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This was a fairly disappointing year for original anthologies, at least for science fiction anthologies—many of them contained one or two good stories, but the overall level of most of them was not particularly high. There were a couple of strong fantasy anthologies, an encouraging trend that has persisted for a few years now. There were few shared-world anthologies, but many theme anthologies, many of them predictably weak. And, although new anthology series were being born, some of the most prominent series died.
Turning to the established SF anthology series, Universe 3 (Bantam Spectra), edited by Karen Haber and Robert Silverberg, was one of the year’s stronger anthologies overall, and still struck me as mostly disappointing, with many of the stories dull and curiously bland. There was some good stuff here, though, mostly the more offbeat material. The best story here is probably Brian W. Aldiss’s “The Madonna of Futurity,” followed by Alex Jeffers’s “Composition with Barbarian and Animal,” which is deliberately and almost perversely slow-paced, but which does create a lush atmosphere and mood, with some sharp details, and Phillip C. Jennings’s “Going West”—the Jennings story is also perverse, in its own way, frustratingly answering none of the puzzles that it raises in the course of the story, but with some vivid and highly unusual world-building and conceptualization. (Jennings’s story is also perverse in casually taking it for granted that normal, red-blooded, American boys would, of course, all be eager to have sex with two-ton alien walruses … Nothing perverted here—they’re all girl two-ton alien walruses, after all. Nothing kinky … This is slipped in (to coin a phrase) in such a casual, matter-of-fact manner that he almost gets away with it.) There was also interesting work here by Terry Boren, Paul Di Filippo, Wil McCarthy, Barry N. Malzberg, and E. Michael Blake. So there is good work here, even first-rate work … and yet, somehow you put Universe 3 down with the feeling that it didn’t really generate a lot of excitement, certainly not as much as has been generated by other Haber & Silverberg Universe volumes. An announcement was made at year’s end that Bantam is dropping the Universe series; this is a real blow to the field, which not only loses yet another market, but a series that, when it was good, was very good, and, at its worst, was never less than competent and professional, and certainly always worth its cover price. The anthology market took another body blow this year with the news that Gollancz is also dropping the British anthology series New Worlds, which makes the current volume, New Worlds 4 (Gollancz), edited by David Garnett, the last in the series. Unfortunately, New Worlds is going out on a low note rather than a high note. New Worlds 4 is a highly uneven anthology, with some good stuff, but also with some Really Stupid stuff, including a very long version of the old story about how somebody’s penis detaches itself from his body and scurries away, and a Barrington Bayley story that features the invention of what amounts to the Sodomy Drive, where you can only navigate hyperspace by the seat of your pants, as it were—except that nobody’s wearing pants, if you see what I mean. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) On the other hand, there are two first-rate stories here, Ian McDonald’s story of starcrossed love between human and alien, “Legitimate Targets,” and Lisa Tuttle’s furiously despairing “And the Poor Get Children.” Plus worthwhile work from Michael Moorcock and Garry Kilworth, an interesting-but-positively-dripping-with-ennui story by Graham Charnock, and a story by Robert Holdstock that could have been quite good if he had taken his material seriously and managed to avoid the broad winks into the wings. On the whole, a disappointing ending to a series that has been intermittently brilliant. L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume X (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, is, as always, mostly minor stories by novice writers, some of whom might be worth keeping an eye on in days to come. There was no volume in the Synergy anthology series out in 1994, for the fourth year in a row, and, in spite of the editor’s assertions to the contrary, I think that it’s reasonable to assume that this series is dead; he’ll have to prove me wrong at this point by actually bringing a volume out.
Promised for next year is a new Full Spectrum volume, the series thankfully seeming to have survived the departure of all of its original editors for other publishing houses, and the launch of a new anthology series from Tor called Starlight, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which sounds quite promising. It’s a sobering thought that, if not for Full Spectrum and the upcoming Starlight, there would now be no continuing science fiction annual original anthology series left in the field at all; at one time, there were a half-dozen or more of them. Next year will also see the launch of the first-ever professional online original anthology; Neon Visions, edited by Ellen Datlow, will appear on Omni’s electronic online magazine on America Online, and will present six original novellas, one per month, with each story online for one month and then archived for six months, so that they can be downloaded by anyone who has access to the online Omni through America Online. This is a fascinating experiment, and how successful it is will be a telling indicator of just how soon (if at all) electronic publishing will blossom into a major force in the publishing world.
Turning to the nonseries SF anthologies, it was a fairly weak year here overall as well, although again most of the anthologies contained at least one or two good stories. I guess in a way Mike Resnick’s “Alternate” anthologies are a series, although not an officially recognized and acknowledged one. If you do consider them to be a series, then the series started strongly several years back with Alternate Presidents, and has been slowly running out of steam through the subsequent volumes—Alternate Kennedys, Alternate Warriors—with each one a little weaker than its predecessor. This trend is actually slightly reversed by this year’s entry, Alternate Outlaws (Tor), edited by Mike Resnick, which I thought was somewhat stronger overall than last year’s Alternate Warriors—but still nowhere as strong as Alternate Presidents had been. Why is this? For my money, it’s because most of the stories in Alternate Presidents were solidly science-fictional extrapolations of legitimate Alternate History themes, things that actually could have happened. That’s still true of the best stories in Alternate Outlaws, such as Walter Jon Williams’s “Red Elvis” and Allen Steele’s “Riders in the Sky” … but with every book the percentage of wildly improbable if not impossible (and sometimes downright silly) scenarios has gone up (“Suppose Mother Teresa formed an outlaw gang with Einstein and Albert Schweitzer!” “Suppose Carmen Miranda and Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson started robbing banks together!” “Suppose Queen Elizabeth the First became a pirate!”), much of it obviously wink-wink in-jokes between Resnick and his authors, and although this sort of thing can be entertaining, and sometimes is here, it also doesn’t usually make for truly first-rate science fiction stories that you can remember more than a day or two down the road. In addition to the Williams and Steele stories mentioned above, Alternate Outlaws also contains entertaining work (yes, some of it fairly improbable, although most of it tends toward the more possible end of the Alternate History spectrum) by Maureen F. McHugh, Frank M. Robinson, Katharine Kerr, Martha Soukup, Judith Tarr, and others. There are apparently more “Alternate” anthologies in the pipeline, but I do begin to wonder if this series hasn’t already lived out its natural life span. Almost all of the above remarks apply just as well, if not better, to By Any Other Fame (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, another anthology which, instead of exploring feasible Alternate History scenarios, mostly plays somewhat silly “What If” games with celebrities—“What if Groucho Marx had been chosen to play Rhett Butler?” … “What if Elvis became the President of the United States?” … “What if Humphrey Bogart was a private detective and Raymond Chandler was a movie star?” … and so on. As with Alternate Outlaws, there is some good stuff here, but it’s mostly the stories that treat the theme the most seriously that deliver the most worthwhile material. The best story here is probably Jack C. Haldeman’s “South of Eden, Somewhere Near Salinas,” although the stories by Nancy Kress, Beth Meacham, Barry N. Malz
berg, and Janet Kagan were also worthwhile; on the whole, this is probably somewhat weaker than Alternate Outlaws, though, while covering much the same sort of ground. Alternate Worldcons (Pulphouse Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440—$10 for Alternate Worldcons), edited by Mike Resnick, is more a fannish joke than an anthology that will appeal to the general readership—stories about what would have happened if other fan groups than the groups that actually won had won the bidding to put on a particular year’s World Science Fiction Convention—and most of the stories in it will be unrewarding (if not incomprehensible) to those who are not hard-core convention-going fans, being mostly excuses to assemble lots of fannish in-jokes; the only piece here that might appeal to a wider readership is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s heartfelt poem, “ApocalypseCon.”
Some of the same sort of ground that is covered in Alternate Outlaws and By Any Other Fame is also covered in Alien Pregnant By Elvis (DAW), edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg, an aggressively tongue-in-cheek anthology built around the premise that the things that you read in the headlines of supermarket tabloid newspapers are actually true—which, of course, means that many of the same celebrities who were featured in the two Resnick anthologies are put through a round of even sillier shenanigans here (for a dead man, poor old Elvis certainly has been kept busy the last couple of years—there was an anthology devoted to Elvis stories last year, another such anthology this year, and at least four of the year’s original anthologies had Elvis stories in them, plus assorted magazine appearances). This is a totally frivolous anthology, of course, not meant to be taken seriously for a minute, and, if you keep that in mind, the stories in it are entertaining enough to make the book worth buying, although you’ll have forgotten almost all of them an hour after reading them; this is one of those anthologies (there were several this year) that should be read one story at a time over a period of days, not read all in one sitting, which would be like sitting down and eating several gallons of caramel popcorn all at once—there was entertaining work here by Allen Steele, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kate Daniel, George Alec Effinger, and Esther M. Friesner herself, among others. On the other hand, Future Quartet: Earth in the Year 2042: A Four-Part Invention (AvoNova), edited by Charles Sheffield, wants you to take it very seriously indeed, and, as a result, perhaps comes across as too frowningly solemn; certainly the four stories here (they are matched with four somewhat fictionalized “essays,” by the same authors), all admirable attempts at forecasting future social problems with an eye to perhaps preventing them, while earnest and well-intentioned, are also mostly gray and rather dull; this also shouldn’t be read all in one sitting, although here, rather than eating too much popcorn at one sitting, the analogy would be to eating huge quantities of something much heavier and more indigestible, a whole pot roast, perhaps—although all the stories contain interesting and substantial social speculations, the most entertaining story here, considered as a story, is, not surprisingly, by that veteran entertainer, Frederik Pohl.
One of the few shared-world anthologies this year was Hotel Andromeda (Ace), edited by Jack L. Chalker, an anthology of stories set in a “Galactic Grand Hotel.” Most of the comments above about Alien Pregnant By Elvis apply just as well to Hotel Andromeda, and it’s another of those books you’re not going to want to read in one sitting, unless you like eating gallons of caramel popcorn at one go—which, perhaps, some people do. Another shared-world anthology, of a sort, anyway, was Elric: Tales of the White Wolf (White Wolf), edited by Edward E. Kramer, an anthology of stories about Michael Moorcock’s famous sword & sorcery hero Elric of Melniboné, by Karl Edward Wagner, Neil Gaiman, Nancy A. Collins, Moorcock himself, and others. There was also a new Wild Cards “Mosaic Novel” this year, Marked Cards, edited by R. R. Martin (Baen).
There were also several examples this year of that curious subgenre, the “regional” anthology—SF stories ostensibly written by authors who all come from one particular region of the country, or written about one particular region of the country; in 1994, we also had an unusual number of “regional” anthologies featuring stories written by authors from other countries, as well. Perhaps the best of these “regional” anthologies, and certainly one of the best science fiction anthologies of the year in general, was the long-awaited Future Boston (Tor), edited by D. Alexander Smith. This anthology collects most of the “Future Boston” stories—set in a slowly sinking Boston that has become the world’s intergalactic trading port—that first appeared in various SF magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but also adds unpublished stories and newly written connecting sections in order to create what has become known in the trade as a “mosaic novel”—and, unlike most such, it manages to work pretty well as one, too; obviously a lot of thought and effort has gone into the creation of the background setting and scenario, and into the integrating of the material as well, much more so than is usually put into these sorts of projects. Most of the “Future Boston” stories that work best as standalone pieces were already published, of course, but some of the unpublished stories are quite good as well, the connecting pieces are interesting, and they really do add to the strength of the overall book—this really is one of those rare cases where the sum of the parts adds up to be greater than the whole. And even if it were not, you’d still have a collection of the original “Future Boston” stories, which included some of the best short work of the late 1980s. So this one is well worth your money, featuring good new material by Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, Resa Nelson, Sarah Smith, David Alexander Smith, and others, as well as memorable reprints by Jablokov, Popkes, David Alexander Smith, Geoffrey A. Landis, and others.
As worthwhile and substantial in some ways, and also one of the best science fiction anthologies of the year, is Alien Shores (Aphelion), edited by Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch, a massive mixed original and reprint anthology of stories by Australian SF writers. The level of quality is perhaps more uneven here than in Future Boston, with some mediocre and even downright bad stories mixed in with the good ones, but it does contain one of the year’s best stories, “Flowering Mandrake,” by George Turner, plus good new stories by Sean McMullen, Stephen Dedman, Chris Simmons, Leanne Frahm, Lucy Sussex, and others, as well as good reprints by Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, Rosaleen Love, Terry Dowling, and others. Even if the overall level of quality were not as high as it is, though, this would still be a fascinating book for the look it gives us into what science fiction can be like in the hands of people from a very different culture and mindset. The same kind of insight can be gained from the two other books of Australian SF that were published (or at least came to my attention) this year—which I’ll mention here for symmetry’s sake, and also for your convenience in case you decide to check out Australian SF in a systematic way, although technically, being reprint anthologies, they should be covered in the reprint anthology section (where I’ll mention them again)—Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF (Coronet Books), edited by Terry Dowling and Van Ikin, which contains good reprint material by Greg Egan, George Turner, A. Bertram Chandler, Cherry Wilder, David Lake, Damien Broderick, Sean McMullen, Terry Dowling, and others, and Metaworlds: Best Australian Science Fiction (Penguin Australia), edited by Paul Collins, which features good reprint stuff by many of the same authors in Mortal Fire and Alien Shores—Greg Egan, George Turner, Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling, Sean McMullen, Damien Broderick, Rosaleen Love, David Lake, Leanne Frahm—although no specific stories are duplicated, an indication of the depth of field that exists in the Australian SF market these days.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 3
