Run for the Border

Twenty-eight years ago, Borderland, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, was first published. This was a shared universe anthology using an urban fantasy setting.The premise was simple: Something had happened to open the border between our world and Faerie. Some decent sized city was near the border when it happened, though no place is ever named, It can found anywhere in the world if one follows certain rules. Or not. Teens ran away to the Border to escape something, to find something, or to just experience magic.

Borderland starts with a story by Steven R. Boyett, just after a way between the Border opens. You see a town attempt to adjust after a cataclysm? An apocalypse? And the return of "elves" (but don't call them that.) Later stories jump ahead some time (but how can time be measured near Faerie?) and introduces us to Stick and Farrel Din, the Dancing Ferret and Danceland, and learn a little something about how people live, survive, and thrive in a town where neither the rules of science nor magic are reliable, where cultures, both world and fay, come together and try to build something new, something theirs, while dealing with the darker side of being human.

In five anthologies and three novels, Bordertown has introduced me to characters who are old friends, Ash Bieucannon, Wolfboy, Sparks, the Fixer and the Finder (Tick-Tick and Orient), Sunny Rico, Linn, Milo Chevrolet, the "Terrible Trio" (Strider, Sai, and Goldy), Screaming Lord Neville, Camphire, and too many more to count. I have eaten at Godmom's, the Hard Luck Cafe, Taco Hell (try the Meltdown Burrito), and Cafe Cubana for tea. I've danced at the Dancing Ferret, Danceland, and the Wheat Sheaf. I've seen Horn Dance and Lord Dunsany's Nightmare and oh so many bands who name the town home. I tell you all this to point out how real the writers made Bordertown for me.

And what writers. I've mentioned Steven Boyett, and if you haven't read his books Ariel and Elegy Beach and if you haven't read those two, are you in for a treat. In the first book he was joined by Ellen Kushner, Charles de Lint, and Bellamy Bach. In the second book, Bordertown, they were joined by Will Shetterly, Emma Bull, and Midori Snyder. I won't go over the full list of those who contributed to the Bordertown series, but a few of the other writers were Delia Sherman, Patricia McKillip, Steven Brust, Caroline, Stevermer, Jane Yolen, Cory Doctorow, Amal el-Mohtar, Tim Pratt, Nalo Hopkinson, Christopher Barzak, Holly Black, and Neil Gaiman.

This is early urban fantasy and, as such, owes as much to magic realism as to the mythic fantasy novels which is the ur-text for most heroic and epic fantasy today. Don't expect to find plot-by-the-numbers, but instead people who love and live so they must be real, which is the real magic.

This is the series that inspired the current urban fantasy trend and was read by many writers working the YA boom. The have a strong place in the history of the genre and and damn fine stories besides.

Borderland edited by Terri Windling & Mark Alan Arnold
Bordertown edited by Terri Windling & Mark Alan Arnold
Life on the Border edited by Terri Windling
The Essential Bordertown: A Traveller's Guide to the Edge of Faerie edited by Terri Windling and Delia Sherman
Welcome to Bordertown edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner
Elsewhere by Will Shetterly
Nevernever by Will Shetterly
Finder by Emma Bull

There is also an Audible.com audiobook edition of Welcome to Bordertown.

(Faun could easily be one of the myriad bands in Bordertown.)