The Snuggly Sirenicon

The Snugglycons #3

by Brian M. Stableford (Editor), Remy de Gourmont, Catulle Mendès

The present volume is a book of sirens, edited and translated from the French by Brian Stableford. The notion of sirens—or, more pedantically, sirènes was taken up with particular relish by writers who described themselves as Symbolists, having picked up the torch of French Romanticism in order to carry forward its quest to defend fertile, inventive and richly meaningful imagination against the corrosions of positivistic thought.

Featuring stories by Remy de Gourmont, Catulle Mendès, and many others, The Snuggly Sirenicon is a key collection of the microsubgenre of mermaid fiction, the inherent fascination of that motif ensuring that it is anything but tedious.

Genres: Fiction

223 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 2021

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.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love this series by English publisher Snuggly Books (which, so far, covers sirens, satyrs and Satan). Mostly including symbolist and decadent authors seeking to revive the playful and mythological during scientific positivity's cultural reign. Many of the stories might be somewhat bland — the overwrought (by our standards) prose makes it difficult to take serious in some stories — but there are some gems in here, including examples of sirens who pine for and die for want of human lovers and others who lie in wait to throttle them.