Guest Post: Can there be such a thing as “Too Much Fantasy?” by David Emrys

David E. Emrys is the author of a couple of self-published fantasies. I got to chatting with him on Twitter, and he seemed like a good fellow. So I asked if he’d like to write something. And he did. So here it is.

Is the fantasy world over-populated? It’s a valid question and one that keeps raising its ugly head in the current era of ‘Lord of the Authors: The Fellowship of the Fantasy’.

Without battling out the topic of Indie vs Traditional, I want to take a moment and talk about fantasy worlds. A simple blog post can’t cover every single fantasy tome to have ever graced a book shelf (or a digital market place like Amazon, for all you e-publishing gurus), but we can highlight a few.

“The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013”, Table of Contents (Prime)

I don’t think I’ve ever picked up one of the Year’s Best fiction books. I once bought one of the politics collections, because it had an article by Matt Taibbi in it. This year’s SFF collection, however, looks pretty good – not to mention containing authors whose work I’m both aware of and interested in. [I found out about it from SF Signal. The book is published by Prime Books.]

This could be a good end-of-year read, or gift for the SFF fan in your life, or even a good place to start for someone who wants to give the genres a try. When you consider that the book features such rising stars as Aliette de Bodard, a slew of (to me) unknowns, and more established authors like Ursula le Guin, Jay Lake and Robert Charles Wilson, this is a pretty solid selection.

Upcoming: “EPIC” ed. John Joseph Adams (Tachyon)

I almost gave this post a rather grand title along the lines of “The Most Important Introduction to Fantasy?” I decided to let my British reserve win out, but I think Epic could well be the best thing to happen to Fantasy newbies for a long time. It’s an anthology that, quite obviously, takes Epic Fantasy as its premise, and editor Joseph John Adams has drawn together a quite spectacular roster of new and established authors.