What
a world the West has woven. Technology, with its mantra of making
life easier, has in fact made our lives more busy and inundated us
with information, so much so that our lives are ever more consumed by
the present. It hurts my heart clicking on links to 'Best SF of All
Time”, or “Top 100 Fantasy Ever” and seeing that 75% of the
books were published after 2000. The efforts of so many brilliant
writers are invisibly crumbling in the public eye. Not quite
vanished but on the verge is Lucius Shepard. Once one of the
absolute titans of fantastika in (semi) short form, few if any of the
younguns have even heard his name. The Ends of the Earth (1991)
may just well be the best collection he produced, and if not, at
least has several horses in the race. Beyond himself, the collection
likewise contains some of the tip-top best short stories to come out
of the late 20th century.
The
collection kicks off with the title story “The
Ends of the Earth”. A down-on-his-luck NY writer tries to get away
from it all in Guatemala. He meets an alluring young French woman in
a lonely tourist town, but has his advances blocked by a weed dealer
who is trying to translate a native board game he found into English.
The writer's advances eventually go too far, and the small town is
turned on its fantastical head. Out of all the stories to choose to
title the collection after, I'm lost why this is the one. It's a
loosely developed, forced concept with random “fantasy” coming
alive in a form that is intended to be horrific but doesn't go beyond
cheap 80s slasher. If the idea was to ease readers in, one toe at a
time, then fair enough. Because...
