The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Heroes and Lost are running truncated seasons (basically what shows they could get in the can before the strike started), as is Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles (a promising new show that revisits the territory of the Terminator films, with lots of guns blazing), while Moonlight (vampire cop, which strikes me as Angel Lite, with more blow-dried hair), New Amsterdam (immortal cop), The Bionic Woman, and Cavemen have already gone “on hiatus,” and how many of them actually make it back on the air after the strike is anybody’s guess. (My guess is that Cavemen, perhaps the weakest new genre show of the season, won’t. Having made the stupid decision in the first place to derive a sitcom from the popular Geico “Cavemen” commercials, they then didn’t hire any of the familiar actors from the commercials, and then skewed their cavemen toward angst and anger rather than sprightly satire, with lame results.)

  Day Break (cop living the same day over and over), Journeyman (time-traveling cop), The Dresden Files (wizard cop), and the long-running The Dead Zone and The 4400 have all been cancelled, and won’t be back no matter what the outcome of the strike may be.

  Jericho, the after-the-atomic-war drama, was cancelled too, but a massive write-in campaign by the show’s outraged fans, who deluged the studio with mailed packets of peanuts (don’t ask why—you had to be there), caused the network to reconsider, and give Jericho a limited second-chance, offering it a number of new shows in the new season to see if it could build its disappointing audience; of course, the strike puts this second-chance in jeopardy as well. (If you wonder at the discrepancy between the network’s perception of “disappointing audiences” and huge numbers of fans mounting a “massive write-in” campaign for the show’s reinstatement, it’s because, in my opinion, the networks are no longer counting their audiences correctly. Counting just the first-run at-home audience, in the classic Neilsen-ratings fashion, ignores all the folks—perhaps a majority, if the experience of me and my friends is anything to go by—who tape the show or copy it on their DVRs or TiVos to watch at some later date, and also those who follow the show on the internet or on On Demand when it’s “rebroadcast” a few days later. The networks badly need to revamp their ratings systems to make some kind of a match with twenty-first Century reality, or they’re going to end up deep-sixing the very shows that have growing audiences, albeit audiences growing in unconventional ways in unconventional media. The days when you can judge anything fairly by counting how many people are sitting in their living rooms in front of their TV sets on any particular night are over.)

  Of the surviving shows (for the moment, we’ll see which of them make it through to the other side of the strike), Heroes seems to be still doing well, although, perhaps inevitably, there’s been some word-of-mouth fan grumbling about how this season isn’t as good as the first season. I think that the once red-hot Lost may be in trouble, and that The Suits are in danger of fixing this show to death, as they’ve done with many another show. The extremely long lacuna between blocks of original episodes, three months in season three, and an even longer break between seasons three and four (with new shows originally planned not to return until summer 2008 (!)—something which, wisely, they’ve changed, with the new season now beginning in January 2008) were serious mistakes, and I’m afraid that much of their audience will have grown frustrated, lost interest, become annoyed, or just plain gotten out of the habit of watching before new episodes begin again (certainly much of the excited buzz on the internet that once centered on the show seems to have cooled and dissipated)—and even once new episodes do start, we’re only going to get the eight episodes that were already in the can before the strike closed things down. As if there weren’t already enough nails in its coffin, the network recently announced that they were changing Lost’s broadcast night from it’s traditional Wednesday to Thursday, a sure sign of a show that a network is losing confidence in. Lost is reputed to be the most expensive to produce series on television, because of its location shooting in Hawaii and its large cast, and if it’s ratings start to seriously slip, it’s toast. (Boy, if this show gets cancelled before its immensely complicated storyline plays out and the final “answers” to its mysteries are supplied, as I suspect is a possibility, there are going to be a lot of pissed-off viewers out there!)

  Stargate: Atlantis is still afloat, as far as I know, although its parent show, Stargate SG-1, has sunk beneath the waves of history. Battlestar Galactica has announced its upcoming season as its last, and, once it follows Babylon Five, Firefly, and the various Star Trek shows into oblivion, there will no longer be any special effects-heavy, expensive-to-produce, space-travel-oriented series left on television, with the partial exception of Stargate: Atlantis, which runs a spaceship scene in every once in a while.

  Shows such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, and Supernatural are much cheaper to produce: all you need are some characters who get psychic visions or talk to the dead or fight the supernatural Menace of the Week, and some monster or ghost makeup; since they’re all set in the present day, there’s no need for expensive special effects or postproduction work or elaborate sets or props or set-dressing. Perhaps as a result of this cost-effectiveness, they all seem to be doing fine and I suspect they’ll be back next season, if there is a next season. Same for Smallville, although it’s a bit more special effects-heavy than the supernatural shows; still, it’ll probably be back, although it seems to me that they’ve already cut it about as close to the supposedly off-limits territory of the Superman comic books as they possibly can without having Clark actually put on the tights and start working for the Daily Planet. I suppose new show Saving Grace fits in best with the supernatural trio above; I respect Holly Hunt, the show’s star and a fine actress, but when this cop drama broke out a real actual no-fooling angelic intervention by a real actual no-fooling angel (yes, this is the cop who talks to angels show), it passed my Too Silly threshold, and I stopped watching it. Another new show, Kyle XY, which started on the Family Channel, is sort of like Heroes Lite, with a boy of mysterious origins trying to figure out his enigmatic past. Pushing Daisies, a surreal comedy about somebody who can bring people back from the dead for small periods of time, tries much too hard in a self-conscious look-at-how-cool-we-are way to be hip and Twin Peaks weird, and so I find it annoying rather than entertaining. Eureka, about a small town where everyone’s a genius, is a somewhat similar kind of semi-surreal comedy, but has a much lighter touch, and so is more watchable, to me, anyway.

  The Sci-Fi Channel sunk a lot of money into an elaborate made-for-TV miniseries called Tin Man, which was sort of a gritty steampunk revisioning of The Wizard of Oz, complete with secret police, androids, and brains in bottles, but although I hear that the ratings were good, it doesn’t seem to have generated a lot of buzz among the majority of genre SF and fantasy fans, who seem to have largely ignored it.

  Some of us at least have access to British programming through BBC America, and you ought to check your listings to see if you get that channel, since the several genre shows on it may be the only ones on television which will continue uninterrupted through the strike—and beside, they’re pretty good. The most prominent of them is the revamped version of that perennial genre classic from the ’60s, Doctor Who, which in tone and spirit is pretty faithful to the original, although the special effects are (somewhat) better; episodes from it have won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (short form) for two years running now, so clearly it’s popular with the fans. Torchwood, a spin-off from Doctor Who, about an intrepid group of clandestine government agents who battle a different alien of the week every show (or sometimes try to recover lost alien technology before it can have a negative effect on the public), is also fun, although again the special effects are somewhat weak by American standards—it all comes across rather like what The X-Files would have been like if it’d been created by the producers of Doctor Who in England rather than in America. Life on Mars, another time-traveling cop show, is also gritty and intriguing, about a detective who somehow
gets thrown from the present day back into the 1970s and must struggle to try to figure out what’s happened to him (it’s rumored that there’s going to be an American version, but I’ll bet they screw it up). There was also a British miniseries version of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, which is hard to find over here (I never could), but which apparently on occasion drifts wraith-like across small and obscure public television channels if you happen to be watching them at three o’clock in the morning.

  We finally got to see some episodes of the now-defunct Masters of Science Fiction, a new anthology show that was much-hyped in advance in some circles. It was clear that The Suits did everything they could to sabotage this series from the start, and had reportedly already made up their minds to sink it before the first episode had even aired, so I’d like to say that it was great, and that the network Philistines just weren’t hip enough to appreciate it—but unfortunately, I can’t. Slow, dated, grossly padded, poorly directed—the episodes just weren’t very good. Word of mouth on it among genre fans was terrible, and I think it would have foundered on its own, even without the distaste of network executives for SF working against it behind the scenes.

  I’ve given up on listing Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, South Park, The Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and other shows of that ilk—they all borrow genre tropes for satirical effect, but it’s clear that they’re not really genre shows in any true sense of the word.

  Coming up next year: a new version of ’70s “classic” show Knight Rider (cop with talking robot car). Wonder when casting calls for that chimpanzee will start?

  The 65th World Science Fiction Convention, Nippon 2007, was held in Yokohama, Japan, from August 30-September 3, 2007. The 2007 Hugo Awards, presented at Nippon 2007, were: Best Novel, Rainbow’s End, by Vernor Vinge; Best Novella, “A Billion Eves,” by Robert Reed; Best Novelette, “The Djinn’s Wife,” by Ian McDonald; Best Short Story, “Impossible Dreams,” by Tim Pratt; Best Related Book, James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, Patrick Nielson Hayden; Best Professional Editor, Short Form, Gordon Van Gelder; Best Professional Artist, Donato Giancola; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Doctor Who; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form); Pan’s Labyrinth; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Kristen Gong-Wong and Lisa Groen Trombi; Best Fanzine, Science-Fiction Five-Yearly, edited by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan, and Randy Byers; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Frank Wu; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Naomi Novik.

  The 2006 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Marriott Financial Center in New York City on May 12, 2007, were: Best Novel, Seeker, by Jack McDevitt; Best Novella, Burn, by James Patrick Kelly; Best Novelette, “Two Hearts,” by Peter S. Beagle; Best Short Story, “Echo,” by Elizabeth Hand; Best Script, Howl’s Moving Castle, by Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy David Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt; the Andre Norton Award to Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier; plus the Author Emeritus Award to D.G. Compton, and the Grand Master Award to James Gunn.

  The 2007 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet at the Saratoga Springs Hotel and Conference Center in Saratoga Springs, New York on November 4, 2007, during the Sixteenth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, Soldier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe; Best Novella, “Botch Town,” by Jeffrey Ford; Best Short Fiction, “Journey Into the Kingdom,” by M. Rickert; Best Collection, Map of Dreams, by M. Rickert; Best Anthology, Salon Fantastique, by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Best Artist, Shaun Tan; Special Award (Professional), to Ellen Asher, for her work at the Science Fiction Book Club; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Gary K. Wolfe, for reviews in Locus and elsewhere; plus the Life Achievement Award to Betty Ballantine and Diana Wynne Jones.

  The 2007 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Toronto Marriott Downtown in Toronto, Canada on March 31, 2007, were: Best Novel, Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, Ghost Road Blues, by Jonathan Maberry; Best Long Fiction, Dark Harvest, by Norman Partridge; Best Short Fiction, “Tested,” by Lisa Morton; Best Collection, Destinations Unknown, by Gary A. Braunbeck; Best Anthology, Retro Pulp Tales, edited by Joe R. Lansdale and Mondo Zombie, edited by John Skipp (tie); Non-Fiction, Final Exits, by Michael Large and Gospel of the Living Dead, by Kim Paffenroth (tie); Best Poetry Collection, Shades Fantastic, by Bruce Boston; Specialty Press Award, to PS Publishing; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Thomas Harris.

  The 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Titan, by Ben Bova.

  The 2006 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Cartesian Theater,” by Robert Charles Wilson.

  The 2006 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Spin Control, by Chris Moriarity.

  The 2006 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison.

  The 2006 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Half Life, by Shelley Jackson and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Caherynne M. Valente (tie).

  The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, went to Stanley G. Weinbaum.

  Death once again took a heavy toll on the science fiction and fantasy fields this year. Dead in 2007 and early 2008 were:

  KURT VONNEGUT, 84, bestselling author of such acclaimed novels as Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and The Sirens of Titan; MADELEINE L’ENGLE, 88, fantasy and YA writer, author of such beloved classics as A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet; LLOYD ALEXANDER, 83, fantasy writer, winner of the Life Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention, author of the “Chronicles of Prydain” sequence, the most famous of which were probably The Black Cauldron and The High King; JAMES OLIVER RIGNEY, Jr., 58, who, writing as ROBERT JORDAN, was the author of the hugely bestselling “Wheel of Time” series of fantasy novels, which started with The Eye of the World and continued for twelve more volumes; FRED SABERHAGEN, 77, best known for the long-running “Beserker” sequence of novels and stories, although he also wrote the popular “Empire of the East” and “Dracula” series; JOE L. HENSLEY, 81, veteran SF and mystery writer, author of over twenty novels and collections; STERLING E. LANIER, 79, fantasy writer best known for his series of stories depicting the supernatural adventures of Brigadier Ffellowes, which were collected in The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes and The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes, and for the postapocalyptic novel Hiero’s Journey, as well as being the editor instrumental in convincing someone to buy Frank Herbert’s Dune after many other publishers had turned it down; DAVID I. MASON, 91, British writer who dazzled everybody with a handful of brilliantly innovative stories like “Traveller’s Rest” in the ’60s, which were later collected in The Caltraps of Time; LEE HOFFMAN, 75, veteran SF and Western writer and longtime fan, who was perhaps best known for her Western novel, The Valdez Horses, which won the Western Writers of America’s Golden Spur Award, and was later filmed; COLIN KAPP, 79, British writer prolific as a novelist and short story writer in the ’60s and ’70s; DAVID M. HONIGSBERG, 48, writer, musician, and fan; CHARLES L. FONTENAY, 89, veteran author of The Day the Oceans Overflowed and others; LEIGH EDDINGS, 69, fantasy writer, author of “The Belgariad” series and others; PATRICE DUVIC, 61, French writer, editor, and filmmaker, a personal friend; PAT O’SHEA, 76, Irish author of the bestselling YA fantasy, The Hounds of the Morrigan; NORMAN MAILER, 84, famous American writer whose closest association with the genre was probably his non-fiction book about the Apollo space program, Of A Fire on the Moon; JOHN GARDNER, 80, British thriller writer best known for continuing the “James Bond” novels after the death of Ian Fleming; IRA LEVIN, 78, bestselling author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil; GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER, 82, historical novelist with no direct genre connection, but whose “Flashman” novels, some of the best adventure novels ever written, are so full of colorful and exotic elements and enjoyed by so many SF fans that a mention seemed justifiable; EDWARD
D. HOCH, 78, prolific and acclaimed mystery writer who also had publications in some SF markets; ELIZABETH JOLLEY, 83, Australian horror writer best known for her style of “Australian Gothic” writing; SYDNEY J. BOUNDS, 86, British SF and children’s book author; JERZY PETERKIEWICZ, 91, Polish author and poet; JURGEN CRASMUCK, 67, German SF and horror writer; RUBENS TEIXEIRA SCAV-ONE , 82, Brazilian SF and mainstream author; ALICE BORCHARDT, 67, fantasy writer, author of the “Silver Wolfe” series, also the sister of horror writer Ann Rice; DOUGLAS HILL, 72, British editor and author of nearly seventy SF books for teens and children; FRED MUSTARD STEWART, 74, author of The Mephisto Waltz; RONDA THOMPSON, 51, author of romance and paranormal romance novels, GERALD PERKINS, 62, writer and fan; PETER L. MANLY, 61, writer and fan; TERRY DARTNELL, Australian SF writer; RALPH A. SPERRY, 62, writer; BENEDICT KELLY, 87, Irish fantasy writer; JOSE COIRO, 74, Braziliam SF author; DANIEL STERN, 79, O. Henry Award-winning author who occasionally wrote SF; CHARLES EINSTEIN, 80, mystery writer who occasionally wrote SF; PAUL E. ERDMAN, 74, author of borderline SF/financial thrillers such as The Crash of ’79; DENNY MARTIN FLINN, 59, writer and actor, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country; CRAIG HINTON , 42, author of five Doctor Who novels; MARGARET F. CRAWFORD, 82, editor, publisher, and fan, co-founder of one of the first of the small presses, Fantasy Publishing Company Incorporated; PETER HAINING, 67, prolific British fantasy and horror anthologist; ROGER ELWOOD, 64, editor and anthologist who sold so many anthologies to so many different publishers in the early ’70s that he was credited with crashing the anthology market and making it impossible for anyone else to sell one for years to come, editor of Ten Tomorrows, Future City, and Epoch (with Robert Silverberg), among many others; PAUL WALKER, 64, writer and interviewer, compiler of the interview collection Speaking of Science Fiction; SIDNEY COLEMAN, 70, academic and critic, professor at Harvard University who sometimes contributed review columns to F&SF, and who was the co-founder of Advent:Publishers; LESLIE FLOOD, 85, longtime British agent and bookseller; PERRY H. KNOWLTON, 80, longtime agent; INGMAR BERGMAN, 89, famed Swedish director and screenwriter, probably best known to genre audiences for his film The Seventh Seal, which had fantastic elements; IAN RICHARDSON, 74, distinguished actor best known to genre audiences for roles in Brazil, Gormanghast, and Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather; ROBERT GOULET, 75, Canadian singer who originated the role of Lancelot in Broadway’s Camelot; MAILA NURMI, 87, who as VAMPIRA was an early horror-show host on television, as well as starring in camp classics such as Plan Nine From Outer Space; YVONNE DE CARLO, 86, actress best know for her role as Lily Munster in TV’s The Munsters; RICHARD A. HAUPTMANN, 62, academic, anthologist, and publisher, an expert on the works of SF writer Jack Williamson and one of the organizers of the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales, New Mexico, author of The Work of Jack Williamson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide, and co-editor, with Stephen Haffner, of the collection Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer; BILL NABORS, 63, writer and poet, a personal friend; ROBERT W. BUSSARD, 79, physicist, whose theoretical Bussard Ramjet engine has been fueling the paper starships of SF writers since the 1960s; PAUL LLOYD, 77, academic and longtime fan; CALVIN W. DEMMON, 65, fan, fan writer, and fanzine editor; JACK AGNEW, 84, fan and artist, a founding member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the oldest fan club in the nation; ELLY BLOCH, 91, widow of horror writer Robert Bloch; JIM RAYMOND VAN SCYOC, husband of SF writer Sydney J. Van Scyoc; JOAN TEMPLE, 90, widow of SF writer William F. Temple; HANK REINHARDT, 73, husband of SF editor and publisher Toni Weisskopf; SUSAN CHANDLER, widow of SF writer A. Bertram Chandler; GAIL DALMAS, wife of SF writer John Dalmas; CHRISTOPHER JAMES BISHOP, 36, son of SF writer Michael Bishop, one of those killed during the massacre at Virginia Tech, where he was a professor; AMELIA MARY SWANWICK, 87, mother of SF writer Michael Swanwick; IRMA KNOTT GOONAN, 86, mother of SF writer Kathleen Ann Goonan; GEORGI GAGIKOVICH NAZARIAN, 91, father of SF writer Vera Nazarian; CLAUDIA LIGHTFOOT, 58, mother of SF writer China Mieville and an author in her own right; PATRICIA LANDIS WILLIAMS, 77, mother of SF writer Geoffrey A. Landis; and MADELON GERNSBACK, 98, daughter of pioneer SF editor Hugo Gernsback.