...and I am an ethereal girl

This suggests those who think fantasy is "escapist" literature completely miss the point. Fantasy is perhaps one of the only modes which can contain the heart of the contradictions of our age: the banality and bureaucracy of evil; the weapons too destructive to be used; the well-intentioned dictators. It doesn't matter if the author is consciously attempting to speak out about these issues--in fact it is probably better he or she doesn't. Much is revealed accidenatally; less is revealed deliberately. Which brings us to "Beyond the Rose." The issue I read was number 3, released in January of 2001. Editor David P. Dunning is also responsible for Black Rose, a horror magazine. From the titles of the two publications you can correctly guess that Black Rose came first, though no assumption should be made that Beyond the Rose is looked upon as any sort of stepchild.

(An examination by Tom Shippey of horror as a genre would be interesting to read, incidentally. What does the popularity of Stephen King and likeminded authors say about our collective psyche in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first?) I assume that Dunning wished to broaden his scope past horror. Rather than dilute Black Rose, he maintained its focus on "supernatural, ghost, horror, and dark fantasy" and started a new anthology of "Sword and Sorcery, High Fantasy, Quests, Alternative Worlds, Writing from the future, Fantasy in the present day, Trolls, Elves, Dwarves, the lot."

My first impulse in critiquing the writings here from a subtext standpoint, teasing out the hidden messages and social commentary, stemmed from a misunderstanding. Beyond the Rose is published in Ireland, so initially I assumed the writers were all Irish. In fact, two of the writers in this issue are American (from Texas and Alaska), one is British, one is a New Zealander, and one lists no country of origin. So you are spared reading my theories on how these stories relate to the experience of life in modern Ireland. But wait--it could be argued that editor Dunning was drawn to include these particular stories because they resonated with his experience somehow, and he lives in modern Ireland...It's still a stretch.

So I will take the collected writings in Beyond the Rose not as a reflection on national culture but Western culture at our time in history. The first, "The Great Forbidding" by Simon Kewin, survives this sort of scrutiny particularly well. One race has caused unspeakable devastation on a world. All of the others can only survive by the use of a spell, "the Great Forbidding," that creates a sort of force field. Outside bloodthirsty malevolence prowls; inside "everyone...did all that they could, without question. There was no other way." Mages use every scrap of their power to maintain the spell, while warriors sometimes venture out of the sphere in the hopes of repairing the damage. The situation sounds psychically exhausting, but compare it to the fear engendered by reports of school shootings, drive-by shootings: _the enemy is all-pervasive._ How many people feel their home is the only sanctuary left, and then hear, as the characters in this story do, a rumor that some wickedness is an interloper inside that last sphere of protection? And what does it say about such a paranoid (if justifiably paranoid) worldview that the place of safety is defined not by an oasis-name of peace, but by its relation to those terrors outside: "the Great Forbidding"?

A story near the end of the issue, Michael Kelly's "Flight of the Crystal Bird," mines the same vein as the Margaret Atwood classic "The Handmaid's Tale." For never adequately explained reasons, certain women in the society of Kelly's story are selected as childbearers, something like surrogate mothers. They have no say in the matter; their role is "divinely decreed by the state." They live apart, as do the men who are the fathers of these children (the mothers are not mentioned) and do nothing with their lives except have a sack of embryos surgically implanted on them. The heroine of the story falls in love with one of the fathers, who teaches her to dream of freedom.

On the surface it is a story of rebellion against tyranny, but I see something else in it I am sure the author did not intend. Deep down it expresses the very modern, Western idea of rebellion against biological reality. In the story the wonder of pregnancy is turned into a horror, not so much by the fact that the childbearer has no choice in the matter, but by the way the embryos are visible in the sack she wears. The ugliness, the alienness, is stressed again and again: "I can see into the sacks at the tiny, perfect embryos, floating, drifting, growing, gaining strength, mewling, then screaming, limbs forming, hands reaching, tearing, pulling, breaching the sack, crawling through, trailing pink-red afterbirth..." The disgust and hatred expressed at the mechanics of childbirth is astonishing. No soft or even neutral words--"baby," "child," "human being" are ever used in regard to what is born; at one point the heroine is informed her friend "produced a male and three females." It is clear at the end of the story the heroine believes living with the man she loves will never result in anything so hideous as a pregnancy.

Another story, Lyn McConchie's "Firedancer," is set in a more deliberately recognizable milieu--European settlers in the West surrounded by Comanche and Apache. Our heroine, Janda Shellin, is a mix of Basque and not-quite-identified-but-quite-likely-Irish. She has a skill that is feared by her folk and admired by the Comanche.

There is something which may be anachronistic about the premise. In the early 1800s would a Basque, from a notoriously clannish people, marry an Irishman? But the mixed-race heritage means Janda never feels comfortable around the other settlers--her strange ability is more an outward sign of her "outsider" status than its cause. The theme of unacceptance is an echo of her father's experience. He had hidden his name in an alias lest the people in the new world "look at him sideways" the way mainland Europeans had.

So this is a tale of prejudice, but also of retreat. We know the fate of the Comanche; McConchie does not write us an alternate history where the Native Americans retain control of the continent. She allows Janda and the tribe she adopts to have a dignified exit, no victory but departure. And the question remains: what of those of us who are left behind? In today's world, will the quirky, the freakish, the homeland-less find a tribe that will accept them, or will they retreat to the mountains, as Basques today still guard the Pyrenees?

David Dunning has exhibited a good eye for provocative stories. I have one quarrel with Beyond the Rose, and that is in the typos in the Guidelines: "Looking for stories were reality gatecrashes fantasy. Sexual content excepted only if neccessary to the story plot." (emphasis mine)

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BEYOND THE ROSE

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