Turning from series to stand-alone books, there were some excellent retrospective anthologies this year. The best of these is the exceptional The Hard SF Renaissance (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, probably the best reprint anthology of the decade so far, and one of the best to come out in the last ten years as well. I don’t always agree with Hartwell and Cramer’s critical opinions and rhetoric, expressed in the extensive storynotes and introductions, and I don’t always agree that all of their selections are a perfect fit for the book, but when any anthology includes 960 pages filled with stories such as Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets,” Paul McAuley’s “Gene Wars,” Poul Anderson’s “Genesis,” Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” Bruce Sterling’s “Taklamakan,” Stephen Baxter’s “On the Orion Line,” and thirty-five other good-to-great stories by writers such as Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Hal Clement, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Stableford, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Gregory Benford, and many others, then it becomes pointless to quibble about such things. This book is a great read, and an invaluable reference anthology if you want a picture of how SF is evolving in the Oughts, and even at $39.95, it’s one of the best reading bargains you’re going to find this year; buy it. The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, is not quite as exceptional as the Hartwell/Cramer anthology, but is still a good solid value, featuring first-rate stories such as Connie Willis’s “Firewatch,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” Damon Knight’s “Anacron,” Greg Egan’s “The Infinite Assassin,” Geoffry A. Landis’s “Approaching Perimelasma,” Clifford D. Simak’s “A Death in the House,” and lots of others. The Great SF Stories (1964) (NESFA Press), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, takes a look back at the year 1964, when classic stories such as Jack Vance’s “The Kraken,” Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” Fritz Leiber’s “When the Change Winds Blow,” Gordon R. Dickson’s “Soldier, Ask Not,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dowry of Angyat,” and Norman Kagan’s “Four Brands of Impossible” appeared, demonstrating that it was a very good year indeed. And The Ultimate Cyberpunk (ibooks), edited by Pat Cadigan, takes a look back into the more-recent past, at the Cyberpunk Revolution of the mid-’80s, examining some of cyberpunk’s rarely mentioned roots in stories such as James Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” and Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Farenheit,” and then passing through some canonical stories such as William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” William Gibson and Michael Swanwick’s “Dogfight,” Bruce Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei,” and Cadigan’s own “Patterns,” before considering more-recent progressions of the form such as Paul McAuley’s “Dr. Luther’s Assistant.” At $16.00 for the trade paperback, this is a great reading bargain, and another valuable reference anthology.
Noted without comment: Future Sports (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and Beyond Flesh (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
The most important reprint fantasy anthology this year (indeed, one of the only reprint fantasy anthologies this year, other than the two Fantasy Bests and the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling) was The American Fantasy Tradition (Tor), edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, which gives a comprehensive overview of the evolution of American fantasy, from stories by Nathanial Hawthorne, Stephen Vincent Benet, Mark Twain, and Robert W. Chambers on to more recent classics such as H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Manly Wade Wellman’s “O Ugly Bird!,” R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris,” Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” Orson Scott Card’s “Hatrack River,” and many others.
Other than the Stephen Jones “Best” anthology and Datlow’s half of the Datlow A Vindling anthology, there didn’t seem to be many reprint horror anthologies this year either, but then again, I wasn’t looking intensively for them either. I did spot The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology (Syracuse University Press), edited by Charlotte F. Otten, which could also be considered to be a fantasy anthology instead, I suppose, depending on how you squint at it.
It was an unexceptional year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, although there were a slew of literary biographies and studies of the work of individual authors, including L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (St. Martin’s), by Katharine M. Rogers; The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (MacFarland), by Karen L. Hellekson; A. E. van Vogt: Science Fantasy’s Icon (H. L. Drake), by H. L. Drake; Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold: A Life (Overlook), by Malcolm Yorke; Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (Ohio State), by Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe; Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (Constable), by Mike Ashley; The Age of Chaos: The Multiverse of Michael Moorcock (The British Fantasy Society), by Jeff Gardiner; Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic (HarperCollins), by Douglas E. Winter, and Isaac Asimov: It’s Been a Good Life (Promethaeus Books), edited by J. O. Jeppsen, a nonfiction collection of excerpts from Asimov’s three previous autobiographical volumes. Of books of this sort this year, the most accessible to the average reader, and probably the most enjoyable, would be Judith Merril’s “autobiography,” Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril (Between the Lines, 720 Bathurst St., Suite 404, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4, C$29.95), by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary. The quotation marks around “autobiography” are there because Merril didn’t live to complete the full-dress autobiography she’d had planned, and there are only pieces of it here, with the book filled out with articles, letters, and other autobiographical snippets Merril produced for one reason or another over the years. There’s still enough here though to give you a bit of the flavor of Merril’s colorful, highly opinionated, passionate, and forceful personality, make this an entertaining read, and make you wish that she’d been able to complete a full autobiography before her untimely death.
More generalized reference books this year included Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, Volumes I & II (Scribner), edited by Richard Bleiler; The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Wesleyan), by Justine Larbalestier; Once There Was a Magazine (Beccon), by Fred Smith; John W. Campbell’s Golden Age of Science Fiction (DMZ), by Eric Solstein; Smokin’ Rockets (McFarland), by Patrick Lucanio and Gary Coville; and, probably the most accessible of these for the average reader, a collection of essays by horror writer Ramsey Campbell, Ramsey Campbell, Probably: On Horror and Sundry Fantasies (PS Publishing), by Ramsey Campbell.
The most generally enjoyable books in this category this year (or at least they sort of fit into this category; although they’re not a perfect fit anywhere) are two “travel guide” books, Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51: Travels with Courtney (Wormhole Books, 413 High St., Fort Wayne, IN 46808, $15.00), by Connie Willis, and A Walking Tour of the Shambles (American Fantasy Press, P.O. Box 1059, Woodstock, IL 60098, $15.00), by Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman. A Walking Tour of the Shambles is a whimsical and good-naturedly grotesque “travel guide” to an imaginary Chicago neighborhood filled with enchanted places and magical people, and Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51: Travels with Courtney is a caustic, sharp-eyed, and very funny tour through real places so bizarre and unlikely that they might just as well be the products of a fantasy writer’s fevered imagination (and it makes it even funnier that they are not).
As has been true for the last few years, the art book field was very strong this year. Among the best of the art books were Fantasy Art Masters: The Best in Fantasy and SF Art Worldwide (Collins), by Dick Jude; Paper Tiger Fantasy Art Gallery (Paper Tiger), edited by Paul Barnett; The Art of Jeffrey Jones (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner; The Science Fiction Art of Vincent Di Fate (Paper Tiger), by Vincent Di Fate; Perceptualistics: Art by Jael (Paper Tiger), by Jael and John Grant; Manchu: Science (Fiction) (Guy Delcourt), by Manchu
; Dragonhenge (Paper Tiger), by Bob Eggleton and John Grant; GOAD: The Many Moods of Phil Hale (Donald M. Grant), by Phil Hale, and the latest edition in a Best-of-the-Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 9: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), by Kathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner.
There were only a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year. The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos (Princeton University Press), by Robert P. Kirshner, may help you make sense of recent cosmological discoveries (primarily, that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating as it expands) that have turned our entire picture of the nature of the universe upside-down. You may be prepared for some possibly even weirder future revelations if you check out one of the most fiercely controversial books in years, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media), by Stephen Wolfram, which puts forth the radical idea that the entire universe is controlled by the same basic set of rules that control cellular animations. To bring things back to Earth, there’s the late Stephen Jay Gould’s last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Harvard University Press), but although Gould’s lucid prose and experience at explaining scientific theory in comprehensible terms help, this is primarily aimed at specialists, and there are probably few laymen who are going to be willing to devote the time and brainwork necessary to absorb and comprehend its thousand-plus pages of text. For a less demanding and more easily graspable and enjoyable book that covers at least some of the same ground, take a look at The Life of Mammals (BBC Books), by David Attenborough, which examines in fascinating detail (complete with gorgeous color photographs) the strange and wonderful lifeways of some of the creatures we share our planet with, lifeways that are often far more astonishing and strange than those of most SF writers’s aliens. It’s hard to come up with a really credible genie-related justification for listing the next book, except perhaps that many SF fans are also history buffs, but in spite of that I’m going to recommend that you go out and buy a copy of The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (W.W. Norton & Company), by Larry Gonick, one of the most informative, sharp-witted, erudite, and flat-out funny books you’re likely to find on the shelves anywhere, and one that’s perhaps particularly germane and valuable this year, as another war in the Middle East looms on the horizon, dealing centrally as it does with the birth and spread of Islam, and some of the root causes of misunderstandings between it and the West. Perhaps a similar weak justification could be used to work-in a mention of Sahara (St. Martin’s), by Michael Palin, which documents a grueling trip around the war-torn Saharan Africa, and shows just how closed-off and inaccessible many of the areas of our planet have become, as war, feral nationalism, and religious intolerance close border after border to the ordinary traveler, leaving us living on a planet where it may be easier to go to the Moon than to go from one country to the country next door.
It was another fairly good year for fantasy movies, but an unimpressive one for science fiction movies, in spite of the release of new entries in the two most successful media SF series of all time.
The big story of the year, easily overshadowing the new Star Wars movie in terms of the buzz and excitement it generated (and it is itself an interesting sign of the times that that can be said), was the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Although there are considerably more changes made here from the storyline of Tolkien’s text than there had been in the first movie, and in some ways more substantive ones, the movie remained true to the spirit of Tolkien’s great work, and all but the most fanatically obsessed fans seemed to be willing to cut Director Peter Jackson some slack. At any rate, although there were quibbles in plenty, they lacked any real force, and the overwhelming majority of Tolkien fans seemed willing to embrace the movie in spite of departures from the Sacred Cannon. There is a lot worth embracing: even if some of Tolkien’s more subtle nuances are lost, the movie is fast-paced and tremendously exciting, shot through with moments of both terror and wonder (although not as quite as many of the later as I’d have liked; the scene of Gandalf and Bilbo relaxing and blowing magical smoke-rings in Fellowship of the Rings was one of the most effective of the whole movie for me, and I’d liked to have seen a few more moments of quiet wonder here as well) and not only features good performances on every level from the live actors, but what is surely by far the best “performance” ever from a CGI-created or animated creature, as Gollum comes close to stealing the movies even from gifted professionals such as Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee. The Two Towers is certainly one of your very best bets this year for good value in return for your money, and if for some odd reason (a supernaturally enforced quota? An aesthetic diet?) you can only see one of 2002’s genre movies, this is undoubtedly the one to see.
The new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, also seems to have satisfied its picky and fanatically loyal fan base, making few (if any) changes from the text of J. K. Rowling’s novel, and also did well at the box-office, although not quite as well as the first one had. It’s a darker movie, a lot more scary, more suspenseful and faster-paced than last year’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but with even less of the feeling of enchantment and wonder than the previous movie had managed to generate. As I said last year for a film about a school for magicians, especially one loaded with CGI-effects, the film lacks magic somehow—that’s even more true of Chamber of Secrets than it was of Sorcerer’s Stone, perhaps because the movie hurtles along at a headlong-enough pace not to have room for even the few evocative magical set-pieces the first film managed to work in. None of these quibbles matter anyway, though, because the movie’s main audience is kids, and the kids seemed perfectly happy with it, and, even more important, no doubt will be perfectly willing to drag their parents (willingly or unwillingly) to the next film in the series.
The year’s other heavy-hitter at the box-office was Spider-Man, which I suppose most people wouldn’t consider to be a fantasy movie, but which is certainly not a science fiction movie (or at least not a good one), as the “science” is complete nonsense—what it really is, of course, is a comic-book movie, practically a genre of their own, which straddle the borderline of both fantasy and science fiction, and play by their own aesthetic rules and their own brand of internal logic (which is why nobody ever realizes that Clark Kent looks exactly like Superman with glasses on). By the rules of real-world logic that the rest of us operate on, Spider-Man makes not a lick of sense, of course, but judged on its own terms, by comic-book aesthetics and comic-book logic, it’s a pretty good version of the adventures of perhaps the most famous superhero of all, after Superman and Batman. Spider-Man was always the comic of choice of intellectual nerds who got slammed up against lockers in high-school and laughed at in gym class, and the movie does a good job of capturing this part of the character’s appeal, with Tobey McGuire somehow managing to actually look like one of Steve Ditko’s drawings of the scrawny, squamulous, lopsided-headed Peter Parker in some of the early scenes. Even after the character’s transformation into a being with vast superpowers, when we’re deep into classic wish-fulfillment/Revenge Fantasy territory, McGuire does a good job of somehow letting us know that, deep inside the skintight costume and the bulging muscles, Peter Parker realizes that he’s still a loser no woman would touch with a stick—an intelligent job of acting. Spider-Man is the most successful film version of a comic-book, both critically and financially, since The X-Men, if not the original Tim Burton Batman, and not only has spawned a new franchise, with several sequels already in the works, but has sent producers scurrying to buy film rights to every comic-book they can find, no matter how obscure. So, like it or loathe it, there’s lot more of this stuff yet to come.
Things were less interesting on the science fiction side of the ledger. The most commercially successful of the year’s SF movies was also in some ways the most disappointing: Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones
still managed to pack in the audiences, but was savaged critically, and, more significantly, didn’t get good word-of-mouth afterward from People who’d seen it, with even most stone Star Wars fans being unable to find anything more positive about it to say than “it was better than The Phantom Menace, anyway.” In spite of good special effects, evocative CGI-generated or augmented sets, wonderful costuming and set-dressing, and even a few good fight scenes (the light-saber battle between Yoda and Christopher Lee was a knockout, but unfortunately was good enough to make most of the rest of the movie look even more limp by comparison), this lack of enthusiasm Was not unearned—the dialog was awful, the storyline made even less sense than it had in The Phantom Menace (and twisted the backstory into even more contradictory knots), and the acting was so flat and wooden throughout, even from ordinarily good actors, that one finds it hard not to give some credence to the rumor that Lucas deliberately directs them to act that way. Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker is an improvement over that creepy little kid from the previous movie, but his portrayal of the Darth-Vader-To-Be as a sullen, whiny, and sulky teenager, seemingly always on the verge of throwing a tantrum and holding his breath until he turns blue (“Why CAN’T I be the most powerful Jedi Knight? I WANNA be the most powerful Jedi Knight! You never let me do ANYTHING!”), lacks any sort of impact or conviction (his love scenes are enough to make a cat laugh), and drains the power from what, in the right hands, could have been an archetypically potent role. A review from The New York Times famously referred to Attack of the Clones as “a two-hour-and-12-minute action-figure commercial,” and, sadly, that largely sums it up.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 5
