The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop's Modern Fables

by Robin D. Laws (Editor), Jim Demonakos, Steve Dempsey (Contributor)

These confusing times of Internet trolls, one-percenters, toxic fame, and impending singularity cry out for clarity — the clarity found in Aesop’s 2,500 year old fables.

70 writers from across the creative spectrum bring their modern sensibilities to this classic format. Zombies, dog-men and robot wasps mingle with cats, coyotes and cockroaches. Parables ranging from the punchy to the evocative, the wry to the disturbing, explore eternal human foibles, as displaced onto lemmings, trout, and racing cars. But beware — in these terse explorations of desire, envy, and power, certitude isn’t always as clear as it looks.

Authors include:
Robert Jackson Bennett, Jason L. Blair, Jesse Bullington, Jim Demonakos, Ray Fawkes, Matt Forbeck, Ed Greenwood, Dave Gross, Taniah Hershman, Jonathan L. Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, John Kovalic, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Adam Marek, Sandy Petersen, JT Petty, Wena Poon, Richard Scarsbrook, Ekaterina Sedia, Greg Stafford, Chuck Wendig, Jim Zubkavich & more.

Contents:
The Story of the Moral -- An Introduction by Robin D. Laws
Can't Learn New Tricks from an Old Dog -- Greg Stafford
The Amok -- Sandy Petersen
The Lion & the Aardvark -- Ekaterina Sedia
Cow & Dog -- Matt Forbeck
Shrew & Sloth -- Halli Villegas
The Beaver & the Trout -- Richard Scarsbrook
The Lemmings & the Sea -- Graeme Davis
The Little Meme That Could -- Emily Care Boss
Wasp & Snake -- Livia Llewellyn
The Cat & the Cell Phone -- Ann Ewan
The Wolf & Death -- Julia Bond Ellingboe
Mother Knows Best -- Steve Dempsey
The Very Rude Salmon -- Chris Lackey
The Toymaker -- Will Hindmarch
The Phone & the Fifteen-Year-Old -- Heather Wood
The Microbe Who Had Perspective -- Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
The Songbird's Famous Tune -- Ray Fawkes
The Man Who Tried to Hide in a Crowd -- Jonathan L. Howard
The Ass & the Rain -- Robert Jackson Bennett
Two Cats on a Ledge -- Chad Fifer
Keeping Up With Jonesy -- Aaron Rosenberg
The Axolotl -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Loquacious Cadaver -- Kyla Ward
The Terrible Lizard -- Colin Beaver
The Unicorn at the Soiree -- Richard Dansky
The Dowager Rabbit & the Dead Account -- JT Petty
The Fox & the Quantum Physicist -- Jesse Bullington
A Real Princess -- Daniel Perry
The Cockroach & the Fly -- Dennis Detwiller
The Raccoon & the Cat -- Katarina Gligorijevic
The Dragon & the Mouse -- Ed Greenwood
The Brood, the Murder & The Tale of the Weasel Boyfriend -- Epidiah Ravachol
The Tiger the Dove -- Nadia Bulkin
The Backwards-Bent Badger & The Forward-Facing Frog -- Jim Zub
One For The Girls -- Sue Train
Shotaro & Haruka -- Wena Poon
The Scientist & the Zen Master -- Benj Tentt
The Stray Dogs Learn Their Lesson -- Nick Mamatas
The Three Zombies & the Crypt Keeper -- Peter Freeman
The Mouse & the Supermall -- Dave Gross
The Goat Who Wished to Go to Market -- Genevieve Valentine
The Minotaurs & the Signal Ghosts -- Peter M. Ball
The Rats & the Cockroaches -- Julie McArthur
Bored To Fu -- Monica Valentinelli
The Poison-Well -- Molly Tanzer
The Squirrel & the Pigeons -- Susannah Dainow
The Coyote & the High Density Feed Lot -- Greg Stolze
The Singer's New Story -- Rob Heinsoo
The Game of Death & Dragon -- Sarah Newton
The Man & the Fish -- Jim Demonakos
The Snake & its Skin -- Stephen Graham Jones
The Boy & his Imaginary Enemy -- Chuck Wendig
The Scientist & the Tiger -- Tania Hershman
The Clan of the Crazy Babies -- Ursula Pflug
Jackdaw & Doves -- Laura Lush
Great Grandmother & the Blessing of the Sea God -- Janqui Mehta
The Muskrat & the Deadline -- John Kovalic
Grandma's Dragon -- Adam Marek
Barking John -- Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Genres: Fantasy, Anthologies, Short Stories

280 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws brought you such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, The Dying Earth, Heroquest and Feng Shui. He is the author of seven novels, most recently The Worldwound Gambit from Paizo. For Robin's much-praised works of gaming history and analysis, see Hamlet's Hit Points, Robin's Laws of Game Mastering and 40 Years of Gen Con.

Reviews

[Joel Hacker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another solid anthology product from Stoneskin Press. If you haven't been reading of their collections, I strongly recommend you do so.
This particular collection consists of modern retellings of a variety of myth/folk/fairy tales and fables. I admit, I was not as engaged as I expected to be, in part because I expected something maybe a little more along the lines that Yolen, McKinley, and others have done in retelling fairy tales as short stories or even novellas/novels. This is not that. These are much more in the vein of fables, being only one to five pages in length each, often with explicitly stated morals. It is very clear which fables or stories some of these are drawn from, some are more mysterious in their origins. We also get a nice mixture of retellings of non-european fables, with some Native American, African, Asian, and Pacific Islander fables getting equal treatment here.
As in any collection, I felt some entries were stronger than others. Particular personal favourites were: The Wolf and Death, The Very Rude Salmon, The Loquacious Cadaver, The Fox & the Quantum Physicist, The Scientist and the Zen Master, Three Zombies & the Crypt Keeper, The Squirrel and the Pigeons, The Muskrat & the Deadline, The Clan of the Crzy Babies, and The Coyote & the High Density Feed Lot.
While some of these may be a little 'mature' in theme, I think their overall morals and length make them, like their forebears, well suited to be read and discussed with children. I would consider reading a lot of these to my own god-children who are quite young, but can also see using these with my high school English classes as well.

[Dave Versace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vast and eclectic collection of short stories updating Aesop's style for the information age. Talking foxes, weasels and carp use mobile phones, troll the internet and drive cars. Every cautionary fable has a moral for modern times, though some are more explicit than others.

Not all of these tales work, but there are some stunning pieces here (too many good ones to list). Editor Robin Laws' introduction is an erudite and comprehensive examination of the enduring value - necessity even - of Aesop (whether or not he was a real person) and a sound justification for the existence of an update.

[Justus · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book delivers exactly what it says on the cover: 70 writers contribute their own "modern fable". How much you enjoy this is probably going to come down to how you feel about fables.

What is a fable, in your mind? What do you want to get out of reading one? And, maybe this is the key point, how much we can't think of literally any other fables besides Aesop's?

This is what Wikipedia has to say

In Classical times there were various theorists who tried to differentiate these fables from other kinds of narration. They had to be short and unaffected;[4] in addition, they are fictitious, useful to life and true to nature.[5] In them could be found talking animals and plants, although humans interacting only with humans figure in a few. Typically they might begin with a contextual introduction, followed by the story, often with the moral underlined at the end.

And if you look at the titles of Aesop's fables you'll see that there is a lot "the X and the Y", with two Animals in a dialogue followed by an explanation of the moral point. The kite and doves, the lion and the mouse, the eagle and the fox, the fly and the ant, the wolf and the crane, the scorpion and the frog.

It is such a different form of story than we're used to consuming. No plot, really. No character arcs. Do we even want a story to be giving us moral instruction? So, in retrospect, a collection like this is an interesting artistic project but it also has set itself quite the challenge.

With 70 writers in 280 pages, these are all quite short. Just a few pages for the most part. And most of them hew towards the classical fable feel, though a few through in more modern novelistic touches. It is almost impossible to talk about this in any cohesive singular way, because the only underlying theme is "write a modern fable" and 70 authors are going to give very different answers to that prompt.

The ones that I liked best took the classic formula but gave it a very modern twist. The titular "The Lion and the Aardvark" is about an online troll (the lion) and a company astroturf shill (the aardvark) with a moral of "if you must be awful on the internet, make sure that you are paid really well for it".

But so many of the stories just didn't land. They were trying a bit too hard to have that moral lesson. Take "Two Cats on a Ledge" as an example. Two Cats live with a Woman in an apartment building high above the street. One day the window screen that keeps them from venturing onto the window ledge is being replaced. They wander outside to explore and end up getting trapped there when the new screen is affixed and there's a moral lesson of "You must do what you are doing when you are doing it". Except then the workman replacing the screen decides to try on the Woman's blouse(?!) and the Woman comes back in and sees him wearing her clothes and hits him with her purse.

The woman screamed at the top of her lungs and hit the man with her purse. He scrambled to snatch his crumpled clothes from the floor.

“You see?” said the steel-gray cat. “Like you, the man was distracted and didn’t do his job. Now she is teaching him the same lesson.”

To be honest, I'm not sure there's much a collection like this could have done to make me love it. The odds were stacked against it. I admit, I largely read this to try something outside of my comfort zone. One great thing about this collection is that since all of the fables are extremely short you can read one in under 10 minutes. This makes it very easy to read 2 or 3 in a brief sitting and then decide if this is the kind of book you want to read cover to cover.

[Jeff Waltersdorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable collection of quick, punchy fables. Updated for modern times, with stories of zombies and internet trolls scattered among the typical anthropomorphic animals, generally relating a moral.

Edited by game designer and writer Robin Laws, the author list includes a number of writers from Robin's native Canada, as well as a number of other game designers, such as Ed Greenwood (Forgotten Realms), Sandy Peterson (Call of Cthulhu), and John Kovalic (Dork Tower).

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a lot of fables in this collection, with a ton of different definitions of fable.

The second-to-last in the collection is a fun metacommentary on the rest, rewarding reading the collection up to that point.

[Rene · Rating 3 out of 5]

not all stories were good. I liked most but some were pretty bad.

[Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read:

Two Cats on a Ledge - Carl Fifer - 4/5