The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  As you can see, although there are a few other players here, such as Underwood Books, the publisher who has been doing an extraordinary job of making SF/Fantasy art available to the average consumer is Paper Tiger, who published a flood of retrospective art collections in 2000 by artists such as Bob Eggleton, Frank Kelly Freas, Ron Walotsky, Chris Moore, Boris Vallejo, and others, and followed it this year with the torrent of books described above. There may have never been a time when it was easier to access the collected art of genre artists, and a good deal of the credit for that goes to the folks at Paper Tiger, who deserve a round of applause.

  Good general overviews and/or illustrated retrospectives were provided this year by Fantasy of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History (Collector’s Press), by Randy Broecker; The Great American Paperback (Collectors Press), by Richard A. Lupoff; The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines (Chicago Review Press), by Peter Haining, and, as usual, by the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 8: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), by Kathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner.

  An offbeat item is Dark Dreamers: Facing the Masters of Fear (CD Publications), a collection of photographs of top horror writers, with photos by Beth Gwinn and text by Stanley Wiater. Gwinn’s photographs are especially good and make me wonder when some savvy publisher is going to turn her extensive gallery of photographs of science fiction authors (Gwinn has been official Locus photographer for a number of years now) into a similar book covering the science fiction field (the last such book, The Faces of Science Fiction, is years out of date, and it’s about time that it’s replaced by a newer, more contemporary volume).

  There were a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, although perhaps none quite as central as there have been in other years. Of interest for those struggling to comprehend the complexities of modern cosmology might be The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam), by Stephen Hawking (who should know, since he himself came up with large sections of modern-day cosmology!), and The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things (John Wiley & Sons), by Hannah Holmes. Maverick ideas, of the sort that may (or may not) someday become scientifically respectable (“continental drift” was once such a scoffed-at “maverick idea,” within my own lifetime), are examined intelligently in Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True (Princeton University Press), by Robert Ehrlich – who casts doubt on some of the crazier of these crazy ideas, while expressing surprising support for the theory of the “abiogenic origins” of coal and oil (which speculates that they are not composed of compressed plant matter, as we were taught in school), and even for the possibility of faster-than-light travel and time-travel. Dinosaur fans will want Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions (Columbia University Press), by Peter D. Ward; while those who aren’t already paranoid enough after the events of September 11th and its aftermath might want to look into Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (Atlantic Monthly Press); and those who enjoy SF’s depiction of aliens might be interested in taking a look into the minds of somefor aliens, ones we share our planet with, as provided by Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (Owl Books), by Marc D. Hauser. A bit further away from the genre’s usual thematic material, but of keen interest to fans of secret history, are Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (Viking Press), by David Hockney, and Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press), by Philip Steadman. These books, which speculate on how Vermeer and other famous Old Masters might have been secretly using camera obscura and other hidden optical techniques to create their most celebrated paintings, are already inspiring science fiction stories (this year’s “Standing in His Light,” by Kage Baker, for instance), with, I’m certain, a good deal more to come.

  This was actually a fairly good year for genre movies for a change, in the fantasy genre, anyway, with several films that proved to be both major-league crowd pleasers and reasonably intelligent and worthwhile examples of the cinematic art.

  The major event of the year, of course, was the release of the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated first installment (there will be two more movies to follow, released approximately a year apart, although they were all filmed at once) of the new film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – which immediately displaced Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which had been the major event of the year up until the release of The Lord of the Rings about a month later. Almost as soon as The Lord of the Rings hit the theaters, internet letter columns and bulletin boards began filling up with screeds from disgruntled Tolkien fans who had long lists of complaints about changes that had been made from the print version, some of them mind-bogglingly trivial (can you say, Get a life? I knew you could!). That kind of reaction was easy enough to predict, and, in fact, I predicted it here last year. Somewhat more surprising was the fact that the vast majority of Tolkien fans not only forgave the film and its transgressions (and, yes, changes from the books there were in plenty . . . although the spirit of the books was pretty well maintained) but embraced it wholeheartedly. Also surprising (to me) was how many people who had never read Tolkien’s trilogy in their lives (and perhaps had never even heard of it) also responded enthusiastically to the movie, which ended up drawing large audiences from beyond the core demographic of stone Tolkien fans.

  The bottom line is that The Fellowship of the Ring is a good movie, easily holding the attention of even people who couldn’t have cared less about hobbits (and may never even have heard of them) when they walked into the theater over the course of a nearly three-hour film. Like the internet nit-pickers, I have a long list of quibbles of my own (mainly that the studio suits, panicking over the long running-time of the movie, forced director Peter Jackson to cut too many of the character-building scenes that ought to have been there, scenes filmed but left on the cutting-room floor; I’m already looking forward to a Director’s Cut DVD that restores them), but most of them really don’t matter. In spite of the compromises in plot necessitated by keeping the film under three hours running time, in spite of the beloved characters and scenes that inevitably had to be lost, The Fellowship of the Ring is an honest, intelligent, good-faith attempt to film a book that many had thought was unfilmable – furthermore, it’s an affectionate rendering of the material, one clearly made by people who respected and valued the source material, and that shows through plainly in the resultant film; in spite of the (relatively – you do have to amortize it over three movies, after all) big budget, this is in many ways a labor of love, free of many of the typical cowardly Hollywood compromises, a brainy art-house film made on a blockbuster spectacular scale, with big-budget production values and small-movie heart. The cast is almost uniformly good, newcomers and old pros alike, with Ian Holm especially good as Bilbo, and Ian McKellen (about whose casting I had some grave reservations) absolutely spectacular as Gandalf, a role which won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination this year. It’s certainly the best film version of Tolkien’s trilogy that we’re going to get in our lifetimes.

  Although not in the same league as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone also came out a lot better than I thought it was going to. I feared that the heavy-handed Chris Columbus, one of my least-favorite directors, was going to fuck the movie up, totally – but instead he did a reasonably good job of translating this beloved book to the screen, giving us his best movie by far. Rather than the Gremlins-like atrocity I feared, Harry Potter is a faithful (perhaps too faithful!), stylish, and reasonably intelligent version of the novel, absolutely stunning visually, and stuffed with sumptuous set-dressing and costuming (it’s certainly one of the handsomest movies of the year), with a wonderful cast of great British character actors – among whom Robbie Coltrane is marvelous as Hagrid; his performance alone is wor
th the price of the movie – in more-than-able support of some fine new child performers who tackle the roles of Harry and his friends. The problem with the movie is that it is oddly stiff in some ways, lacking tension, building neither suspense nor momentum as it goes along, so that by the protracted “action climax,” I was sneaking peeks at my watch instead of sitting on the edge of my seat. Strangely, for a movie about a school for magicians, the film lacks magic somehow. It’ll also be totally predictable for any adult genre fan, of course – but in a way, none of these quibbles really matter here. Although it’s a reasonably painless, and even enjoyable, experience for adults to sit through, the audience the movie is aimed at isn’t adults – it’s kids. And with that audience, the movie clearly and undeniably hit a bullseye. Kids loved it. Many children in the audience were already nagging to see it again before the credits had even stopped rolling, and, last I heard, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had settled into the record book as the second-highest-grossing movie of all time.

  A sleeper hit that actually rivaled Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in box-office sales was the computer-animated movie Shrek, which was good enough to be talked about by many as being in the same league as enduring children’s classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and Toy Story. Somewhat to my own surprise, since I came to it with low expectations, Shrek turned out to be fresh, smart, darkly satiric (someone involved in this movie really dislikes the Disney conglomerate, and many of the best jokes are at Disney’s expense), and very funny (if deliberately vulgar, with a startling number of gross-out scenes and fart jokes – which the kids love, of course – for a kid’s movie). Fans of the original children’s book tend not to like it, saying that it’s been changed out of recognition in the film version, but since I never read the original, this wasn’t a problem for me – and I greatly appreciated what was on the screen for passing the parent’s/grandparent’s test with flying colors: still being reasonably entertaining and watchable-without-severe-pain when your children or grandchildren insist on watching it for the fourth time in a row. In fact, I think the adults enjoy it as much or more as the kids do, clicking into a whole range of satiric cultural jokes and nuances that are invisible to the under-five set, who are enjoying it on a completely different level: this is also a hallmark of a great kid’s movie, and I think it’s possible that Shrek will stand the test of time and prove itself to be just that. The voice characterizations are quite good, especially those by Michael Myers, Eddie Murphy, and John Lithgow, and the completely computer-generated animation, although uneven, is overall pretty good, ranging from startlingly good to passable, but rarely falling below passable. (There were several other completely computer-generated animated movies this year, including Final Fantasy, that went for a less cartoonish, more photo-realistic look; the whole field of computer-created graphics and animation is moving with almost unsettling speed, and clearly can only become more widespread and prominent as the century progresses.)

  Another computer-generated animated kid’s movie was Monsters. Inc., from the same people who brought us Toy Story, Toy Story II, and A Bug’s Life, but had the misfortune to come out in the same year as Harry Potter and Shrek, and so probably didn’t have the impact that it might otherwise have had. It was by no means a failure commercially, but it did tend to be overshadowed by the other movies, and might have stood out more and been talked-about more in a different year – too bad, because, although not as good as Pixar’s Toy Story, it was also an offbeat, intelligent, witty, and imaginative movie, with good voice characterizations by John Goodman and Billy Crystal. Another enjoyable and hugely successful kid’s movie this year (although, as I can testify from personal experience, nowhere near as pleasant for an adult to sit through four times in a row as Shrek) was Spy Kids, a lush (and deliberately silly) James Bond fantasy with the heroic superspy roles being played by kids, who have to rescue their hapless former-superspy parents from captivity. Atlantis, a more traditional Disney animated film, with more-traditional Disney aesthetics, seems to have sunk without raising much of a ripple, which perhaps should ring a warning bell for the makers of such movies that the tastes of the audience are changing – but which probably won’t, as Disney is already in the process of churning out a ton of sequels to past hits.

  Other fantasy movies this year (a few with some SF elements), all pretty high on the “Feh!” scale (with some making it all the way up into “Jesus, I can’t believe they made this!” territory) included the truly abominable Cats and Dogs, the disappointing sequel The Mummy Returns (with Brandon Fraser still working hard at being affable, but with even less to work with this time around), three deliberately anachronistic knights-in-armor movies, A Knight’s Tale, Black Knight, and Just Visiting (all of which plowed in one way or another much the same ground that Monty Python had plowed more effectively, with more humor, decades before), and two big-budget film versions of computer games, Laura Croft: Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which were box-office smashes, visually splendid, and, not surprisingly, almost totally calorie-free (to say nothing of the fact that a brain is not at all required to enjoy them, and is, in fact, rather a downcheck if you do bring one into the theater with you by mistake).

  Things were far less bright on the science fiction side of the scale, as far as SF/Fantasy films were concerned. In the last couple of years, Hollywood has shown that it can make entertaining, reasonably intelligent, worthwhile fantasy movies – the jury is still out, however, as to whether it can make entertaining, reasonably intelligent, worthwhile science fiction movies; so far the evidence is not encouraging, and this year’s crop of SF movies didn’t do a lot to tip the scale in a positive direction.

  The best and most-talked about SF movie of the year, AI, directed by Stephen Speilberg, from a concept left uncompleted at his death by the late Stanley Kubrick, still didn’t seem to arouse even a fraction of the enthusiasm stirred up by a movie like The Fellowship of the Ring, and although it was far from unsuccessful at the box-office, it wasn’t the carrying-all-before-it smash that had been anticipated. There’s much style and intelligence here, some good acting and striking production values, and even plenty of unusually sophisticated genre concepts, but somehow it just didn’t congeal, and with its uneasy mix of different – and clashing – aesthetic styles, failed in the final analysis to satisfy either fans of Stephen Speilberg or Stanley Kubrick, or most SF fans either. The year’s other interesting SF movie, K, was an earnest, moderately subtle, well-meaning attempt to make a quiet, “intelligent” SF film without the usual cutting-edge special effects and slam-bang things-blowing-up adventure stuff, graced by strong performances by Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, and probably went over a lot better outside the genre, to audiences to whom all of the intellectual content wasn’t already extremely familiar.

  After this point, things go downhill fast. Planet of the Apes managed to be inferior in most significant respects to the nineteen movies of the same name, of which it is a remake. Yes, it looks great, almost a given with a movie directed by Tim Burton, it has the usual quirky and striking Burton visuals, and the set-dressing, the costuming, and the special effects are far better than in the old version. The plot is a total hash, though, making even less sense than the 1968 version, and managing to muddle the waters enough so that it doesn’t even carry the satiric impact of the old movie, which at the time was powerfully effective, at least to people outside the genre (experienced genre readers had seen it all before, of course, and were not remotely surprised by the “surprise ending” that blew non-genre audiences away). When your spanking-new huge-budget film has less rigor, intellectual appeal, and gravitas than an old Charlton Heston-finds-yet-another-excuse-to-get-his-shirt-torn-off sci-fi adventure flick from the ’60s, you know you’ve done something wrong. Paying a little less attention to the visuals and a little more to the writing might have helped. Ghosts of Mars followed much the same kind of storyline as last year’s sleeper hit, Pitch Black, but d
idn’t do it as well. Osmosis Jones and Evolution were SF slob comedies, with Evolution, the moderately better of the two, coming across as a sort-of Men In Black-lite, if you can imagine that; both movies seem to have tanked, apparently appealing neither to the SF audience or the slob comedy audience.

  I’m sure that there was the usual parade of horror films, from supernatural movies to serial-killer stuff, but I no longer care enough to bring myself to go see any of them, so you’re on your own.

  Way out, off the furthest useful edge of definition, as far as what can be called an SF movie is concerned, is a smart little independent movie called The Dish – which really is SF, in fact, but, with its focus on Australian contributions to the American space program of the ‘60s, will probably be of interest to many SF fans.