The Year's Best Fantasy - Second Annual Collection -1989 - Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Editors) - featuring work by Joan Aiken, Tanith Lee, Charles de Lint and Ian MacDonald

The most fascinating, and daunting, aspect of selecting material for an anthology titled The Year's Best Fantasy is that the field of fantasy is as broad and transmutable as the whole field of literature. In American publishing today we have a genre called Adult Fantasy, which evolved after J. R. R. Tolkien’s books proved so popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These books are often filed away in bookstores with two other genre categories: Horror and Science Fiction. A genre label such as adult fantasy is created for the marketing and selling of books rather than as a literary distinction—thus, under the fantasy label you will find a bewildering variety of books, from excellent to dreadful, from simple adventure tales to complex literary experimentations (just as under the fiction label you will find everything from Harold Robbins to Thomas Pynchon). To further confuse a fantasy lover wandering through a book- store in search of a “good read,” books published as adult fantasy account for only a portion of all fantasy books published. You will also find fantasy books—sometimes indistinguishable from those found on the science fiction shelves—published as “mainstream” fiction, “literary” fiction, classics, foreign works in translations, children’s fiction, folklore, fairy tales, myth, poetry, and Jungian psychology.

There is no way a volume such as this can possibly cover every fantastical, magical, or surrealistic work published here and abroad, nor can this summation of the year provide you with more than a brief overview of fantasy in the contemporary arts. But I hope my experiences as an editor working with fantasy writers and artists across this country and England will help point the way to some material you might have overlooked, some new works you might enjoy. >
Fantasy is flourishing in the contemporary arts, becoming more prev- alent and more accepted in all areas of adult popular culture. (Only in this last century has fantasy been deemed fit merely for children, relegated to the nursery, as Professor Tolkien pointed out, like unfashionable fur- niture that adults no longer wanted.) In addition to fantasy books on the xiv INTRODUCTION bestseller lists, there are fairy tales on prime-time television, on Broadway, at the movies, in popular music—and they continue to be a staple of opera and ballet as well. A review of Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale musical Into the Woods deplored “this trend toward escaping into the never-never lands of fantasy”; yet fantasy at its best—when created with heart and intelligence—not only enables us to escape from reality, but returns us to the real world again with the ability to see it all the more clearly. I believe fantasy has been so popular in recent years because the fantasy tale speaks with a language capable of touching us deeply and because it comes from the folklore tradition of “the tale well told.” Well-told tales are too noticeably absent from much of today’s popular culture, and even from much of the literary mainstream.

• from Terri Windling's introduction

This was the first year they began to include horror in the anthology, and in subsequent editions it became The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.