Subject: Review: FANTASTIC ALICE edited by Margaret Weis

From: "Evelyn C Leeper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 22:29:55 GMT

FANTASTIC ALICE edited by Margaret Weis
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1995 Evelyn C. Leeper

     This is an anthology of seventeen stories based in some way on Lewis
Carroll's ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.

     Well, I suppose it sounded promising.

     I was not encouraged by the fact that the introduction refers to the
original work both as ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and ALICE IN
WONDERLAND.  It also describes Lewis Carroll as "the epitome of the proper
Victorian gentleman," a description which I do not believe squares with his
penchant for photographing nude girls.  But the real test, of course, is the
stories themselves.

     While it would be expecting too much for the stories to equal
Carroll's, I had hoped they would at least capture some of the spirit (as
did Gilbert Adair's ALICE THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE a few years ago).
Unfortunately, for the most part they don't.  A couple have as their only
connection the fact that they have a talking Cheshire cat.  (In this they
are similar to Thomas Disch and John Sladek's BLACK ALICE, which had a
Tenniel illustration on the cover, but no connection with the Carroll
stories.)  Others postulate that Wonderland is some sort of fantasy world
bearing little resemblance to how Carroll described it, or even the
afterlife.  And the stories are so downbeat, filled with child abuse, death,
drugs, and so on.  I know that's real life, but Wonderland was supposed to
be an escape from real life.  Even the stories that do seem to be set in the
"real" Wonderland are mostly unsatisfying, their jokes and paradoxes taken
straight from Carroll himself.  The one exception to this is Connie Hirsch's
"Wonderland Express," in which Hirsch seems to have come up with NEW
wordplay of the type Carroll used.

     One other story that did work was "A Common Night" by Bruce Holland
Rogers, mostly because Rogers did a good job imitating Carroll's poetry.

     But on the whole, FANTASTIC ALICE is a disappointment, and I cannot
recommended it even (or perhaps especially) for fans of the Carroll works.

     I also have a complaint separate from the contents of the book.  For
the reader, a trade paperback should offer some advantage over a mass-market
paperback, and should certainly not be worse.  Yet when I left this book in
the car for only four hours, the cover looked like someone had taken a
curling iron to it.  Other companies manage to make trade paperbacks that
avoid this; I would hope Ace would too.

%B      Fantastic Alice
%E      Margaret Weis
%C      New York
%D      December 1995
%I      Ace
%O      trade paperback, US$12
%G      ISBN 0-441-00253-6
%P      291pp

-- 
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email-masked]
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in
Samson's time." --Richard Nixon