The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection
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Other good SF reprint anthologies included The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (Running Press), edited by Alex Dally Macfarlane; Time Travel: Recent Trips (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures (Running Press), edited by Sean Wallace; and The Best of Electric Velocipede (Fairwood Press), edited by John Klima.
There weren’t a lot of reprint fantasy anthologies this year, but there was Magic City: Recent Spells (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and The Mammoth Book of Warriors and Wizardry (Running Press), edited by Sean Wallace.
Prominent among the reprint horror anthologies were The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (Tachyon Publications), edited by Ellen Datlow; Lovecraft’s Monsters (Tachyon Publications), a mixed reprint/original anthology edited by Ellen Datlow; The Baen Big Book of Monsters (Baen Books), edited by Hank Davis; and Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson (Oxford University Press), an anthology of classic horror stories written between 1816 and 1912, edited by Darryl Jones.
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It was a moderately strong year in the genre-oriented nonfiction category.
In spite of many flaws (including at times being too exhaustive), the book of the year in this category was probably Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948–1988: The Man Who Learned Better (Tor), by the late William H. Patterson, Jr., the second half of a massive Heinlein biography, the first half of which, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907–1948: Learning Curve (Tor) appeared in 2010, and which is likely to remain the standard Heinlein biography for the foreseeable future (to some extent because most of the sources that Patterson interviewed for his research are now dead). For some of you, particularly younger readers for whom Heinlein was not a seminal figure, this huge biography may contain more information about Heinlein than you really wanted to know, but for those of you who grew up reading Heinlein (and many of us cut our SF-reading teeth on his YA novels in the fifties and sixties), it’s a must-read, and held my interest even through the occasional dull patches. Another look at Heinlein through the focus of his fiction is provided in The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction (McFarland), by Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders.
Another intriguing look at the life of an SF author was a posthumously published autobiography, Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! (Tor), by—who else?—Harry Harrison. Other books about genre authors, or critical studies of their work, included Greg Egan (University of Illinois Press), by Karen Burnham; The Art of Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins), by Hayley Campbell; Ray Bradbury Unbound (University of Illinois Press), by Jonathan R. Eller; and Gregory Benford (University of Illinois Press), by George Slusser.
A critical study of an individual author (in fact, of one story by that author) is provided in a reprint of The American Shore: Mediations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—“Angouleme” (Wesleyan University Press), by Samuel R. Delany. Other critical overviews of the genre are to be found in What Makes This Book So Great (Tor), by Jo Walton; nonfiction anthology The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press), edited by Rob Latham; two books of collected reviews, Stay (Beccon Publications), by John Clute and Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews (Steel Quill), by Adam Roberts; Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (Lethe Press), by Hal Duncan; Call and Response (Beccon Publications), by Paul Kincaid; Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (Oxford University Press), by Brian Attebery; The Past That Might Have Been, the Future That May Come: Women Writing Fantastic Fiction, 1960s to the Present (McFarland), by Lauren J. Lacey; Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction (Aqueduct Press), by Sheila Finch; and Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Arthur B. Evans.
Writing nonfiction about fictional worlds is a peculiar notion, but there were a number of such “nonfiction guidebooks” this year, including The World of Ice and Fire (Bantam), by George R. R. Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson, which explores, with maps and the history of prominent families, the world of Martin’s Westeros, and several such books about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, including The Compleat Ankh-Morpork: City Guide (Random House/Doubleday), by Terry Pratchett, The Folklore of Discworld (Anchor Books/Random House), by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook (Transworld/Doubleday UK), a travel guide to the railroad network of Discworld, ostensibly written by fictional character “Mrs. Bradshaw,” and The Science of Discworld (Anchor Books/Random House), by Terry Pratchett with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. There was also a collection of nonfiction pieces by Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction (Doubleday), by Terry Pratchett.
Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, will be of interest to anyone concerned about the environment and how it has been portrayed in SF. Writers and those with ambitions to become writers might be interested in Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (McSweeney’s), by Cory Doctorow. Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy’s Greatest Science Fiction (Firefly Books), by Guy Haley, has lots of striking photographs, although “science fiction” is here construed to mean media SF, movies and TV shows, only.
Tolkien enthusiasts might want to get Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by J. R. R. Tolkien, collecting academic lectures Tolkien gave at Oxford about one of the first known fantasies in written literature; a bit, er, academic, but which sheds interesting light on Tolkien’s own later work.
There weren’t a lot of art books published in 2014, but there was some good stuff among them. In spite of a change of editors and publisher, your best bet as usual was probably the latest in a long-running “best of the year” series for fantastic art, Spectrum 21: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Flesk Publications), now edited by John Fleskes, taking over for former editors Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also good were: The Collectors’ Book of Virgil Finlay (American Fantasy Press), edited by Robert Weinberg, Douglas Ellis, and Robert T. Garcia, The Art of Jim Burns: Hyperluminal (Titan Books), by Jim Burns; The Art of Ian Miller (Titan Books), by Ian Miller and Tom Whyte; Dark Shepherd: The Art of Fred Gambino (Titan Books), by Fred Gambino; The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon (Titan Books), by John Harris; The Art of Greg Spalenka (Titan Books), by Greg Spalenka; and The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era (Zenith Press), by Ron Miller.
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In both 2012 and 2013, according to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films. This year, 2014, before the release of American Sniper, all of the top ten box office champs were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”), with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes taking eleventh place and The Amazing Spider Man 2 taking twelfth place. You have to go all the way down to fourteenth place to find a nongenre film, 22 Jump Street—but then it’s followed by genre films in fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth place, with nongenre films not kicking in again until Gone Girl in eighteenth place. In all, sixteen out of the top twenty earners are genre films, with at least ten more scattered through the next eighty. Nor is this anything new; genre films have dominated the box office top ten for more than a decade—you have to go all the way back to 1998 to find a year when the year’s top earner was a nongenre film, Saving Private Ryan.
It’s hard to shake the suspicion that if it wasn’t for genre films, Hollywood would have gone broke long ago.
Unusually, two out of the top three earners were SF films (the top slots are usually taken by fantasy or superhero films)—Guardians of the Galaxy, a good-natured update of the classic space opera movie, was number two at the box office this year, earning a staggering $332,965,525 overall so far (and the DVD hasn’t even been released yet), with The Hunger Games: Mo
ckingjay—Part 1 (certainly dystopian YA SF, practically a genre of its own these days) coming in first. To fill out the rest of the top ten, superhero films finished in third and ninth place (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past respectively), animated movies in fourth and tenth place (The LEGO Movie and Big Hero 6 respectively—although it would be possible to argue that Big Hero 6 was also a superhero movie), SF (even if junk SF) scoring again in seventh place (Transformers: Age of Extinction), and live-action fantasy films taking sixth and eighth place (The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies and Maleficent respectively).
None of the top ten were taken terribly seriously as “serious films” by critics or by the more intellectually inclined of the viewing audience, although The LEGO Movie got surprisingly good reviews for what amounted to a two-hour commercial for a toy company that you had to pay to watch. Transformers: Age of Extinction was probably the most badly reviewed of the top ten, although the most critically reviled big budget A-release movie of the year may have been an attempt to reinvent the biblical spectacular, Exodus: Gods and Kings, which also—with its 140 million dollar budget weighing it down—failed at the box office. Several new installments of franchise series also underperformed, among them Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Penguins of Madagascar, and Rio 2, and some attempt to start new franchises or revive old ones didn’t work either, including RoboCop, Dracula Untold, and Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
As did last year’s Man of Steel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, some of this year’s movies sharply divided their target demographic, with hordes of loyal fans spilling oceans of pixels arguing about whether movies such as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were or were not worthy of inclusion in their respective canons. This was perhaps most noticeable with the final Hobbit movie, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, which in spite of lots of scathing reviews and bad word of mouth among Tolkien fans, still easily managed to reach sixth place in the list of top box office earners, in spite of only being released in the middle of December—and no doubt it’s going to earn a lot more money in 2015, which is probably all that the producers really care about. SF film Interstellar, which is one of the few genre movies on this list with pretentions to being a “serious” dramatic movie dealing with serious issues, divided fans in a similarly extreme way, with reviews and word of mouth differing so sharply that you almost had to wonder if they were all seeing the same movie.
There are, unsurprisingly, lots more genre movies in the pipeline for release in 2015. The ones that seem to be generating the most buzz at this point seem to be the new Avengers movie, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the J. J. Abrams–directed Star Wars movie from Disney, which many of the hard-core Star Wars fans are already outraged by even though it hasn’t come out yet. Preemptive outrage, I guess.
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There are now so many SF and fantasy shows on television, with the surviving shows from 2014 and the years before being joined by a torrent of new shows in 2015, that it’s become hard to keep track of them all.
Perennial favorites in recent years, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Doctor Who, continue to dominate the ratings, and shows like Supernatural, Teen Wolf, and The Vampire Diaries continue to hold on in spite of perhaps getting a bit long in the, er, tooth, while the once-wildly popular True Blood brought a disappointing season to a disappointing end and vanished from the airways. Long-running show Warehouse 13 also died. Of the genre shows that debuted in the last couple of years, Sleepy Hollow, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Once Upon a Time, Arrow, Falling Skies, Person of Interest (much more centrally a genre show than a thriller now that they’ve started to run a plotline about an emergent AI), The Originals, Resurrection, Under the Dome, Grimm (although it’s shaky in the ratings), Haven (ditto), Beauty and the Beast, and The 100 have survived, while, as far as I can tell (and it’s sometimes hard to be sure; Internet sites sometimes run contradictory reports), Almost Human, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Ravenswood, Believe, Star-Crossed, Witches of East End, Dracula, Continuum, The Neighbors, Revolution, Zero Hour, and The Tomorrow People have not. Of these shows, Sleepy Hollow, Arrow, and Person of Interest seem to be the strongest in the ratings. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is struggling in the ratings again, although the show is probably useful enough to Marvel/Disney as a promotional tool for whatever Marvel movie is coming along that it may survive anyway.
Of the new shows debuting in 2014, the most successful seems to be Gotham (a stylish noir take on what crime-drenched Gotham City was like when Batman was still a child, a concept that I wouldn’t have thought would work, but which is saved by good acting and moody Gothic, highly atmospheric set design and photography), The Flash (detailing the adventures of—oh, go ahead and guess!), and Outlander, based on the best-selling paranormal romance series by Diana Gabaldon. Constantine, based on a gritty magic-using comic book antihero, and The Librarians, based on the movie franchise about a secret society of librarians who fight evil with magic, seem to have also generated a fair amount of buzz, although it’s unclear how they’re doing in the ratings.
Coming up in 2015 are Agent Carter (a spin-off from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the animated Star Wars Rebels, 12 Monkeys, Ascension, Daredevil, Dark Matter, Galavant (a Monty Pythonesque musical comedy satirical take on knights and chivalry), iZombie, The Last Man on Earth, Scream, Sense8, Supergirl, Stitchers, The Expanse (based on the popular space opera series by James S. A. Corey), The Messengers, and The Whispers. Some of these will make it, many will not. Hard to guess which will be which at this point.
On the horizon are promised TV versions of Westworld, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Shannara based on Terry Brooks’s The Elfstones of Shannara, Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, and Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood cycle although many of these promised shows never actually show up. It’ll be interesting to see how many of these actually make it to the air.
Other returning shows are The Leftovers, Salem, Lost Girl, Bitten, Helix, Penny Dreadful, and Legends.
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The 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon 3, was held in London, England, from August 14 to August 18, 2014. The 2014 Hugo Awards, presented at LonCon 3, were: Best Novel, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie; Best Novella, “Equoid,” by Charles Stross; Best Novelette, “The Lady Astronaut of Mars,” by Mary Robinette Kowal; Best Short Story, “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere,” by John Chu; Best Graphic Story, “Time,” by Randall Munroe; Best Related Work, “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative,” by Kameron Hurley; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, Ginjer Buchanan; Best Professional Editor, Short Form, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Julie Dillon; Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), Game of Thrones: “The Rains of Castamere”; Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), Gravity; Best Semiprozine, Lightspeed Magazine; Best Fanzine, A Dribble of Ink; Best Fancast, SF Signal Podcast; Best Fan Writer, Kameron Hurley; Best Fan Artist, Sarah Webb; plus the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer to Sofia Samatar.
The 2013 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the San Jose Marriot in San Jose, California, on May 17, 2014, were: Best Novel, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie; Best Novella, “The Weight of the Sunrise,” by Vylar Kaftan; Best Novelette, “The Waiting Stars,” by Aliette de Bodard; Best Short Story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” by Rachel Swirsky; Ray Bradbury Award, Gravity; the Andre Norton Award to Sister Mine, by Nalo Hopkinson; the Special Honoree Award to Frank M. Robinson; the Kevin O’ Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award to Michael Armstrong; and the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to Samuel R. Delany.
The 2014 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet on November 9, 2014, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, during the Fortieth Annual World Fantasy Convention,
were: Best Novel, A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar; Best Novella, “Wakulla Springs,” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages; Best Short Fiction, “The Prayer of Ninety Cats,” by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Anthology, Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; Best Artist, Charles Vess; Special Award (Professional), to Irene Gallo, for art direction of Tor.com, and William K. Schafer, for Subterranean Press (tie); Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, and Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ellen Datlow and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
The 2013 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America on May 10, 2014, during the World Horror Convention at the Portland Doubletree Hotel in Portland, Oregon, were: Best Novel, Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, The Evolutionist, by Rena Mason; Best Young Adult Novel, Dog Days, by Joe McKinney; Best Long Fiction, “The Great Pity,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best Short Fiction, “Night Train to Paris,” by David Gerrold; Best Collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron; Best Anthology, After Death, edited by Eric J. Guignard; Best Nonfiction, Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction, by William F. Nolan; Best Poetry Collection, Four Elements, by Marge Simon, Rain Graves, Charlee Jacob, and Linda Addison; Graphic Novel, Alabaster: Wolves, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Screenplay, The Walking Dead: “Welcome to the Tombs,” by Glen Mazzara; Specialty Press Award to Gray Friar Press; Richard Laymon (President’s Award) to J. G. Faherty; plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to Stephen Jones and R. L. Stine.