[Teresa Edgerton]

One thing we haven't been talking about is that missing (missing in my opinion at least) sense of wonder.

I'm almost through reading No Flame But Mine, the last book in Tanith Lee's Lionwolf trilogy. And I like the book very much -- a great deal more than the second book, which seemed to wander too far, too often, from the main threads of an already complex story -- but considerably less than the first book, Cast a Bright Shadow.

On the face of it, I should be enjoying Flame more, since the themes are transformation and renewel -- entirely congenial with my personal taste -- and the body count is rather less, while the events of Shadow are far more tragic and cruel, including a mass slaughter. So why do I like Shadow better, when it is full of things that make me cringe? It's because there is so much more in it of the marvelous and the numinous.

Now at least for me any sense of the numinous is getting harder and harder to find, but the marvelous is aparently still alive and well in the genre where Space Ship's efforts are focussed -- the YA Fantasy. Of course this genre has its share of good books and bad books; some of them are simplistic, some of them are shallow. But the best ones are shaking off most of the familiar Fantasy conventions and spontaneously creating new ones. Without melodrama to fall back on, these authors seem to really be stretching the boundaries of their imaginations -- and I predict that the kids who are reading these books now are going to be expecting a lot more from Adult Fantasy when they reach that stage in a few years time. Whether the market will change to accomodate them, or whether they'll be disappointed and we'll lose them is another question.