A Quest-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic

May 1, 2002
In her rather inelegantly titled A Quest-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic, Margaret Weis, coathor of the Dragonlance and Death Gate series, collects her favorite stories of brave missions and heroic undertakings. Whether it's Charles L. Fontenay's The Silk and the Song, in which a young human tries to free his fellow humans from enslavement to the tailed, four-fingered Hussirs, or Lois Tilton's Greek mythology inspired Firebearer, in which a young blacksmith tries to rescue the god who gave humans fire, we turn, writes Weis, to quest stories to learn how to be heroes of our own lives.

May 15, 2002
The latest of Warner Aspect's commendable trade paperback anthologies demonstrates variations on the quest theme to fantasy fans lately recruited or reenergized by the recent film of " The Fellowship of the Ring." So doing, it shows the range of the quest theme and the proficiency of Weis as an editor. Two authors no longer with us, Poul Anderson and Karl Edward Wagner, are represented by, respectively, a humorous short piece and a rather dark one concerned with the price of setting lovers off on perilous quests. C. J. Cherryh presents a king who learns from a dragon, and in arguably the best story in the book, Orson Scott Card gives us another dragon, slain by a warrior who knew already more than the dragon expected. Michael Moorcock's contribution is about his staple character Elric, Neil Gaiman's is predictably dark, but each is representative of its author's most serious work. Think of this as an intelligent grab-bag, suitable to just about every fantasy collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)