Whatever You Do . . . DON'T Drop It On Your Cat!

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I've had a story anthologized!  Big whoop, you say.  That happens all the time.

No, no, no, this is a very big whoop indeed.  Sense of Wonder, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, must surely be the very largest SF anthology ever compiled.  When I tell you it's almost a thousand pages long, that doesn't take into account that it has the dimensions of an old-fashioned telephone directory.  Or that each page has three columns of rather small print.  This book has fiction by something like 148 different authors, from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly to Nalo Hopkinson.  It has 62 specialized essays on topic ranging from Postcolonial Science Fiction to Jim Baen.  It has the entire text of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars!  And it contains my own "The Edge of the World."

Obviously this is not a book you'd want to drop on a household pet.

Sense of Wonder is intended, if I've got this right, to be used as a textbook for college science fiction classes.  No matter what slant the teacher takes on SF, this book has it covered.  Is this a totally mad notion?  Maybe.  But I remember when Jim Frenkl first came up with the concept of a gigantic best-of-the-year anthology and handed editorship of it to Gardner Dozois.  A lot of us wondered then if there was really a market for such a thing.  Yet now, more than a quarter century later, it's still going strong.  So the same thing may well apply in this case too.

You can read a description of the volume (and the table of contents) here.

Above:  Here it is, the distinguished thing, next to an actual life-sized pig.  Just to give you some sense of scale.

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