The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Among the series anthologies, the late Terry Carr’s last Universe volume, Universe 17 (Doubleday), was unfortunately rather weak—some good work here, but nothing outstanding. Universe is the longest-running original SF anthology, and its loss would be a blow to the field. Fortunately, it looks as though this anthology series will survive the tragic death of its founding editor—Universe will be taken over by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber and will appear every other year instead of annually. Far Frontiers, the Baen anthology series, edited by Jim Baen and Jerry Pournelle, also underwent a transformation in 1987—Jerry Pournelle stepped down as co-editor, and the name of the series became New Destinies. Aesthetically, however, little has changed; it still remains a good solid anthology, but one that, to date, has published nothing of really first-rank quality. Another Writers of the Future anthology appeared in 1987. L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume III (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys. As with previous volumes, it may well be true that some of the writers herein will someday be the big-name professionals of the future—you will definitely be seeing a lot more from M. Shayne Bell, R. V. Branham, Martha Soukup, and Dave Wolverton, for instance—but the stories they have produced for this particular anthology are novice work. A new SF original anthology series started this year, with Synergy: New Science Fiction, Volume 1 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by George Zebrowski. This shows every sign of being a promising series, and it will be interesting to see it develop. The first volume, however, contains good work by Frederik Pohl, Ian Watson, Charles Harness, and Rudy Rucker, but does not have any really exceptional material. Another new original SF anthology series, Full Spectrum, edited by Shawna McCarthy and Lou Aronica, is forthcoming next year from Bantam Spectra.

  There were no really good high fantasy anthologies this year, unfortunately. With high fantasy booming as a genre, I do not know why original anthologies of the stuff are so rare. I personally like well-executed high fantasy anthologies, and would like to see more of them. As usual, though, there were a lot of horror anthologies published. Shadows 10 (Doubleday), edited by Charles L. Grant, and Whispers VI (Doubleday), edited by Stuart David Schiff were the best of them—both solid volumes of their respective series. (Shadows and Whispers are usually the best bets in the original horror anthology field and have been so for years.) There was an interesting one-shot original horror anthology this year, The Architecture of Fear (Arbor House), edited by Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz. Less interesting were Masques II (Maclay), edited by J. N. Williamson, and Doom City (Tor), edited by Charles L. Grant. Night Visions 4 (Dark Harvest) was very uneven (as this series almost unavoidably is), but did feature some good work.

  * * *

  It was a pretty good year overall for novels, although there was no single novel that dominated 1987 the way that, say, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway or Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness dominated their respective years. Once again, I must admit that I was unable to read all the new novels released this year, or even the majority of them. Locus estimates that there were 298 new SF novels, 256 new fantasy novels, and 96 new horror novels released—and their estimates are probably low. It is difficult to understand how anyone could keep up with 650 new novels, let alone anyone with anything else to do. Certainly I can’t. Therefore, as usual, I am going to limit myself here to comments on novels I did read. I was most impressed by Lincoln’s Dreams, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); Mindplayers, Pat Cadigan (Bantam); Vacuum Flowers, Michael Swanwick (Arbor House); Life During Wartime, Lucius Shepard (Bantam); The Urth of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe (Tor); When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger (Arbor House); The Forge of God, Greg Bear (Tor); Great Sky River, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); Land of Dreams, James P. Blaylock (Arbor House); and A Mask for the General, Lisa Goldstein (Bantam Spectra).

  Other novels that have gotten a lot of attention this year include: 2061: Odyssey Three, Arthur C. Clarke (Del Rey); The Secret Ascension, Michael Bishop (Tor); Seventh Son, Orson Scott Card (Tor); The Annals of the Heechee, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Voice of the Whirlwind, Walter Jon Williams (Tor); On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers (Ace); Aegypt, John Crowley (Bantam Spectra); Little Heroes, Norman Spinrad (Bantam Spectra); Bones of the Moon, Jonathan Carroll (Arbor House); War for the Oaks, Emma Bull (Ace); To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein (Ace Putnam); Dover Beach, Richard Bowker (Bantam Spectra); Dawn, Octavia E. Butler (Warner); The Smoke Ring, Larry Niven (Del Rey); Memories, Mike McQuay (Bantam Spectra); Way of the Pilgrim, Gordon R. Dickson (Ace); Rumors of Spring, Richard Grant (Bantam Spectra); Sign of Chaos, Roger Zelazny (Arbor House); The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King (Donald M. Grant); Still River, Hal Clement (Del Rey); Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner (Arbor House); Infernal Devices, K. W. Jeter (St. Martin’s Press); Soldiers of Paradise, Paul Park (Arbor House); and Araminta Station, Jack Vance (Underwood-Miller).

  (I should set off mention here of books I bought and edited myself for the Isaac Asimov Presents line for Congdon & Weed, so that you can make the proper allowances for bias: The Man Who Pulled down the Sky, John Barnes; Pennterra, Judith Moffett; Agent of Byzantium, Harry Turtledove; Through Darkest America, Neal Barrett, Jr.; Station Gehenna, Andrew Weiner; and Caliban Landing, Steve Popkes.)

  It is interesting to note that, once again, the Nebula electorate ignored works by some of the biggest names in the field—Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, Dickson, Clement, King—in favor of placing novels by middle-level writers such as Wolfe and newer writers such as Murphy and Bear on this year’s final Nebula Ballot. What does this mean? I don’t know, but in a field like SF, where name-recognition is supposed to be the most important factor, it must mean something. Perhaps it is an early indication that somewhere down the line there is going to be a big shift in just whom the audience recognizes as big-name authors.

  It is also encouraging to note that there was a steady stream of first novels once again this year. Locus listed about thirty of them—no doubt there were actually more. None of them had as much of an impact on the field as a few first novels have had in recent years—there are no first novels on the final Nebula Ballot this time around, for instance, although they dominated it in 1984. Many fine first novels did appear in 1987, though; particularly strong were the Cadigan, the Moffett, the Barnes, the Park, the Bull, and the Kushner.

  As you can see from looking over the lists, Tor, Arbor House, and Bantam had particularly strong years in 1987.

  * * *

  Nineteen eighty-seven was not as strong a year overall for short-story collections as 1986, although several excellent volumes did appear. The best of the year’s collections were The Jaguar Hunter, Lucius Shepard (Arkham House) and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Howard Waldrop (Ursus Press), both landmark collections. If you can afford them (which few people will be able to, alas), the monumental five-volume The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick (Underwood-Miller) and The Essential Ellison, Harlan Ellison (The Nemo Press), also belong on everyone’s bookshelf. Evil Water, Ian Watson (Gollancz); Cardography, Orson Scott Card (Hypatia); Faces, Leigh Kennedy (Atlantic Monthly Press); Portraits of His Children, George R. R. Martin (Dark Harvest); and the posthumous collection The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories, Manly Wade Wellman (Doubleday) were also first rate.

  Also outstanding this year were The Best of Pamela Sargent, Pamela Sargent (Academy Chicago); True Names … and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge (Baen); Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Ursula K. Le Guin (Capra Press); The Hidden Side of the Moon, Joanna Russ (St. Martin’s Press); Our Best: the Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (Baen); Night Sorceries, Tanith Lee (Daw); Polyphemus, Michael Shea (Arkham House); And the Gods Laughed, Frederic Brown (Phantasia Press); Why Not You and I?, Karl Edward Wagner (Dark Harvest); Scared Stiff, Tales of Sex and Death, Ramsey Campbell (Scream/Press); and The Bridge of Lost Desire, Samuel R. Delany (Arbor House).

  It is interesting to see th
e extent to which small presses have come to dominate the field of short-story collections. Arkham House, Dark Harvest, Underwood-Miller, Ursus Press, The Nemo Press, Scream/Press, Hypathia, Academy Chicago—these, and other small presses, were the publishers who brought you short-story collections this year, for the most part. Trade publishers mostly avoided the risks involved in publishing collections, and seemed content to let the small presses pick up the slack. Let us hope that more of the regular trade publishers pick up some of that slack next year, and start publishing more collections.

  * * *

  It was another fairly good year in the reprint anthology market. As is the case almost every year, your best bets in the reprint market were the various “Best of the Year” collections. This year there were three covering science fiction (including this one), one covering fantasy, one covering horror, plus the annual Nebula Award anthology. (Next year there will be one fewer “best” covering science fiction—Terry Carr’s—but an additional one covering both fantasy and horror.) The best nonseries reprint anthology of the year, and one of the best values for your money of any year, is the enormous retrospective horror anthology The Dark Descent (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell. Hartwell definitely has an aesthetic ax or two to grind here: the extensive section introductions and story notes are designed to put forward a sequence of polemical critical points about the nature of horror fiction and the evolution of the genre; they are deliberately argumentative. You may disagree with some of this critical armature—or not want to be bothered with it at all—but it is hard to find fault with the fiction that Hartwell has selected, or complain about value received for your dollar: the book is 1,011 pages long and contains an amazing 56 stories. The Dark Descent will be a landmark anthology for years to come. Any book eclectic enough to contain neglected masterpieces, such as Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” Gene Wolfe’s “Seven American Nights,” Michael Bishop’s “Within the Walls of Tyre,” and Thomas M. Disch’s “The Asian Shore,” all in one volume, deserves to be on everyone’s bookshelf, whether it is classified as horror, fantasy, or science fiction. Almost equally fascinating, not so much for the quality of the stories reprinted—though all of them are good, and a few of them are excellent—as for the fascinating literary analysis, is Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder (Warner), edited by Robert Silverberg. Literary analyses, couched in the form of personal reminiscences, surround each story, as Silverberg tries to discern the qualities and techniques that make each story successful. This is another anthology that belongs on every bookshelf, and most particularly on that of the would-be SF writer—it is practically a one-volume writing course and contains a great deal of valuable perspective and analyzed technique for the aspiring author.

  Also worthwhile this year were The Fifth Omni Book of Science Fiction (Zebra), edited by Ellen Datlow; Interzone, the Second Anthology (St. Martin’s Press), edited by John Clute, David Pringle, and Simon Ounsley; The Great SF Stories: 16 (Daw), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; Neanderthals (NAL), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh; Christmas Ghosts (Arbor House), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell; Vampires (Doubleday), edited by Alan Ryan; and Vamp (DAW) edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. Noted without comment is Demons! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

  * * *

  It was another solid year for the SF-oriented nonfiction/SF reference book field, although there were no exceptional items, as there have been in other years. There were several valuable reference volumes: Anatomy of Wonder, 3rd Edition (R. R. Bowker), edited by Neil Barron; Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror 1986 (Locus Press), compiled by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, Vols I & II (Gale), compiled by H. W. Hall. (Some of these, most notably the Hall, may be of more interest to libraries or to scholars than to the average reader.) There was another addition this year to the ever-growing five-foot shelf of critical books about Philip K. Dick—Mind in Motion, the Fiction of Philip K. Dick (Southern Illinois University Press), edited by Patricia S. Warrick. A critical study of a more-ignored author, Imprisoned in a Tesseract: the Life of James Blish (Kent State), by David Ketterer, is the only study of Blish to date. Robert Heinlein (Twayne), by Leon Stover, is billed as a study of this controversial author, but is more of a whitewash job than an impartial critical study, with Stover leaping passionately to Heinlein’s defense against nearly every criticism that has ever been leveled at the Great Man. Surely Heinlein must have some faults as a writer, whatever his merits, and admitting to a few of them might have made this volume less nakedly partisan and of more real critical use. There was also a study of Frank Herbert, The Maker of Dune: Insights of a Maker of Science Fiction (Berkley), edited by Tim O’Reilly, and one of Frederik Pohl, Frederik Pohl (Starmont), by Thomas Clareson. Two historical studies, Foundations of Science Fiction (Greenwood), by J. J. Pierce and Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (Gollancz), by Michael Moorcock, are interesting, if for nothing else, for their differing aesthetic viewpoints. Also interesting was Intersections, Fantasy and Science Fiction (Southern Illinois University Press), edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabin.

  For lack of a better place to list it, I am also going to mention in this section Cvltvre Made Stupid (Houghton Mifflin), by Tom Weller. It is a follow-up of sorts to Weller’s very funny Science Made Stupid, which won a Hugo for Best Non-Fiction (!) a couple of years ago, much to the author’s bemusement.

  * * *

  Overall, 1987 seemed—to me, at least—like another generally lackluster year for science fiction and fantasy films. Among the few bright spots were Robocop and The Princess Bride, probably the two best SF/fantasy films of the year. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Predator had a few interesting touches, although his The Running Man was fairly familiar stuff. Spaceballs was disappointing, and I remain puzzled by the decision to satirize Star Wars ten years after the fact, long after every possible satiric point had been made time and time again. The Golden Child was even more disappointing, with only Eddie Murphy’s manic presence to partially redeem a muddled and ridiculous plot. Speaking of muddled and ridiculous, Angel Heart was a major disappointment, a pompous and incredibly pretentious movie not even remotely redeemed by loving closeups of Mickey Rourke’s heaving buttocks. The Witches of Eastwick was a silly and somewhat lowbrow version of John Updike’s novel. Worse than disappointing were Superman IV, Innerspace, Masters of the Universe, Hello Again, and Harry and the Hendersons. There were a number of moderately upscale horror movies (The Lost Boys, Prince of Darkness, The Gate, Hellraiser), none of which was wholly successful, and seemingly dozens of lower-budget horror/slasher movies—far too many to list here, most of them bad beyond belief. All in all, not much of a year.

  For the last couple of years, Edward Bryant has been complaining in Mile High Futures that this particular part of the Summation serves only to demonstrate that I know nothing about film, and that I have been overlooking many of the good ones. So this year, in the interests of completion, I have asked Ed to contribute his own list of the year’s ten best SF/fantasy films. Presented without comment, here is Ed Bryant’s list of the year’s top films: (1) Robocop; (2) Near Dark; (3) The Princess Bride; (4) Hellraiser; (5) Man Facing Southeast; (6) Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home; (7) Wild Thing; (8) Innerspace; (9) Nightflyers; (10) Predator/The Running Man.

  Meanwhile—we are back to my opinions again here, not Ed’s—science fiction and fantasy shows had a year of mixed success on television. “Amazing Stories” finally died, as did an eccentric, promising, and intelligent new series “Max Headroom.” On the other hand, “Star Trek: the Next Generation” is one of the most commercially successful new programs on television this year. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is not particularly good; the acting is flat and the plots are simplistic—in fact, this series is already using moronic plot devices (the crew go down to a primitive planet and engage in gladiatorial contests) that t
he original series did not resort to until the third season. So, good ratings aside, this is a disappointing show so far, and I am not sanguine about it improving substantially in the future. Also a hit show, one of the biggest new hits of the season, in fact, is “Beauty and the Beast.” This is a well-crafted and earnest show, with many intelligent touches, much more impressive than “Star Trek: the Next Generation.” “Beauty and the Beast’s” plots are very repetitive, though, so much so that I found myself losing interest in the show midway through the season. If this turns out to be a common reaction, the show could eventually end up in trouble—so far, however, it has been winning its time slot and is certainly more successful than the much more heavily hyped “Amazing Stories” was. It is certainly more deserving of success than “Alf,” which has become one of those hype-manufactured cult favorites that seem so inexplicable ten years down the road (remember the Fonz?)—let alone “Friday the 13th: the Series” and “Bates Motel” (Psycho as a weekly television sitcom? Give me a break!), let alone “Out of this World” and “Small Wonder”; the less said about these last two shows, the better.