It didn’t seem to be quite as strong a year for first novels as last year, although some excellent first novels did appear. The first novels that stirred up the most excitement and acclaim this year were Queen City Jazz, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor), Gun, with Occasional Music, Jonathan Le-them (Harcourt Brace), and Vurt, Jeff Noon (Crown), the Arthur C. Clarke Award winner this year, which pulled reviews ranging from admiringly positive to almost rabidly negative. Other first novels included: This Side of Judgment, J. R. Dunn (Harcourt Brace); The Imperium Game, K. D. Wentworth (Del Rey); Voices in the Light, Sean McMullen (Aphelion); Changing Fate, Elisabeth Waters (DAW): The Woman Between the Worlds, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre (Dell); Aggressor Six, Wil McCarthy; Witch and Wombat, Carolyn Cushman (Warner Questar); Love Bite, Sherry Gottlieb (Warner); The Child Queen, Nancy McKenzie (Del Rey); Aurian, Maggie Furey (Bantam Spectra); and Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, Jane Lindskold (AuoNova). The Del Rey Discovery line, which had stirred up a lot of excitement last year with acclaimed and award-winning first novels by writers such as Nicola Griffith and Mary Rosenblum (Griffith won the Tiptree Award, Rosenblum the Compton Crook Award), seemed to generate less of interest this year, and I get the feeling that it’s being phased out, or at least is being allowed to peter out—which, if true, is a shame, since it was a very promising line.
It looked to me, although this is a subjective opinion, gathered from reading the reviews and listening to reader reaction, as if 1994 was a pretty good year for novels, although there was no clear favorite, no single book that dominated the category in the way that other books have done in years past. It’s anyone’s guess what will end up winning the major awards, although Green Mars and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter seem to be favorites in some quarters. And, of course, SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule allows books from 1993 such as Greg Bear’s Moving Mars to be pitted against the 1994 novels for the Nebula Award, which complicates things even more, and makes it even more difficult to predict who is going to win what. (Green Mars, of course, already won last year’s Hugo Award, and is now up for this year’s Nebula Award, just to confuse things further. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that Kim Stanley Robinson won the Nebula and the Hugo Awards last year with two separate books? I can’t think of any other case where the same author won the Nebula Award with one book and the Hugo Award with another book, in the same year!)
As can be seen from a glance at the list above, Tor had another very strong year (perhaps even stronger than last year), as did Bantam Spectra. The HarperCollins line is also beginning to show up on the list, as is stuff from the revamped Warner Aspect line and from the AvoNova line, which was spared from a shakeup that might have resulted in its demise when the sale of Morrow/Avon fell through. And, in another positive bit of news, the Harcourt Brace line, which was reported to be dead last year after the dismissal of editor Michael Kandel, has hired Kandel back again as a “consultant” and seems not to be dead after all—and is also placing some strong books on the list.
And for those who voice the often-heard complaint that there’s no science in science fiction anymore, it should be noted that in the list above the books by Egan, Sterling, Kelly, Robinson, Attanasio, Benford, Baxter, Turner, Silverberg, Kress, McHugh, Banks, Anderson, McAuley, Pohl, Steele, and a number of others, are clearly and unequivocally science fiction by any reasonable definition—and that a few, especially the Egan, the Benford, the Robinson, and the Baxter, are “hard” science fiction as hard and pure as it is ever likely to get. In spite of all the moaning about how SF is being diluted (and, by implication, ruined) by fantasy, there is still plenty of pure-quill core science fiction to be found if you look for it. (Although it should also be said that in some cases, as in Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, the admixture of fantasy with science fiction, far from “ruining” SF, is instead producing some exciting and viable new hybrids, and opening up new horizons.)
Associational items that might be of interest to SF readers this year included: Norman Spinrad’s near-future thriller about terrorism and the uses of electronic media, Pictures of 11 (Bantam), which makes an interesting companion to his classic SF media novel, Bug Jack Barron; two historical novels by Judith Tarr Throne of Isis and The Eagle’s Daughter, both from Tor; and Richard Matheson’s horror-western, Shadow on the Sun (Berkley). I’m not sure where to mention the illustrated book version of Harlan Ellison’s screenplay version of Isaac Asimov’s collection I, Robot, called I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (Warner Aspect)—but since it’s a screenplay that reads like a novel, and is as long as most novels, perhaps this is as appropriate a place as any. To be fair, I’ll also mention it in the art books section.
Another interesting milestone to note is that HotWired, the online electronic-magazine version of Wired, announced plans to serialize Alexander Besher’s novel RIM: A Novel of Virtual Reality, with added hypertext links and multimedia enhancements, the first time this has been done (in quite this way, anyway), as far as I know. People keep telling me that Electronic Publishing in any significant form is decades away, if it ever comes at all—but I dunno. Seemed to me you could see the seeds of it everywhere this year, if you looked around.
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1994 didn’t seem to be as strong a year overall for short-story collections as 1993 had been—the publication last year of the massive Cordwainer Smith retrospective collection The Rediscovery of Man was enough all by itself to tip the balance in favor of 1993—but there still were some excellent collections published this year. The best collections of the year were: A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Ursula K. Le Guin (HarperPrism); The Breath of Suspension, Alexander Jablokov (Arkham House); Unconquered Countries, Geoff Ryman (St. Martin’s Press); The Coming of Vertumnus, Ian Watson (Gollancz); and Travellers in Magic, Lisa Goldstein (Tor). Also first-rate were: Crashlander, Larry Niven (Del Rey); Otherness, David Brin (Bantam Spectra); Women and Ghosts, Alison Lurie (Doubleday); A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories, Robin McKinley (Morrow Greenwillow); The Girl Who Heard Dragons, Anne McCaffery (Tor); The Early Fears, Robert Bloch (Fedogan & Bremer); and The Passage of Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, Barry N. Malzberg (NESFA Press). Special mention should be made of a hard-to-categorize item, Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison (Morpheus International), a collection of stories by Ellison, each matched with the painting by Yerka that inspired it.
Sharply reversing the trend for the last several years, most of the best collections this year were published by mainline trade houses such as Bantam Spectra and HarperPrism and Tor, while relatively few were published by the small presses, which until now had dominated this category throughout the last part of the ’80s and the early ’90s; Arkham House and NESFA Press, however, remain important sources of major new collections, especially Arkham House, which in the last couple of years has published collections by many of the hottest new writers in SF. It’ll be very interesting to see if this trend continues; since I’d like to see the total of collections published annually go up sharply (you’d be surprised by a list of some of the authors, even popular ones, who have never had a collection, especially a collection from a mainline trade publisher), I’d be pleased to see both the trade publishers and the small presses increase the number of collections they bring out every year—there’s certainly room for expansion.
Since very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, mail order is your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: Arkham House, P.O. Box 546, Sauk City, WI 53583—$20.95 for The Breath of Suspension; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203—$14.00 for The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg; Morpheus International, 200 N. Robertson Blvd. #326, Beverly Hills, CA 90211—$24.95 for Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison.
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The reprint anthology market had another sol
id year in 1994, with a larger-than-usual number of big “historical overview” –type anthologies, all of them excellent values. As usual in this category, some of the best bets for your money were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 28 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by James Morrow. Science fiction is at the moment still being covered by only one “Best of the Year” anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, but a new “Best” series covering science fiction, to be edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, has been announced for next year—this additional coverage from what will no doubt be a very different aesthetic perspective than mine is certainly a good thing for the genre at large, and it will be very interesting to see Hartwell and Cramer’s idea of which of 1995’s stories are worthy of inclusion in a “Best” anthology; certainly the field is wide and various enough for there to be room for volumes representing different tastes than my own. This year there were still three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: Karl Edward Wagner’s long-running Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW), this year up to volume XXII, an entry in a newer British series, The Best New Horror 5 (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, and the Ellen Datlow half of a mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Seventh Annual Collection. Unfortunately, Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories has died with him; the series will not be continued next year, which brings to a sad close the longest-running “Best” anthology series in the SF/fantasy/horror end of the industry, and which puts DAW Books entirely out of the business of publishing “Best of the Year” series—at one time, they were publishing three such “Best” series, one covering science fiction, one covering fantasy, and one covering horror, but now all those series are dead. I continue to think that the expansion of the market for fantasy, and especially the recent expansion of the short fiction fantasy market with specialized magazines such as Realms of Fantasy and anthology series such as Xanadu, indicates that fantasy ought to merit more coverage than just the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, that someone ought to start an annual “Best” volume devoted to fantasy alone (or, perhaps, that the Datlow/ Windling volume ought to be split into two separate books), but so far this is a suggestion that has fallen upon deaf ears.
Turning to the retrospective “historical overview” anthologies, there was a retrospective Nebula volume this year, Nebula Award-Winning Novellas (Barnes & Noble), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (although I continue to question the wisdom of singling some award winners out as “better” than others, which is the implication of this volume and the recent SuperHugos anthology), and a new Hugo-winners volume, The New Hugo Winners, Volume III (Baen), edited by Connie Willis. There was also a retrospective anthology of stories from F&SF, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Edward L. Ferman & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an anthology that belongs in the library of every serious student of science fiction. Also first-rate was another “historical overview” anthology, this one covering fantasy, The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (Oxford), edited by Tom Shippey. A retrospective anthology with a somewhat more specialized slant was New Eves: SF About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (Longmeadow Press), edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine, and Forrest J. Ackerman—some of the stories in this anthology of stories by women about women have dated rather badly, but the book does also contain more recent work by strong contemporary writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Mary Rosenblum, Karen Joy Fowler, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, Maureen F. McHugh, and others, and, in any case, even the “dated” material is of historical interest … and importance, in a genre rapidly forgetting its own history. Noted without comment is another big retrospective “historical overview” anthology, Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Gardner Dozois.
Without doubt, by far the most controversial “historical overview” anthology of the year is The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, which managed to generate at least as much heat and light, especially in the form of “flamewars” on the various computer networks, as last year’s fiercely controversial The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ironically, most of the howls of protest seemed to be coming from core fans of “Hard SF,” who were outraged by the inclusion of writers such as J. G. Ballard, Kate Wilhelm, and Philip K. Dick as “Hard SF” writers. This is definitely an anthology with an ideological axe to grind, and I have no intention of attempting to analyze—let alone argue with—the intricate structures of theory advanced by Hartwell and Cramer to justify their definitions of what qualifies as “Hard SF,” although no, the anthology’s inclusions don’t always make sense to me, either—but I’m not sure, in the long run, that any of that really matters. As I said last year in defense of The Norton Book of Science Fiction, another book whose contents you could certainly quibble with and second-guess (as critics probably will be doing, for years to come), what is overshadowed by the controversy over who’s been included and who’s been left out is that, like The Norton Book before it, The Ascent of Wonder is an enormous book jam-packed with excellent stories by excellent writers. Considered just as a pure reading value—ignoring all the polemics and the conflicting aesthetic arguments—The Ascent of Wonder is certainly one of the very best buys for your money available in the field this year, and certainly deserves a place on your library shelf just as a reference anthology alone, whether or not you agree with Hartwell and Kramer’s overview of the evolution of “Hard SF” or their opinion as to who ought to be in a “Hard SF” anthology.
You could also argue with the selections in Future Primitive: The New Ecoptoias (Tor), edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, a few of which seemed far enough off the ostensible theme that they ought to be in some other anthology altogether—but again, it’s a good reading value for your money, and includes quirky and not frequently reprinted stories by Howard Waldrop, Gene Wolfe, Pat Murphy, R. A. Lafferty, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, and others. Omni Visions Two (Omni Books), edited by Ellen Datlow, is another interesting and worthwhile reprint anthology, featuring good stories by Kate Wilhelm, Howard Waldrop, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Michael Swanwick, and others. Two good reprint anthologies of stories from little-seen Australian writers (already mentioned above) are Mortal Fire, Best Australian SF (Coronet Books), edited by Terry Dowling and Van Ikin, and Metaworlds (Penguin Australia), edited by Paul Collins—although you’ll probably have to haunt well-stocked SF specialty bookstores, or mail order, to find them. There was also a good reprint (mostly) anthology of Canadian SF, also mentioned above, Northern Stars (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant. There was also a reprint anthology of science fictional vampire stories, Tomorrow Sucks (Baen), edited by Greg Cox and T. K. F. Weisskopf, and Jack Zipes edited a reprint fantasy anthology, The Outspoken Princess and The Gentle Knight: Timely Fairy Tales for Tumultuous Times (Bantam). Two anthologies of mostly reprint stories were Animal Brigade 3000 (Ace) and Commando Brigade 3000 (Ace), both edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh.
Noted without comment are: Horses! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; and Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.
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This seemed to be a moderately weak year in the SF-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, although perhaps any year would look weak by comparison with a year like 1993, which saw the publication of the landmark volume The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. There was, however, a fair amount of general nonfiction that might be of interest to SF readers. Most of the SF reference works this year were rather specialized, and many of the critical books difficult for the average non-scholarly reader to wade through, but the most prominent items in this category this year included
: Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1991 (Greenwood), edited by Robert A. Collins and Robert Latham; The Fabulous Realm: A Literary-Historical Approach to British Fantasy, 1780–1990 (Scarecrow Press), by Karen Patricia Smith; The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (Underwood-Miller), by Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. Mallett; Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Oxford Opus), by Edward James; Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Greenwood), by John J. Pierce; Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (Macmillan/Twayne), by Paul Alkon; The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Greenwood), by M. Keith Booker; two literary biographies/ studies, Roald Dahl: A Biography (Farrar Straus Giroux), by Jeremy Treglown and Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (Syracuse University Press), by Robert Crossley; and another study of fairy tales, Fairy Tale As Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, Jack Zipes (University Press of Kentucky). Of more general interest and perhaps more accessible for the average reader were: Isaac Asimov’s posthumously published autobiography, I. Asimov: A Memoir (Doubleday), by Isaac Asimov (although I remain convinced that Isaac intended the title to be I, Asimov, a humorous reference to his famous collection I, Robot, and not the dry I. Asimov title it was published under); a book of transcriptions of interviews given by Samuel R. Delany at various points in time, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (Wesleyan University Press), by Samuel R. Delany; and a sort of dictionary/guide to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun novels, Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle (Sirius Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi—still somewhat specialized, but less dry by virtue of its subject matter than some of the more academic studies above.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 5
