The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  It was a weak year in the original anthology market, even weaker than last year, with few original anthologies published, and even fewer of any significant quality. The best original SF anthology of the year, with little competition, was undoubtedly Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg (Avon Eos), the companion volume to last year’s highly successful fantasy anthology Legends. Like Legends, Far Horizons is an anthology of stories set in various well-known fictional worlds, except that this time those worlds are (ostensibly, anyway) science fictional ones rather than fantasy. If you’re already a fan of any of the famous SF series featured here, there’s little doubt you’ll get more than your money’s worth in entertainment value out of Far Horizons (if you’re a fan of all of the series included here, you should be out the door and headed to the nearest bookstore already!) The only quibble I have is that the backstories involved in some of these long-running series have grown so complicated that a reader who comes to some of these novellas cold, without having read anything in that particular series before, may have trouble understanding what’s going on in the story, or at least in appreciating its full emotional impact, which depends in part on an appreciation of prior context. All of the stories here suffer from this problem to some degree; the ones that do the best job of telling a satisfactory story that stands on its own feet without reference to the parent series being necessary include Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Old Music and the Slave Women”, Dan Simmons’s “Orphans of the Helix”, Nancy Kress’s “Sleeping Dogs”, Robert Silverberg’s “Getting to Know the Dragon”, and Gregory Benford’s “A Hunger for the Infinite”, but the other stories are well worth reading too, if you can overcome or overlook the dependent-on-familiarity-with-the-backstory flaw, or if you’re already familiar with earlier work in the series. (There are a few interesting curiosities involved in the selection of the material for inclusion here, such as Anne McCaffery and Robert Silverberg being represented by stories in lesser-known series, since their best-known science fiction series had already been included in the fantasy anthology Legends – but that kind of hairsplitting will mean little to the average reader.) As a $27.50 hardcover, it’s the most expensive anthology of the year, and some may hesitate because of the price, but considering the amount of quality of work you get for the money, it’s really one of the best reading bargains of the year.

  Running through the rather meagre possibilities for a follow-up candidate for the title of best original SF anthology of the year, we quickly come to Moon Shots, edited by Peter Crowther (DAW), followed a half step or so down by Not of Woman Born, edited by Constance Ash (Roc). Both of these are substantial anthologies, although both suffer from the twin faults of original theme anthologies: some of the stories are too similar to each other, with motifs and assumptions and even major plot elements repeating in story after story (the stories by Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, and Scott Edelman in Moon Shots, for instance; the Stableford and the Edelman stories even share the idea that the architects of a reviving future space program would want to involve one of the last surviving participants of the twentieth-century space program as a PR stunt!), while at the same time, paradoxically, other stories are so far off the theme that it’s hard to see any real justification for including the story in the anthology in the first place. (In Moon Shots, Colin Greenland’s straight mainstream story certainly falls into this category, as does Robert Sheckley’s flimsy supernatural tale, and the justifications for including Ian McDonald’s surrealistic “Breakfast on the Moon, with Georges”, or Gene Wolfe’s “Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?” – a homage to an obscure R.A. Lafferty story, which must make the Wolfe story rather puzzling to those who haven’t read the Lafferty – are suspiciously weak as well; while in Not of Woman Born, several of the strongest stories, including the Walter Jon Williams, the Susan Palwick, and the Michael Armstrong, really have little to do with the ostensible theme of the anthology.) With Moon Shots, I also found it somewhat disappointing that an anthology “in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the first manned moon landing” was so gloomy and pessimistic overall, with it being taken for granted in story after story that humankind’s exploration of space is essentially over, and perhaps the human race itself is washed up as well (all of which contrasts oddly with Ben Bova’s aggressively upbeat introduction to the anthology, which states the belief that the real Age of Space is just beginning – something I tend to believe myself). Nevertheless, both Moon Shots and Not of Woman Born are superior anthologies, with Moon Shots being undoubtedly the best original DAW anthology in more than a decade. The best stories in Moon Shots, in my opinion, were Stephen Baxter’s “People Came from Earth”, Paul J. McAuley’s “How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen”, and Brian Stableford’s “Ashes and Tombstones”, although there’s also good work here by Eric Brown, Brian Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, and others. The best stories in Not of Woman Born were Walter Jon Williams’s “Daddy’s World”, Sage Walker’s “Hunting Mother”, and Susan Palwick’s “Judith’s Flowers”, although there’s also good work by Jack McDevitt, Janni Lee Simner, Michael Armstrong, Constance Ash herself, and others. As inexpensive paperback originals, both anthologies make fairly good reading bargains too.

  After the three titles discussed above, finding really worthwhile anthologies becomes much more problematic. Of the year’s remaining original SF anthologies, the two best are both small-press items: in the long-running Canadian anthology series, Tesseracts, the latest edition, Tesseracts8, edited by John Clute and Candas Jane Dorsey (Tesseracts Books), and the assembled-on-line “SFF Net” anthology (mentioned also above), The Age of Reason: Stories for a New Millennium, edited by Kurt Roth (SFF NET). Both will be hard to find in bookstores (especially The Age of Reason), and so are probably better mail-ordered, and both are a bit pricey, but they’re probably worth it, not only because of the quality of the fiction, which is reasonably high overall in both cases but because both anthologies will serve as an introduction to a lot of writers with whom the average reader is likely to be unfamiliar, instead of the familiar stable of usual suspects who feature in many of the year’s other anthologies (especially paperback fantasy anthologies, which seem to use much the same roster of authors in one anthology after another). Tesseracts8 features an excellent novella by Karl Schroeder, and good work by Sally McBride, Yves Meynard, Ursula Pflug, A.M. Dellamonica, Cory Doctorow, and others. The Age of Reason doesn’t have any one standout piece that reaches the level of quality of the Schroeder story in Tesseracts8, but it does feature a large amount of good work, much of it from unknowns or near unknowns such as Diana Rowland, Vera Nazarian, James A. Bailey, Susan J. Kroupa, Deborah Coates, and many others, as well as good stuff from bigger names such as Geoffrey A. Landis, Lois Tilton, G. David Nordley, Timons Esaias, Dave Smeds, and others. (Tesseracts Books, The Books Collective, 214-21 10405 Jasper Ave., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 3S2 – $9.95 (Canadian) for a paper edition, $23.95 (Canadian) for a cloth edition of Tesseracts8; SFF Net, 3300 Big Horn Trail, Plano, TX 75075 – $14.95 For The Age of Reason: Stories for a New Millennium; the book can also be ordered on-line at http://www.sff.net.)

  After this point, we begin to run out of options fast. Although I suspect that many of the individual authors knew better, the New Age sillinesses that were part of the conceptual baggage that participants in the shared-world anthology Past Lives, Present Tense, edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (Ace), were perforce constrained to make use of (such as the idea that transferring a dead person’s DNA into a living person would enable the living person not only to experience the past memories of the dead person as if they were their own but would create a self-aware conscious persona of the dead person that could then sit inside the living person’s skull and have long conversations with them about current happenings in the plotline), tip the stories from being science fiction to unadmitted fantasy, in my opinion. Most of the stories are rather weak anyway, with only R. Garcia y Robertson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch managing to fashion anything re
ally readable out of this upromising clay. Future Crimes, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (DAW), is a promising theme, one that has produced many great SF stories over the years, but again the stories here are rather weak, with only the Alan Brennert story rising a bit above the average. The idea behind the very strange “anthology”, Quantum Speculative Fiction, edited by Kurt Roth, based on a concept by publisher Gordon Meyer, is that you buy a three-ring loose-leaf notebook containing some original stories, with room for more, and then subsequently, four times a year, they send you an additional batch of new stories, which you can then clip into the notebook. It’s an interesting experiment, but in practice has not turned out to be an entirely successful one for me, perhaps because of the “anthology’s” narrow specialization, devoted to publishing only “funny” stories – most of which, alas, I didn’t find to really be all that funny; humour being as subjective as it is, of course, you may find them hilarious. There are some good writers involved, including Michael Bishop, Leslie What, Robert L. Nansel, Terry McGarry, Kage Baker (who has the single best story here, “Desolation Rose”, although it’s not particularly funny), James Van Pelt, Richard Parks, K.D. Wentworth, and others. (This might work better if the contents were more generalized, and not restricted to just comic stories – but I’m not sure if this clip-in loose-leaf notebook concept is really a feasible one for fiction, no matter what kind of material they were using.) I haven’t seen an “instalment” of Quantum Speculative Fiction in a while now, and I’m not sure if they’re really still continuing with it or not, but if you’d like more information (I can’t find a price listed anywhere in the package I got), contact Obscura Press, P.O. Box 1992, Ames, IA 50010-1992, or send e-mail to www.quantumsf.com. And, as usual, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XV, edited by Algis Budrys (Bridge), presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.

  Other original SF anthologies this year included Alien Abductions, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (DAW), and the mixed SF/fantasy anthology Prom Night, edited by Nancy Springer (DAW).

  In fantasy, there didn’t seem to be any one single standout anthology, one that was obviously the year’s best (like last year’s Legends). The most substantial item in this category is probably the mixed fantasy/horror anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Avon) (which I choose to view as a fantasy anthology for these purposes; it does seem to lean more toward that end of the spectrum anyway), which contains good work by Tanith Lee, Nancy Kress, Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Neil Gaiman, Delia Sherman, Nalo Hopkinson, Harvey Jacobs, Susan Wade, Melanie Tem, and others.

  Below this point, there was only the usual welter of paperback fantasy theme anthologies, most of which could fairly be described as “pleasant but minor”, The best of the lot, by a hair, was probably Merlin, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), which contained good work by Jane Yolen, Charles de Lint, Michelle West, Brooks Peck, and others. A Dangerous Magic, edited by Denise Little (DAW), contained interesting stuff by Peter Crowther, Michelle West, John DeChancie, and others; while Twice upon a Time, also edited by Denise Little (DAW), fairy tales retold from the viewpoint of the villain, contained worthwhile stuff by Esther M. Friesner, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Leslie What, Alan Rodgers, Jane Lindskold, Richard Parks, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and others. Chicks ’n Chained Males, edited by Esther Friesner (Baen), which ought to get some kind of special award for dumbest title of the year (bad enough that the book actually carries a supposedly tongue-in-cheek disclaimer from the editor on the back cover, specifically blaming publisher Jim Baen for it!) is another in the series of comic anthologies that began several years back with Chicks in Chainmail; the book contains comic work by Elizabeth Moon, Susan Shwartz, Harry Turtledove, Susan Casper, Lawrence Watt-Evans, K.D. Wentworth, and others, but there’s definitely the feeling about the whole project that the joke is wearing thin, and that most of this ground has been covered before.

  Since these are all relatively inexpensive paperbacks, you’ll probably get your money’s worth of entertainment out of them – don’t expect anything really substantial here, though.

  A fantasy shared-world anthology was Legends: Tales from the Eternal Archives 1, edited by Margaret Weis “with” Janet Pack and Robin Crew (DAW). I don’t pay close attention to the horror genre any more, but at a quick glance it would seem that the most prominent and acclaimed original horror anthology was probably 999, edited by Al Sarrantonio (Avon). Other original horror anthologies included Northern Frights 5, edited by Don Hutchison (Mosaic Press); White of the Moon, edited by Stephen Jones (Gollancz); and the mixed mystery-horror anthology Dark Detectives, edited by Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer).

  Big news in this market for next year will probably be the appearance of the new volume in the prestigious Starlight anthology series, and perhaps (we hope) the appearance of the first volume in the as-yet untitled major new original anthology series that will be “like Full Spectrum”, from Avon Eos. And the long-delayed “Space Colony” anthology edited by Greg Benford and George Zebrowski is supposed to hit print soon. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much to really look forward to on the horizon in the original anthology market, not that we’ve heard about yet, anyway.

  In spite of gloom so luxuriant among many fans and writers that it amounted to despair, in spite of the widely accepted myth that there are almost no publishing houses left in business any more that publish genre books, and that almost everything that does come out is a media spin-off novel, in spite of mergers and shake-ups that cost the field at least one SF line, the fact is that more or less the same number of SF and fantasy books were published this year as last year (not counting media-oriented books), that there were actually more new SF and fantasy novels (again, not counting media novels) published in 1999 than there had been in 1998, and that with the opening floodgates of the print-on-demand market, it’s possible that there could be a significant number more published next year (nor does it look like any really significant cuts are ahead for most of the regular trade publishers). In spite of the mergers and cutbacks and shake-ups, in spite of continuing moaning about how the genre is dying, there’s still a lot of science fiction/fantasy/horror books being published, and chances are there will continue to be a lot of genre books published in the foreseeable future.