The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Australian Greg Egan may be the hottest new writer of the decade, and he demonstrates why in Axiomatic, my other candidate for best collection of the year. Egan’s writing lacks (as yet) the maturity and richness of Le Guin’s best work, and occasionally reads as though he’s producing a thinly fictionalized version of some scientific article he’s been excited by, rushing to recast the idea-content in story form without taking the time to let the idea mature or integrate as fiction … but this is a fault common to relatively young writers, and I see signs that he’s already beginning to outgrow it. What he does have going for him is the inventiveness and ingenuity of his ideas, and the uncompromising rigor and unflinching logic with which he works the implications of those ideas through to their ultimate conclusions. Egan may be doing some of the best thinking taking place in the genre today, and when he matches that thinking with a story, setting, and characters rich and fully developed enough to be worthy of it, as he does in the best of the work here, the result is spectacular, work that is genuinely on the Cutting Edge of the field. (There was another strong collection by Greg Egan this year, Our Lady of Chernobyl (MirrorDanse Books), about which all of the above remarks also apply—but since it was published by a small press in Australia, it’ll probably be much more difficult to find for the average reader than Axiomatic.)

  Among the year’s other top collections were: Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler (Four Walls Eight Windows); Georgia on My Mind and Other Places, Charles Sheffield (Tor); Matter’s End, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); and Common Clay, Brian W. Aldiss (St. Martin’s). Katharine Kerr’s Freezeframes (HarperPrism), like the Le Guin discussed above, can be considered either as a collection or a “mosaic novel”; either way, it contains some first-rate work. Kate Wilhelm’s A Flush of Shadows (St. Martin’s) is mostly a collection of mystery novellas, although several of them contain minor fantastic elements, and at least one of them is straightforward science fiction; all are written up to Wilhelm’s exactingly high standard. Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (Four Walls Eight Windows) is another novella collection, this one of baroque, wildly inventive, cartoonishly satirical, deliberately outrageous “steampunk” stories that juxtapose Victorian settings and characters with SF situations and tropes, with results that are sometimes forced and artificial, but often bright and funny as well. A similar kind of aesthetic (one pioneered in fact by Moorcock, who was doing this kind of thing long before any of the “steampunks” came on the scene) can be found in Michael Moorcock’s two stylish collections, Lunching with the Antichrist (Mark V. Ziesing) and Fabulous Harbours (Millennium). Another quirky item is Bibliomen, by Gene Wolfe (Broken Mirrors Press), described as “Twenty-two characters in search of a book,” a series of fictional bios with illustrations by Ian Miller. The work of one of the most popular of the field’s new writers is collected in The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians and A Conflagration Artist (Wildside Press), both by Bradley Denton; these just won a World Fantasy Award, but since you can only get them as a boxed set for seventy dollars, they may be beyond the resources of many readers. Other good collections included: Dealers in Light and Darkness, Cherry Wilder (Edgewood); Seven Tales and a Fable, Gwyneth Jones (Edgewood); and Ganglion and Other Stories, Wayne Wightman (Tachyon Publications). There were two good fantasy collections, The Panic Hand, Jonathan Carroll (HarperCollins UK) and The Ivory and the Horn, Charles de Lint (Tor), and two collections that mixed horror, fantasy, and SF, Cages, Ed Gorman (Deadline Press) and Strange Highways, Dean Koontz (Warner).

  There were an unusually large number of good retrospective collections this year, allowing you capsule glimpses of a writer’s career in short fiction. The best was probably The Ultimate Egoist (North Atlantic Books), the first in an ambitious series of volumes that aims to return to print all of the short work of one of SF’s best short-story writers, Theodore Sturgeon. Similarly noteworthy is Ill Met in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber (White Wolf), the first of a handsomely produced omnibus series that intends to return all of Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories to print; since the Gray Mouser stories are one of the foundation stones of modern fantasy, influencing almost everything that came after them, these volumes are indispensable for any good library of the fantastic. There should also be a place in every complete library, though, for: Tales of Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith (Necronomicon Press); Gold, Isaac Asimov (HarperPrism), a retrospective of Isaac’s career that includes both fiction and nonfiction; Ingathering: the Complete People Stories, Zenna Henderson (NESFA Press); and Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus). Other retrospective collections, long unavailable but now back in print, that belong in every library are The Best of Lester Del Rey (Del Rey) and The Best of John W. Campbell (Del Rey).

  An associational item is Atlantis: Three Tales (Wesleyan University Press), a collection of three excellent mainstream novellas by SF writer Samuel R. Delany. Delany fans will definitely want this one, as it’s some of his most substantial work in years.

  Continuing a trend from last year, and reversing a previous trend that had applied for several years, most of the major collections this year were released by regular trade publishers rather than by small presses—although with a few of those publishers, the distinction is a fine one. Four Walls Eight Windows had a strong presence this year, but has since dissolved. HarperPrism and Millennium placed several books on the list, as did St. Martin’s Press, and White Wolf could well become a presence in this category. Among paperback publishers, Tor brought out the most collections again this year. The small presses continued to be important, especially in the area of retrospective collections; almost all of the year’s retrospective collections were from small presses, although Del Rey is to be commended as well for bringing some of its excellent “Best of” author collections back into print; I hope they reissue the rest of them, too. Edgewood showed up on the list, as did Mark V. Ziesing, NESFA Press, Necronomicon Press, Deadline Press, and several very small presses, such as Tachyon and MirrorDanse.

  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: MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia, $9.95 for Our Lady of Chernobyl, by Greg Egan; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701, $25 for The Ultimate Egoist, volume 1, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon; Necronomicon Press, Box 1304, Warwick, RI 02893, $11.95 plus $1.50 postage for Tales of Zothique, by Clark Ashton Smith; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $24.95 for Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson; Deadline Press, Box 2805, Apache Junction, AZ 85217, $35 for Cages, by Ed Gorman; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA 94107, $21 plus $2 handling for Ganglion & Other Stories, by Wayne Wightman; Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088, $60 for Lunching with the Antichrist, by Michael Moorcock; Broken Mirrors Press, P.O. Box 380473, Cambridge, MA 02338, $7.50 for Bibliomen, by Gene Wolfe; Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238, $9 for Dealers in Light and Darkness, by Cherry Wilder, $8 for Seven Tales and a Fable, by Gwyneth Jones; Wildside Press, 37 Fillmore Street, Newark, NJ 07105, $70 for The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians, by Bradley Denton, (available only as a boxed set with A Conflagration Artist, by Bradley Denton.)

  * * *

  This was a somewhat quiet year in the reprint anthology market; certainly there seemed to be fewer of them than in some recent years. The current wisdom in publishing seems to be that it’s more desirable—hotter, sexier—to do theme anthologies as original anthologies rather than reprints. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always turn out to be true. The editor of a reprint anthology about, say space stations (or dinosaurs, or artichokes, or whatever) at least knows in advance the quality of the stories that he’s going to use, and so can assure the overall quality of the book; the editor of the original anthology in many cases must u
se what he can get by the time the deadline looms—even if what he can get turns out to be a bunch of mediocre stories that don’t handle the theme as well as classic reprints have in the past. The reprint anthology can usually provide a better examination of a specific theme, therefore, or at least one that is more even in overall quality—but as long as publishers remain convinced that readers are more likely to buy an original anthology than a reprint anthology, the reprint market will continue to shrink.

  This year, as usual, some of the best bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 29 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent. For some years now, science fiction has been being covered by only one “Best of the Year” anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand—but in 1996 there will be a new “Best” series covering science fiction as well, to be edited by David G. Hartwell. I won’t, of course, attempt to review it, for obvious reasons—but David’s taste is different enough from my own that I’m sure that he will produce a very different book from mine, and it will be interesting to see what stories impressed me that didn’t impress David, and vice versa. And surely an examination of the field and the year from a different aesthetic perspective will be a useful thing for the genre at large; the field is wide and various enough for there to be room for many different volumes, all representing different tastes and perspectives. As Karl Edward Wagner’s long-running Year’s Best Horror Stories died along with him last year, alas, this year there were only two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror, instead of three: an entry in a newer British series, The Best New Horror Volume Six (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, and the Ellen Datlow half of a mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Eighth Annual Collection. More short fantasy is published every year, even factoring in the unfortunate death of the Xanadu anthology series, and I suspect that someone will launch an independent “Best” volume devoted to fantasy alone, but so far fantasy is still covered only by the Terri Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology.

  There was no big, controversial retrospective anthology this year, such as The Norton Book of Science Fiction or The Ascent of Wonder, but, despite that, there were still some very good values in the retrospective “historical overview” anthology category. Like last year’s New Eves: SF about the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, most of the best retrospective anthologies this year detailed the contributions of women writers to the SF and fantasy genres. The two best such anthologies were Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent, an omnibus reissue of three well-known anthologies from the seventies, Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, and The New Women of Wonder, covering the period 1944 to 1978; and Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (Harcourt Brace), also edited by Pamela Sargent, which updates things by covering the period 1978 to 1993. Many of the same authors are featured here as in New Eves, but the overlap of stories is small, and these two volumes belong on the bookshelves of everyone with a serious interest in the development of the field. Much the same could be said about The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (Viking), edited by Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones—I’m a bit bothered by the fact that the editors make no distinction whatsoever between science fiction and fantasy, lumping it all in together as “fantasy,” but there’s lots of good reading here, too, and this is another worthwhile volume. In fact, all three anthologies provide a valuable historical perspective on the evolution of science fiction—and one not always discussed in depth in the standard histories of the genre, which, to date, have tended to be written by men.

  There were some good reprint horror anthologies this year. The best of them explored the borders between genres, and featured SF as well as horror. Cthulhu 2000 (Arkham House), for instance, edited by Jim Turner, is a stylish and intelligent Lovecraftian anthology which, in addition to work by many of the writers you’d expect to find, also features work by writers who are usually not thought of as Lovecraftians, such as Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Esther M. Friesner, Bruce Sterling, and Joanna Russ. (These have been a good couple of years for Lovecraft fans: late last year there was another big anthology of Lovecraft-inspired new work, which we missed, Shadows over Innsmouth (Fedogan & Bremer), edited by Stephen Jones, and there have been a couple of other Lovecraft-oriented books this year as well.) Between Time and Terror (Roc), edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, which also contains much Lovecraftian work, is another book that explores the borderline between science fiction and horror, reprinting some vigorous hybrids of the two forms, including works by writers such as John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as more expected writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Clive Barker. Monsters of one sort or another also got a lot of coverage this year. There were two huge anthologies of stories about the Frankenstein monster, one mostly original, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (covered above), and one reprint, The Frankenstein Omnibus (Orion), edited by Peter Haining; at least a half dozen anthologies about vampires, most of them original anthologies; at least two anthologies about werewolves, Werewolves (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (which is mostly original stories), and Tomorrow Bites (Baen), edited by Greg Cox and T. K. F. Weisskopf (contains one original story); and even an anthology about monsters from other cultures, Orphans of the Night (covered above).

  Noted without comment are: Dinosaurs II (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Angels! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Isaac Asimov’s Skin Deep (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams; and Isaac Asimov’s Ghosts (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

  Mention should probably be made here of an associational item, an anthology of humorous competitions (as in, come up with a future Burma Shave ad) and cartoons from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, called Oi, Robot (Mercury Press), edited by Edward L. Ferman.

  * * *

  It was a somewhat quiet year as well in the SF-oriented nonfiction and reference-book field, with the most interesting items for the nonspecialist being follow-ups of one sort or another to 1993’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, perhaps the best one-volume SF reference work ever produced.

  Of these follow-ups, perhaps the spiffiest, the most useful, and certainly the most fun to play with, was a CD-ROM, not a book: Grolier Science Fiction: The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Grolier Electronic Publishing; $35 from Grolier Electronic Publishing Inc., 90 Sherman Turnpike, Danbury CT 06816). Based on the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, the CD-ROM version has been expanded and updated with 25,000 words in new entries and 25,000 words’ worth of updates, plus the addition of lots of “multimedia” graphics: stills from movies, book covers, author photos, and so on, plus audio and video clips. Based as it is on the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, the CD-ROM is actually usable as a reference source and a research tool, unlike some of the similar CD-ROM projects offered in the last few years. Whether it’s any more useful than the print version is dubious; the spiffy graphics are mostly just entertaining embellishments, fancy icing on the cake of the print text, and don’t really add anything vital to the information you can get out of the old-fashioned book version. I suppose you can argue that the information is presented in a more easily storable form in the CD-ROM version, a slender disk rather than a very thick hardcover book.… (The book, however, is easier to “access,” and doesn’t require that you own an expensive computer system before you can use it.) The additional graphics are fun to play with, though—perhaps especially in those places where they haven’t quite worked all the bugs out of things (in the Gallery, for instance, try calling up the photos of Mike Resnick or Terry Pratchett and see what happens!). The other “follow-up” is Sc
ience Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley), by John Clute, which almost functions as an abridged or (very) simplified version of the original Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, with a lot of very nice looking graphics added, the same kind of thing that decorates the Grolier CD-ROM—book covers, author photos, movie stills, etc. (no audio or video clips, of course). Of necessity, a lot of information is left out that was available in the original Encyclopedia, so this is far less valuable as a reference source or research tool, but it does provide an intelligently selected “time line” of the evolution of the science fiction field, so that a casual reader who dips into this book for a few moments is more likely to emerge with at least a sketchy capsule knowledge of some of the history of the genre than he probably would have gained by dipping at random into the much more comprehensive Encyclopedia. If you’ve already got the Clute and Nicholls volume, then you don’t really need this one, but it does make a stylish and handsome coffee-table book, and certainly does the job it’s intended to do a lot better than previous books of its type, for instance, Brian Ash’s 1977 The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which was so confusingly designed and poorly laid out as to be nearly incomprehensible and almost totally useless for any sort of research or reference work. Also of general interest will be a collection of letters by the late Isaac Asimov, put together by his brother just before his own death this year, Yours, Isaac Asimov (Doubleday), edited by Stanley Asimov.

  Turning to the more specialized reference books, those more likely to be of interest to the scholar than to the average nonscholarly reader, prominent items in this category this year included: Anatomy of Wonder 4 (R.R. Bowker), edited by Neil Barron, an update of what is probably still the best bibliography of the field; The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, 2d ed. (Scolar Press), by David Pringle, another useful bibliography; the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed. (St. James), edited by Jay P. Pederson and Robert Reginald; British Science Fiction Paperbacks and Magazines 1949–1956 (Borgo), by Philip Harbottle and Stephen Holland; The Supernatural Index (Greenwood), by Mike Ashley and William G. Contento; and Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults, 4th ed. (R.R. Bowker), by Ruth Nadelman Lynn.