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Mad Hatters and March Hares

Page 33

by Ellen Datlow

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

  The Doll Collection*

  The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm

  The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (with Terri Windling)

  The Monstrous

  Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (with Terri Windling)

  Twists of the Tale

  Vanishing Acts*

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (with Terri Windling, Gavin J. Grant, and Kelly Link)

  * A Tor Book

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Multiple-award-winning ELLEN DATLOW has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty-five years. She was fiction editor of OMNI magazine and SciFiction and has edited almost one hundred anthologies. She lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Richard Bowes has published ten books and eighty short stories. He has won World Fantasy, Lambda, Million Writer, and IHG awards.

  A new edition of his Nebula-nominated novel From the Files of the Time Rangers came out in March 2017 from Lethe Press. His 9/11 story “There’s a Hole in the City” recently got a fine review in the New Yorker and is online at Nightmare Magazine. Recent and forthcoming appearances include Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Darker Realms and Black Feathers anthologies.

  Bowes is currently writing a novel about a gay kid with a bit of magic about him in 1950s Boston.

  C. S. E. Cooney is an audiobook narrator, singer/songwriter, and winner of the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bone Swans: Stories. Her work includes the Dark Breakers series, Jack o’ the Hills, The Witch in the Almond Tree, and poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features Rhysling Award–winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction and poetry can be found at Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Apex, Uncanny, Lakeside Circus, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, GigaNotoSaurus, Goblin Fruit, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 5, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Rich Horton’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, and elsewhere.

  She can be found at csecooney.com and on Twitter at @csecooney.

  Kris Dikeman lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Year’s Best Fantasy 9, Strange Horizons, Sybil’s Garage, The Best of All Flesh, and Sympathy for the Devil, among other places. Read more of her work online at krisdikeman.me.

  Andy Duncan’s short fiction has been honored with a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and three World Fantasy Awards, as well as a 2016 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. His third collection, An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories, is upcoming from Small Beer Press. An alumnus of Clarion West 1994, he is on the tenured English faculty at Frostburg State University.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. Ford’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies.

  Ford is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Hayakawa Award, and Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in Ohio in a 120-year-old farmhouse surrounded by corn and soybean fields and teaches part-time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, more than 250 stories, and has some comic books in the works. His most recent novels are the werewolf novel Mongrels and the novella Mapping the Interior. Jones has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Awards for Multicultural Fiction, and three This Is Horror Awards. He’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Novels of the Year.

  He teaches in the MFA programs at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, two children, and too many old trucks.

  He can be found on twitter: @SGJ72.

  Matthew Kressel is the author of the novels King of Shards and Queen of Static. He’s been twice nominated for a Nebula Award and once for a World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Interzone, Apex Magazine, as well as the anthologies Cyber World, After, Naked City, The People of the Book, and many others.

  He cohosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside Ellen Datlow, and he has been a longtime member of the Altered Fluid writing group. Find him online at matthewkressel.net or @mattkressel.

  Seanan McGuire lives, works, and watches way too many horror movies in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares her home with her two enormous blue cats, a ridiculous number of books, and a large collection of creepy dolls.

  McGuire does not sleep much, publishing an average of four books a year under both her own name and the pen name “Mira Grant.” Her first book, Rosemary and Rue, was released in September 2009, and she hasn’t stopped running since. When not writing, she enjoys Disney Parks, horror movies, and looking winsomely at Marvel editorial as she tries to convince them to let her write for the X-Men. Keep up with McGuire at seananmcguire.com, on Twitter as @seananmcguire, or by walking into a cornfield at night and calling the secret, hidden name of the Great Pumpkin to the moon. When you turn, she will be there. She will always have been there.

  Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in Albedo One, Interzone, Black Static, and on Tor.com. She’s been anthologized in several of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’s Best British Fantasy 2014, and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015.

  Her story “Fabulous Beasts” won the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. The first collection of her short fiction will be published in 2018. More about her work can be found at priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com.

  Delia Sherman has written numerous short stories, many of them for her current editor. Her collection, Young Woman in a Garden, was published by Small Beer Press. She has written three novels for adults: Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings, with Ellen Kushner. Novels for younger readers include Changeling, The Freedom Maze, and The Evil Wizard Smallbone. Although she can recite all of “Jabberwocky” and large chunks of dialogue from Looking-Glass and Alice verbatim, she can’t play chess. She can, however, knit, and does.

  Angela Slatter is the author of the collections The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels, Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories, as well as the novellas Ripper and Of Sorrow and Such. With coconspirator Lisa L. Hannett she has written Midnight and Moonshine and The Female Factory.

  Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, one Ditmar Award, and six Aurealis Awards. She has an MA and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. She was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow in 2013, and the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Perth in 2016. Her work has been adapted for the screen.

  Angela’s debut novel, Vigil, was published in 2016, and the sequel Corpselight in July 2017. Restoration will follow in 2018.

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

  She is the winner
of the Andre Norton, James Tiptree, Jr., Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.

  She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen Best of the Year anthologies.

  In comics, she has written Catwoman and Batman and Robin Eternal for DC, and Xena: Warrior Princess for Dynamite; her short work has appeared in Vertigo’s Strange Sports Stories and Kodansha’s Attack on Titan Anthology. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, NPR, and other venues.

  Katherine Vaz is a former Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University and Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute, and is the prize-winning author of two story collections, Fado & Other Stories and Our Lady of the Artichokes, and two novels, Saudade and Mariana.

  Her work is often in the school of magical realism. Her children’s/YA stories have been published in various anthologies, including as the title story in Swan Sister. Her latest book is The Love Life of an Assistant Animator. For years she has been a frequent contributor to anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

  Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji.

  Her work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award, and won the Shirley Jackson Award.

  She’s sold more than two hundred short stories; four novels, including the multi-award-winning Slights; and six short-story collections, including the multi-award-winning Through Splintered Walls.

  Her most recent novel is the multi-award-winning The Grief Hole and her most recent short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce is a graduate of Clarion West and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and won the Andre Norton Award for the second volume in her Flora Fyrdraaca series, Flora’s Dare.

  Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and several year’s best anthologies. Her most recent book, a collection of short stories entitled Prophecies, Libels & Dreams was published in 2014.

  She may be found online, intermittently, at @crackpothall.

  Jane Yolen, author of more than 360 books, is a master of disguise—sometimes a writer of delightful award-winning children’s books, sometimes a punster of awe-filled jokes, sometimes a poet of depth-charged verse, sometimes a writer of Nebula Award twisted and twisting short stories and novellas, sometimes the author of Holocaust novels, sometimes the Grand Master of SFWA (the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America). Try to keep up.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Gentle Alice  •  Kris Dikeman

  My Own Invention  •  Delia Sherman

  Lily-White & the Thief of Lesser Night  •  C. S. E. Cooney

  Conjoined  •  Jane Yolen

  Mercury  •  Priya Sharma

  Some Kind of Wonderland  •  Richard Bowes

  Alis  •  Stephen Graham Jones

  All the King’s Men  •  Jeffrey Ford

  Run, Rabbit  •  Angela Slatter

  In Memory of a Summer’s Day  •  Matthew Kressel

  Sentence Like a Saturday  •  Seanan McGuire

  Worrity, Worrity  •  Andy Duncan

  Eating the Alice Cake  •  Kaaron Warren

  The Queen of Hats  •  Ysabeau S. Wilce

  A Comfort, One Way  •  Genevieve Valentine

  The Flame After the Candle  •  Catherynne M. Valente

  Moon, and Memory, and Muchness  •  Katherine Vaz

  Run, Rabbit, Run  •  Jane Yolen

  Also Edited by Ellen Datlow

  About the Editor

  About the Authors

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Gentle Alice” copyright © 2017 by Kris Dikeman

  “My Own Invention” copyright © 2017 by Delia Sherman

  “Lily-White & the Thief of Lesser Night” copyright © 2017 by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Conjoined” copyright © 2017 by Jane Yolen

  “Mercury” copyright © 2017 by Priya Sharma

  “Some Kind of Wonderland” copyright © 2017 by Richard Bowes

  “Alis” copyright © 2017 by Stephen Graham Jones

  “All the King’s Men” copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey Ford

  “Run, Rabbit” copyright © 2017 by Angela Slatter

  “In Memory of a Summer’s Day” copyright © 2017 by Matthew Kressel

  “Sentence Like a Saturday” copyright © 2017 by Seanan McGuire

  “Worrity, Worrity” copyright © 2017 by Andy Duncan

  “Eating the Alice Cake” copyright © 2017 by Kaaron Warren

  “The Queen of Hats” copyright © 2017 by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  “A Comfort, One Way” copyright © 2017 by Genevieve Valentine

  “The Flame After the Candle” copyright © 2017 by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Moon, and Memory, and Muchness” copyright © 2017 by Katherine Vaz

  “Run, Rabbit, Run” copyright © 2017 by Jane Yolen

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  MAD HATTERS AND MARCH HARES

  Copyright © 2017 by Ellen Datlow

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Dave McKean

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9106-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9107-0 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9108-7 (ebook)

  eISBN 9780765391087

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: December 2017

 

 

 


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