Bordertown

Scarce paperback, 1986 1st printing, of Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s Bordertown stories centered around a place between human civilization and a society of freaks, cryptids, and elves. It’s a ‘shared world’ written about by multiple authors in an anthology format, which could go so, so wrong but just doesn’t! I love the Phil Hale cover painting.

You’re now supposed to be aware of and respect something called “worldbuilding,” as if fictional locales might crop up by accident, or without sufficient intentionally-sculpted edge detail. I notice it’s often invoked as a counterpoint to the necessary: plotting, characterization, dialogue, basic scene-setting.

Worldbuilding on purpose, or saying it is a discrete process at all, is reverse engineering: an observer in a lab coat trying to understand what it might be like to have a fucking imagination.

251pp.
Condition: Good—arguably great for a mass market as old as I am.
Publisher: Signet
Year: 1986