August Books 5) After the King
5) After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed Martin H Greenberg, introduction by Jane Yolen

I picked this up for €5 or so, remaindered in the Leuven bookshop, and was very pleasantly surprised. Nineteen short stories by various fantasy authors, all more or less in the Tolkien vein; two or three clunkers (Dennis McKiernan, Mike Resnick), but the average being very good and several excellent - Stephen Donaldson, Gregory Benford, and a particularly impressive foray by John Brunner, who eschewed the fantasy setting chosen by most of the others and wrote a piece set in England in 1921. I had read the Terry Pratchett piece somewhere else ("She's always going on about billy goats. I have no knowledge whatsoever about billy goats") but I am surprised not to have encountered any of the others before - this collection was published in 1992 for the centenary of Tolkien's birth. Perhaps that just shows how little fantasy I read as compared to sf.