Not every collection has to be earth-shattering. Not every story has to be a mind-blower. Sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s just amusing and easy to read and straightforward, without challenge or morally fraught situations. And that’s where The Very Best of Tad Williams comes in, because that’s precisely where it slots in along the speculative fiction spectrum. Split between shaggy dog stories and Outer Limits-style“Gotcha!”s, the collection speeds along smoothly and without too many hiccups.
The collection opens with “The Old Scale Game”, which is nicely representative of both the level of wordplay and the tone that carries throughout. A story about a knight and a dragon who go into business together rather than duke it out, it features some amusing imagery and resolves like a sitcom when the dragon sets his buddy the knight up with a local witch, staving off his incipient alcoholism so that all three – plus the army of other mythical creatures they’ve adopted along the way, can live happily ever after. The next piece, “The Storm Door”, hits the other side of the equation, as a psychic detective comes home to provide lengthy exposition and receive an unpleasant surprise.
The best piece is the elegant, emotionally affecting “Monsieur Vergalant’s Canard”, a tale of two brothers and their clockwork duck. Providing a twist that is both unforeseen and entirely appropriate, it is a small miracle of precision. “Three Duets for Virgin and Nosehorn” is another standout, eschewing easy approaches while remaining satisfying in connecting and resolving its three parallel tales of a doubting priest, an artist and his muse, and a princess out of myth. And there is “Child of an Ancient City”, perhaps the best-known piece in the collection and also a collection of tales-within-a-tale.
The remainder of the book, with the main exception of the screenplay for “Black Sunshine”, a teenagers-keeping-a-terrible-secret horror movie, is more along the line of literary comfort food. “Every Fuzzy Beast of the Earth, Every Pink Fowl of the Air” is perhaps the most over-the-top, a tale of a precocious little girl correcting all of God’s mistakes during creation. “A Stark and Wormy Knight” is another story with a dragon protagonist, this time in the form of a story to dragon young’uns, complete with folksy dialect and a sudden revelation that sucks much of the humor out of the telling. “Omnitron, What Ho” is a flat Jeeves and Wooster pastiche, though I’m fairly certain Bertie never shoved anyone out an airlock, and “Some Thoughts Re: Dark Destructor” takes Hollywood-style script notes and applies them to elementary school kids’ home-brew comic book. With these, your mileage may vary, based on personal experience and appreciation of the subject matter.
“Z is For…” and “Not With A Whimper, Either” fall more on the “gotcha” side of the ledger. The former could easily be a classic-era Twilight Zone episode, while the latter details the rise of an AI through text conversation with an everyman figure. A clever gag at the end saves it from self-seriousness, but the approach to technology feels a bit dated. And the Otherland “The Boy Detective of Oz” also suffers from bumpy tech, as well as a lack of clear stakes in its tale of a virtual Kansas populated by refugees from Oz.
The collection closes with its most unsettling piece, “And Ministers of Grace”. The story of an interplanetary assassin sent by a theocracy to disrupt a secular utopia, it wears its politics on its sleeve. Separated from home and the reassuring voices of its religious leaders, the assassin wreaks havoc, evolves, and plays out the drama of its own rebirth. To its credit, the story ends without a firm conclusion, dialing back the presentation from earlier to present a more nuanced, eerie possibility.
Perhaps Williams simply works better in long form, and the short story model doesn’t allow him the space he needs to unpack his concepts properly. That being said, many of the pieces here are, if not memorable, enjoyable, and the one-two punch of “Vergalant” and “Ministers of Grace” will provide food for thought long after the taste of the other stories has faded.
(Tachyon, 2014)
