{"id":58660,"date":"2026-02-23T06:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=58660"},"modified":"2026-02-23T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T15:16:39","slug":"the-essential-patricia-a-mckillip-by-patricia-a-mckillip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/the-essential-patricia-a-mckillip-by-patricia-a-mckillip\/","title":{"rendered":"The Essential Patricia A. McKillip by Patricia A. McKillip"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>In \u201cWhat Inspires Me,\u201d Patricia A. McKillip\u2019s WisCon 2004 Guest of Honor speech, and penultimate entry in The Essential Patricia A. McKillip<\/em>, the award-winning fantasy writer said: \u201cWhat I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person\u201d (p. 298). That\u2019s the best possible summary of what this new career retrospective is, I think, though of course it\u2019s made of short stories and not novels. It\u2019s an excellent primer on McKillip\u2019s themes, threads, preoccupations, imagery, and style, as well as her incredible range. And it led me to reflect on some of her intersections with other writers, too.<\/p>\n

As far as themes and threads go: A prominent one is women who are trapped by their roles, by a lack of opportunity, and by men. These men are sometimes well-meaning and clueless\u2014but often they are mean and even cruel, dismissive and neglectful, and closed<\/em>. Men who don\u2019t ask questions, who assume things about the women and the world around them: what they are like and what they are capable of and what they mean. Many of these stories (and a lot of McKillip\u2019s work in general) are romantic and end happily (as she alludes to in \u201cWriting High Fantasy,\u201d the final entry in this anthology); but it\u2019s the men who are willing not just to think, but to reconsider, who find happy endings. These men put metaphors together and uncover different perspectives, and they allow other people to know more than they do. The exception to this lies in the more fairy-tale or parable-feeling stories, like \u201cThe Lion and the Lark,\u201d in which the man is a magical entity and doesn\u2019t do a whole lot of learning or changing. But in \u201cThe Lion and the Lark,\u201d the man at least does a good job of knowing and loving the protagonist.<\/p>\n

The fairy world appears often, posited as a secret world. And here\u2019s another of the collection\u2019s threads: secrets, and particularly secret identities and their discovery. The majority of these stories have at least one character who isn\u2019t who they seem to be, or who isn\u2019t sure themselves who they are. There\u2019s often a lot of intersection between secret identities and secret worlds, or sometimes simply a different, secret, way of things. Indeed, the most important hallmark of McKillip\u2019s style, I think, is her particular mix of solidity and dreaminess. Her characters feel like real people, with practical concerns, who you could imagine stubbing their toes or running out of groceries\u2014things that are mundane but also specific to them and their world. But these solid characters exist in much more fluid worlds. Her settings and plots are both held together by feeling, evocative description, and character, and so sometimes they\u2019re vague and oddly shaped. Sometimes her novels can be a little loose and meandering because of that dreaminess, while some of the short stories in this collection end before I wish they did.<\/p>\n

My two very favorite stories in the collection are \u201cLady of the Skulls and \u201cByndley.\u201d Both of them exemplify this point about style in fascinating ways.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something particularly powerful and rich about \u201cLady of the Skulls,\u201d and I think part of that is due to how focused the setting is: a lone tower, filled with vast amounts of mythical treasure, standing far away from everything on a barren plain. Those who visit the tower are allowed to choose one thing to take with them. If they choose the most precious thing in the tower, they can leave freely; if they choose wrongly, they die as soon as they leave. The Lady of the Skulls is the woman who guards this tower and has to watch as men come and break themselves on it.\u00a0She plants her flowers in old skulls. Her watering can is the helmet of some past adventurer.<\/p>\n

I felt the awe of the magic here, and understood this woman as a particular, specific person. All of the complex elements and different flavors get to kind of marinate in this one specific place, which sits at one specific point in these men\u2019s lives. We do get a flashback at the end, but it feels like a reward to me, not a break in focus, because it finally gives us the final piece we need to understand the place we\u2019ve been in for the rest of the story.<\/p>\n

In general, though, my favorite McKillip stories tend to sit somewhere in between her real-world style and her vaguest dream-like style. \u201cByndley\u201d does exactly that. It is about a wizard named Reck who once fell in love with the faerie queen. The faerie queen invited him into the woods, and took him into her bed. But the queen has a husband, and Reck can\u2019t help but be jealous. He steals a special gift that the king gave the queen: a \u201ctiny living world within a glass globe\u201d that\u2019s astonishingly beautiful. Because he\u2019s a wizard, he was able to escape, by jumping into the globe itself and making the globe vanish. Now, years later, he still has the globe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.\u201d (p. 111)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Reck doesn\u2019t say this to excuse or defend himself. He explains this to one of the citizens of the town of Byndley, where he\u2019s come on a quest to return the glass globe back to the faerie world. He cannot live in peace with what he\u2019s stolen. He feels the weight of the queen\u2019s memory\u2014or his own guilt. So he searches far and wide for a way to give it back. And in his search, it turns out, he seems to have discovered something true about faerieland and about himself, something that applies to McKillip\u2019s stories generally: Something about the porousness of worlds, and about what it means to be inside one or another, and how you can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time, in different ways.<\/p>\n

In fact, Reck discovers that he\u2019s never really left the globe at all. The town of Byndley is made up of faeries in disguise, and the townsperson to whom he told his tale was the faerie queen herself. When he leaves Byndley, he doesn\u2019t look back: \u201cHe looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn\u201d (p. 116). This is how McKillip\u2019s work makes me feel, too, and I think it\u2019s what I want out of fantasy most of all (alongside characters to be there with me): the feeling of that promise of wonder and enchantment, and the truth of that feeling. Somehow, by giving the globe back, Reck gets to keep that feeling with him, which was what he really wanted anyway.<\/p>\n

Stylistically, \u201cByndley\u201d and \u201cLady of the Skulls\u201d work particularly well because of the way they give us that feeling\u2014they give us a world that we can feel that way about. It\u2019s magical enough to be wondrous, but it\u2019s also defined enough to picture at all. Sometimes, McKillip\u2019s more real-world stories lose the wonder for me\u2014\u201cMer,\u201d for example, is this way, although I did really enjoy it. Others are so vague that it\u2019s hard to get a grip on anything, though this is more true of some of her novels than of any of the stories in this collection.\u00a0In The Book of Atrix Wolfe <\/em>(1995), for example, there\u2019s also a wizard who tries to travel between the fairy realm and the human realm. But that story is written in a much more dreamlike way, and also (maybe more importantly, even) the journey often takes place in Atrix Wolfe\u2019s head. For much of the book, he has nobody to talk to about what he\u2019s trying to do or what exactly is troubling him. In \u201cByndley,\u201d Reck asks people questions all the time, so that even if we don\u2019t get definite answers about what the world is like, we learn what the people of Byndley are like and what they think. In \u201cLady of the Skulls,\u201d the two main characters ask each other questions, too. There\u2019s something about that communication and the acceptance of wonder that really makes these stories come alive.<\/p>\n

McKillip is unique; there\u2019s no one else who you\u2019d mistake for her. But she is deeply invested in fantasy as a genre, and fantasy in turn is often interested in interpretation and repetition (among other things). Le Guin is maybe the most obvious comparison, as far as feminism and the role of women in magic go (A Wizard of Earthsea<\/em> [1968] notwithstanding; McKillip didn\u2019t need to go through the learning curve that Le Guin did). Tanith Lee is also in there, and Angela Carter (Carter especially in \u201cThe Lion and the Lark\u201d); and, a little bit more recently, Ursula Vernon\u2014the matter-of-factness, the vivid lives of different unusual people (particularly women), the brand of humor. But \u201cByndley\u201d in particular shows McKillip\u2019s fundamental Beagle-ness.<\/p>\n

Peter S. Beagle is an admirer of McKillip\u2019s work and they collaborated on a novel; he also wrote the afterword to Dreams of Distant Shores<\/em> (2016). Together, they\u2019re two of my personal favorite writers because of their simultaneous true love of fantasy and<\/em> reality\u2014for the strangeness to be found within. McKillip is a little dreamier than Beagle is, Beagle a little more jokey and parodic, and Beagle\u2019s women frustrate me sometimes, but that\u2019s for some other review; but ultimately what we see in their fantasies is an unusual interest in people and in spaces-between.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, McKillip\u2019s \u201cThe Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath.\u201d This is a relatively early story. And Kushner\u2019s introduction explains that Terri Windling commissioned it for her collection Elsewhere <\/em>in 1982; it was McKillip\u2019s first published short story for adults. I like how surprising it is, and how funny it is. The characters are taken seriously\u2014it matters who they are and why they think and feel the ways they do. What happens to them isn\u2019t predictable, and nor is it predictable what the story focuses on and cares about. It\u2019s excellent stuff. Likewise, in \u201cThe Witches of Junket,\u201d the characters are great and at the very centre of the story, alongside a really fascinating portrayal of witchiness. The POV character in particular is one of McKillip\u2019s excellent older women. If the story gets a little bit jumbled up, and the pacing is a little bit too fast\u2014there are too many new characters and I would\u2019ve loved the time to get to know them a little better, and to more clearly understand what was at stake\u2014this can be forgiven because of the connection it makes between reader and characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Witches of Junket\u201d is set in our contemporary world, as is \u201cOut of the Woods.\u201d This is another story that\u2019s difficult to predict, but in this case that\u2019s more because of what the story chooses to focus on than because of plot. The main character, Leta, is worked to the bone by her husband and by her magician boss, and we know that something must change. But that change is surprising, more melancholy than I expected, and somehow also exactly right. I wish this story had been longer, because I wanted to know what happens to the main character, but its abrupt ending is part of the point. Indeed, I\u2019m not always very patient about shorter stories, especially when they hinge on ambiguity or some sort of \u201cgotcha\u201d moment, but McKillip almost always wrong-foots me. I have no idea what happens in \u201cWeird,\u201d for example, and yet I\u2019m still thinking about it. I don\u2019t feel irritated or upset about that, just intrigued.<\/p>\n

Still, \u201cKnight in the Well\u201d is maybe the book\u2019s primary example of McKillip\u2019s dreamy vagueness: There\u2019s a lot going on, it\u2019s beautiful, and, again, I had no idea what any of it meant until maybe halfway through the story at best. This story, too, ends rather abruptly, and I would\u2019ve enjoyed much more time with these characters instead of having their conflicts resolved so fast. In contrast with \u201cWeird,\u201d however, this is one of the volume\u2019s longer stories, at around fifty pages. \u201cThe Gorgon in the Cupboard\u201d is of similar length, and likewise I wanted more perspective from it: on the story\u2019s women, as well as more information about the titular gorgon, who in a way was the least interesting part of the story. If the shorter stories can feel too brief, both of these longer stories feel a little bit structurally lopsided\u2014and so also somehow unfinished.<\/p>\n

Why are these stories the length that they are? Why not longer or shorter? I wonder what was going on with these stories; were they written for some purpose in particular? I would love more background information on them. This is perhaps my one real criticism of the present volume: I would have liked more information on the stories, and more information about the logic behind the anthology itself. It\u2019s a lovely book, and all of the stories deserve to be here and to be read carefully. I\u2019m just not sure what makes this collection the \u201cEssential\u201d McKillip, especially when compared to Tachyon\u2019s earlier (and also excellent) McKillip anthology, Dreams of Distant Shores<\/em>. With a title like this, I\u2019d have liked there to be an explanation of why these stories, and not others, are so definitive.<\/p>\n

For instance, \u201cWonders of the Invisible World,\u201d collected here, is the title of another McKillip anthology, and so we might assume it has significance. In the story (which shares its title with a book by Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan), a researcher from the far future goes back in time and pretends to be an angel that Cotton Mather saw in a feverish revelation. Her boss has sent her there because he\u2019s trying to write a history of imaginative thought\u2014and, in their far future, everything possible to imagine has already been imagined by a very powerful computer. The researcher isn\u2019t allowed to veer from her script, which is set to minimize any alteration of the past, even though\u00a0she very much wants to. When Cotton Mather raves about witches, it\u2019s difficult for her to stomach. But she\u2019s supposed to keep the angel within the limits of what Cotton Mather would have imagined the angel to be.<\/p>\n

When the researcher returns home, to a time when everything imaginable has already been imagined, her son and her friends are playing a video game together. Their characters are in an intergalactic zoo, and they try to defeat the computer by imagining different animals. The computer is always able to display whatever the children dream up\u2014but then an angel appears in one of the animal cages. The angel belongs to none of them. Except, possibly, to the researcher. The angel is caught in the zoo, like the researchers are caught in history, and like her current world is trapped because imagination can no longer create a way out. But then the angel disappears, and that\u2019s the end of the story. So what does this mean, and what can it tell us about the logic of this collection? My best stab at it: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip<\/em> is by and large concerned with three things\u2014how can imagination set people free, what do people imagine, and how do those imagined things\/people\/places connect and change throughout space and time?<\/p>\n

If nothing else, this collection certainly serves as an excellent McKillip primer. The anthology itself is beautiful: Thomas Carey\u2019s cover illustration is so very McKillip, and it\u2019s also resonant of the ornate Kinuko Y. Craft\u2019s Ace covers. Ellen Kushner\u2019s foreword is deeply personal and moving. But other excellent McKillip primers exist: They include Dreams of Distant Shores<\/em> itself, a Strange Horizons roundtable on Ombria in Shadow<\/em><\/a>, and Audrey Isabel Taylor\u2019s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building<\/em><\/a>. I also highly recommend The Riddle-Master of Hed<\/em> and its two sequels, as well as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld<\/em>. But if you haven\u2019t started reading McKillip yet, this is certainly a good place to start\u2014and then, hopefully, continue. But, wherever you start reading McKillip\u2019s work, you won\u2019t want to stop.<\/p>\n
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In \u201cWhat Inspires Me,\u201d Patricia A. McKillip\u2019s WisCon 2004 Guest of Honor speech, and penultimate entry in The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, the award-winning fantasy writer said: \u201cWhat I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":58665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/The-Essential-Patricia-A.-McKillip-cover.jpg?fit=1123%2C1500&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-fg8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58660"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58681,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58660\/revisions\/58681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}