Locus, February 2013
Page 7
The remaining two original anthologies are fantasy only, both with a very different tight central theme. Under My Hat edited by Jonathan Strahan is a book of YA witch stories by some of the most beloved names in the field, and although the tone is light-hearted, the stories are substantial enough to appeal to both a YA and an adult audience. Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar and K.V. Taylor, is made up of three novellas (by Kaaron Warren, Deborah Biancotti, and Cat Sparks) about the goddess Ishtar. Set in ancient times, modern day, and at the end of time respectively, these tales deftly depict varying aspects of the goddess of love and death, in vastly different writing styles, but coming together in a satisfying, cohesive work.
We have fifteen reprint anthologies to recommend this year, a jump from the ten we recommended last year. Editor John Joseph Adams’s Epic: Legends of Fantasy is the one of two fantasy-only reprints, featuring the stuff of legends, and from legends in the field. The Sword & Sorcery Anthology edited by David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman provides an overview of the subgenre, with reprints ranging from classics from the 1930s to the present day.
Mixed science fiction and fantasy anthologies include Rock On edited by Paula Guran, with stories about, or informed by, rock and roll, and Beyond Binary edited by Brit Mandelo, featuring a wide variety of genderqueer stories about alternate sexualities.
That leaves three science fiction reprint anthologies: Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution edited by Ann VanderMeer, featuring the very best DIY-spirited, Victorian-flavored science fiction that informs the steampunk subgenre; Robots: Recent A.I. edited by Sean Wallace & Rich Horton, which has robot stories of all sorts from the past decade; and, finally, Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, which focuses on that most recent of posthuman future realities.
The seven Year’s Bests on our list compile some of the best fiction of the year, as defined by their respective editors. The darker side of fiction had an excellent showing this year, with two titles, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four edited by Ellen Datlow (which includes her year-end summation that provides valuable insight into the wide variety the field has to offer), and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012 edited by Paula Guran. And one with a much larger pool, The Century’s Best Horror Fiction: Volume One and Volume Two, is a huge two-tome set that features the best horror from 1901 to 2000. Year’s Best SF 17 edited by David G. & Kathryn Cramer Hartwell and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois both present the results of superb curation we’ve come to expect, while still offering surprisingly different tables of contents. Both Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 and Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six not only give us first-rate stories, but also give lie to the separation of the two categories, with more stories than ever falling into the interstices of those two genres. To divide the Year’s Best anthologies into their component parts, we have four covering SF, three covering fantasy, and three (including one Century’s Best) covering horror.
–Heather Shaw
ART BOOKS
It was another slim year for art books again, with 11 to recommend, down from 12 last year; we received 47, up slightly from 45, from US publishers and a few from elsewhere.
There are only three best-of titles to recommend this year, leading with Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, with the same high quality and dizzying variety we’ve come to expect. Fantasy+ 4, edited by Vincent Zhao, continues this exceptional series, a polished presentation from Chinese publisher Cypi, aimed at the American market. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Exposé series, Exposé 10 editor Ronnie Gramazio includes an ‘‘honor roll’’ of all the artists that have appeared in the pages of Exposé. It’s an impressive list of names from an equally impressive 79 countries.
We have five themed collections on the list this year. In honor of the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit, Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull have produced the definitive The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, with more than one hundred full-color drawings, paintings, sketches, maps, and plans by Tolkien himself, some published here for the first time, with many full-color foldouts. Steampunk: An Illustrated History, edited by Brian J. Robb with a foreword by James Blaylock, is a fun, illustrated history of the popular movement, with 193 heavily collaged, full-color pages with gems from an early illustration of an ‘‘electric air canoe’’ to a brassy Dalek. The Art of the Dragon, edited by Patrick Wilshire & J. David Spurlock, is your one-stop shop for colorful traditional-style fantasy illustrations of dragons. You’ll see the usual suspects here: Michael Whelan, Bob Eggleton, Todd Lockwood.
Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration by Scott Tracy Griffin is a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s creation, with art from early pulp covers, comics, books, movie posters, and more illustrations of half-nude men and women, lions, apes, and elephants than you can shake a spear at. Star Wars Art: Illustration, edited by Eric Klopfer, is the third book in the Star Wars art series (we recommended Star Wars Art: Visions in 2010). The quality of the series is high, with a variety of impressive art inspired by old and new series, from spec art, posters, playing cards, book covers, and even miniature packaging, with over 40 contributing artists.
We have one single-artist collection to recommend, and one from a pair of collaborators. Velocity is the third art book from Stephan Martiniere. No one understands composition, light, and color quite like Martiniere: his science fiction and fantasy landscapes are immersive and mesmerizing. Brian and Wendy Froud have done much to shape our view of the fair folk with their amiable and sometimes gothic grotesques. Trolls combines Brian Froud’s paintings and drawings with Wendy Froud’s puppetry and prose, for a privileged glimpse of life under the bridge.
We have two hard to categorize books to list this year. Spectrum Fantastic Art Live!, edited by John Fleskes, commemorates the five special guests at the inaugural Spectrum Fantastic Art Live! convention, with 64 pages of full-color illustrations from Android Jones, Brom, Iain McCaig, Phil Hale, and Mike Mignola. Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, continues the run of successful steampunk, alternate history mashups by Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett, this time with a ‘‘real-life biography’’ of Victorian dime novel hero Frank Reade and his family. It makes good use of pseudohistorical documentation and doesn’t attempt to underplay the often imperialistic subtext of the Victorian era adventure story.
Because of the large volume of worthy offerings that didn’t quite fit our requirements, we’ve included several honorable mentions. In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, edited by Ilene Susan Fort & Tere Arcq, et al., is a beautiful book of interest to artists seeking inspiration and to those seeking understand the visual history of the fantastic. We missed seeing White Cloud Worlds its year of publication, a must-see 2010 collection of fantasy and science fiction art from New Zealand artists, but it belongs on your shelves. Bob Peak, edited by the artist’s son Thomas Peak, is a handsome coffee-table book showcasing the life and works of this influential artist, who was responsible for the iconic and influential movie posters of Star Treks I-V, Excalibur, Camelot, and Superman. Though only a small percentage of SF art is present, this book is highly recommended as inspiration and historical artifact. William M. Timlin, The Ship that Sailed to Mars, was rare and long out-of-print before this reprint edition arrived, making the illustrated book available to the average collector. Finally, gaming enthusiasts will enjoy Awakening: The Art of Halo 4, edited by Paul Davies, and The Art of Assassin’s Creed III edited by Andy McVittie.
–Francesca Myman
NON-FICTION
We’re recommending 12 non-fiction titles, the same as last year, chosen from 68 (26 reference titles and 42 historical or critical volumes), down from 74 (27 reference titles and 47 historical or critical volumes).
Five
of the books on our list offer non-fiction by well-known novelists, with autobiographical and commentary pieces often providing insights on how their lives informed their fiction. An Exile on Planet Earth: Articles and Reflections by Brian Aldiss is the most obvious example of this sort of novel-gazing, with the lead essay, ‘‘Metaphysical Realism’’ connecting key moments of his life with the characters, plot, or setting in the novels they inspired. William Gibson’s Distrust that Particular Flavor is particularly delightful, sharing Gibson’s own sense of wonder and discovery when he encounters the ideas that later inspire his fiction. Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson comprises essays, talks, introductions, and interviews by and with the author. The views into Michael Moorcock’s world offered in London Peculiar are similarly presented, with a wealth of material from his long and vibrant life. The autobiographical essays collected in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by the late Diana Wynne Jones offer a startling glimpse into a childhood full of run-ins with authors of legend (Beatrix Potter, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien), and offers her thoughts on the craft of writing.
Three books offer critical writing on a single author: We Wuz Pushed by Brit Mandelo gives a satisfying feminist examination of the work of Joanna Russ, Michael Dirda revisits his first encounter with the ‘‘sense of wonder’’ by applying his love for Arthur Conan Doyle to a critical look at his life and work, and Angela Carter: New Critical Readings is a collection of essays that offers insight into the author’s work from a wide variety of critical approaches. Two books examine the field during a short period in its history: As If by Michael Saler takes a deep, critical look at ‘‘the literary prehistory of virtual reality’’ by looking at the richly detailed worlds created by Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard, as well as the better-known worlds created by Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America by John Cheng is an examination of the influence of Hugo Gernsback during the pulp heyday of SF from 1926 to 1941.
The final two books on the list are broader in scope. Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 edited by Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo is a update to David Pringle’s 1985 book on the best 100 SF novels since 1949. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn is a finely curated selection of essays, divided into three sections: the history of the field, critical approaches to SF, and popular themes or tropes in the field.
–Heather Shaw
2012: The Year In Review continues after ad.
2012: APOCALYPSE NOT (BUT MAYBE) by Gary K. Wolfe
Gary K. Wolfe (2011)
One of the first things that came to mind looking over the list of books I reviewed last year (and some that I didn’t) is that the line between YA and general fiction, at least as far as SF and fantasy are concerned, seems to have been blurred nearly beyond recognition. Sure, it remains useful for publishers and booksellers to sort things into convenient market segments, but who among readers really noticed or cared that Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in the UK), one of the year’s first and best fantasy novels, appeared as a YA title? By now we’ve learned that that’s where we need to look for Lanagan, and no one seems to mind much. By the same token, a few months later, almost no one I talked with spoke of China Miéville’s Railsea or Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities as these authors’ latest detours into YA; that seems to be where Bacigalupi wants to be these days, no matter how grim and brutal he gets in his followup to Shipbreaker; and Railsea seems to fit nicely into Miéville’s program of exploring different genres, in this case the nautical adventure tale with echoes of both Stevenson and Melville. Much the same might be said of Cory Doctorow, whose Pirate Cinema continues his program of addressing immediate social issues, especially regarding freedom of expression, through the YA lens. Other writers, such as Ian McDonald with Be My Enemy and Nalo Hopkinson with The Chaos, were able to write excellent YA which markedly departs from their adult fiction, mostly in terms of the age of protagonists, linearity of plot, and point of view. Even being a clearly YA-oriented series such as Catherynne Valente’s, didn’t keep The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There from ending up on Lev Grossman’s top 10 fiction list for Time Magazine.
Of course, the argument has sometimes been made that much of SF and fantasy is pretty close to YA to begin with, and thus it comes as something of a tonic that the two most important science fiction novels of the year were pretty clearly adult novels, at least in terms of complexity of theme, structure, and characterization. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 marked his return to idea-packed, ‘‘grand-tour’’ style hard SF, while M. John Harrison’s Empty Space concluded a trio of densely imagined, morally ambiguous novels that together constitute what is certainly one of the major SF series of the post-2000 era.
Robinson’s novel also reflects a trend which we’ve seen growing over the past few years, in which the space frontier has largely returned to the solar system, with social and economic tensions developing between the more densely populated inner planets and the freedom-seeking pioneers of the outer solar system, almost a direct echo of the similar east-west conflict of the American 19th century, or to some extent the late, waning British empire. Certainly, some of the writers most intriguingly exploring this future are not Americans at all: Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth is a strong beginning to his Poseidon’s Children series, while Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass recalls the corrupt politicized solar system of Alfred Bester, and Paul McAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale (whose Quiet War series was a seminal work in the new solar system fiction) bucks his own trend by moving out of the solar system, to Fomalhaut, only to have his characters discover that problems are not so easily left behind. An excellent sampling of the possibilities of this new solar-system SF – which could be seen as mediating between space opera and mundane SF, or possibly as a withdrawing to the familiar in an era of diminished expectations – is Jonathan Strahan’s original anthology Edge of Infinity.
2012 was also the centennial of a number of classic works of early SF – Doyle’s The Lost World, Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, and Hodgson’s The Night Land – and while the movie John Carter spectacularly tanked at the box-office (even though it really wasn’t that bad, in a Burroughsian sense), there was a fair amount of re-examination of SF history going on – not only in the Library of America’s reprinting of the Burroughs (along with my own collection of 1950s novels), but in works as diverse as John Scalzi’s popular Redshirts, an engaging take-down of some formulaic aspects of the Star Trek mythos, and Roberts’s Jack Glass, an intended tribute to both classic SF and classic mysteries, though the SF works out better than the mysteries. Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett’s The Long Earth, developed from an old idea of Pratchett’s, set out to re-imagine the even older idea of SF as an infinite series of frontiers, using the parallel-universe mechanism, though how successful that will be is likely to depend on later volumes. For me, the year’s most effective use of the alternate-history trope was Terry Bisson’s Any Day Now, which didn’t exactly hearken back toward earlier SF, but certainly evoked key shifts in American culture from the 1960s to the present. Even two of the most provocative and enlightening non-fiction works of the year invited us to look backward: Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle focused largely on the non-Holmes works (thus giving insightful attention to the SF works), while Paul Di Filippo and Damien Broderick’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels 1985-2010 was a collection of short essay-reviews that made the case for a collection of novels that ranges from the expected to the eccentric.
It was a particularly strong year for single-author collections, and here again the past was much with us. The most important retrospective collection of the year was Ursula K. Le Guin’s two volumes of selected stories The Unreal and the Real from Small Beer Press, a long-awaited overview of one of the most important careers SF has produced, chosen by Le Guin herself. Ano
ther stunning retrospective was Jonathan Carroll’s The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories, something of a surprise and delight from an author most of us associate with novels. Even Robert Sheckley got a late posthumous revival from the mainstream press, with Store of the Worlds, part of the ‘‘New York Review Books Classics’’ series, cleverly edited by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich perhaps to introduce one of the field’s most mordant satirists to the hip young readership that has already embraced Philip K. Dick. Within the genre community we also saw a welcome collection of Neal Barrett, Jr. stories from Subterranean, Other Seasons. Not quite a retrospective, but certainly a collection of stories that have become classics in their own right, was Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule, which even added a new and quite important tale to the saga of the most impressive (and tragic) dragon in modern fantasy.
But the quality of collections apart from these overviews was impressively high, and there were a lot of them: Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry, Nancy Kress’s Fountain of Age, Margo Lanagan’s Cracklescape, Patricia McKillip’s Wonders of the Invisible World, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Angels and You Dogs, Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom, Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s Permeable Borders, Brian Evenson’s Windeye, as well as eye-opening collections by newer writers, such as Kiini Ibura Salaam with Ancient, Ancient. But for me the most eye-opening collections of the year were Kij Johnson’s brilliant At the Mouth of the River of Bees, whose contents come already awash in awards of various sorts; and Karin Tidbeck’s Jagganath, from a writer whose unique voice is already known in Sweden, but virtually unknown in the English speaking world. That should change rapidly; not since Margo Lanagan have I encountered an entire book of stories entirely new to me, and entirely original.