Introduction
Joshua Palmatier
I didn’t start out reading science fiction or fantasy. When I was a kid, I was big into mysteries—“Hardy Boys,” mostly, but I’d started branching out into more general mysteries. Then one day my mom accidentally brought home an Andre Norton book from the library, instead of the requested Mary Norton book. That was the end of mysteries for me; it was exclusively Andre Norton for a long while. And one of Andre Norton’s most common themes was portals. I soon discovered that portals were common in many of science fiction and fantasy novels, from the classics like C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to Stephen R. Donaldson’s “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.” Portals were everywhere.
And then they weren’t.
For a long stretch of time, portals disappeared from the SF&F world. Or at least it seemed that way to me. So when contemplating what themes I could use for upcoming anthologies, I thought, “Why not do one centered around portals to other worlds?” It felt like it was time to bring portals back into the foreground a little bit. And it appears that I wasn’t the only one struck with this idea. Since its inception, I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the number of novels being announced (or even released) that involve characters traveling through a portal from one strange world to another, even if one of those “strange worlds” is our own. It appears portals have become timely once again.
In this book, you have sixteen tales of travelers passing through a doorway or gate, stone arch or wormhole, without knowing what awaits them on the other side. Journey with them across that boundary to find out. We hope you enjoy the ride.