I've been spending some time in Borderland. My discovery of the fantasy series created by Terri Windling was pure kismet. I've been a reader of Jonathan Carroll for a while and she was mentioned by him from time to time. Then, I happened across a story set in Bordertown in a best of fantasy writing anthology. The next stop was Emma Bull's bittersweet book about star-crossed young people, Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands. I followed it up with her coup de grace, War for the Oaks. Then, serendipity led me to Bull's equally talented spouse, Will Shetterly's Nevernever. (Yes, he's the same fellow who wrote the wonderful civil rights fantasy novel, Dogland.) Currently, I'm reading Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

If you want to visit Bordertown, I suggest you take a less roundabout route. A good place to start is The Essential Bordertown: A Traveller's Guide to the Edge of Faerie, edited by Windling and Delia Sherman. The collection provides the groundwork and rules for the Borderland series and contains stories that will whet your apettite for more.

But, why should you want to cross the Border? Not just because it is there. These stories and novels provide excellent insights into human nature and societal interactions. Most of the inhabitants of the place between the world as we know it and Faerie are humans, elves and half-breeds. (However, a spell can change an individual at the wave of a hand. Just ask Wolf Boy.) In Bordertown proper, both science and magic are equally available and equally unreliable. Its denizens must merge the two to survive. The most typical form of transportation, the motorcyle, relies on both its engine and a spell box to take over when it hits spots where technology fails.

The merger that makes things go doesn't work as smoothly with the people of Bordertown, though. The average young resident belongs to a gang: Bloods if he is elven, the Pack if he is human, and the Rune Lords if he is mixed, though there are others that focus on ethnicity or interests. The fighting among the gangs is deadly. The saving grace is that humans, elves and halfies do form allegiances, often as they move past the dangerous adolescent years. The process is helped along by gang-free zones such as God Mom's Restaurant. In them, all races are welcome, but must behave civilly. When interracial relationships are successful it is often because the strengths of the individuals involved are emphasized. In Finder, a human boy with a propensity for locating lost objects and an elven girl who can fix any mechanical item merge their talents and become best friends. Love sometimes triumphs, resulting in a growing population of mixed-race Borderlanders.