I so wish I’d come up with the “Fantastic” line of anthologies. It’s like a franchise in some ways, especially considering the vast array of collections we’ve seen over the years. Conqueror Fantastic actually hearkens back to the ones Mike Resnick edited, being an anthology of alternate history stories with a common theme. In this instance, Pamela Sargent asked a group of authors to find pivotal points in history starring “conquerors” (for all that term implies), and to imagine a different path. The results are certainly interesting.
There’s the strange, such as Paul Di Filippo’s “Observable Things,” which invokes the spirits of Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft to reimagine an episode early in New England’s history. This one is surely an acquired taste, for I found it extremely hard to get into. Much more to my personal tastes was “Intensified Transmogrification” by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, dealing with a Lyndon B. Johnson driven to madness by his obsession with the Vietnam War and the Communist Chinese Menace.
Other conquerors who get their turn in the spotlight include Napoleon (George Zebroski’s “Nappy”), Hitler (Ian Watson’s “Adolf” and Stephen Dedman’s “Twilight of Idols”), Genghis Khan (Pamela Sargent’s “Spirit Brother” and James Morrow’s “Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole”), Alexander the Great (Michelle West’s “To The Gods Their Due”), and more. Everyone has their own favorite periods of history, and those periods of history which leave them cold. Likewise, this is a scattershot collection, the stories all quite well done, but catering to a range of tastes. I plan to go back and reread some of the stories I merely skimmed, but even with a first impression, I like what I see here. Conqueror Fantastic does a good job of living up to its mandate.