The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Among the critical books, the most flavorsome and interesting for the nonspecialist will probably be two books of stylish, controversial, and sometimes deliberately provocative essays by two well-known SF writers: The Detached Retina (Syracuse), by Brian W. Aldiss, and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (Indiana University Press), by Joanna Russ. Somewhat more abstract are Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (Routledge), by Damien Broderick, and Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors (Syracuse), edited by David Seed. There were a couple of additions to the ever-growing shelf of critical works about the late Philip K. Dick: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (Pantheon), edited by Lawrence Sutin, is probably the one that the Dick fan will want the most, consisting as it does of nonfiction pieces and fragments by Philip K. Dick himself, who saw “reality” from as strange a perspective as anyone ever has; the other, Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (Greenwood), edited by Samuel J. Umland, is heavier going, and will appeal mostly to scholars, specialists, and those who are really obsessed with Phil Dick. There was a literary biography/study, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Greenwood), by S. T. Joshi, and yet another study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Marina Warner.

  There were again several good values in the art-book field this year, including Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton (Paper Tiger), Bob Eggleton; Electric Dreams: The Art of Barclay Shaw (Paper Tiger), Barclay Shaw; The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe (Morpheus), Wayne Barlowe; A Hannes Bok Showcase (Charles F. Miller), edited by Stephen D. Korshak; Stephen E. Fabian’s Women & Wonders (Charles F. Miller), Stephen E. Fabian; a sequel to the immensely popular Dinotopia, called Dinotopia: The World Beneath (Turner), by James Gurney; and a sort of “Best of the Year” compilation of last year’s fantastic art, Spectrum II: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Burnett and Arnie Fenner. As can be seen, Paper Tiger and Charles F. Miller are bringing out the bulk of the interesting work in this area.

  Turning to the general genre-related nonfiction field, there was a good deal of interesting stuff this year, some of it perhaps further out on the periphery than some readers will be willing to go; I’m willing to bet, though, that most of it will be of interest to most genre readers. The Private Life of Plants (Princeton), by David Attenborough, for instance, shows the plants of our own world to be far stranger than most of the alien life-forms invented by science fiction writers, and there are probably a dozen story ideas lurking in this fascinating book’s descriptions of the intricate and sometimes downright amazing survival strategies utilized by plants around the world. The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (Grosset/Putnam), by James Burke and Robert Ornstein, will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Burke’s famous Connections series, being another shrewd examination of the ways that our societies are shaped by technology and by cultural assumptions, sometimes in subtle and surprising ways. The Seven Wonders of the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (Henry Holt), by John and Elizabeth Romer, is a bit further removed from genre concerns, but will certainly be of interest to that large portion of the genre audience interested in history and alternate history, especially as it largely concerns itself with the technologies and engineering logistics used in creating ancient Wonders such as the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes. On a different note, many genre readers will find it worthwhile to pick up The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (Andrews and McMeel), by Bill Watterson, especially now that the original comic strip has died; at its best, Calvin and Hobbes was not only one of the most brilliant and funny comic strips of modern times, but it was also the strip that ventured most often and most successfully into genre territory, as Calvin imagines himself to be a rampaging dinosaur or an intrepid spaceman battling wonderfully drawn Bug Eyed Monsters … who usually turn out to really be his grade-school teacher. This is a strip I’ll miss, as it brought a richness of imagination and a subtlety of touch to a milieu usually lacking in both qualities these days.

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  Nineteen ninety-five was a decent year at the box office for genre films, with a fair number of midlevel hits, although no blockbusters on the scale of The Lion King or Jurassic Park. Artistically, it was a mixed year, with some good movies and some real stinkers … although if you take a careful look at what are usually listed just as “genre films,” and break them down by actual type, you’ll find that, like last year, there were many more good fantasy movies than there were good science fiction movies.

  In terms of artistic quality, the best science fiction movie of the year wasn’t even a science fiction movie. The box-office smash Apollo 13 is technically not a science fiction movie because, of course, the events that it describes are not science fiction, but instead are based on something that actually happened (you knew this, of course, right? I hope you did, anyway). In spite of this inconvenient fact, don’t be surprised to see Apollo 13 show up on next year’s Hugo ballot for Best Dramatic presentation, and very probably win, too … because, in spite of the fact that it’s not SF, it catches the spirit and the mind-set behind science fiction better than anything has in years, and does a better job overall of giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the space program than the movie version of The Right Stuff, and I’ve yet to meet an SF fan—most of whom are still space-flight enthusiasts, after all—who didn’t love it. Besides, disregarding everything else, those rockets in space look great—and it’s amazing how much of a jolt of Sense of Wonder those images can still evoke, even though they’re images not of imaginary futures but of an era that is over and receding rapidly into the only dimly remembered past. Spaceships are still very potent stuff symbolically, speaking without words to some dream that lives in the back of the skull—it’s too bad that NASA has not been able to figure out some viable way to use that dream to inspire the public into supporting the space program. (Instead, NASA has accomplished the amazing feat of making space travel dull … but that’s an essay for another place than here.)

  Once you get beyond Apollo 13 (if you consider it to be a genre film in the first place), it wasn’t really much of a year for SF films in terms of either artistic or box-office success. Johnny Mnemonic was a flop at the box office, but it was not as bad as most critics said it was (it may have been the most critically savaged movie of the year); in fact, although it was seriously flawed, Johnny Mnemonic may have been the most artistically successful real science fiction movie of the year. At least it tried to appeal to an intelligent, adult audience, with a literate script by William Gibson Himself and some good set-dressing and special effects, especially the stunning computer-interface sequences. It wasn’t very well directed, though, and the zombielike performance by Keanu Reeves in the title role probably was the final nail in its coffin. The much-discussed Waterworld, the most expensive movie ever made, turned out to be a standard action film, with boat chases standing in for the usual car chases, lots of shooting, and some very silly rubber science. It’s hard to see on the screen just why this movie had to cost $175 million; it’s no more spectacular than other big-budget special-effects-laden let’s-blow-up-lots-of-things action thrillers, such as the Die Hard movies or the Lethal Weapon movies, and, in fact, is less impressive than some of the best of the action thrillers, being less effective, for instance, than last year’s less grandiose and much less expensive Speed. Even though it was the tenth highest-grossing movie of the year, earning more than $88 million, Waterworld didn’t even come close to earning back its immense budget, although it may yet reach a small profit when overseas, TV, and videocassette sales are added into the total. Judge Dredd was an overblown and disappointing version of the cult ultraviolent British comix; almost as expensive as Waterworld at $100 million, it did considerably worse at the box office, perhaps an indication of the fading star-power of Sylvester S
tallone. Congo was a recycling of King Solomon’s Mines (and, in spite of its immensely larger budget, managed to look more like it was shot on a soundstage than the earlier movie did!) with some coy postmodern touches added, featuring an embarrassingly bad performance by a good actor, Tim Curry, who now qualifies for admittance to the Ludicrous Accent Hall of Fame, along with Robert Shaw (what was that accent he had in Jaws, anyway?). Species takes a genuine and even rather sophisticated SF idea (one lifted uncredited from print SF writers, of course, most notably Fred Hoyle) and then, disappointingly, uses it merely for a platform for another Alien clone, turning into just another monster-on-the-rampage-among-us movie. Similarly, The Net takes an idea that was Cutting Edge SF just a few years back—how computer manipulation of worldwide data banks can turn someone into an invisible nonperson, effectively wiping them from existence—and uses it as a platform from which to launch a fairly standard Hitchcockian chase-thriller of Mistaken Identity, the sort where an innocent person must unravel a mystery while on the run from relentlessly pursuing killers and the cops. The computer hacker elements don’t really add anything vital to a formula that goes at least as far back as North by Northwest, merely becoming a new kind of McGuffin, but considered as a thriller, The Net is not a bad one at all, with some good suspense, and a good performance by Sandra Bullock … whose character actually solves the mystery and outwits the bad guys all by herself, instead of standing by wringing her hands and moaning while a handsome male hero resolves everything with a climactic fistfight with the villain—that alone is reason enough to see the movie! The computer hacker/Mean Streets–cyberpunk territory was also covered by Virtuosity, Hackers, and Strange Days, none of which did very well at the box office, with Strange Days, which had been expected to be a Major Motion Picture, especially disappointing. Outbreak was obviously inspired by last year’s harrowing nonfiction book The Hot Zone, but the producers evidently felt that the prospect of everyone in the United States being killed by an outbreak of an Ebola-like virus was not scary enough, and decided to spice things up with some helicopter chases instead. It’s hard to know where to list Batman Forever—it’s obviously more a fantasy than it is a science fiction movie, but it has no overt supernatural element. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year, although I’m not entirely sure why. Val Kilmer, though somewhat stolid, is at least less inappropriate as Batman than—give me a break—Michael Keaton (although he is upstaged effortlessly by Chris O’Donnell as Robin in every scene they play together), and Jim Carrey, who has made a career out of flamboyant overacting, was born to play a Batman supervillain (although it’s sad to see a good actor such as Tommy Lee Jones chewing the scenery right along with him); but the movie is confusingly directed, and shot so much like a rock video that it’s often impossible to tell what’s going on even during the fight scenes—a major drawback for an action movie. Still, there’s no arguing with success, and the success of Batman Forever ensures that there will be at least one more Batman movie, and probably several of them. Mortal Kombat is even further out on the edge of the genre than Batman Forever, being literally a live-action version of an arcade video game. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a big-screen version of a popular kid’s television show, and Tank Girl is a live-action version of a cult comix (Tank Girl is considered a cult movie in some circles … but apparently there weren’t enough cultists to keep it from sinking out of sight at the box office).

  Right at the very end of the year, Terry Gilliam’s new film Twelve Monkeys was in some theaters in a limited release, but I never was able to catch up with it, and will have to save consideration of it for next year.

  Not much of a year for SF movies, then, really, all in all. After the disappointing turnout for movies like Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Hackers, Strange Days, and The Net, the computer hacker/cyberpunk movie subgenre is probably dead in the water for the foreseeable future, so don’t expect to see the film version of Neuromancer anytime soon. I’d like to think that the failure (relative to costs, anyway) of grotesquely overblown special-effects-heavy blow-up-everything-in-sight SF movies such as Waterworld and Judge Dredd has taught the moviemakers a lesson—but probably it hasn’t. Still awaiting release at year’s end were most of the big-budget blockbuster Major SF Movies that we’ve been promised for several years now: the first film in the new Star Wars trilogy, the new Stanley Kubrick SF movie, the new Indiana Jones movie, the sequel to Jurassic Park, and so on. Also scheduled for next year or thereabouts is a new Star Trek: The Next Generation theatrical film; let’s hope it’s more artistically successful—better writing would certainly help, guys!—than last year’s disappointing Star Trek Generations.

  There were some good fantasy movies. Toy Story, the first-ever completely computer-animated movie (and almost certainly not the last), was not only a technological marvel, but a stylishly told and fairly intelligent piece of storytelling that appealed to adults at least as much as it appealed to kids. For a talking-pig movie, Babe was treated with astonishing respect by the critics, was popular at the box office, and even made it into the Oscar nominees. The Secret of Roan Inish was an evocative and lyrically filmed fantasy, and The Indian in the Cupboard was an effective and respectful version of a well-known children’s book. Jumanji was somewhat muddled, but had some playful special effects and a certain exuberance. A Goofy Movie, a feature-length Goofy cartoon, was popular with kids, although not as palatable to adults as Toy Story. Even the charming The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain is clearly a fantasy of some sort, though it has no supernatural element whatsoever. (There were bad fantasy movies as well, of course, including a couple of the year’s highest-grossing movies: the overblown and somewhat distasteful Casper, and the animated feature Pocahontas, which was extremely dubious history even by Disney-movie standards—Pocahontas was only twelve when she met John Smith, didn’t marry him, and died very young in exile. And the movie was somewhat sappy to boot. Other bombs included what may, if he’s lucky, be the nadir of Eddie Murphy’s guttering career, A Vampire in Brooklyn, and the Mel Brooks comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It. I’m not going to bother to list all the horror movies, although there were a fair number of them, including big-budget Halloween and Candyman sequels.)

  The film industry, then, is capable of making a good fantasy movie—but clearly has no idea, most of the time, how to make a good SF movie. Almost no SF movies make a genuine attempt to deal in an intelligent fashion with the idea-content of science fiction—instead, they typically concentrate on the special effects and the costuming and the set dressing, on flashy set pieces and big explosions, usually skimping even on basic story line, let alone the ideas behind the story. When was the last time you saw a real, core science fiction movie—not an engaging space fantasy such as Star Wars, or a disguised horror movie such as Alien, or an adventure-fantasy such as Raiders of the Lost Ark—that was presented in an intelligent and sophisticated enough manner that adults could appreciate it without making major allowances for it … let alone one that had some really intriguing or challenging conceptualization in it, some real sophistication of idea and theme? Some viewers would reach back to Blade Runner, others would have to go all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey … but, whichever you choose, it’s certainly been a long time.

  Turning to television, there were as many or more genre shows than ever on the air, but most of them were not all that impressive. Star Trek: Voyager doesn’t seem to be establishing itself all that well (and has not improved much in quality since its premiere last year, already getting into recycling old plots from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to be struggling some in the ratings as well—according to TV Guide, less than half the twenty million viewers who were watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when it premiered are still watching it now. That’s still a pretty big audience, of course, about ten million viewers—but the other way to look at it, equally valid, is that another ten million viewers have stopped watching it since the show came on
the air. For what it’s worth, most Star Trek fans I’ve talked to don’t like the two new shows anywhere near as much as they like Star Trek: The Next Generation—I feel that way myself—even if they do watch them … and a lot of them have stopped bothering to do so. A sign that there may be some unease in the Star Trek empire is that they keep trying to shore up the ratings of the new shows by bringing stars from Star Trek: TNG into them. The very popular character of Lieutenant Worf permanently joined the Deep Space Nine cast this year, for instance, and Q and Ryker from TNG have visited Star Trek: Voyager, in spite of the fact that the isolation of that show’s characters from the rest of the familiar Star Trek universe was supposed to be a plus creatively. In fact, there are signs that the producers are chafing against the (self-imposed) limitations of both shows: Deep Space Nine keeps coming up with lame scenarios to get its cast the hell out of their dull Space Shopping Mall, continually finding new excuses, however weak, to load them into spaceships and send them whizzing around the galaxy instead; and in spite of its premise of total isolation, Voyager is already exploiting every way possible to make contact with the familiar Star Trek universe, including flashbacks, time travel, and dream/alternate reality sequences, and clearly would be happy to be able to think up even more. In my opinion—and no, I don’t think that the producers of Star Trek have even the slightest interest in my opinion—what they ought to do is bite the bullet, admit (tacitly at least) that they’ve made a mistake, and do what they ought to have done in the first place: Star Trek: The Next Next Generation—smash the two shows together spectacularly in a multi-episode (and ratings-grabbing) extravaganza, blow up (perhaps literally) Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and jam the most popular cast members of both shows into a refurbished Starship Enterprise, along with willing and available Star Trek: TNG characters, such as Worf and Ryker. There’s not the remotest chance that they will actually do this, of course—for one thing, they’d lose the merchandising on the Deep Space Nine- and Voyager-related products and tie-ins—but a revamped Star Trek: The Next Generation would certainly generate more excitement than the new shows have managed to do so far, especially if the next TNG theatrical film is a big success. (As an indication of relative public-acceptance levels, can you imagine anyone wanting to go see a Deep Space Nine or Voyager theatrical film? No, neither can I—and apparently neither can they, either, because no such film has even been hinted at as a remote possibility.)