When Did Unicorns Turn Red?
I started devouring fantasy as soon as I learned to read. Sometimes I had as many as four or five books going at a time. I left them all over the house and picked up whichever book happened to be handy. I even read in bed after lights-out. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I would sneak a book under the covers and read one line at a time by the light of my electric blanket controls.
Those stories whisked me away to worlds populated by unicorns, dragons, wizards, talking beasts, knights in armor, and teens who pulled swords from stones or fought against evil on the way to becoming kings and queens.
As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, I loved all things mystical, magical, and wondrous. For me, my favorite images from that era are inextricably bound together: sunshine, puffy white clouds, peace signs, flower children, smiley faces, sparkles, rainbows—and unicorns.
In paintings and tapestries and myths, unicorns are most often portrayed as pale, ethereal creatures, so of course, I thought of them as pure and noble horse-like beings that practically glowed with magical light. They lived in forest glens and paused in their virtuous thoughts only to be petted by fair maidens in flowing dresses.
Of course, that’s not the only kind of unicorn. I used to watch Star Trek (the original series) with my dad. In the episode “The Enemy Within” there’s actually a tawny-colored unicorn dog. Not only wasn’t it a milky color, it looked nothing like a horse. So even with unicorns the imagination can run wild.
As Kevin J. Anderson described in his introduction to One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology, he and I adopted the purple unicorn to represent a philosophy we taught: Writers should do their best work in the allotted time, no matter the writing assignment. If writers can’t respect their readers enough to do a good job, they shouldn’t accept the contract. Purple unicorns symbolize commitment to quality.
When our series editor, Lisa Mangum, and our managing editor, Peter Wacks, suggested that our next anthology feature red unicorns (complete with the perfect title from Finley Scogin), we were surprised at first and then intrigued. The color red is full of energy. Our society uses red to express so many ideas—anger, heat, love, war, danger, embarrassment, not to mention spiciness or ripe fruit—what stories would it inspire? Of course we wanted red unicorns.
So the following pages hold a wealth of red unicorn stories to entertain you.
Are red unicorns real? Just as real as all the other colors of unicorns. And I can’t wait to see what comes after A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology.
Until the next volume,
Rebecca Moesta, Publisher
WordFire Press
A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology is the second benefit anthology to fund Superstars Writing Seminars scholarships which covers tuition for writers who have not yet had the opportunity to attend a seminar.