Funestine

by Brian M. Stableford (Editor), Catherine de Lintot, Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps

The remarkable stories included in this volume, published in the 1730s, show a marked evolution in the contes de f�es, each being more substantial, and more imaginatively innovative than its predecessor.

Although they clearly attempt to take up where Baronne d'Aulnoy and Comtesse de Murat had been forced to leave off, in terms of their imaginative extravagance, their use of metamorphoses and their quirky employment of allegory exhibit a further development in the direction of the calculatedly absurd and the surreal.

These are not the only works of the period to extrapolate its licensed disorder to the chaotic brink of surrealism, but they do so more self-consciously than most. The stories gathered herein provide an intriguing kaleidoscopic pattern, and can justly be reckoned to be more than the sum of their parts.

288 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2018

About the author

Brian Michael Stableford was a British science fiction writer who published more than 70 novels. His earlier books were published under the name Brian M. Stableford, but more recent ones have dropped the middle initial and appeared under the name Brian Stableford. He also used the pseudonym Brian Craig for a couple of very early works, and again for a few more recent works. The pseudonym derives from the first names of himself and of a school friend from the 1960s, Craig A. Mackintosh, with whom he jointly published some very early work.