Fans of Kate Elliott will have a good idea what to expect from Tachyon Press’ The Very Best of Kate Elliott, a 2015 collection of twelve short stories, some set in the numerous worlds she has invented over the last two decades, as well as four essays. In these richly imagined worlds, intimate scenes take place among friends, lovers, mentors, and families — and the prominent characters are always women. In these stories, a young woman rides to escape an arranged marriage, a widow travels to save her village, and a woman fights to defend her honor. In her introduction, Kate Elliott discusses the landscape of the fantasy and science fiction worlds she fell in love with, grand stories focused almost exclusively on men. Comparing the river of stories to the river of her home, Elliott writes that “Narrative gets engineered until we start to believe it has always run this way.” Again and again in The Very Best of Kate Elliott, stories full of women show other ways for the narrative to flow. The plot of “Riding the Shore of The River of Death” is almost immediately recognizable as a straightforward fantasy story: a group of young warriors on a hunt to prove their manhood encounter an obstacle and then a powerful sorcerer. Their companions follow and there is a confrontation among a circle of standing stones. At the end, the protagonist must make a choice. Almost a straightforward story, except that one of the hunters, and the sorcerer, are both women. The companions who follow include the hunter’s betrothed, a mighty hero who will nevertheless trap her in a life she does not want. With this story, Elliott adds to and reclaims the simple heroic fantasy so many of us grew up with.
