The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  At one time, there were at least five or six major SF anthology series, including Orbit, New Dimensions, Nova, Universe, and others, but they have vanished one by one over the years, until now the only one left (although others are scheduled to start up in the near future) is Full Spectrum, which has been published at irregular intervals since the late eighties, and which is now up to its fifth volume. Full Spectrum 5 (Bantam Spectra), edited by Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein, received the kind of rave reviews when it came out that Full Spectrum anthologies usually get, but, frankly, although there are a few good stories here, I found the anthology to be, on the whole, something of a disappointment. The first disappointment was that most of the stories in the book are not really core science fiction, but instead are either fantasy or some variant of metafiction/surrealism … and that most of the fantasy stories are weak even when considered as fantasy stories. There is some good work in the book, but, with one possible exception, nothing really of first-rate quality. Leaving aside the One Possible Exception for a moment, the best story here is probably Howard V. Hendrix’s “The Music of What Happens,” although it’s a bit too long for its weight, and occasionally the level of New Age spirituality that you have to wade through gets a bit too thick for my taste, a problem I often have with Hendrix’s stuff; still, it is a respectable story, and definitely worth reading. Jean Mark Gawron’s “Tale of the Blue Spruce Dreaming (Or How to Be Flesh)” and William Barton’s “When a Man’s an Empty Kettle” both have some good new ideas in them (particularly the Gawron), but both felt too long to me, as though both could have been trimmed by at least a third. Michael Bishop’s “Simply Indispensable” took a good idea and ruined it (for me, anyway) by a great deal of extremely coy overwriting. Jonathan Lethem’s “The Insipid Profession of Jonathan Hornebom” was very well crafted, but it seemed to me to fall between two stools: considered as a satire, it wasn’t satirical enough, or nearly funny enough, not enough of a real takeoff on Heinlein’s famous story, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”; considered as a straight story, not a satire, you have to wonder: Why bother?—since the Heinlein story actually covered this same ground as well or better more than forty years ago, and it doesn’t seem that Lethem has actually brought all that much of a fresh slant to the material. So the story is neither one thing nor the other, and so, in my opinion, fails as both, in spite of the vividness of the writing. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Shimabara” is also very well crafted, but, although interesting for the historical detail it conveys, is one of those pieces of metafiction I mentioned above, certainly not SF, and probably not fantasy, either. Neal Stephenson’s “Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast” is a pleasant entertainment, adroitly handled, but the ground that it covers is very familiar. Richard Bowes’s “Fountains in Summer” is engrossing, but doesn’t really go anywhere; it’s too obviously a part of a larger work to stand well on its own feet as an independent piece of fiction. There is also good work here—not first-rate work, but good solid work—by Patricia A. McKillip, Mark Bourne, Pat York, Karawynn Long, Paul Park, and others. Which brings us to the One Possible Exception, Gene Wolfe’s “The Ziggurat,” which, line by line, is working on a level of craft far above anything else in the book, the level of craft of a first-rate work … but which is also a cryptic story that left me wondering, when I’d finished it, just how I was supposed to have reacted to it, and exactly what I was supposed to have taken away from it. Many women readers have reacted negatively to the main character, at least one of them describing him angrily in a review as “a sexist asshole,” and I found myself disliking him as well; it’s hard not to, since he is stubborn and blinkered and at times downright pigheaded (the death of his son, for instance, seems to me to be at least as much his own fault, for insisting on going back to the cabin, against all common sense, as it is the fault of the actual murderer), and since the opinions of women he expresses throughout are, to say the least, severe. But, as Wolfe is an author who loves to play subtle games with the reader, and in whose work things can seldom be taken at face value, this may be exactly the way you are supposed to be reacting to him. I suspect that it’s an entirely different story depending on whether you like the main character and sympathize with his reactions or not—and I don’t see anything on the page that clearly indicates just how the author wanted you to react to him. Still, any story that can arouse such violently polarized responses, and can leave as many questions in the mind of a reader after he’s finished turning the pages as this one does, is definitely one worth reading.

  All of Full Spectrum’s founding editors have subsequently left Bantam, and even two out of three of the editors of this volume are now gone, with only Tom Dupree still working for the company, but apparently the series will continue, with a new volume being assembled even as I write, and it will be very interesting to see if the future editors, whoever they turn out to be, can do something to revitalize this important series, which I have considered to be in a slump for the last few years, although other critics do not necessarily agree with me. One of the few other surviving original anthology series, this year’s Hubbard Award anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XI (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, is, as usual, made up of novice work by young writers, some of whom may—or may not—develop interestingly in years to come. Scheduled for next year is the launch of a new anthology series from Tor called Starlight, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which sounds promising; supposedly there will be a new edition of George Zebrowski’s long-dormant Synergy anthology series sometime in the indefinite future, too, as this series has reportedly been sold to a new publisher, White Wolf. With luck, perhaps at least one of these anthology series can establish itself, making the SF original anthology series market look a bit less like an endangered species right on the brink of extinction.

  Turning to the nonseries SF anthologies, I was considerably more impressed with New Legends (Tor), edited by Greg Bear, than I was with Full Spectrum 5; in fact, New Legends is clearly the best original SF anthology of the year, and, although I won’t go quite as far as the reviews that have described it as “the Dangerous Visions of the nineties,” it’s certainly one of the most substantial and important anthologies to appear in a good long time. New Legends contains, in my opinion, several of the year’s best stories, and very little in it is less than good—in fact, even the “merely” good stuff in New Legends is better than almost anything in Full Spectrum 5. The best stuff here includes Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets,” which includes some extremely sophisticated conceptualization and weird-new-idea stuff; Ursula K. Le Guin’s quietly lyrical and moving “Coming of Age in Karhide,” which returns to the setting of The Left Hand of Darkness; Paul J. McAuley’s evocative “Recording Angel,” which comes as close as anything I’ve seen to effectively capturing at least some of the mood and tone of Cordwainer Smith’s best work; and Carter Scholz’s compelling “Radiance,” which, although it’s borderline science fiction at best, is certainly one of the most powerful stories I’ve read this year. A step down from there, although still very good, we have Mary Rosenblum’s eloquent “Elegy”; Poul Anderson’s “Scarecrow”; a story by “Sterling Blake” (pseudonym for a Big-Name Author) called “A Desperate Calculus,” which is harrowing and effective (although it does reproduce almost exactly the plot of Tiptree’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”); and Robert Silverberg’s “The Red Blaze Is the Morning.” Also worthwhile were Greg Abraham’s slow but thoughtful “Gnota”; Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Rorvik’s War,” which covers territory I’ve seen covered before (for instance, in Joe Haldeman’s much shorter “The Private War of Private Jacobs”), but which covers it in an interesting way; and Gregory Benford’s bizarre “High Abyss.” A good bit weaker, but still respectable, are Sonia Orin Lyris’s “When Strangers Meet” and George Alec Effinger’s “One” (although the suggestion that the story has remained unsold for years because it was too “dangerous” to pri
nt is nonsense). I myself didn’t care all that much for Robert Sheckley’s “The Day the Aliens Came,” which seemed heavily dated, but then, Sheckley’s work has always been something of a blind spot for me, and I know that other reviewers have rated it up at the top. The weakest story here is probably James Stevens-Arce’s “Scenes from a Future Marriage,” although even it is more substantial than several of the stories in Full Spectrum 5.

  On the whole, this is a very impressive anthology, with some of the best work of the year in it, and almost nothing that is less than good.

  One strong “hard science”–oriented anthology in a year is a rarity, but this year we had two—Far Futures (Tor), edited by Gregory Benford, is another good anthology, and the runner-up for the title of the best original SF anthology of the year. Far Futures is more uneven and less impressive overall than New Legends, but it does contain some first-rate work, and almost everything in it is at the least solid and competently professional. As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this is an anthology of five novellas set in the very far future—at least a thousand years, although many of them go all the way to the End of Time, billions of years from now, or even further. Benford boasts in the introduction that in this “hard science” anthology “You’ll find no fin de siècle, ‘bored parties at the end of time’ narratives,” which I assume is a sneer at the work of writers such as Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, and Gene Wolfe … although, frankly, a few of these stories could have used a bit of the stylistic flash and élan of those writers, since the biggest flaw of some of the stories here is a tendency to trudge in a rather pedestrian manner past a catalog of Ultimate Wonders, as though both the authors and their characters have been numbed by the immense scale of everything. The best stories here, though, skillfully avoid this problem—Joe Haldeman’s “For White Hill” and Poul Anderson’s “Genesis” both manage to operate on a sweepingly cosmic scale while at the same time remaining focused on human characters whose ultimate fate you come to care about. The Anderson in particular delivers a few genuine jolts of pure-quill old-fashioned undiluted Sense of Wonder, something the genre does all too rarely these days. The rest of the stories struggle to achieve the effect that Haldeman and (particularly) Anderson pull off, getting the mix wrong to one degree or another, although none of them are outright failures, and other readers may well like some of them better than the ones I’ve listed as my favorites. Greg Bear’s “Judgment Engine” has an opaque opening and a flat detached style that makes it somewhat difficult to get into, but it ultimately repays the effort, delivering some intriguing and very original speculative content and thinking … although in a rather abstract, bloodless way (appropriate, I guess, since none of the characters in “Judgment Engine” have any blood!) that makes it hard to get any really satisfying emotional jolt out of the story, even though it does involve the End of the Universe as we know it. A similar problem mars Charles Sheffield’s “At the Eschaton,” which manages to be an emotionally flat story even though it’s about an obsessed-to-the-point-of-madness character who will go to literally any ends to get his dead wife back. In spite of all the main character’s heavy breathing and garment-ripping, though, there is somehow not a lot of emotional charge here, and even though stars and galaxies are destroyed on a scale that would make even the old Superscience boys of the thirties blanch, and the story literally takes us to the End of the Universe, and beyond, somehow not a lot of excitement is generated by all these wonders. In spite of a lot of bright, inventive thinking, good prose, and certainly enough vastness of scale for anybody, “At the Eschaton” is ultimately unsatisfying—and I think that the reason why it fails is the reason why many stories of this sort fail. For instance, when the main character makes his first jump into the future, awakening two hundred years later, there are no sensory details of the future mentioned at all, no evocative local color—we get no idea of what being in the future feels like, on a mundane, everyday, minute-to-minute scale: The present is people talking in a featureless room; the future is people talking in another featureless room; the End of Time itself is people talking in another featureless room … so that in spite of all the grand galactic sweep, the story ultimately feels claustrophobic. The much-vaunted Sense of Wonder does not automatically come just from making your canvas as large as possible if you haven’t done a good job on the figures moving through the landscape. This is not a mistake that Anderson makes, for instance, canny old pro that he is, nor would Aldiss or Wolfe have made it, either. The weakest of the novellas here, by a considerable margin, is Donald Kingsbury’s “Historical Crisis,” a pastiche of and comment on Asimov’s Foundation trilogy that is not really a comfortable match with the contents of the rest of the book; in fact, it feels as if it has wandered in out of some other anthology altogether. Still, four out of five of these stories are strong, and two of them are among the year’s best, so Far Futures is obviously one of your best buys of the year.

  (Interestingly, almost every one of these novellas involves downloading someone’s mind/personality into a computer, and often the replicating of that downloaded personality … even though this is something that Benford himself is on record as saying that he considers to be unlikely to the point of impossibility, and something that he has criticized the cyberpunks for using as a motif, giving it as an example of how they play the game of hard science “with the net down.” A bit inconsistent, then, to find the same motif used so extensively here, in a book self-billed as the hardest of the hard …)

  I must say that I’m pleased that these two anthologies are made up largely of core science fiction, not fantasy, not postmodernism, not metafiction, not magical realism. I like all of those forms, and have published all of them myself, but it’s nice to see some good solid science fiction every once in a while, too!

  Mention should probably be made here of the so-called electronic anthology Neon Visions, edited by Ellen Datlow, which appeared over the year as a sequence of novellas published electronically on Omni Online. Taken individually, the six novellas are of impressive quality—although not all of them are center science fiction, either—and if you consider it to be an actual anthology (which is arguable, since the novellas have not been assembled in one place in any concrete form, a form that you could hold in your hand—or even “access” all at once), then it would be one of the year’s best, ranking just under New Legends and Far Futures. I suspect that most people won’t really consider this to have been published, though, until the “anthology” comes out in print form, if it ever does. This whole issue raises many interesting questions that are going to be haunting award-eligibility committees for years to come.

  Most of the year’s other original science fiction anthologies, unfortunately, are considerably weaker than the three mentioned above. How to Save the World (Tor), edited by Charles Sheffield, has some of the same earnest, heavily polemical quality as Sheffield’s 1994 anthology Future Quartet: Earth in the Year 2042: A Four-Part Invention. Unfortunately, the stories in this book, less substantial than those in Future Quartet, epitomize the worst of both worlds: Considered purely as fiction, they’re thin, overly didactic, and frequently dull; considered as earnest sociological speculation, as works of futurology that might actually suggest some workable societal change that would indeed teach us How to Save the World, they are at the best highly impractical and unlikely, and at the worst downright silly.

  Also not terribly impressive, although perhaps a bit better overall than How to Save the World, were The Ultimate Alien (Dell), edited by Byron Preiss, John Betancourt, and Keith R. A. DeCandido and Nanodreams (Baen), edited by Elton Elliott, both mixed reprint-original anthologies where the reprint stories were stronger than the original work; Nanodreams is the stronger of the two overall, although by far the best story in it is a reprint of Greg Bear’s ten-year-old “Blood Music.” Women at War (Tor), edited by Lois McMaster Bujold and Roland J. Green, is one of several anthologies this year—Sisters in Fantasy, Sisters of the Night (female vampires), the
Women of Wonder anthologies, The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, the satirical Chicks in Chainmail—that seem to be specifically targeting women as a potential market, an interesting change of strategy, since many SF publishers have traditionally (and mistakenly, in my opinion) considered women to be a demographically insignificant share of the buying audience. Women at War seems to be trying to appeal to both the female audience and the audience for Military SF, something that seems unlikely at first glance, Military SF being generally considered to be a province that appeals largely to men—until you realize that Bujold’s own novels probably reach just such a mixed audience, at which point you begin to wonder if the editors aren’t onto something after all. At any rate, there is some good if not exceptional work here by Judith Tarr, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and others, although the stories tend to be less gung ho bloodthirsty and enthusiastically predatory, and to question the morality/inevitability of war itself more, than is the usual wont of most Military SF. It will be interesting to see if this anthology actually finds the audience it’s seeking. Superheroes (Ace), edited by John Varley and Ricia Mainhardt, also seems somewhat confused as to what audience it’s aimed for; obviously, a book about people with superhuman powers is aimed at the comics audience, or at least at the same fringe of it who enjoy the Wild Card series edited by George R. R. Martin, but there’s an odd mocking, satirical, demythifying slant to most of the stories here, which tend to make fun of the whole idea of costumed crime-fighters with secret identities, unlike the Wild Card stories, which, in spite of a few conscious ironies, on the whole treat the same mythological structure with affection and respect; most comics fans take comics very seriously, however, and they are unlikely to be amused by demythifying stories that ridicule the core assumptions of their field, so it seems to me that Superheroes is in danger of alienating the very audience who are most likely to be interested in it in the first place. Most of the stories here are SF only by courtesy, of course, and most are decidedly minor, although a few of them are entertaining; the best stories here are by Roger Zelazny—although it is also by far the furthest away from the ostensible theme—and by John Varley, although the same basic idea that Varley deals with here rather heavy-handedly, playing it for yucks, was handled with much more subtlety and grace by Kim Newman in his story “Übermensch!” a few years back.