The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors of The Best Science Fiction: 1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both later incorporated in The Martian Chronicles; Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story “In Hiding;” an excellent early Poul Anderson story, one by Isaac Asimov, and half a dozen others, all of which would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by the modest sales standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for another decade or so.

  Toward the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the Year anthology edited by Judith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines founded, shows like Star Trek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.

  When word went forth in 1983 that one more Year’s Best anthology was being assembled, this one under the editorship of Gardner Dozois, it was reasonable to expect a creditable job. Dozois was, after all, a capable and well-known writer himself, who had begun his career precociously with a short story in 1966 and from 1971 on had brought forth a great deal of impressively powerful work; he had edited a string of theme anthologies (A Day in the Life, 1972, Future Power, 1976, Another World, 1977, and many others); and for five years beginning in 1977 had taken over the editorship of Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year anthology. But no one, I think, was quite prepared for the magnitude and comprehensiveness of The Years Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection, the 1984 inaugural volume of the new Dozois anthology, nor could anyone have anticipated that the series would, in time, come to be the defining summation of a glorious era in science fiction.

  I have the first volume of the Dozois series before me now. It looks surprisingly like the most recent one: a thick book (575 pages; the twentieth volume has 648) that announces its name in bold letters emphasizing the words SCIENCE FICTION, proudly asserts that it offers “Over 250,000 words of Fantastic Fiction” (the subhead on the most recent volume reads, “More than 300,000 words of Fantastic Fiction”), and lists on its cover the names of thirteen of its twenty-five contributors.

  Those contributors were a stellar group, of course: Poul Anderson, Kim Stanley Robinson, George R. R. Martin, Joe Haldeman, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Dan Simmons, Avram Davidson, R. A. Lafferty, etc., etc., etc. Some, like Bear and Willis and Simmons and Robinson, were just entering their years of greatness. Some, like Davidson and Lafferty, were nearing the end of important careers. Taken all together, the stories represent a shrewd cross-section of what was already a potent period in the history of the s-f short story, a period that would see even greater accomplishments a couple of years later when Dozois became editor of the ranking s-f monthly, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  But that first volume was not distinguished merely by the excellence of its fiction. What gave it special importance and, eventually, immense historical value, was the sixteen-page essay “Summation: 1983,” in which Dozois provided a penetrating, closely analytical account of the year’s activities in the world of science-fiction publishing: comings and goings among editors and publishers, sales figures for best-selling books, circulation figures for magazines, thematic trends in current science fiction, news of awards and conventions, comments on recent s-f movies, obituaries. No previous best-of-the-year anthology had provided anything comparable. Each of the nineteen subsequent volumes has had a similar summation section, each at least as lengthy as the first and some much longer indeed; in and of themselves they form a continuing chronicle of the evolution of science fiction in the late twentieth century that will be of value to critics, historians, and readers for decades to come.

  The stories chosen by Dozois in these first twenty volumes also constitute a statement about the nature of the s-f short story in that two-decade period—a statement filtered through the sensibility of just one reader, of course, but a highly informed one, steeped in the history of the field, imbued with a sense of science fiction’s value both as entertainment and intellectual stimulation, and further augmented by the editor’s own innate knowledge, as a skilled practitioner himself, of the art of the short story. Over the years Dozois’s story-picking expertise has been confirmed by reader approval, demonstrated through the great number of Hugo awards conferred on Dozois-chosen stories and by the many awards given to the anthology itself.

  Dozois’s task as anthologist was complicated, in an odd way, when he became editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1985. Asimov’s had already established itself as the outstanding magazine of the field by then, but under Dozois’s guidance it attained an even more powerful position of dominance, as is shown by the unparalleled fourteen Hugo awards for Best Editor that he received during the nineteen years of his stewardship of the magazine. John Campbell’s Astounding was similarly dominant in its day, more than half a century ago—but Campbell was not also the editor of a Best of the Year anthology. When Healy and McComas, in 1946, chose twenty-five of their thirty-three stories from the Campbell Astounding, no one was particularly surprised or upset: everyone knew that most of the superior stories of the era had been published there. And, since science-fiction writers tend naturally to gravitate toward their era’s top magazine, a similar concentration of the best work began appearing in the Dozois-edited Asimov’s. But Dozois as anthology editor could not allow himself to draw as extensively on his own magazine as Healy and McComas had drawn on Campbell’s, lest his book seem merely self-promoting; and so he was faced with the perplexing necessity of finding worthy stories for his anthology that had originally appeared in magazines competitive with his own.

  Examining a few randomly chosen volumes of the Dozois series, we can see how well he managed this tricky task. The seventh volume, published in 1990, contains twenty-five stories, of which just nine originated in Asimov’s: an admirable show of objectivity. The eleventh volume, from 1994, includes only seven Asimov’s items out of twenty-three. The twentieth volume, released in 2003, shows an eight-for-twenty-six ratio. Surely the practice of this sort of discipline required Dozois to eliminate from his anthology a great many stories from his magazine that must have seemed as worthy of reprinting as the ones he did choose for the book; but the fact remains that he compelled himself to look far and wide for stories and the contents pages of his anthologies display a broad range of fiction from every appropriate source in the field.

  One does see a certain group of authors appearing regularly in volume after volume: Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Ian McDonald, John Kessel, Nancy Kress, Lucius Shepard, Mike Resnick, Greg Egan, Walter Jon Williams, and four or five others. The presence of such a cast of constant favorites would hardly be a surprise in any ongoing series of anthologies, which, after all, represent by definition the personal tastes of the series’ editor; but in fact Dozois’s little group of regulars were chosen for one anthology after another primarily because they were consistently doing the best work in the field. New writers joined the group every year: Robert Reed, for example, an unknown writer when the series began, came in with the ninth volume and has scarcely missed one since. The contents page of the twentieth volume gives us Maureen F. McHugh, Charles Stross, Alexander
Irvine, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Coleman Finlay, and three or four more whose names would have meant nothing to readers a decade or so ago, but who can be expected to turn up on future contents pages of the Dozois anthology with great regularity in the years to come. More than thirty years after he first edited a science-fiction anthology, Gardner Dozois still maintains the ability to spot fresh new talent.

  And now, to mark the completion of the first twenty years’ run of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Dozois has selected The Best of the Best. Every writer whose work is included here knows what an immense honor it is to be chosen. For Gardner Dozois himself the book is the capstone of two decades of remarkable work. Let him revel in the pleasure of knowing that he has given us, here, a volume that takes its place instantly among the classic science-fiction anthologies of all time.

  preface

  * * *

  When I started work on The Year’s Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection, back in 1983 (the book appeared in 1984), I was thirty-six, just past having been a hot young Turk in the ’70s, beginning to brown and curl a bit, my son was fourteen, most of the famous SF writers of the Campbellian Golden Age of the ’40s and the Gold/Boucher Age of the ’50s were not only still alive but available to be talked to at most science-fiction conventions, and most of my peers and contemporaries were, if not new writers anymore, still on the young ends of their careers and not really well-known yet … and I knew several young hopefuls, like a local fan called Michael Swanwick, who had only four or five sales under their belts. It would be two years yet before I took over the editorship of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  Now, as I sit typing in 2004, I’m an old man, my son has two children of his own (six and eight, respectively), most of the Big-Name writers who dominated the genre then are dead, and my peers and contemporaries, those of them who are still alive, are no longer Hot Young Turks, but rather the Big-Name writers of the field, and they are as gray and wrinkled and sagging as I am. Michael Swanwick is a multiple Hugo-winner. And my almost-twenty-year career as editor of Asimov’s is behind me and being coolly evaluated by critics and historians. Time washes you away in a flood, and by the time you can turn your head and look back, the beach has dwindled to a thin tan line behind you. There is no further shore.

  So, after having completed twenty-seven Best-of-the-Year anthologies over a period of twenty-eight years (the time and number discrepancy is because I turned out six volumes of an earlier Best-of-the-Year series in the ’70s, for Dutton, before starting on this series—which started out with the now-defunct publisher Blue jay Books, and switched to St. Martin’s Press in 1987, with the Fourth Annual Edition, when Bluejay folded), it seemed time for a retrospective, a look back.

  By the time you read these words, there will have been twenty-one volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction published. Those twenty-one volumes together contain 6,306,634 words of fiction, written by one hundred and eighty different authors. When the idea of putting a Best of the Best retrospective anthology together first occurred to me, it seemed like a straightforward task, perhaps even an easy one. It was not. In fact, this may have been one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had to do (as far as putting anthologies together is concerned anyway; shoveling coal in the hot sun is considerably harder by any absolute standard, believe me). For one thing, in order to figure out what stories in those volumes were really the best, I had to reread a significant proportion of those 6,306,634 words, especially as I found that I barely remembered some of the stories from earlier volumes.

  Doing all that reading was not the hardest part, though. Looking back through the twenty-one volumes only served to remind me how many good stories had appeared in them over the years. Even with a retrospective volume as large as this one, I couldn’t possibly get all of them, or even a significant proportion of them, into the book. Even a book twice the size of this one wouldn’t be big enough to include all the stories that probably should be included. Since all of those stories were to my taste in the first place—which should hardly come as a surprise—and since taste was the usual winnowing-screen I would employ in selecting which stories to use from someone else’s anthology or magazine, how was I going to cut the huge crop of contenders down to a manageable number?

  For starters, for symmetry’s sake, I decided to limit the choice to the first twenty volumes. In the unlikely event that I live long enough to produce an additional nineteen volumes, perhaps we can have a Best of the Best II. Then, although novellas have always been among my favorite stories in the Bests, and there are easily a dozen or more that ought to be in the multidimensional, infinitely-expansible version of this book (Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” Frederic Pohl’s “Outnumbering the Dead,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Woman’s Liberation,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Mars,” William Barton’s “Off on a Starship,” Lucius Shepard’s “R&R,” Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain,” Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Judith Moffett’s “Tiny Tango,” Greg Benford’s “Immersion,” Greg Egan’s “Oceanic,” Ian McDonald’s “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” John Kessel’s “Stories For Men,” and so many more), here in the real world where practical considerations of length exist, I clearly had room for no more than a few of them, if I wanted to get a large selection of authors representative of twenty years’ worth of Best volumes into the book.

  I was still left with the most difficult problem, though—how do you decide what the word “Best” means in this context? Do I go for the best-known stories, stories such as Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain” and James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur,” which have been reprinted very widely and which most people have already seen, or do I go with other good stories by the same authors that haven’t been as ballyhooed? If I didn’t use the most famous stories, many people were going to be disappointed that they weren’t there. On the other hand, if I used them exclusively, I’d produce a book full of stuff that everyone’s already read and that’s largely duplicate elsewhere. The only solution I could see was to walk a tightrope between the two, putting in some of the most famous stories and in other cases picking more obscure and unfairly overlooked alternatives instead—although I’m aware that I’m taking a chance of pleasing nobody with this approach.

  The biggest decision I came to, though, was that I had to pick the stories that had made the strongest impression on me as a reader, stories that really moved or excited or impressed me, both on first reading years ago and on rereading now, stories that made me put down the book when I finished them, and stare off through the air, and shiver, remembering the wonders I’d just experienced—and that I had to pick them with no (or as little as possible, anyway) consideration for demographics, for whether I had enough big-name writers, or enough women writers, or enough Brits, or whatever, or whether or not I’d selected stories from all the important markets that ought to be represented. So don’t even bother to tell me that there’s too many stories from Asimov’s here (although several of them are from before I took over as editor, and Asimov’s has been the dominant American SF magazine of the ’80s and ’90s, under three different editors), I already know. Or that there’s not enough stories from Interzone, or that there ought to be something from Science Fiction Age. I picked the stories I had the strongest emotional reactions to, and let the chips fall where they may, as far as demographics were concerned, although no doubt I’m buying myself a lot of trouble with the critics by dong so. I have no doubt that a different editor could have gone through this same pool of stories and come up with a totally different selection of stories that would have been equally valid and equally defensible as deserving the title Best of the Best, that in fact no two readers would come up with the same list if asked to select one. Hell, a day earlier or a day later, I might well have come up with a different list myself.

  But it’s reassuring to remember that there really have been a lot of good stories published in this series over the course of two decades. If ever the
term “embarrassment of riches” applies, it applies here. So I like to tell myself that even if I’d closed my eyes, stabbed out a finger, and picked stories at random, you’d probably still be getting a pretty good anthology out of it.

  In closing, I’d like to thank Jim Frenkel, my editor at Bluejay, who not only proposed the idea of me doing a new Best-of-the-Year series in the first place, after my Dutton series had died, but who insisted that it be a really big fat volume, as big as possible; I was against this idea, thinking that people wouldn’t want to spend the extra money for a big hardcover volume, but over the years almost every positive review has mentioned the size of the Best as a selling point and most reader feedback indicates that people like it big, so he was right and I was wrong. If he’d listened to me, the series might have died long ago. I’d also like to thank my own editors at St. Martin’s over the years, Stuart Moore, Gordon Van Gelder, Bryan Cholfin, and, today, Marc Resnick.

  I’d also like to thank the often-unsung acquisitions editors who had the good taste to buy these stories in the first place: Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, Ed Ferman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gordon Van Gelder, David Pringle, Peter Crowther, Constance Ash, Stanley Schmidt, Greg Bear, David Bischoff, and Patrick Nielson Hayden, as well as all the editors over the last twenty years who bought all the stories in those twenty volumes that didn’t happen to make the cut for this particular retrospective. I’d like to thank the writers, who labored long into the night over keyboards in lonely rooms to write all the stories in this anthology, and all the other stories in the twenty volumes of the Best, and all the good stories that didn’t make it into any of them in the first place—because there’ve always been more good stories than we have room to use, every year from the beginning to now.