Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!*’s Reviews > The Big Book of Classic Fantasy > Status Update

Finally 25% finished with the anthology, with a meta-fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson. Not the greatest of his tales, but certainly something I’d never come across otherwise. This is perhaps the best aspect of this book: things you’ll probably never read elsewhere, even when the writer is ubiquitous.

‘The Goblin Market’, a poem. Delightful!

The Diamond Lens and The Magic Mirror, consecutive stories, both featured men discovering and falling instantly in love with unattainable women who don’t know they exist, one because she is seen only through a mirror, the other being of microscopic size. Both men go to pieces as a result. Lovely stories but a bit proto-incel.

In which the narrator looks through an impossible microscope at a drop of water: ‘These forms presented the appearance of what might be called, for want of a more specific definition, foliated clouds of the highest rarity—that is, they undulated and broke into vegetable formations, and were tinged with splendors compared with which the gliding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold.’

From the editors on Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862): “Brilliantly original, his stories include enigmatic characters, greedy narrators, disembodied eyes, and, perhaps we should quickly move past this, orgies.”

No, hold on, let’s go back to that. Tell me more.

I find it interesting reading fiction for adults from a writer best known for children’s books, like George MacDonald of The Princess & the Goblin fame. His story The Magic Mirror, a chapter from his Phantasies, is surprising, chilling in places, and iconic. It makes me wonder about the origins of magic mirrors in fiction, surely lying in folklore. This story invokes many later famous mirror-focused stories.

My first Melville: The Tartarus of Maids (I'll read Moby Dick eventually),. Some choice quotes:

'The steel shoes of my pung craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy snow, as if it had been broken glass. [...] where, right across the track—not ten minutes fallen—an old distorted hemlock lay, darkly undulatory as an anaconda.'

and

'But where are the gay bachelors?'

The Frost King, by Louisa May Alcott at age 16 written for neighbourhood children. It is sickly sweet, with flower fairies spreading light and goodness and gumdrops to the grumpy Frost king. The editors could have cut the last line, which appears to be a transition from the framing story this was taken from and ends the piece with a touch of confusion.

One benefit of this anthology is stories from famous writers that you're unlikely to encounter elsewhere, Jules Verne's Master Zacharias is a bit fairy tale, a bit Catholic fable, and somewhat anti-science considering Verne's best-known proclivities.

I believe this is the first time I have used the word 'proclivity'.

'The Story of Jeon Unchi' for the first time in English translation. Full of stuff like this:

He flew around on a cloud again, until he came across two men fighting over a pig's head. ... "I bought this pig's head at a fair price, but this official is using his position to steal it from me." Unchi cast a spell, making the pig's head open its mouth and bite the official, who took fright and ran away.