Welcome to Bordertown
Read Welcome to Bordertown Online
Authors: Ellen Kushner,Holly Black (editors)
Tags: #Literary Collections, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Supernatural, #Short Stories, #Horror
ORE
B
ORDERTOWN
B
OOKS
Anthologies:
Borderland
, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold
Bordertown
, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold
Life on the Border
, edited by Terri Windling
The Essential Bordertown
, edited by Terri Windling and Delia Sherman
Novels:
Elsewhere
by Will Shetterly
Nevernever
by Will Shetterly
Finder
by Emma Bull
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Anthology copyright © 2011 by Holly Black, Ellen Kushner, and Terri Windling
“Bordertown Basics” copyright © 2011 by Terri Windling. “Welcome to Bordertown” copyright © 2011 by Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling. “Shannon’s Law” copyright © 2011 by Cory Doctorow. “Cruel Sister” copyright © 2011 by Patricia A. McKillip. “A Voice Like a Hole” copyright © 2011 by Catherynne M. Valente. “Stairs in Her Hair” copyright © 2011 by Amal El-Mohtar. “Incunabulum” copyright © 2011 by Emma Bull. “Run Back Across the Border” copyright © 2011 by Steven Brust. “A Prince of Thirteen Days” copyright © 2011 by Alaya Dawn Johnson. “The Sages of Elsewhere” copyright © 2011 by Will Shetterly. “Soulja Grrrl: A Long Line Rap,” “Night Song for a Halfie,” and “A Borderland Jump-Rope Rhyme” copyright © 2011 by Jane Yolen. “Crossings” copyright © 2011 by Janni Lee Simner. “Fair Trade” text copyright © 2011 by Sara Ryan. “Fair Trade” illustrations copyright © 2011 by Dylan Meconis. “Our Stars, Our Selves” copyright © 2011 by Tim Pratt. “Elf Blood” copyright © 2011 by Annette Curtis Klause. “Ours Is the Prettiest” copyright © 2011 by Nalo Hopkinson. “The Wall” copyright © 2011 by Delia Sherman. “We Do Not Come in Peace” copyright © 2011 by Christopher Barzak. “The Rowan Gentleman” copyright © 2011 by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. “The Song of the Song” copyright © 2011 by Neil Gaiman. “A Tangle of Green Men” copyright © 2011 by Charles de Lint.
Bordertown and the Borderlands were created by Terri Windling, with creative input from the authors of the previous stories and novels in the Borderland series, as well as Mark Alan Arnold (coeditor Volumes I & II) and Delia Sherman (coeditor Volume IV). The “Borderland” setting is used in these stories by permission of Terri Windling.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Bordertownseries.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welcome to Bordertown : new stories and poems of the Borderlands / edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner ; introduction by Terri Windling. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Stories and poems set in the urban land of Bordertown, a city on the edge of the faerie and human world, populated by human and elfin runaways.
Contents: Welcome to Bordertown / by Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling — Shannon’s law / by Cory Doctorow — Cruel sister / by Patricia A. McKillip — A voice like a hole / by Catherynne M. Valente — Stairs in her hair / by Amal El-Mohtar — Incunabulum / by Emma Bull — Run back across the border / by Steven Brust — A prince of thirteen days / by Alaya Dawn Johnson — The sages of elsewhere / by Will Shetterly — Soulja grrrl / by Jane Yolen — Crossings / by Janni Lee Simner — Fair trade / by Sara Ryan — Night song for a Halfie / by Jane Yolen — Our stars, our selves / by Tim Pratt — Elf blood / by Annette Curtis Klause — Ours is the prettiest / by Nalo Hopkinson — The wall / by Delia Sherman — We do not come in peace / by Christopher Barzak — A Borderland jump-rope rhyme / by Jane Yolen — The Rowan gentleman / by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare — The song of the song / by Neil Gaiman — A tangle of green men / by Charles de Lint.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89745-0
1. Supernatural—Literary collections. [1. Supernatural—Literary collections.] I. Black, Holly. II. Kushner, Ellen.
PZ5.W43 2011 808.8′037—dc22 2010035558
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
F
OR
T
ERRI
W
INDLING
,
who showed us all the way to the Border
NTRODUCTION
BY
H
OLLY
B
LACK
A
nyone writing urban fantasy today owes a debt to Terri Windling.
When Terri created the original Borderland series of shared-world stories, there was nothing else like it. The first two volumes,
Borderland
and
Bordertown
, came out in 1986, and created a city where the capricious and dangerous elves of folklore (even if they called themselves something else) walked around in leather jackets, drank alongside human artists and poets at bars, and, most of all, existed in a world that wasn’t long ago and far away. Bordertown was always close by, just around a corner, the place you could run away to if you dared.
I was a college student when I read the books for the first time, and they cracked wide open my sense of what you could do in fantasy. Reading about Bordertown was the first time I saw people like me in speculative fiction. Messed-up kids, making messed-up choices. I couldn’t be a magician’s apprentice or a pig keeper who might or might not be a king’s son or a princess with a prophecy hanging over my head. But I could, maybe, somehow, be part of a community of artists who loved magic.
It was more than the idea of folklore mixed with contemporary life that compelled me. I was also drawn in by the idea that all these writers
knew one another.
They were
friends.
Even their characters were friends! They wrote stories together and left clever references to each other in their work. And that created in me a longing for something I didn’t even know I could have. I could someday be a writer and have writer friends and we could tell stories together.
From the first time I read the books, I knew that was what I wanted—to be a part of a community of artists.
It was the dream of that life that propelled me into and through college, through endless writing and rewriting of my first novel, through introducing myself to other writers. It was Bordertown that inspired me to see the mythic and strange in the detritus and mundane trappings of the modern day.
When Ellen Kushner asked me to coedit this anthology with her, I was thrilled. And when Terri Windling gave us her blessing along with lots of good advice (plus the promise to write an introduction), we were off and running. We set about gathering together as many friends of Bordertown as we could. We knew that other readers of those original books had grown up to be writers themselves. We hoped, too, that some of the writers of the original stories would be willing to revisit Bordertown. Asking around, we found a diverse collection of Bordertown fans (including our editor at Random House, Mallory Loehr), each of them more eager than the last to return to the city caught between the Realm and the World, the city where all things were still possible.
I even got to do the thing I dreamed of when I first read Bordertown—I got to write a story with a friend.
Every
urban fantasy writer has Terri Windling to thank: for
being an innovator, for striking out into new territory. Whether or not today’s urban fantasy writers have ever personally read a single Bordertown book (and many have read far more than one), their work is descended from them. Bordertown created the genre. It built the town that everyone else is playing in. This is the book series that changed the landscape of fantasy, and I am proud and humbled to be a part of this new volume.