The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  So, an uneven anthology-but I think that, on balance, there's more than enough worthwhile stuff here (including a few stories of a sort you're unlikely to find anywhere else) to make New Worlds worth its $12.99 cover price ... and to make me hope that the series continues next year.

  Free Space (Tor), edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, is a hardcover libertarian shared-world anthology, seventeen original stories set in a complex Future History chronology worked out by Linaweaver and some others, two poems, and a very-slightly rewritten version of Greg Benford's 1995 story "The Worm in the Well," here called "Early Bird" instead. The contributors range from those you'd expect to find here, such as Dafydd ab Hugh, L. Neil Smith, and Poul Anderson, to odder fish such as Ray Bradbury and William F. Buckley Jr. Oddly, nowhere on the front or back covers is the word "libertarian" mentioned, with only a passing reference to the Libertarian Futurist Society buried in the copy on the inside flap, and this coyness about coming right out and saying what the anthology is makes me wonder if Tor was reluctant to mention libertarianism on the cover-which in turn makes me wonder who they think the audience is for this book, and if they were afraid that advertising this as a libertarian anthology would repulse more readers than it would attract; why publish it in the first place then? And by not clearly marking it, aren't you taking a certain chance of missing some of the very audience most likely to buy it in the first place?

  I don't intend to discuss the validity or real-world feasibility of the political positions put forth in the book, but only to discuss how well the stories in the anthology work as fiction. Unfortunately, the bulk of them don't work very well as fiction-and so, it seems to me, are probably not working all that effectively as propaganda either; I can't see many people who aren't already libertarians having their Eyes Opened and their opinions changed by this anthology, and so the book mostly is "preaching to the choir," something that is often true of liberal books with a political agenda-such as Lewis Shiner's antiwar anthology When the Music's Over-as well. Little chance that any teenager is going to stay awake through most of these stories long enough to be infected with any dangerous political memes.

  Most of the stories here are pretty lame, full of two-dimensional cardboard characters spouting rhetoric, and often rather dull, clogged with polemic, with what little plot there is frequently coming to a halt so that one character or another can deliver a political rant, or to let big blocky chunks of infodump go lumbering by, or so that one character can lecture another one at length about basic facts of their society that both of them should already know. Even old pro Poul Anderson lets the didactic balance of his story get dangerously out of whack in places, with paragraphs that should clearly come supplied with a sign that flashes "Author's Message!" above the type, although he's too much of a veteran entertainer to fail to tell a moderately absorbing human story at the same time, unlike a few of his younger colleagues. Some of the other authors also strike a workable balance between entertainment and polemics. Leaving John Barnes's story aside for the moment (more on that below), the best story in the anthology, by a good margin, is probably James P. Hogan's "Madam Butterfly," a slyly entertaining look at the hidden connectors, some of them quite subtle, that tie all of our lives together and often tip the balance of destiny one way or the other. The next best story here would be William F. Wu's "Kwan Tingui," a nicely crafted and nicely felt piece that carries a freight of genuine human emotion lacking in many of the other stories (my only objection to the Wu story would be to mention that it could have taken place fundamentally unchanged back on Earth in any number of historic settings, without needing to be told as science fiction at all; still, there's no reason why it couldn't validly be told in a science fictional setting too). Other stories worth reading here include the Benford reprint, Robert J. Sawyer's "The Hand You're Dealt," Arthur Byron Cover's "The Performance of a Lifetime," and the aforementioned Poul Anderson story, "Tyranny."

  In some ways the most substantial story in the book, and certainly the strangest, is John Barnes's "Between Shepherds and Kings." This is an odd story, a metafiction piece dealing with an author-who we are clearly supposed to identify with Barnes himself, although how much Barnes himself is actually like this is open to question-who is being asked to write a story for this very anthology by people named "Brad" and "Dafydd"; while Brad and Dafydd sit in the author's living room and explain the anthology's elaborate Future History to him, the author gets slowly potted while silently trying-and failing-to come up with a story idea that would rationalize all the unexamined and often mutually contradictory assumptions behind that future history. Reviewers have called this story "Malzbergian," with excellent justification, but it actually reminds me more of a C. M. Kornbluth story called "The Only Thing We Learn"-, there is a bitter self-mocking edge to the portrayal of the "author" that seems more like Kornbluth than like Malzberg to me. This is by far the most "subversive" story in the anthology, although what it subverts are the libertarian assumptions that drive the rest of the book-as the author comes up with and then discards one plot scenario after another, he makes hash out of one after the other of the basic assumptions upon which the anthology's Future History is based, even questioning the fundamental idea that a free-trading capitalist space-dwelling society would be possible in the first place (there's a milder example of such subversion also to be found in Arthur Byron Cover's story, which seems to demonstrate that the freedom to do as you please without regard for anyone else might eventually lead to the destruction-or at least the severe endangerment-of human society itself). The editors are to be complimented for guts, for publishing a story that effectively cuts the ground out from under every other story in the book, but it is an odd decision, and Barnes's story is sharply different from anything else here, as if it had somehow wandered into the anthology from some other fictive universe altogether.

  You probably could have gotten $5.99' worth of entertainment out of this book, if it had been published as a mass-market paperback, but at $24.95, I cannot in good faith recommend it. A curious marketing decision by Tor, one of serveral they made in the anthology market this year.

  Alternate Tyrants, edited by Mike Resnick (Tor), is more substantial and somber in tone than some of the other recent Resnick Alternate Whatever anthologies have been-perhaps because thinking about the idea of tyranny got the authors in a more solemn mood in the first place. There are fewer stories here that postulate the wildly improbable if not impossible (and often downright silly) scenarios that filled books like Alternate Warriors or Alternate Outlaws ("Suppose Mother Teresa formed an outlaw gang during the Depression with Einstein and Albert Schweitzer!"); the most improbable stuff here is "Suppose Al Capone became President of the United States!" and "Suppose Buddy Holly became President of the United States!" (a close variant of the story from another, older Resnick anthology, By Any Other Name, which asked "Suppose Elvis Presley became President of the United States!"-and, in fact, in the current story, Buddy Holly follows Elvis into office!). There's less of that sort of thing here, and more stories that feature scenarios which, although unlikely, actually could happen-the most ingenious of which is to be found in Michelle Sagara's story and so function a lot better as Alternate History stories than do most of the more "playful" stories, the more extreme examples of which are, in my opinion, just fantasy stories with all-star celebrity casts rather than valid science fiction.

  The best story here is clearly Maureen F. McHugh's "The Lincoln Train," and it's a pity that this anthology was delayed for so long that the story has to appear here as a reprint rather than as an original ... although you could argue that the anthology's loss was McHugh's gain, since I doubt she would have won a Hugo with this story if it had appeared here first rather than in F6SF. (And, of course, the story contributes to the strength of the anthology even as a reprint.) Next to "The Lincoln Train," the strongest stories here are Gregory Feeley's "The Crab Lice," Frank M. Robinson's "Causes," and Michelle Sagara's "The Sword in the Stone," with th
e Feeley story easily carrying off the title of most inventive and imaginative story in the book that doesn't fall into the trap of third-ratehoward-Waldrop-without-the-spark-of-genius-gosh-isn't-this-really-kind-of-silly Historical Gonzoism. There's also other good work here by Adrienne Cormley, Karawynn Long, Richard A. Lupoff, Lyn Nichols, and others.

  Alternate Tyrants is probably the most substantial of this sequence since at least Alternate Kennedys, one of the first two titles-which makes it all the more ironic that Tor has already given up on the series (it's clear, in fact, that they only issued this one reluctantly, after delaying it for several years) and that this will be the last of them. I do think that this series became tired toward the end of its life, locked into a sequence of diminishing returns, with the last couple of volumes especially weak-but in an odd way, I'll miss them, nevertheless ... and it's always sad to see an anthology series die, especially these days when there are so few of them left.

  All the other Resnick Alternate anthologies were mass-market paperbacks, but this one has been issued as a more-expensive trade paperback instead-which seems like an odd decision, to raise the cover price on the latest installment of a series of anthologies that you're already complaining don't sell well enough (which you'd think would encourage even fewer people to buy it), but apparently the idea is that the profit margin on a trade paperback is higher than that on a mass-market, being not much more expensive to produce.

  The Return of the Dinosaurs, an original anthology edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), strikes me as somewhat weaker than the book to which it's a sequel, 1993's Dinosaur Fantastic. I can't be too self-righteous about this, since I've edited two dinosaur anthologies myself and would probably edit another one if asked, but there is a feeling to much of the material here that this ground may have been gone over too many times and is becoming played out. Whatever the truth of that, there's less here that's really innovative, and less of substance, than there was in Dinosaur Fantastic. Many of the authors, in fact, dodge the issue, not really writing about dinosaurs-the living, or once-living, animals-at all in any central way, but instead do joke stories full of comic talking dinosaurs who perform the same kind of anachronistic Dino Shtick, satirically mimicking human behavior, that should be familiar to anyone who ever caught an episode of the old TV sitcom Dinosaurs; some of this material is supposed to amuse by its presumption-the pope converting the dinosaurs to Christianity, for instance-but, as in the Resnick Alternate anthologies, this selfconscious "outrageousness" makes for thin stories and usually doesn't involve any true innovation or breadth of imagination, no matter how Wild and Crazy the juxtapositions of images become. Other authors come close to ignoring the ostensible theme altogether. There are two pieces of fan fiction here, one of them David Gerrold's insufferably coy "The Feathered Mastodon," which features Resnick himself as a main character; the other piece, Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Stomping Mad," is actually one of the more entertaining stories in the anthology-but its rationale for being included here (it takes place at a Jurassic Park media convention) is slim enough to be almost subliminal.

  There is some good material here. The best story in the anthology by a good margin-although nowhere near the top of her form-is Maureen F. Mchugh's "Down on the Farm," a clever story about moral choices and the running of bureaucratic mazes, weakened somewhat by a hurried ending. Next best would be Gene Wolfe's sly fabulation "Petting Zoo," which also features a talking dinosaur (although not one who does comic Dino Shtick) and which could almost be a children's story in mood, although its gentle tone is deceptive, and there is a sting in the story's 'tail.' Other worthwhile stories here include Bud Sparhawk's "Fierce Embrace," Michelle Sagara West's "Flight," Robert J. Sawyer's "Forever," the aforementioned Kristine Kathryn Rusch story, and Susan Shwartz's "Drawing Out Leviathan."

  All in all, I think you can probably get $5.99' worth of entertainment out of this anthology-but I'm glad that they didn't decide to do this one as a more expensive trade paperback.

  Black Mist and Other Japanese Futures, edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Farrell (DAW), is, as the title indicates, a collection of stories-five novell asset in Japanese-dominated futures (none of them, oddly, are written by Japanese authors-for that, you have to see the reprint anthology Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories). The two best stories here, Pat Cadigan's "Tea from an Empty Cup" and Richard A. Lupoff's "Black Mist," are actually reprint stories, having appeared electronically on Omni Online all the way back in 1995, although no acknowledgment of that fact is made anywhere in the book. Of the rest of the stories, the best is Jack Dann and Janeen Webb's intriguingly detailed although somewhat too-picaresque "Niagra Falling," followed by Patric Heimaan's earnest, engrossing, but probably overlong "Thirteen Views of Higher Edo" ("Patric Helmean" is almost certainly a pseudonym, and I think I know for whom; but since I have no direct evidence, I'll keep my mouth shut about it). The book is rounded off by Paul Levinson's deliberately controversial "A Medal for Harry," which tries hard to be offensive and succeeds, but which is also at the same time rather silly, an effect I don't think the author was trying for intentionally.

  It's hard even to tell what's the ostensible theme of Destination Unknown, edited by Peter Crowther (White Wolf), even after you've read the jacket copy and the Guest Introduction-"fabulous worlds" perhaps, or "locations rich and strange and bizarre" is about as close as you can get. Oddly, then, considering all that, few of the stories here evoke any particularly strong sense of place or are particularly adroit in their use of local color, nor-with a few exceptions are the places they take us to all that rich and strange and bizarre.

  In terms of overall literary quality, this is a fairly good anthology, quiet, low key, competent, with few outright stinkers but also few stories that will linger long in your mind after you've put the book down. The bulk of the stuff here is quiet horror, very mild indeed by today's standards, of a peculiar subvariety that might almost be called English Cozy Horror; I actually respond better to this sort of thing than I do to most splatterpunk/Maximum Gross-Out horror, but it's not considered hip today, and I doubt that the horror establishment will take much-if any-notice of the stuff here.

  There are two pretty good science fiction (or at least science-fantasy) stories here, the two strongest stories in the book, both of them more "rich and strange and bizarre" than most of the other stories in the anthology, and evoking a stronger sense of place-Ian McDonald's "The Five O' Clock Whistle" and Terry Dowling's "The Maiden Death" are evocative, mood-heavy, style-rich (and slightly overwritten) stories haunted by ghosts and echoes of (respectively) Bradbury's Mars and Ballard's Vermilion Sands. The anthology also contains interesting work by Ian Watson, Lisa Tuttle, Kathleen Ann Goonan, R. A. Lafferty, and others.

  First Contact, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff (DAW), seems to have been infected by the Friviolity Plague that affects so many of these DAW anthologies. There's some pleasant minor work here, but the emphasis is definitely on the word "minor," with most of the authors choosing to go for joke stories rather than attempting anything substantial or particularly imaginative with the theme. It's a sad state of affairs when the year's movies and TV shows come up with more original and inventive twists on the theme of First Contact than does an anthology of stories by nineteen working SF writers, but that's just about the case here. The best stories are by Kristins Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jack C. Haldeman II, Gordon Eklund, and Peter Crowther.

  Two offbeat items are the British anthologies Decalog 4: Re: Generations, edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards (Virgin), and Decalog 5: Wonders, edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore (Virgin). The Decalog series apparently started out as media-oriented anthologies, with at least one of them consisting of Dr. Who stories, but by this point in time they've moved away from media fiction and are publishing some solid core science fiction as well. Decalog 5 is particularly interesting, with a first-rate story by Stephen Baxter (who appeared in practically every genre market
in existence this year, plus a few nongenre ones! ... or so it seemed anyway), and good work by Dominic Green, Ian Watson, and Jeanne Cavelos, although Decalog 4 was also interesting, with good work by Alex Stewart, Ben Jeapes, and Liz Holiday. (These anthologies may be somewhat difficult for American readers to find too-but, if it's any consolation, at least nowhere near as difficult as finding Future Histories would be!)

  An interesting anthology that we missed last year is David Copperfield's Beyond Imagination, edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner (Harperprism), an eclectic anthology that mixes science fiction, fantasy, mild horror, and hybrids of these forms of various sorts, and which features strong, powerfully imaginative work by Robert Silverberg, Greg Bear, Peter S. Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, and others. This is one of the better anthologies of the last couple of years, in fact, and probably worth its hardeover price of $23.00, although by now I think that it's also available in a mass-market edition as well. Another eclectic mixed anthology that we missed last year was the British anthology Lethal Kisses, 19 Stories of Sex, Horror and Revenge, edited by Ellen Datlow (Millennium Orion), which, in spite of the title, contains a strong SF story by Pat Cadigan, an unclassifiably strange story on the borderland of literary surrealism by Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann, and good near-mainstream stories with no real fantastic element at all by Pat Murphy and Jonathan Lethem, as well as the expected erotic horror stuff by writers such as Simon Ings, Michael Marshall Smith, David J. Schow, A. R. Morlan, and others.