INTRODUCTION
JONATHAN STRAHAN
Welcome to Eclipse Four. Five years ago, early in the Australian summer of 2007, I was hard at work on the first volume of what I hoped then would prove to be an annual series of unthemed science fiction and fantasy anthologies. It was, for me, a heady and exciting time. The decision to launch the Eclipse series was an optimistic one, and it reflected a sense of optimism about science fiction and fantasy generally, and short fiction in particular, that was widely held at the time. Several other anthology series—Lou Anders’s Fast Forward, George Mann’s The Solaris Book of Science Fiction and The Solaris Book of Fantasy, and Ellen Datlow’s The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy—were launched around the same time and all were received well. They were followed by Mike Ashley’s Clockwork Phoenix series and many, many original anthologies. That sense of optimism was, in many ways, well placed. As I wrote in the introduction to Eclipse One:
“This is a good time for the short story in genre circles. Not maybe in business terms—we’re yet to develop a twenty-first century business model that allows writers to make a living writing short stories—but in artistic terms, it’s extraordinary. Whether in anthologies like this one, or in magazines or on websites, short stories are being published in staggering numbers. Thousands each year, millions of words, and in amongst this torrent of content is some extraordinary work.”
That has continued to be true over the following years. Business models remained a problem. Print magazines didn’t exactly flourish, but long-time campaigners like Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF continued to appear as they had for many decades, as did Interzone, Realms of Fantasy (though it did die twice), and many others. Online magazines evolved and became critical to the scene with Clarkesworld, Subterranean, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and many, many, many more developing into important, well-paying markets that published some of our finest short fiction. It’s easy to feel, in these days of the iPad and the Kindle, that a successful long-term business model is yet to emerge, but an honest observer would have to admit these are still good times for short fiction.
What does that mean for Eclipse? It was always intended to be a spiritual descendant of the classic anthology series of the 1960s and ’70s like Knight’s Orbit, Carr’s Universe, and Silverberg’s New Dimensions. With stories appearing on Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, Shirley Jackson, Sidewise, BSFA, Aurealis, Ditmar, and other ballots, and with volumes of the series itself winning the Aurealis Award, and being nominated for the World Fantasy and Locus awards, it’s hard to not feel that it is meeting that goal.
That doesn’t mean I’m any closer to knowing what a volume of Eclipse should be, or that I’m anywhere near done. Ever since Jetse de Vries named the series I’ve been taken by the idea that it was rare and unusual, a strange, dark eldritch thing where wonderful things might happen within its pages. I’ve tried, as much as I can, to make sure each volume was different, a place though where reality was eclipsed for a little while with something magical and new. And yet each volume has had its own personality. Eclipse One was very much a general beast, Eclipse Two much more science fiction-oriented, and Eclipse Three was the one with the broadest outlook.
What of Eclipse Four? In some ways it is the strangest and most eldritch volume yet. When I started work on it I intended it to be very much a sister volume to Eclipse Three, but like the wilful, living thing it is it insisted on being the book it would be, not an echo of its predecessor. During the nearly sixteen months I’ve been working on Eclipse Four writers have joined and left the book, have delivered and redelivered stories, and in some cases have moved from delivering one type of story to delivering another. In the end the fourteen stories here range from tall tales to coming-of-age stories, move from the deep South to the outer reaches of our solar system, and approach everything from how we find love and happiness to how we cope with death and grief.
Many of the writers here are new to Eclipse, but some, like Jeffrey Ford, are old friends and regulars to the series. All of them have outdone themselves and I’m deeply grateful to them all for letting me publish their work here. I would also like to express my gratitude here to my publishers, Night Shade, who have been wonderful to work with, and to my wife Marianne and daughters Jessica and Sophie, who have been endlessly patient. I would also like to thank you, the reader, for picking this book up and taking it home. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have, and that this is just the start of a beautiful friendship. As for me, I’m working on Eclipse Five. See you next year!
Jonathan Strahan
January 2011