Fantastic Metropolis

Reader response centered around dead animals, for the most part. Barbara Rosen wrote in to say, “...at its best, Leviathan is full of breathtakingly good writing, odd imaginative quirks, mystery and redemption. At its worst, the writing is still breathtakingly good, but oh, my!” “Oh, my!” referred specifically to Tanyo Ravicz’s story “Passion for Puppy,” in which the narrator strangles a dachshund. Interestingly enough, despite a number of human deaths in the anthology’s stories, over a dozen readers wrote in to protest the dead dachshund, not a one to protest the dead humans.

The most surprising thing about Leviathan 1, in retrospect, is that over the years, several of those stories have proven to be part of something larger. Ursula Pflug’s “Telepathic Fish” is part of her just-released novel Green Music from Tesseract Books, Green Music. Stepan Chapman’s “The Chosen Donor” eventually saw print as part of his novel The Troika from my own Ministry of Whimsy Press. Richard Winter’s “New Bow” became part of his book Ila from Impatiens Press. Next most surprising? Despite any award consideration and very negligible attention from the year’s best anthologies, the anthology continued to sell at a steady rate, bolstered by word of mouth. It still amazes me that people will come up to me at conventions and mention how much they enjoyed reading Leviathan 1.

The worst part of Leviathan 1? The promotion. Our ads looked like crap because I did them myself. We also had 200 copies of the anthology shipped to a World Fantasy Convention for use in freebie bags given out to attendees. However, for some reason, they weren’t put in the freebie bags and on the weekend in question Alan M. Clark called us from the convention asking me what I wanted to do with them. The organizers had gotten hold of him because his art was on the cover. I made the mistake of saying “put them on the flier table as freebies.” Apparently, dealers converged like sharks and made off with dozens at a time, selling them for months through catalogs or at conventions. Certainly, we got some extra distribution that way, but it didn’t help our bottom line.

That there was a need for Leviathan seemed obvious. The publications with which Leviathan was sometimes compared—Crank! and Century—did not fulfill the same niche. Century focused on magic realism—stories in which a fantastical element entered into the real world. Crank! published mostly gonzo science fiction. Both were great, but neither publication, in my opinion, was sympathetic to surrealism. (And, frankly, the good-natured joke around Ministry HQ was that eventually, even publishing once every four years, Leviathan would have more volumes out than Century had issues, Century being “quarterly” as in “once every 25 years”. I also recall the always self-absorbed Bryan Cholfin, Crank! editor, rudely ripping a copy of Leviathan 1 out of my hands, running through the list of contributors, and saying, “I don’t know who these people are? Who are these people?”, before a ReaderCon panel.) The Silver Web, edited by Ann Kennedy (now VanderMeer!) probably came closest to Leviathan’s focus, but Ann focused on artwork and poetry as well as fiction, and all of her fiction was surreal.

Leviathan 2

In between Leviathan 1 and 2 lies the phenomenon known as Stepan Chapman’s The Troika. Leviathan 1 had served another purpose: it had fully awakened the Ministry of Whimsy from its slumber. Over the course of just a few years, we had published Bruce Taylor’s short story collection The Final Trick of Funnyman, a couple of well-received chapbooks, and developed an innovative web site… as well as survived The Troika. As the single most successful book in the Ministry’s history—winning the Philip K. Dick Award—The Troika had both been a crowning triumph and a resource-devouring cause of near exhaustion.

All of which explains why Leviathan 2 occurred in 1998, not in 1995, as originally planned. Clearly, we had to move away from the idea that the Leviathan series could be an annual event. Clearly, too, co-editors were going to be as short-lived as drummers for Spinal Tap. Luke O’Grady disappeared into the Canadian wilderness and, although he’s still living, I have no idea where he is or what he is doing.

Enter Rose Secrest, who would provide support for and help edit Leviathan 2. Which would not be easy. I had decided on the “theme” of novellas. At the time, I was writing the novellas that would comprise City of Saints & Madmen and was having difficulty placing them with anyone. I figured I couldn’t be the only one with that dilemma and resolved to provide another market for long fiction. Rose was lucky in that I only let her see the “finalists,” so to speak. Me, I was not so lucky. (Nor Ann, who is really an unacknowledged co-editor on all three volumes.) During the reading period, I read or skimmed over 2,500 novellas. Out of those 2,500 novellas we wound up taking only one—L. Timmel Duchamp’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-aged Woman.” The other three pieces—from Rhys Hughes, Richard Calder, and Stepan Chapman—I solicited from the authors. David Pringle then provided a great introduction about novellas in general. After going through such an intense reading period, I did begin to think that the tongue-in-cheek idea we’d had early on to present rejection slips at conventions to people we didn’t want to submit to the anthology had some merit. The main problem, however, was not really quality of writing, but that we wanted to produce something different. Many of the submissions were just too traditional in nature.

By this time, the whole idea behind Leviathan 1 having had time to infect people’s minds, Leviathan 2 received a great deal more attention, becoming a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and certainly not a handicap when the Ministry—primarily for The Troika—became a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. I was also proud of the interviews with the authors that we included in Leviathan 2—Rhys Hughes, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Richard Calder had never been interviewed before.