Conqueror Fantastic

by Pamela Sargent (Editor / Contributor)

All-new stories by the best of the best

Michelle West € Pamela Sargent € Jack Dann € George Alec Effinger € Ian Watson € James Morrow € George Zebrowski € and more...

Here are thirteen original tales in which destinies are changed-and with them, the future. Each story imagines what the world would be like if its most powerful leaders had met different fates. Some of the greatest minds in science fiction take on alternate history, including a victorious Hitler, a virtual Napoleon, and an Alexander the Mediocre.

Genres: Anthologies

320 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 6, 2004

About the author

Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. In 2012, she was honored with the Pilgrim Award by the Science Fiction Research Association for lifetime achievement in science fiction scholarship. She is the author of the novels Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, Watchstar, The Golden Space, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, Child of Venus, Climb the Wind, and Ruler of the Sky. Her most recent short story collection is Thumbprints, published by Golden Gryphon Press, with an introduction by James Morrow. The Washington Post Book World has called her “one of the genre's best writers.”

In the 1970s, she edited the Women of Wonder series, the first collections of science fiction by women; her other anthologies include Bio-Futures and, with British writer Ian Watson as co-editor, Afterlives. Two anthologies, Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s and Women of Wonder, The Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, were published by Harcourt Brace in 1995; Publishers Weekly called these two books “essential reading for any serious sf fan.” Her most recent anthology is Conqueror Fantastic, out from DAW Books in 2004. Tor Books reissued her 1983 young adult novel Earthseed, selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and a sequel, Farseed, in early 2007. A third volume, Seed Seeker, was published in November of 2010 by Tor. Earthseed has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Melissa Rosenberg, scriptwriter for all of the Twilight films, writing the script and producing through her Tall Girls Productions.

A collection, Puss in D.C. and Other Stories, is out; her novel Season of the Cats is out in hardcover and will be available in paperback from Wildside Press. The Shore of Women has been optioned for development as a TV series by Super Deluxe Films, part of Turner Broadcasting.

Pamela Sargent lives in Albany, New York.

Reviews

[Amélie · Rating 3 out of 5]

“To the Gods Their Due” by Michelle West follows Alexander the great, showing his rise to power and his relationship with one of his men, Hephaestion.

[Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking it was a collection of original alternate history stories, but it’s not quite that. Many of the stories do involve “what-if” plot points, but they’re rooted in fantasy -- but not of the Tolkienesque variety, either. In Stephen Dedman’s “Twilight of Idols,” for instance, Adolf Hitler kills a dragon straight out of the Niebelungen, making him more or less invulnerable (how do you think he escaped injury from that bomb?), but the rest of his career fits more into the “secret history” category. Michelle West’s “To the Gods Their Due” is a cautionary tale about Alexander and the price to be paid for quasi-immortality, and while it’s a well-written story, there’s nothing especially “fantastic” about it. (I don’t think access to a soothsayer counts.) “Intensified Transmogrification,” by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, is a brief alternate history about LBJ with no fantasy element that I can discern. (Schizophrenia is not fantasy.) And so on. There’s some pretty good writing in this volume, but not much thematic consistency.

[SFReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

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