A couple excerpts below from various introductory or outro materials recently written or published.

(sample cover by Templesmith–now, that’s a Mord!)

Wasteland: The Apocalyptic Edition Volume 1 by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten (covers by Templesmith), out in July.

From the intro: “Sometimes Big Ideas come out of deceptively small beginnings. In the first issue of Wasteland, a wanderer named Michael comes out of the desert into a small settlement. It’s a century after the Big Wet has destroyed the world as we know it. Michael wants to sell the flotsam and jetsam he’s picked up during his travels, including an enigmatic machine. He’s a survivor with hidden powers, but he meets his match in the person of the healer Abi, among the best female characters in comics. Not only will Abi not let him alone, she won’t even let him bleed out in peace….What happens next is similar to what happens in Stephen King’s iconic Dark Tower series: the world created by Antony Johnston opens up in continually unexpected and complex ways.” Really love this series. There’s even a soundtrack!

Glass Coffin Girls, a collection by Paul Jessup (PS Publishing).

From the intro: “The volume of stories you hold in your hands shows a preoccupation with lack of connection—between characters, between narratives, sometimes between pages. Jessup calls Glass Coffin Girls a ‘crevice book . . . a shadow volume whose pages were written in the cracks of ancient cities and long since forgotten. Nine stories, nine shadows,’ and indeed sometimes the reader will feel as if they’re experiencing the photo-negative or parallel universe of a story that exists on the other side of the page. Haunted? Haunting? It’s up to the reader to decide.”

The Best of Michael Moorcock, from Tachyon.

From the afterword: “[About overcoming the difficulties of creating a Moorcock best-of...] Even so, several admittedly invasive decisions had to be made in compiling the final contents. We decided to leave Elric largely to the excellent new series of reprints from Del Rey, opting to begin this volume with a later Elric story. We also decided that Jerry Cornelius—a Moorcock character who has come to serve as a kind of running commentary on the state of the world—could only be excerpted in a way that would seem incomplete, and thus we left that fine fellow largely to his own devices (for now)… Which brings us to a very important point: This writer, without the aid of those two robust companions, would still have had an amazing career. That career, in the short form, breaks down roughly into stories that fall under the rubric of fantasy/SF and, using a hated term, the literary mainstream. There is some overlap, for those who grade on taxonomy. For example, Moorcock’s ‘World War Three stories read appear to partake of a variety of influences in style and execution—part of what makes them still seem contemporary. It is this overlap, along with the guiding intelligence and wit of the author, that provides coherence to this collection.”

…..

Oh, also, read Adam Roberts’ vivisection of Farah Mendlesohn’s The Rhetorics of Fantasy in Extrapolation, which reads in part, “Yes, form is interesting. But that’s a major problem for this study, because although Mendlesohn’s approach might be called ‘formalist’, she is not really interested in form per se, but rather in a (deliberately) fuzzily-rendered, apologetically displayed essentialized notion of what Fantasy is…So the texts in which she is interested all share ‘a common center,’ one ‘difficult to pinpoint’: the place ‘where mimesis ends and the fantastic begins.” What does she understand by mimesis? ‘Mimesis is the art of persuading the reader to forget the mediation of language.’ This seems to me–flatly–wrong. It is, for instance, pretty much the opposite of what is argued in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis…Auerbach’s reading of the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis argues that the mimetic sense of an engagement with reality is achieved precisely by the text’s stylistic artificiality and lacunae.” Anyway–and oddly–this makes me want to read the damn book, which I sent to Larry. (Larry–any chance I could borrow it back?)