Unnatural Creatures: Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman by Neil Gaiman
Received my ARC today. This looks like an excellent collection.
Stories include selections from Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, E. Nesbit, Peter S. Beagle, and some other classic authors, but there are also stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Megan Kurashige, Nnedi Okorafor, and E. Lily Yu. The only way I could possibly be more excited to read this would be if there was also an N.K. Jemisin story.
While the male authors picked are all white dudes, I actually kind of like the way that works out. Many of the stories by men in this collection are by guys who are dead, and if this was someone’s only exposure to fantasy I think one would have to draw the conclusion that white men are the history of the genre and that the future of fantasy storytelling is represented by a fairly diverse group of women.
I’m really proud of this collection. And I don’t think that would be a particularly wrong-headed conclusion, either.
Puzzled to learn that Samuel R. Delany, aka Chip Delany to his friends, whose story ‘Prismatica’ I reprint in Unnatural Creatures for the first time in 35 years, is now thought of as a white dude, though. He does have a long white beard.
This is what Chip Delany looked like before he had a long white beard:
(via existentialcrisisfactory)