cover image The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women

The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women

Arlene Williams, A. Susan Williams, Richard Glyn-Jones. Viking Books, $27.95 (576pp) ISBN 978-0-670-85907-8

Fantasy, as novelist Russ contends in her introduction to this impressive collection, gives women ``the method to handle the specifically female elements of their experience in a way that our literary tradition of realism was not designed to do.'' Editors Williams and Jones take a very broad view of what constitutes fantasy: the collection, comprised of 38 stories written between 1941 and 1994, opens conventionally enough, with Elizabeth Bowen's classic horror story ``The Demon Lover'' but also includes more masculine-seeming SF by the pseudonymous James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), whose disturbing ``The Milk of Paradise'' reminds us that love, especially of the alien other, can be the strongest force of all. There are several specifically feminist entries, such as Lisa Tuttle's moving ``Wives,'' about creatures on a strange planet who are forced to bind and emotionally starve themselves to conform to a male ideal of femininity, and the cheerfully amoral, appallingly satisfying ``Boobs,'' by Suzy McKee Charnas. There is room here for the darkly fantastic (Tanith Lee's ``Red As Blood''); for the delicately sentimental (Zenna Henderson's ``The Anything Box''); and even for one of the most deliciously droll of flying saucer stories (Muriel Spark's ``Miss Pinkerton's Apocalypse''). If, as Russ says, ``fantasy is reality,'' then this is the reality of some higher, more eloquently truthful, plane. (Oct.)