The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy: Fourth All-New Collection

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

Brilliant new collection of comic fantasy masterpieces

This dazzling new collection of off-the-wall fantasies features stories from the minds of the funniest writers in the field, including Esther Friesner, Neil Gaiman, Tom Holt, Paul di Filippo. Adam Roberts and Molly Brown. Here are 35 stories guaranteed to reassure us that the next-door world will be just as mad as this one. It includes a mix of brand-new stories and rare finds or forgotten gems, with a wide range of tales to suit every taste in humour. From the missionary plunged into the bizarre initiation rituals of a lost tribe to the bloke who thought magic would help his love life, from a wizard allergic to magic who sneezes his way into chaos to a man who finds his shoes have taken over control of his life, The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy unfalteringly turns fantasy and horror fiction on its head and makes magic into mayhem. A welcome new shot of comic genius in the sphere of fantasy fiction.


Copyright and acknowledgements
The wonders to behold / Mike Ashley
Forbidden bridges of the faceless slaves in the nameless house of the night of dread desire / Neil Gaiman
The blue magnolia / tony Ballantyne
Colquitt's high-energy trousers / Steven Pirie
A drama of dragons / Craig Shaw Gardner
Pest control / Adam Roberts
Wrong planet / Tom Holt
Return of the warrior / Laird Long
Christmas games / David Langford
Stephen Skarridge's Christmas / Frank R. Stockton
Sing a song of sixpence / Robert Loy
The Kaluza-Klein caper / Damien Broderick
Shoes / Robert Sheckley
The day we played Mars / Maurice Richardson
Fowl play / Steve Redwood
The deaths of Robin Hood / Rhys Hughes
Bad timing / Molly Brown
Sweet, savage sorcerer / Esther Friesner
The power and the gory / James Bibby
The strange affair of Mr. Corpusty / Anthony Armstrong
The great wish syndicate / John Kendrick Bangs
Fractal paisleys / Paul Di Filippo
Almost heaven / Tom Gerencer
A rude awakening / Gail-Nina Anderson
Spoiled rotten / Grey Rollins
The birth of A.I. / Cynthia Ward
Stakes and adders / Marilyn Todd
The sea serpent syndicate / Everard Jack Appleton
Yo ho hoka! / Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson
The mirrors of Moggropple / John Morressy
I married a robot / Ron Goulart
Mrs Wilson and black arts of Mrs Beelzebub from number six / Steven Pirie
Sooner or later or never never / Gary Jennings
Notes on contributors.

Genres: Fantasy, Humor, Anthologies, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Comedy

512 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2005

About the author

Michael Raymond Donald Ashley is the author and editor of over sixty books that in total have sold over a million copies worldwide. He lives in Chatham, Kent.

Reviews

[Henrik Andersson]

Now, this isn't actually a complaint, but when I'm reading a book called "The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy" I'm expecting the stories within to be fairly recent. As it turns out, half of the 30+ stories were written in the last millenium - the earliest from 1905! Had the book been named "The New Mammoth Book Of Comic Fantasy" I'd have had no qualms, but since most of these stories are pretty good I'll let it slide.

The stories all range from classic fantasy (wizards & dragons type) to sci-fi futurism, but all with a little twist to them. A few stories get themselves too bothered with complicating their prose in order to impress someone, and failing to deliver their story in the process. The very last story in particular by Gary Jennings (1972) is not only nearly unreadable, it's not even near fantasy. Unless you count ordinary fiction as fantasy.

Entertainment is found among the stories who will anachronize and distort settings we are familiar with. The Deaths Of Robin Hood (Rhys Hughes, 2002) is one such story.

Others do well without changing the format, simply entertaining us within the usual fantasy world. One such story is The Mirrors Of Moggropple (John Morressy, 1989). Gems are also delivered by those who take an idea and run with it, for example The Great Wish Syndicate (John Kendrick Bangs, 1911) and The Strange Affair Of Mr Corpusty (Anthony Armstrong, 1932).

A satisfying few of the stories deliver no fun, and on the whole I think you will find entertainment enough to read this Mammoth Book.

[Tim Hicks]

As others note, it's fantasy and SF, although always to comic effect.
Don't know how they get "new" out of this, with a 1905 story and a 1955 Hokas story included.

But there were more good stories than I expected, so I'm happy.

[Margaret]

Meh.

Aliens+robots+spaceships+other worlds = science fiction.

Magic+dragons+elves+supernatural beings = fantasy.

I don't care for most science fiction, with a few rare exceptions. Three quarters of the stories in this compendium were not, in fact, fantasy. They were science fiction. That irritated me to the point where I didn't even bother reading them all. Harumph. Where was the Terry Pratchett? Neil Gaiman did not contribute a story - he just wrote the introduction. Which was lame. There's GOT to be better examples of current, interesting, well-written fantasy shorts than pseudo-P.G. Wodehouse crossed with Star Trek the Next Generation. These stories didn't exhibit much other than the ability to construct bad puns; the knack of turning comedy around to profundity, to meaning, is the reason why I enjoy the genre. I like the reflection of our ordinary, messed-up, painful world through the lens of fantasy - the bending of meaning - like a good stand-up comedian. I saw none of that in this collection.

Meh.

[Tommy Verhaegen]

More than 500 pages with a great variety on comic fantasy short stories.
Another bunch of lesser know stories, rare to find or even never published in book form.
Writer from the noble unknown to real top-notch in Fantasy.As are the other books in the series, it is again a pearl (but not exactly of wisdom though it is full of wizards).
Not every story may appeal to you, depending on your personal taste, but many will.
Humor from subtle to hilarious and covering all varieties.
32 stories in all, with a short biography of the authors at the end.
A must-have.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins]

The essential problem with rating an anthology is that the quality of the stories can vary a lot, and an average score raises poor stories while pulling down good ones, so my strategy is to rate the overall quality of the collection as a product of Mammoth Books and Mike Ashley, not the stories as a whole.

Basically, this is a low average Mammoth Book. The publishing strategy for that company was always Quantity over Quality, and who has ever even heard of Mike Ashley outside his collections of low-quality genre-themed anthologies? This volume is Ashley at his worst.
I knew this was going to be a painful excursion for me when the very first story was by Neil Gaiman, the single most over-hyped writer of the first decade of the 21st century. I largely skipped through the following few dopey MADCAP! (yawn) stories which relied upon smirking silliness for effect, and then re-read for maybe the 34th time A Drama of Dragons, by Craig Shaw Gardner, for which that is the opening chapter to his series, A Malady of Magics, a series I adored when I was 13 years old. After that I was alternately bored and confused by a long series of 'comedic' Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy published across some 150 years and tossed together like a salad and with no discernible humor and mostly trying to be absurd instead of funny. The low point came with Frank R Stockton's entirely boring Stephen Skarridge's Christmas, whose only point of amusement was how clearly it stole from A Christmas Carol. Utter Trash.
I skipped ahead, only reading opening paragraphs mostly, just in case anything shining emerged from this dreary volume. My head ached from how awful these tales were.
That's when I hit upon Rhys Hughes' astonishing The Deaths of Robin Hood. An absurd tale, and one fully aware of how closely to hew to the surreal versus the insane, this story reminded me of a playful tale by Leonora Carrington, one that satirizes the Robin Hood saga far more effectively than "Men in Tights" ever did, and veined through with truly surreal humor. Delightful, and fully aware of itself throughout. I was enchanted with this story long before the entire tale was revealed as the setup for a pun that took my breath away.
That one tale kept me testing the remainder of the collection, hoping for something again at that level.
And then, the volume ended without delivering anything but a few more readable tales, but nothing worthy of a mention.

A terrible waste of paper, but that's par for Mammoth. I'm going to look for more by Rhys Hughes though.

[Mary Kay Kare]

Mr. Ashley seems to have very peculiar definitions for the words "comic" and "fantasy". I mean, yes, humo(u)r is very individual, but in a book with this many stories I ought to have been amused more often than I was. Also, a good number of those stories were science fiction, not fantasy. I've no objection to sf, I read it regularly, but that was not what I thought I was buying. Can't recommend it at all.

[Doug Lewars]

*** Possible Spoilers ***

I've seen some criticisms that not all the stories were within the fantasy genre. This is correct but the majority were and Sci-Fi/fantasy is often closely related. A second criticism is that these stories aren't very funny. There's some truth to that. Writing humor can be very difficult - particularly when no two people seem to laugh at the same things. Humor is very personal. There were a few stories that I thought were rather childish but I also thought a young person would find them hilarious. There were a number that I classified as 'cute' - not something to laugh at but worth a smile and there were a few that evoked a chuckle. For, me, however, there were two stories that did laugh at and these made the entire book worthwhile.

'Sooner or Later or Never Never' by Gary Jennings was one. It told the tale of Crispin Mobey, a very young, very idealistic, evangelical preacher who want to make his mark in the world by saving a primitive tribe of Australian bushmen. Things do not go well for poor Crispin and what befalls the poor lad I found more than a little amusing.

The second story I particularly enjoyed was 'Stakes and Ladders' by Marilyn Todd. Here we have a witch and a teacher of witches attempting to mark exam papers while a snake who, may formerly have been a prince is lobbying her to make him human once again. It isn't so much that he minds being a snake. It's simply that a development project is threatening to eliminate the habitat where he and a goodly number of his peers live. After a class transformation assignment goes horribly wrong, our teacher finds herself out of a job and therefore turns her attention to other things. Eventually matters work themselves out but it's great story and well worth reading.

A couple of stories are trite, most are okay and, as noted above, a couple are excellent. I think it's worth investing your time in reading this one.

[Tricia Stricklin]

I don't give up on books very easily, some taking months, or even years to slog through. I gave up on this halfway through. Most of the authors' apparent idea of "comic" is just to write as badly as possible and hope someone finds it funny that the writing is overwrought and sometimes refers to boobies or has a reference to something in our world. I feel like I could see a freshman author actually writing these stories without tongue in cheek, and the actual situations were rarely humorous. I guess it just wasn't my idea of funny, and it became so painful to read that I didn't really care what I was missing from the other half of the stories.

[Mary]

The title is correct - but not sure this is the exact same book. Wrong number of stories and a missing author. Not sure it really matters. I'm not all that fond of short stories, though it helps if they are good stories. Fantasy is not my favorite genre, either - so, you're asking, why did I pick up this book? I'm wondering myself.

[Buggz79]

There were some decent stories but most missed the 'comic' mark for me. Ah well, can't win em all I suppose.

[Holly]

Despite the title advertising that this is a collection of fantasy, a good portion of these stories are actually science fiction. Like many short story collections, some of the stories are excellent, some mediocre, and some awful. I did feel that many of the stories felt either very rushed or alternately dragged on; very few felt nicely balanced.

[Caroline]

My only experience of fantasy novels has been Terry Pratchett's excellent Discworld series, so I thought I would give this one a go.
Although titled "The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy" many of the stories within are actually sci-fi. They all have one thing in common though. They are amusing and hugely entertaining.

[Tasneem]

A fabulous collection of some very talented writers. I enjoyed it very much, and found the vision truly entertaining.

[Jenny Burridge]

Excellent.

[Tanya Beaton]

It was amusing... some of them weren't very funny, but most of them were entertaining.

[Al]

Excellent collection of light stories with humor.

[Michaela]

This is certainly a mammoth of a compilation of short stories. 32 in 534 pages. All in all the stories were hit and miss. I think it was a genius compilation overall. I would read again.

[Dwer]

most of the author's senses of humor do not match mine. nuff said

[Jenny]

A lot of hits and a lot of misses.

[Jean Sharp]

As with all multi author compilations, there are some gems, and some clods of rotting cabbage.
The stories by the named authors in the blurb are good, and as I said, some unexpected gems.