Map of Dreams

2007 International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA): William L. Crawford Award — Best First Book by a New Fantasy Writer

Fantasy has come to be associated with a literature of escapism but M. Rickert's collection, Map of Dreams, hearkens back to the root meaning of "fantasy," from the word "phantasia" or "a making visible." Myths exist here, not as old stories, but as ancient truths about the nature of being a modern human.

There are winged creatures in these stories, and there is odd magic as well, but these serve as elementals of emotion, making apparent the inner lives of humans. There is terror, and humor, too; love and sorrow, despair and recovery — all in a reality where dreams and nightmares do not fade away upon close inspection. Rickert's stories do not lull; they awaken.

In the title story, a near-40,000-word novella published here for the first time, Annie Merchant witnesses — experiences — her daughter's murder by a sniper; a random murder. Annie then vows to relive that moment, and prevent her daughter's death. She forsakes her marriage, her friends, her home, and invests body and soul into this endeavor. She studies every tome she can find at the library on physics and "curved space"; her quest eventually takes her to Australia where the everyday myths and dreams of the Aborigines become her new reality; she befriends people, from the present as well as the past, who aide her in her search for the past. But above all else, her love for her daughter gives her the strength of will to find and embrace redemption.

"Peace on Suburbia" is a different kind of Christmas story, about a different kind of Saviour; a world in which parents fear for their children's safety, and terrorism poses a threat to home and neighborhood. And in this same world — our world! — where our children go off to war, the story "Anyway" asks the questions: What if you could save the world?...Would you do it?

"Cold Fires," about love and obsession, which Locus magazine calls "virtuoso narrative artistry, two embedded tales conspiring to tell the story that frames them," was a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation's Fountain Award, and named to Locus's 2004 "Best of the Best" list.

Map of Dreams — featuring seventeen tales plus four interstitial framing sections: Dreams, Nightmares, Waking, and Rising — is the highly anticipated first short fiction collection from M. Rickert, heralded as "the hot new writer of the year" by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, editors of the Year's Best anthology series. With an introduction by Christopher Barzak and an afterword by Gordon Van Gelder, editor and publisher of the prestigious The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

"Sorrows, anguish and bitter might-have-beens dominate Rickert's fitfully brilliant collection of fantasy fiction, whose title novella, according to Gordon Van Gelder's afterword, reveals a love of the natural world that wonderfully imbues the author's often enigmatic fiction. Rickert's nature is less illumined by golden daffodils than 'red in tooth and claw,' rife with the fierce necessary complements of birth and death, reality and dream, sanity and madness. Rickert acknowledges her 'magical realism' owes a literary debt to Gabriel García Marquez, but her most powerful passages, like 'Moorina of the Seals,' a startling ecological hymn, and 'Many Voices,' the horrific exposé of a women's prison, draw on woman's strengths and weaknesses as maiden, matron and crone. 'Leda' and her other subtle retellings of myth, couched in the deceptively prosaic dialogue of America's underprivileged, achieve resonances that plumb the darkest depths of human love and loneliness, and occasionally rise to 'the song that both connects, and disconnects us, shared, but never owned, life.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The stories in this collection both sting and delight me. M. Rickert is a trailblazer in the unexplored dark corners of our lives, marking the way out ahead of us with fearlessness and humor and grace. Map of Dreams will be at my bedside for a long time to come." Charles Coleman Finlay, author of The Prodigal Troll

"'All life is death,' she says. 'From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive.' This may be Rickert's characteristic theme, and from it she's forged the most impressive debut collection I've seen this year." Gary K. Wolfe, Locus, October 2006

"Don't miss this excellent collection of stories by M. Rickert (an exceptionally talented writer working at the literary end of the fantasy field), for it's likely to be an awards contender." Terri Windling, The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts

M. Rickert is the author of many short stories that have been anthologized in several Year's Best Science Fiction and Year's Best Fantasy collections. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.