Fantastic Metropolis

In the Beginning…

Oddly enough, the Leviathan anthology series grew out of the 1992 Clarion East Workshop, during which a fellow student, Luke O’Grady, and I discussed doing a magazine. In 1993, I proposed (or Luke proposed—hard to remember who said what first) publishing an original fiction anthology. Doing so would also in effect resurrect the Ministry of Whimsy. The Ministry had been moribund since 1991, when we had published the second and last installment of the fantasy magazine Jabberwocky. (That in turn had signaled the end of the second phase of the Ministry’s evolution, the early history well documented at www.ministryofwhimsy.com.)

Early possible names for the anthology included “Quiddity,” “Distant Bells,” and “Questions.” In other words, “Leviathan” really was the best possible choice. The choice of “Leviathan” as a title also allowed us to establish our focus—or lack of one. As it states on the copyright page of Leviathan 1:

The Leviathan anthology series will attempt to cover many different themes and concerns without the kind of specific restrictions that often prove the downfall of more focused theme anthologies. Leviathan takes its name from the second, less well-known definition of “that which is too large to be seen in its entirety; important in scope or intensity.” Thus, each anthology shall attempt to map part of the leviathan that is fiction.

Nothing particularly ambitious about that goal! And, of course, we had made up this supposed second definition of Leviathan to suit our scope.

Leviathan 1 may indeed have been the most ambitious of the three anthologies in the way it mixed mainstream and fantastical stories. Using the ambiguous theme of “Into the Gray,” Luke and I chose 10 stories about discovery, using as our title page quote “Every perfect traveler always creates the countries where he travels” (Nikos Kazantzakis). We then arranged the stories from least fantastical to most fantastical and used a mythical piece by Joe Nigg as our introduction. By ordering the stories as we did, the reader went from mainstream relationship stories to, by anthology’s end, Stepan Chapman’s squid-headed people story, “The Chosen Donor,” without suffering the bends. (The true ending to the anthology would have been M. John Harrison’s “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium,” but Luke didn’t like the story, I’m sad to say.)

We needed art to match the contents, so we managed to buy a surreal piece from Alan M. Clark. Duane Bray, a friend from high school who now works for one of the largest design firms in the world, did the layout and design for the cover. Duane would wind up doing the design for every trade paperback the Ministry published (except Punktown), including all three Leviathans. He is the main reason our books looked good enough to compete with any publisher in the world.

On Leviathan 1, artist and designer both had another issue to deal with. The main financial backer of the anthology wanted to incorporate a compass into Alan’s cover art. We had had a compass done as a frontispiece by Penelope Miller (my mom, I should reveal), but this backer wanted it somehow Photoshopped into Alan’s art, or for Alan to somehow take the photograph of his art (he didn’t have the original) and paint a compass onto it! There followed a rather ridiculous argument, ending in victory for the sane…

Reaction to Leviathan 1

Needless to say, the reaction from mainstream and genre critics was often one of bewilderment, although many reviewers did get what we were trying to do (in part to say that a story can be fantastical at the level of metaphor alone). Tangent and Literary Magazine Review, diametrically-opposed publications, both loved the anthology. Tangent gushed that Leviathan 1 was “one of the best collections of quality fiction at any level that I’ve seen in years. Not since the early volumes of Damon Knight’s Orbit series has such a consistently well-written set of stories appeared under one cover.” Literary Magazine Review wrote, “A big, handsome devil. Just about everything wins reader confidence early and then maintains it with intelligent development.” Mark Kelly, Locus reviewer, had good and bad things to say in a review that was cautious but fair. Paul Di Filippo, in the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic Newsletter praised many of the stories—“Every story is well-crafted and inherently substantial; it’s easy to imagine any one of them appearing in, say, The New Yorker”—but thought the anthology displayed a lack of focus. Albedo One, an Irish SF magazine, disliked what it saw as self-indulgence on the part of our authors. The local Tallahassee Democrat ran a noncommittal review by chopping off the reviewer’s ringing endorsement in the last paragraph and using the inappropriate headline of “A Nightmarish Vision: Anthology’s Spooky Stories Bring Bad Dreams to Life.”