ecstaticA lot of the classics* of the urban fantasy genre were published during the 1980s, and many of them fell out of print during the same time period. They were like thieves in the night, only instead of sneaking into your house and stealing all your stuff, they snuck into your head and planted ideas like seeds. Maybe they didn't germinate overnight. Maybe they took years, or decades, to begin sprouting. But they did sprout, and the flowers they grew into spread more seeds, until the genre itself began to grow.
I was too young to really appreciate what was going on during those beginning days, but I already read voraciously, and several of those strange flowers have been a part of my mental landscape for as long as I can remember. Jack of Kinrowan. War for the Oaks. Gossamer Axe.
Bordertown.
Bordertown was a modern-day Neverland, a place where the lands of humanity and the fae collided, with magic and science at continual war with one another. It was a place for teenage runaways, filled with music and madness, and there were times when I, as a pre-teen nerd girl who never felt like she really belonged anywhere, practically ached with the longing to find that magic doorway that could get me there. In Bordertown, I would find friends, and adventures, and stories, and maybe I'd get hurt, but I'd do it in a place that hurt everyone, not just the ones who didn't quite fit in. In Bordertown, I could make the rules, and break the rules, and take the rules for whatever they were worth. All I had to do was find the door.
I knew even then that Bordertown was just a story, but it was a beautiful story, and stories have power. I read every Bordertown tale I could find with the same voracious need, and when they stopped coming, I started looking further afield. When I met Ellen Kushner last year in Australia, I told her that I wrote urban fantasy because I'd come too late to write Bordertown, and the genre as it exists now was as close as I could get.
Those original books are sadly out of print now. For thirteen years, the doors to Bordertown have been closed.
The doors to Bordertown are opening again on May 23rd. Welcome to Bordertown is a gorgeous, glorious anthology of all-new stories and poems set in that magical place, written by an incredible assortment of authors, and because the authors and editors are clever, you don't need to know anything but what I've told you here to appreciate it. Bordertown is where the magic is. Bordertown is where the music is. Bordertown lives.
In the meanwhile, you can read three of the original stories on the website; you can begin exploring this world; you can fall in love the way I did when I first heard the city's name, and the way I did again when I went to Boston and was handed an advance copy of the new map. Bordertown lives.
Now step into the story and find out why so many of us have loved this world so fiercely, so cleanly, and for so very, very long.
Bordertown lives.
I missed it so much.
(*Defining "classics" as "things without which the genre would not occupy the shape it occupies today," not based on popularity or staying power or even, in some cases, quality.)
April 21 2011, 01:39:03 UTC 6 years ago
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