If The Faces of Science Fiction suffered from a shitty printing effort and I’ll say it did, The Faces of Fantasy is quite the opposite with everything did in a manner befitting the subject. Now I’ll admit that over a decade in advances in publishing technologies separate the former which published in 1984 from the latter which was published in 1996, and the latter is so good that is as good as anything being published today in terms of design and the quality of the book itself.
The Faces of Fantasy is a hardcover book is an oversized, twelve inches by nine inches, hardcover book (Amazon think there was a softcover edition but I doubt there really is one) with lovely cover art of Neil Gaiman standing in front of his house in Minnesota.
It starts off with an amazing twelve page essay by Terri Windling, über editor and author of a novel you really should read now, The Wood Wife, on, well, the history of fantastic literature from the very first stories now before talking about Perret and this book. The earlier had no such essay, no introduction, nothing. Did I mention that this book is Tor Books which is the premier publisher of both SF and fantasy in the States? Yeah it made a huge difference from the effort that Bantam Books put into the earlier publication.
Now let’s skip to near the back of this publication. Look there’s an index. Guess what didn’t have an index? You guessed it. It’s odd than any book like this would be published without an index but The Faces of Science Fiction was. As there’s over a hundred writers, it’s a must for figuring out where someone is here as they’re not in alphabetic order.
Perret is a much better photographer sixteen years on with a keener eye for her subjects and an apparent ability to get more interesting photos with them oh there’s still some photos where the writers look, err, blindingly bored with being there, but there’s a much larger number of great ones — Terri Pratchett up a tree, Terri Windling under a stone arch, Patricia Kennealy- Morrison on a couch in a very weird room, Diana Wynee Jones looking positively regal, Ursula K. Le Guin holding her cat and Steven Brust looking like himself which is to say something out of the writing of Alexander Duma. Note that listing has a number of British writes in it in as unlike the previous volume which was all North American folk, she actually travelled to the UK and Ireland as well. It makes for a much better book.
Each person was asked for a quote. Not surprisingly, some cooperated nicely, some pretty much flaked it off. (One writer died before he could give a quote.) In general, I’d say the writers here were more cooperative than the earlier group was with even the shortest of quotes mostly showing a spark of imagination.
Copies of the hardcover edition are quite reasonably priced at the usual online sources. If you’re seriously interested in fantasy and the writers who are responsible for much of the best writings you there, do yourself self a favor and get a copy of this.
(Tor Books, 1996)
