss this? But as it went on it I realised what was happening and it really tickled me. There were many bits that made me laugh out loud, a few very nice turns of phrase, and even some excellent advice for proofreaders. I'm not ashamed to say that I'm one of my own favourite writers: what's the point of being a writer if it's not to write exactly the stories you want to read, with the sort of jokes that really make you laugh?
Overall, one of the best BFS publications I've read in a while, even if I am biased. If more anthologies were this length, instead of rambling on for five or six hundred pages, I'd read a lot more of them.
If you like the sound of it, the way to get the anthology is by joining the British Fantasy Society. Their monthly bulletin for members includes a Dropbox link to a selection of past publications, including this one.
The last issue I reviewed was BFS Journal #18, edited by Allen Stroud (see TQF64). For this issue he moves on to Advisory Editor, while Sean Wilcock takes over as editor. Sarah Deeming is introduced as Reviews Editor, a review section making its welcome return to the publication after an absence of some years.
The first couple of articles are quite hard work. The first tries to persuade us by way of Jungian theory that mazes, water and eating are traditionally feminine. Taking a theory and shoe-horning a few cherry-picked moments from books into it doesn’t tell us anything very much about the books or the usefulness of the theory.
The second, about “Jung’s Concept of the Anima in Fantasy and Science Fiction Pulp”, has a similar problem, and puts forward the nonsensical idea that the UFO craze of the fifties resulted from a Buddhist symbol springing from the “collective unconscious” relating to “the totality of the self”. Hm.
The third article, “When Fantasy Meets Uchronie” by Pascal Lemaire, is genuinely interesting and knowledgeable, telling us about an area of science fiction I knew nothing about: French alternate histories. I’ll be reading some of them in future. It also introduced me to the excellent phrase used for vampire romance in France: bit lit.
The fourth article is a lengthy history of Ladbroke Grove counterculture, taking in people like Pink Floyd, Mick Farren and Michael Moorcock. It’s interesting – I hadn’t known for example how the Notting Hill carnival had begun – but not rigorously academic: many quotations are unsourced, and sometimes even the speaker is unidentified.
Three shorter articles include Allen Ashley’s visit to a witchcraft exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Jessica Pascoe on a guided tour of Middle-Earth filming locations, and three academics talking about a seminar series on international fantasy at the University of Leeds, and setting out their mission statement.
The review section starts with a six-page review of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House which devotes only a few paragraphs to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House rather than the book. A review of the Nicholas Eames book Bloody Rose tells the reader that we might “love him or hate him”, without explaining why we might hate him.
There are also informative reviews of The Godserfs’ Trilogy, The Girl King and Dragon Heart, all of which make it clear how good (or otherwise) the reviewers thought the books were, which I always appreciate. The issue’s one editorial wobble comes with a review of Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules, which seems to have been published in an early draft.
Otherwise, the egregious errors that plagued #18 have gone, and once you get past the thirty pages of Jungian nonsense at the beginning, there are some good articles with useful knowledge to share. Also, the bibliographies now have the date immediately after the authors’ names, making them much easier to use.
Overall, a good deal of improvement since the last issue reviewed. ***
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| Eating a pork pie in the lovely grounds of the Royal York Hotel. |
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| Fran Terminiello and Juliet E. McKenna show us how to fight. |
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| Charlaine Harris and Adele Wearing in conversation. |
“We don’t know how you’ll react. The erratic behaviour of the author mentioned in [another article] is a strong illustration of why we don’t read self-published authors. We don’t have a firewall between us and the writer. Books from publishing houses that don’t have any self-published books give a level of detachment between what we write and the reaction we’ll get.”
"This man really has no clue at all when it comes to reviews and reviewing. It seems to me that Theaker enjoys writing self-indulgent twaddle - nasty gibes - and spends most of his time writing negative, not informative reviews. I haven't seen one he's written that I would say I agreed with."
"The BFS is now taking recommendations for next year's awards, and I've decided to withdraw Theaker's Quarterly Fiction from the Best Magazine/Periodical award for as long as I'm the awards administrator, or as long as I'm the editor of the magazine – whichever tenure comes to an end first. …
That's partly because I'd have been profoundly embarrassed to win the award over a shortlist that included for example Black Static and Interzone, magazines to whom, for all our good qualities, we can't hold a candle. But also because a win for us in that category would have cast not just my integrity into doubt, but the integrity of the entire awards."
