The opening

I'm still on a restricted diet - just a few short stories from time to time. I just finished another collection co-edited by Gardner Dozois featuring a bunch of major players in the field. But this time it is fantasy, the co-editor is Jack Dann and the collection is Dark Alchemy. At first glance it looked like a similar sort of collection to the last one I read - a showcase for the current state of the art. Well it is that after a fashion but it is also themed - something not obvious from the cover notes. I'm not sure why you would want to obscure something like that. The theme seems to be wizards and more specifically the discovery or emergence into wizardly powers. Hardly an obscure or under-used theme but very well done in this case. Get a bunch of top authors contributing and you get a good outcome. In fact, in fantasy you often get better outcomes. Short stories allow the fantasy writer more scope than within the bounds imposed by the marketplace for the novel or trilogy. Most of the stories here seem to benefit from that freedom - only one or two plod along at the pace of a novel.

I would say this though. The big downside of a themed anthology is that the same basic story lines get repeated a lot. There just aren't that many things you can do when uncovering a wizardly power. Most of the authors here manage to transcend this by just writing well and doing the character and world building well. Still, the "here we go again" feeling does knock a bit off some of these stories. The ones where the big revelation is the heart of the story rather than the excuse to tell a tale.

I wonder if I'm up to reading a novel next. Perhaps the last one in a series about a wizard coming into his power.