Issue 9

Issue 9 is kind of about looking back. We have two returning authors from our first year: Amalia Gladhart, author of Weeks Without Rain from our very first issue, and Deborah Davitt, author of Sun and Moon from Issue 3. Our third piece is from new-to-us author Daniel Horowitz Garcia, and was originally submitted for last fall’s Special Steampunk Theme Issue.

If The Fantasist had started Kindergarten with Issue 1, it would be in second grade now. Second grade is a “review and consolidate” year, when students go over the things they learned in the past two years, solidifying it into a foundation for what lies ahead. After two years, comprising 8 issues, 22 novellas, 3 short stories, and a children’s novel, The Fantasist has pretty well circumnavigated the existing boundaries of fantasy. We went out to the contested borderlands of Space Opera and Steampunk in our two special issues, and visited the ambiguous realms of low- and no-magic literary fantasy. We’ve gone in and around, though magical alternate histories, intense alternate futures, faeries, Shakespeare, and other people’s dreams. We’ve done wizards, androids, undead, big burly guys with swords, princesses, witches, sentient gloves, scholars, and a woman made of bees.

But our mission statement is not just to explore the known boundaries of our genre, or even to plant a few flags in the nearer regions just beyond its borders. It is to broaden the definition of fantasy, to deepen and complicate the conversation around speculative fiction, and to expand the role of fantasy within that conversation. We’ve done some of that, but there’s more and weirder still to come.
Welcome to Volume 3!

The Intercessor by Deborah Davitt
Alchemical Gun Club by Daniel Horowitz Garcia
Best Laid Plans by Amalia Gladhart

Evan Adams
Creative Director
The Fantasist