"Factum Est Bonum."
Tales from the Year Between is an anthology series somewhere at the intersection of the darkly fantastic, the comically fantastic, and the outright bizarre.
Its editor-in-chief and 'Grand Hierophant' is C. Vandyke (or 'Chris Van Dyke', depending on where you look); its first volume is 'Achten Tan: Land of Dust and Bone', with subsequent releases planned twice yearly.
Each volume is set in a different invented world, with each contributor writing one or more pieces of whatever kind of work they like within that world. The uniqueness of Tales from the Year Between is of two main flavours:
- The world of each volume is created in collaboration between all of that volume's contributors. At the beginning of the process, there's nothing but a name and one or two very broad-strokes bits of information about the sort of setting it might be; then, through playing a variant on Avery Alder's game 'The Quiet Year'
(Year Between is not officially associated with Alder or 'The Quiet Year', but uses the game to generate its world), the universe is created. Over fifty-two turns, each representing a week in an extremely eventful year, the contributors create places, concepts, events, and characters; all of that material is then available to use in the works within the volume. - Confusion, weirdness, variety, and even contradiction are all embraced, if not outright encouraged. Because the contributors are all working within a shared world, there are likely to be points where their works conflict with each other, and that's all part of the fun. Both Watsonian and Doylist explanations may be implied or suggested, or it's all just rolled with as an amusing and vaguely meta side-effect of the unusual creative process. The motto of the anthology is 'Factum Est Bonum': roughly, 'it's all good'. As wide as possible a range of different styles and formats is also encouraged, with works in the first volume including poems, short stories, recipes, letters, newspaper articles, plays, hymns, and in-universe essays.
The anthology's website contains contributor bios and information about each volume as well as Bonus Material in the form of 'apocrypha': pieces that may or may not have made it into the printed volumes but have been published on the website instead or in addition. Sometimes these are poems, stories, and other pieces that wouldn't have been out of place in the volume; in at least one instance, the apocrypha section has been used to host an audio piece that for obvious reasons couldn't be printed.
The volumes of Tales from the Year Between are:
- 'Achten Tan: Land of Dust and Bone' (August 2020). In a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, a fantasy city finds itself in a fragile peace following a long war with a species of viciously intelligent rats known as the Craven. Built within the bones of some long-dead giant, Achten Tan has a lot going on: elves riding giant ants, gnomes harvesting algae from caverns, a possibly mad seer bent on gladiatorial combat, a dark elf wizard, mysterious magic mirrors, at least two very good ribs restaurants, and much more.
Provides examples of:
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Tales from the Year Between as a whole
- Alternate Continuity: So far, no explicit examples of other dimensions or timelines, but the fact that some stories within the same volume contradict each other might suggest that Year Between worlds operate on a slightly wobbly canon. Avoids Continuity Snarl, though, because it's sort of part of the point that there is no single consistent right answer, with contributors free to shape or change the world however they see fit.
- Genre Roulette: A mix of this and Genre-Busting; while each volume of the anthology is set within a single world, and that setting is fairly clearly tied to a specific genre, the individual pieces within each volume could be comedic, serious, pseudo-academic, tragic, romantic, erotic, poetic, horrific, or any-other-ic takes on any element of the world. Occasionally leads to Mood Whiplash where darker pieces are placed next to sillier ones.
- New Weird: The editor-in-chief and at least a few of the contributors are fans, and it shows. While some of the works within each volume are spec-fic stories played mostly straight, you're also likely to find a lot of much stranger pieces exploring bizarre elements of the world or simply doing something rather more different and unexpected.
- Pulp Magazine: The volumes (deliberately) elicit the feel of old periodicals, although each volume is a collection of works in a unique world rather than ever featuring anything serialised. (Current plans, at least, seem to be for each volume to be entirely distinct from every other, so don't expect 'Achten Tan: Volume Two' any time soon - but given the frequently weird and meta tone of Year Between it doesn't seem impossible that there could be callbacks, brick jokes, and crossovers between worlds in one form or another.
- Shared Universe: Of a peculiar kind, since each volume's universe is created in a collaboration between all the contributors to that volume. Everybody is then able to call on any characters, places, events, or other details to use within their own works, but they're also free to go in a different direction or even contradict existing information.
Volume One - 'Achten Tan: Land of Dust and Bone'
- Aerith and Bob: Dark wizard (or witch, Depending on the Writer) C'Naga, seer Gerwyn, warrior Aislinn Rrekwe'm, engineer E'de'an, and gnome Frizzlewink live in the same world as Dolphin Joe, Howlin' Jed, and a carpenter named Alan.
- An Aesop: The play 'Om-Noms, The Holy Ones' is apparently supposed to be an In-Universe example of this. It provides a suggested explanation for why everything seemed to go horribly wrong in one particular year in Achten Tan (that year, of course, being the titular year dreamed up by the writers): because their ancestors had the opportunity to listen to warnings from angels but decided to eat the angels instead.
- The Artifact: A few characters who were clearly conceived as being important to the world during the world-generation phase end up appearing in precisely none of the works within the volumes. The character index mentions, for example, Rapaecio Pallor: an explorer who, with the help of assistant Sven, discovered a magical compass, a sinister cult, and a means by which to defeat Evil Sorcerer C'Naga. Apparently none of the contributors felt like telling that story, so Pallor and Sven are relegated to footnotes and a single passing mention in a newspaper article about a ribs restaurant.
- Bizarrchitecture: Achten Tan is built within the skeleton of a colossal, long-dead animal. Houses are built in its ribs; streets follow the spine; the skull is the main gate. Given that different authors play around with the setting in various ways, attempting to line up locations in the skeleton with any real consistency could end up forming some mindmelting non-Euclidean shapes. (That said, there are official maps, and they are beautiful.)
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Kind of. There are ants and turtles which are definitely just larger, rideable versions of 'normal' ants and turtles but are known as g'ants (for giant ants) and tartules.
- Conlang: There are a few separate invented languages within the world, some only alluded to and others with full phrases or sentences.
- Cassandra Truth: Appropriately, Cass of the story 'Jon Andra's Daughter' (which makes her full name... well, you can work that one out) seems to be a Cassandra. Nobody believed her when she insisted that the Everfall would shine earlier this year; she turns out to be correct, although she's wrong in her initial belief that it means prosperity and success for the coming year. She then prophesies that things will in fact go very wrong (and she's much more correct about that, as detailed in many other stories in the volume!) but doesn't get a chance to warn people due to her untimely death at the end of the story.
- Desert Punk: Achten Tan is within a huge desert wasteland (the 'Bonewastes'). There's only one tree in the whole place, although there are water sources such as the Everfall and other nearby vegetation.
- Evil Sorcerer: C'Naga, a dark wizard long thought dead, nevertheless manages to maintain an ominous presence over many of the people in the world of Achten Tan. Gerwyn may or may not also be something along these lines.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: North Ribs Ribs and South Ribs Ribs are ribs restaurants in, respectively, the northern and southern ribs of the skeleton that is Achten Tan's most distinctive geographical feature.
- Fantasy World Map: The map of Achten Tan and the surrounding areas is beautiful, and some fun is had with the map of the city's buildings: there are Post-It notes between Tyila (the librarian credited with creating the map) and someone (presumably an editor) on the subject of why she's neglected to include Jezebone's brothel.
- Fictional Document: A whole bunch. On top of the short stories and poems in the volume, there are letters, plays, essays, recipes, and news stories written by In-Universe characters.
- Footnote Fever: While not the only piece to employ footnotes (or, more commonly, endnotes), 'An Excerpt From Achten Tan Days' revels in them. Some of its pages are more than 50% footnote.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: From the index of characters:Character Who Does Not Explicitly Appear In Any Stories But Is In The Background Of All Of Them Unnamed And Unseen, The - You won’t find this person by looking at the words of any of the tales within this collection, but rest assured that they are there in every single one of them. They’re in this index right now. They’re in every book you’ve ever read. They are the eyes watching you from between the lines of every sentence of your life.
- Gentleman Adventurer: Septic Blatt, who developed the art of riding giant ants.
- Grand Theft Me: Strongly implied to be what C'Naga does to Aislinn in 'By Bone & Blood'. In front of the latter's daughter, no less.
- Horse of a Different Color: The most commonly-ridden creatures in Achten Tan are g'ants (giant ants) and tartules (big turtles). The former, at least, are the loyal steeds of the an'chers (ant-ranchers), a sort of creed of cowboy-farmer-soldier cavalry people.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: North Ribs Ribs, which became a huge part of Achten Tan civilisation, started as a dumb joke during the world-generation process. The nature of Year Between lends itself to this, really, since it involves a bunch of people of varying silliness throwing around as many ideas as they can and seeing what sticks; naturally, some of the most ridiculous ones end up getting picked up and developed in the world's creation and in the stories.
- Love Triangle: A few cases, including a rather sexy one in 'Scattering'. Saphira has several people in (seemingly) unrequited love with her, including Kaii ('A City of Bone and Tar', in which he ends up crushing on someone else anyway) and her two assistants Chip and Xan.
- Mad Scientist: Drizko Tinkersbane, who Depending on the Writer is either a reasonably capable assistant where scientific matters are concerned or a somewhat terrifying genius. He skews more towards the latter in the later tales in the volume, which makes sense given that they're in a rough chronological order and it's not until a fair way through the year that he comes into contact with Ichor, an almost-definitely evil substance with a bad case of Blue-and-Orange Morality.
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Magnificent Bastard: Petar Pan, who is charismatic, dangerous, and quite possibly supernatural. Not always outright antagonistic, but never anything less than a powerful and potentially malevolent trickster. He's quite possibly directly or indirectly responsible for a lot of the bad stuff that goes down in Achten Tan, starting with the implication in his first appearance (in 'A City of Bone and Tar') that he may have encouraged the dangerous addiction in Saphira that later became more popular among the people. - Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The gnomes of Achten Tan came from elsewhere and ended up settling underground, but then somehow became algae farmers and also started up their own ribs restaurant to compete with the otherwise monolithic establishment that is North Ribs Ribs.
- Our Goblins Are Different: There are hobgoblins and tomgoblins (or simply 'hobs' and 'toms'), two distinct but closely-related types of underground-dwelling humanoid. One's green, one's blue, and both are very very little. (There are also gnomes living underground, so that's a third similar but distinct group.)
- Rat Men: The 'Craven' (not their name for themselves) are intelligent ratlike humanoids.
- Sand Worm: There are some of these roaming the desert, although they don't feature prominently in many stories.
- Scrapbook Story: A lot of the pieces within the volume are presented as documents from within the universe, though not all.
- Serious Business: Ribs joints play a disproportionately enormous role in Achten Tan life. Old Crawman, owner and proprietor of North Ribs Ribs (a ribs restaurant in the northern ribs region of the bones that make up Achten Tan topography), is one of the most frequently occurring characters, and several stories allude to or take place in his restaurant. There're even a few recipes!
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: 'Jon Andra's Daughter' is about Cass (the titular daughter) watching the Everfall when she receives a great cosmic warning of horrors to come. She heads back to the town to embrace her destiny as the prophet of calamity, but on the way down she slips on a rock and dies.
- Shout-Out: Peter/Petar Pan is obviously Peter Pan; Old Crawman's son is sometimes referred to as Younger Crawman but is named William Crawman Williams, of all things; the appendix 'Post-Structural Semiotics of Reconstructive Osseotopography' is a Whole-Plot Reference to China Miéville's The City & the City; Drizko's name might well be a nod to Drizzt Do'Urden; Huwgogh von Gernsback, ostensible author of one of the introductions, is a clear allusion to Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Awards are named). On a meta level, the characters of the play 'Om-Noms, The Holy Ones' are In-Universe shout-outs (mostly unflattering) to contemporary Achten Tanians.
- Signature Style: Several of the contributors have notable and distinctive stylistic quirks, but Sarah Parker's poems take the cake for their unconventional wordplay, punctuation, and formatting (they're perhaps most reminiscent of E. E. Cummings).
- Sophisticated as Hell: From one of the In-Universe forewords, for just one example:IN THE 50 years since Brother Hugo first released his so-called "definitive edition" of the Achten Tan Codex, much has changed in the scholarship surrounding the text. Most importantly, scholars now agree that the late head archivist was "tripping balls" (as they say) while assembling this collection. Colleagues attest he was "high as a freaking kite" 24-7 during this stage of his life, and thus it is highly likely that everything in this book is, to use the vernacular, "utter bullshit."
- Stylistic Suck: Invoked in a few pieces framed as In-Universe documents.
- The Woobie: Arguably, it's pretty easy to feel sorry for poor Bone Chief Opu Haku. Although he was one of the most powerful figures in Achten Tan, his most notable contribution to the world's history was getting murdered; as such, there are at least two different stories depicting his untimely demise (by as many different killers, no less).
- Factum Est Bonum!
