There were also two anthologies of Canadian SF this year. Prairie Fire: New Canadian Speculative Fiction, edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and G. N. Louise Jonasson, a special book version of the Canadian magazine Prairie Fire, produced for ConAdien, this year’s Worldcon, shows the Canadian tradition to be less oriented toward hard scientific concepts and updated space-opera than is the Australian tradition, at least in this volume, which leans more heavily toward softer “speculative fiction” than toward core SF; there is interesting work here (although not all of it necessarily science fiction by most accepted genre definitions) by Maria Billion, Keith Scott, Peter Watts, Derryl Murphy, Andrew Weiner, and others. Northern Stars: The Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction (Tor), a mixed original and reprint anthology edited by David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant, gives us, not surprisingly, a look at a Canadian tradition that is much more solidly science fictional than the work in Prairie Fire, closer to—although, fascinatingly, by no means entirely synonymous with—the tradition of work in the United States and Britain. The original stories here are somewhat weak, but that’s balanced by the presence of many strong reprint stories by writers such as Phyllis Gotlieb, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Spider Robinson, Charles de Lint, Andrew Weiner, Robert Charles Wilson, Eileen Kerrnaghan, Robert J. Sawyer, and others, including two really outstanding stories, William Gibson’s “The Winter Market” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s unjustly overlooked “(Learning About) Machine Sex.”
Rounding out the year’s “regional” SF anthologies was Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor (Signature Books), edited by M. Shayne Bell, ostensibly an anthology of stories by writers who live in Utah and southeastern Idaho—“the Corridor”—although they have to stretch the definition to “or has lived” there to get in people like Orson Scott Card, who don’t anymore. (I’ve heard this book referred to, sarcastically, as Great Science Fiction by Mormons, but although most of the writers here do seem to be Mormons, that may be an accident of geography, and, in any case, is not the official organizing principle given.) The original fiction here, unfortunately, tends to be rather weak, although there is interesting work by Dave Wolverton, D. William Shunn, and others, and the anthology also features strong reprint work by M. Shayne Bell, Michaelene Pendleton, and, especially, Orson Scott Card, whose huge novella “Pageant Wagon” is the kingpiece of the book. There was also a horror anthology of stories set in the South (mostly in New Orleans and its surrounding areas), South from Midnight (Southern Fried Press), edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Thomas R. Hanlon.
Turning to the fantasy anthologies, there was another edition in the Xanadu series this year, Xanadu 2 (Tor), edited by Jane Yolen. This one was perhaps slightly less substantial than last year’s volume, but still delivered a pleasing mix of different styles of fantasy, over a nicely eclectic range of tone and mood, and featured strong work by Megan Lindholm, Delia Sherman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Patricia A. McKillip, and others; let’s hope that this series will continue for many years, because I think that it is contributing something valuable to the contemporary scene.
Encouragingly, the year also featured several strong and very eclectic fantasy (mostly) anthologies. For instance, it’s hard to know where to categorize the British anthology Blue Motel: Narrow Houses Volume 3 (Little, Brown), edited by Peter Crowther. Ostensibly it’s a horror anthology, but it contains a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit into the horror category at all, including a very strong SF story by Ursula K. Le Guin, another of her recent crop of Hainish stories, “Betrayals,” which I’d have to rank as perhaps the third best Le Guin story this year, right behind “Forgiveness Day” and “The Matter of Seggri”—and which looks very out-of-place indeed in a horror anthology, making you wonder how in the world it got there. That’s not the end of the unclassifiable stuff, though. Blue Motel also features another good SF story, by Kathleen Ann Goonan, a strange fantasy by Brian W. Aldiss which mingles Greek myth with the dreams of a condemned modern-day prisoner, a mystery-horror Hitchcock homage with distinct surreal elements by Ian McDonald, and a totally surreal and totally unclassifiable fantasy by Michael Moorcock. The rest of the anthology is mostly made up of standard English ghost story stuff, more what you would have expected, although still perhaps slightly more cozy and less gruesome than the usual hardcore horror anthology, which is one reason, along with its eclecticism, why I arbitrarily decided to review it here under fantasy. It’s definitely a worthwhile anthology, one of the year’s better ones, in fact—a shame that Le Guin didn’t publish “Betrayals” somewhere where most of the people who’d like to read it would have a chance of finding it, though. Another quite eclectic anthology, in spite of what would seem like a fairly restrictive theme, was Tales from the Great Turtle: Fantasy in the Native American Tradition (Tor), edited by Piers Anthony and Richard Gilliam. I hadn’t expected much, going in, since Native American themes had already been overused to the point of cliché in fantasy in the last few years, but I was pleasantly surprised by the range of different types of materials and different styles and attacks here—ranging from stories similar to traditional Native American folktales to harder-edged stories set in the modern world to stories set in the borderland between science fiction and wild surrealism—and Tales from the Great Turtle may well be the best fantasy anthology of the year, and one of the year’s best in any category. My favorite from the book is William Sanders’s “Going After Old Man Alabama,” a nicely quirky backwoods fantasy with a wry flavor to it somewhat reminiscent of the work of Terry Bisson or the early R. A. Lafferty. My second favorite is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s powerful “Monuments to the Dead.” The book also features a chunk of Jack Dann’s famous unpublished novel, Counting Coup—unfortunately, it is just that, a chunk, and doesn’t really stand on its feet as an individual work of fiction, but it’s worth reading anyway, and gives you a feel for what the rest of the (alas, unpublished!) novel is like. There is also strong, quirky work here by Owl Goingback, Jane Yolen, Ed Gorman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caroline Rhodes, Esther M. Friesner, Rick Wilber, Pamela Sargent, Gerald Hausman, Nicholas A. DiChario, and others. All in all, only a few mediocre-to-bad pieces here, making it a good value for your money; it’s a nice-looking hardcover, too, with an unusually creative cover design. The other candidate for best fantasy anthology of the year was Black Thorn, White Rose (AvoNova Morrow), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, another anthology of “updated” fairy tales told with modern sensibilities, a sequel to last year’s Snow White, Blood Red. This isn’t quite as strong overall as Snow White, Blood Red had been, but it is still one of the year’s best fantasy anthologies, with an entertaining and satisfyingly varied selection of stories, many of them straddling that ambiguous borderland where fairy-tale fantasy shades into horror; in fact, a legitimate argument could be made for considering it a horror anthology, but I do think that, on balance, it feels more like a fantasy anthology than a horror anthology, which is why I’m mentioning it here. The best story in Black Thorn, White Rose is Howard Waldrop’s strange mixture of backwoods humor, fairy tale, and Damon Runyonesque riffs, “The Sawing Boys,” but there is also strong work here by Nancy Kress, Patricia C. Wrede, Michael Kandel, Jane Yolen, Roger Zelazny, Peter Straub, and Susan Wade, among others. Not quite in the same league as Tales from the Great Turtle or Black Thorn, White Rose, but still an enjoyable and eclectic anthology whose contents include fantasy, Alternate History, horror, and science fiction, was Weird Tales from Shakespeare (DAW), edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg. This is another of those anthologies that, given the rather silly concept—stories about Shakespeare, or stories that play in one way or another with Shakespeare’s material—is actually better than you’d expect it to be, although the bulk of the stories are not meant to be taken seriously. The best story in Weird Tales from Shakespeare is Gregory Feeley’s “Aweary of the Sun,” but there is also worthwhile material by Brian Aldiss, Josepha Sherman, Laura Resnick, Esther M. Friesner, Mike Resnick, Gre
gory Benford, Kate Elliot, and others. Another eating-a-gallon-of-caramel-popcorn-at-one-sitting anthology is Deals with the Devil (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick, Martin H. Greenberg, and Loren D. Estleman, which delivers just what it says it’s going to deliver, most of the stories lightweight to extremely lightweight, a few of them more substantial than you’d think, the majority of them reasonably entertaining; the best work here is by Gregory Feeley, Frank M. Robinson, Pat Cadigan, Judith Tarr, George Alec Effinger, Laura Resnick, David Gerrold, Anthony Lewis, and Mike Resnick himself. There was also yet another Christmas anthology this year, joining the crowded shelf of such titles that have been brought out in the last few years, a mixed reprint and original anthology called Christmas Magic (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell. Most of the originals here are rather weak, but the bulk of the book is reprint material, and there are strong reprint stories here from Donald E. Westlake, Alexander Jablokov, Janet Kagan, Robert Frazier and James Patrick Kelly, Howard Waldrop, William Browning Spencer, Harlan Ellison, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and others.
I haven’t been following the horror field as closely as I once did, but it seemed to me that the most prominent horror anthology of the year may have been Little Deaths (Millennium), edited by Ellen Datlow. I’ve frankly grown tired of the standard “Erotic Horror” anthology, especially the gross-out splatterpunk fuck-’em-in-the-intestines-while-they-die sort, which have proliferated so greatly in the last couple of years as to almost form a subgenre of their own (interestingly, in spite of the violence toward women and hostility for women that seems to be an integral part of these sorts of books, many of the authors who most frequently write for them are women, an odd social phenomenon), but Little Deaths is done with a good deal more literary sophistication and variety of tone than is the standard product. My favorite story here was Nicola Griffith’s novella “Yaguara,” followed by Lucius Shepard’s “The Last Time”; the book also features strong work by M. John Harrison, Pat Cadigan, Jack Womack, Sarah Clemens, and others. Unfortunately, the Griffith, the Shepard, and the Harrison stories, some of the best stories in the anthology, have all been cut out of the upcoming American edition (I read the British edition), meaning that the book you get is going to be considerably weaker than the book you could have gotten, which is a shame. Also getting a lot of attention in the horror market this year was Love in Vein: Twenty Original Tales of Vampiric Erotica (HarperPrism), edited by Poppy Z. Brite, which leans toward the grotesque, splatterpunk end of the field, but which is occasionally leavened by welcome touches of intelligence and style. There was less such leavening in The King Is Dead: Tales of Elvis Postmortem (Delta), edited by Paul M. Sammon, a mixed reprint and original anthology that is pretty solidly hardcore splatterpunk in sensibility, although there is some stuff here that doesn’t rely on the grotesque, by writers such as Harlan Ellison, Chet Williamson, Michael Reaves, and others. Ironically, the two best stories here, “Bubba Ho-Tep,” by Joe R. Lansdale and “Donna Rae,” by Neal Barrett Jr., demonstrate the strengths and the weaknesses of splatterpunk, both full of headlong energy and strong, shaggy, irreverent humor, and both spoiling some of their impact (for old farts like me, anyway) by indulging in material that is too obviously there for no real reason other than to shock the reader, deliberate gross-out-for-the-sake-of-grossing-people-out stuff, like a little boy picking his nose and showing it to a roomful of his mother’s friends having a tea party. On the whole, then, I’d have to say that this book is less successful than last year’s Elvis anthology Elvis Rising: Stories on the King, and certainly more concentrated on horror than that anthology was, which also featured science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream stories. (It’s interesting to notice the similarities—and the differences—between The King Is Dead and Alien Pregnant by Elvis: both anthologies rely heavily on stories inspired by tabloid newspaper headlines, but the mood and tone of those stories are very different from one book to the other.) Mention should also be made of The Best of Whispers (Borderlands Press), edited by Stuart David Schiff, a mixed reprint and original anthology of stories from the well-known (and now, alas, defunct), horror/fantasy semiprozine that includes original work by Whitley Strieber, Ray Bradbury, Lucius Shepard, Melanie Tem, and others, and strong reprints by Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Connie Willis, Ramsey Campbell, and David J. Schow. Other original horror anthologies this year included: Borderlands 4 (Borderlands Press), edited by Elizabeth and Thomas Monteleone; Return to the Twilight Zone (DAW), edited by Carol Serling; Dark Destiny: The World of Darkness (White Wolf), edited by Edward E. Kramer; and the above-mentioned South from Midnight. (It should be mentioned that some of the anthologies that I have pigeonholed above as fantasy anthologies—for instance, Blue Motel and Black Thorn, White Rose, and even, to a somewhat lesser extent, Deals with the Devil—could validly have been listed as horror anthologies instead; and, if they were so listed, then Blue Motel and Black Thorn, White Rose would certainly have to be ranked along with Little Deaths as the top horror anthologies of the year (although which order I’d rank them in, I have no idea). Listing them as fantasy anthologies instead was a subjective decision on my part, and a case could be made for either categorization.)
An associational anthology that might be of interest to some genre readers is The Mysterious West (HarperCollins), edited by Tony Hillerman—the gimmick here is that this is a book of mystery stories with Western settings, written by well-known mystery writers, but some of those writers, such as Bill Pronzini, Ed Gorman, and Carole Nelson Douglas, will be familiar to the SF readership as well, and a few of the stories even have mild fantastic elements (one being narrated by a cat, for instance).
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In terms of literary quality, 1994 seemed to be a pretty good year for novels, perhaps even better than 1993, although somewhat fewer strong first novels were published than last year.
As far as the numbers are concerned, the newsmagazine Locus estimates 1,109 original books and 627 reprints, for an overall total of 1,736 SF/ fantasy/horror books published in 1994, declining by 5 percent from 1993’s total, the third year in a row of decline—although, for all the grim recessionary talk that has preoccupied the field during the last couple of years, if you compare this to 1993’s total of 1,820 titles, it’s clear that this decline has by no means been an enormous one; what usually happens is that the death of one already established publishing line is balanced by the launching of a new line somewhere else, leaving the overall totals roughly the same. (It should be emphasized that this total does not include the gaming and media-related books; if it did, the overall total would be far higher.) Original SF/fantasy/horror novels make up 616 of the titles in that overall total. According to Locus, there were 204 SF novels published in 1994 (as opposed to 263 in 1993), 234 fantasy novels published in 1994 (as opposed to 267 published in 1993), and 178 horror novels published in 1994 (as opposed to 175 in 1993—it’s interesting to note that although adult horror titles declined, the explosion in the Young Adult horror market more than made up the difference; 38 percent of all horror books are now Young Adult titles, up from 30 percent last year). Hardcover books accounted for 39 percent of the total this year, trade paperbacks for 20 percent, and mass-market paperbacks for 41 percent—five years ago, trade paperbacks accounted for only 7 percent of the total, while mass-market paperbacks made up 50 percent, so obviously the trade paperback format has grown at the expense of the mass-market paperback format. Many if not most adult SF and fantasy novels seem to come out in hardcover these days, with a mass-market or trade paperback reprint following; there are noticeably fewer original mass-market paperbacks than there were only a few years ago; some publishers have almost phased-out the paperback original, with Tor, for instance, now doing 76 percent of its original titles as hardcovers—that’s high, but Bantam/Doubleday/ Dell is doing 38 percent of its originals as hardcovers, and Random/ Ballantine/Del Rey/Fawcett is doing 40 percent of its originals as hardcovers, so obviously Tor is not alone in following this trend. Maybe the original mass-market
paperback is on the way out, or at least destined to be squeezed down to a far smaller share of the market.
Even restricting myself to the SF novels alone, it’s obviously just about impossible for any one individual—let alone somebody with all of the huge amounts of reading that I have to do at shorter lengths for Asimov’s and for this anthology—to read and evaluate all of the more than 200 new science fiction novels that came out in 1994, or even a really significant fraction of them.
Therefore, as usual, I’m going to limit myself to listing those novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1994, including: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Michael Swanwick (Morrow/AvoNova); Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra); Heavy Weather, Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra); Wildlife, James Patrick Kelly (Tor); Slow Funeral, Rebecca Ore (Tor); Brittle Innings, Michael Bishop (Bantam); Soils, A. A. Attanasio (HarperCollins); Beggars and Choosers, Nancy Kress (Tor); Permutation City, Greg Egan (Millennium); Furious Gulf, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); Half the Day Is Night, Maureen F. McHugh (Tor); Red Dust, Paul M. McAuley (Morrow/AvoNova); Temporary Agency, Rachel Pollack (St. Martin’s Press); Ring, Stephen Baxter (HarperCollins UK); Mother of Storms, John Barnes (Tor); Larque on the Wing, Nancy Springer (Morrow/AvoNova); Love & Sleep, John Crowley (Bantam); The Stars are Also Fire, Poul Anderson (Tor); Somewhere East of Life, Brian W. Aldiss (Carroll & Graf); North Wind, Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz); Feersum Endjinn, Iain M. Banks (Orbit); Hot Sky at Midnight, Robert Silverberg (Bantam Spectra); Genetic Soldier, George Turner (Morrow/AvoNova); Mysterium, Robert Charles Wilson (Bantam Spectra); Pasquale’s Angel, Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz); Caldé of the Long Sun, Gene Wolfe (Tor); Summer of Love, Lisa Mason (Bantam Spectra); The Engines of God, Jack McDevitt (Ace); The Voices of Heaven, Frederik Pohl (Tor); Towing Jehovah, James Morrow (Harcourt Brace); Summer King, Winter Fool, Lisa Goldstein (Tor); Happy Policeman, Patricia Anthony (Harcourt Brace); Worldwar: In the Balance, Harry Turtledove (Del Rey); Terminal Café, Ian McDonald (Bantam Spectra); Foreigner, C. J. Cherryh (Warner Aspect); Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Jack Wamack (Grove Atlantic); End of an Era, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace); Climbing Olympus, Kevin J. Anderson (Warner Aspect); Shadow’s End, Sheri S. Tepper (Bantam Spectra); The Jericho Iteration, Allen Steele (Ace); Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen); Merlin’s Wood, Robert Holdstock (HarperCollins UK); The Carnival of Destruction, Brian Stableford (Carroll & Graf); Fires of Eden, Dan Simmons (Putnam); Insomnia, Stephen King (Viking); and The Dolphins of Pern, Anne McCaffery (Del Rey).
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 4
