The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Another good mixed reprint (mostly) and original SF anthology, by the same editorial team, is War and Space: Recent Combat (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, an anthology of recent Military SF, although their definition of Military SF seems a bit broader than it sometimes is. As with Robots: The Recent A.I., there is one good original story here, Sandra McDonald’s “Mehra and Jiun,” as well as strong reprints by Ken MacLeod, David Moles, Charles Coleman Finlay, Yoon Ha Lee, Paul McAuley, Tom Purdom, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Geoffrey A. Landis, Cat Rambo, and others. Another good value for the money.

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, is another mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy. Some of the best stories here are by Howard Waldrop, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Norman Spinrad, Edward Bryant, Lewis Shiner, Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Denton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly.

  A good reprint anthology of parallel or alternate world stories is Other Worlds Than These (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, which featured good work by Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, Kelly Link, Michael Swanwick, Yoon Ha Lee, Pat Cadigan, George R. R. Martin, Vandana Singh, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, and others.

  The Posthuman/Singularity story was never quite cohesive enough to function as a subgenre all its own, but there were lots of them throughout the ’90s and the oughts, including some of the best work of those periods, and the form is still very much an important part of the current SF scene today. Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (Tachyon), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, a reprint anthology, does a good job of providing a historical overview of the Posthuman/Singularity form, taking us from an excerpt from Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John in 1935, through perhaps the first modern posthuman story, Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million,” in 1966, through the cyberpunk days of the ’80s, represented here by Bruce Sterling, and on through the rich harvest of such stories from the ’90s and oughts to the present. The best stories here, other than those already mentioned, are probably the ones by Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenblum, Robert Reed, Justina Robson, and Hannu Rajaniemi. The anthology also contains a reprint of Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” an immensely influential bit of speculation that set many of the concerns and shaped much of the content of this kind of story, and which popularized the term “Singularity” itself; there are also speculative essays by Ray Kurzweil and J. D. Bernal, and other stories by Isaac Asimov, Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Bear, David D. Levine, and Vinge himself.

  Retro SF is represented by Tales from Super-Science Fiction (Haffner), edited by Robert Silverberg, which features pulp stories from Jack Vance, Daniel F. Galouye, James Gunn, and Silverberg himself.

  Substantial reprint fantasy anthologies included The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (Tachyon), edited by David Hartwell and Jacob Wiseman, and Epic (Tachyon), edited by John Joseph Adams. For those not familiar with Sword & Sorcery, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is a good place to start, providing a historical overview of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre, from its beginnings in the Weird Tales of the 1930s up to the present day, with original stories by Michael Swanwick and Michael Shea. Unsurprisingly, the best stories here are classics by Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock, and Joanna Russ, but there’s also good stuff by Glen Cook, Rachel Pollack, George R. R. Martin, and others. Epic: Legends of Fantasy, is another meaty, solid anthology, this one all reprint, that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fantasy styles; the best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is probably George R. R. Martin’s “The Mystery Knight,” an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but there are also strong stories by Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tad Williams, Orson Scott Card, Paolo Bacigalupi, Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N. K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, and others.

  Other reprint (mostly) fantasy anthologies included two books of Christmas stories, Season of Wonder (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and A Cosmic Christmas (Baen), edited by Hank Davis; Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (Prime Books), edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

  There were a lot of reprint horror anthologies, some of which included a few original stories, and occasionally an admixture of fantasy in varying strengths: The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books), edited by Ross E. Lockhart; Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Running Press), edited by Marie O’Regan; Extreme Zombies (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Bloody Fabulous (Prime Books), edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

  Anthologies of gay SF and fantasy and/or erotica included Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Connie Wilkins and Steve Berman; Fantastic Erotica: The Best of Circlet Press 2008–2012 (Circlet), edited by Cecilia Tan and Bethay Zaiatz; Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Brit Mandelo; and Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Steve Berman.

  It was a somewhat weak year in the genre-oriented nonfiction category, mostly notable for books of essays by genre authors, including An Exile on Planet Earth: Articles and Reflections (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford), by Brian W. Aldiss; Distrust That Particular Flavor (Berkley), by William Gibson; London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (PM Press), by Michael Moorcock, edited by Michael Moorcock and Allan Kausch; Some Remarks (William Morrow), by Neal Stephenson; Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (Greenwillow Books), by Diana Wynne Jones; and two books of essays and film reviews by Gary Westfahl, The Spacesuit Film: A History (McFarland) and A Sense-of-Wonderful Century (Borgo Press).

  There were several critical studies of various genres, including Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels (NonStop Press), by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo; Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Keith Brooke; Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction [Volume II] (Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries) (PS Publishing), by S. T. Joshi; The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge University Press), edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn; As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press), by Michael Saler; and Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts (Bloomsbury), by Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J. C. Davis. There were several studies of the work of individual authors, including: a study of the work of Gene Wolfe, Gate of Horn, Book of Silk: A Guide to Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun (Sirus Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi; Judith Merril: A Critical Study (McFarland), by Diane Newell and Victoria Lamont; Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion . . . So Far, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs; Scanned Clean: An Analysis of the Work of Michael Marshall Smith (PS Publishing), by David Sweeney; and The Manual of Aeronautics: An Illustrated Guide to the Leviathan Series (Simon Pulse), by Scott Westerfield.

  All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (lulu.com), by John Conway, is not technically genre oriented, but since I’ve never meet an SF fan who wasn’t interested in dinosaurs, I’m including it anyway. If you haven’t read anything about dinosaurs for the last decade or so, this book will be an eye-opener—these definitely aren’t your father’s dinosaurs, or even the dinosaurs you used to know as a kid when you marched a plastic T. rex across the living-room rug while
making growling sounds; for one thing, most of them have feathers! Another book that will interest most genre readers (and which makes for a nice segue into our next section) is Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart (Titan Books), edited by Steve White.

  Speaking of art (see what I did there?), 2012 was a pretty weak year in the art-book market. As usual, your best bet was probably the latest in a long-running Best of the Year series for fantastic art, Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also good were: Expose 10: The Finest Digital Art in the Universe (Ballistic Publishing), edited by Ronnie Gramazio; The Art of the Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), art by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull; Art of the Dragon PB: The Definitive Collection of Contemporary Dragon Paintings (Vanguard Productions), edited by Patrick Wilshire and J. David Spurlock; Trolls (Abrams), by Brian Froud and Wendy Froud; M. W. Kaluta: Sketchbook Series 1: Sketchbook (IDW Publishing), by Michael William Kaluta; and, a bit on the edge of genre, but still vaguely justifiable because of its fantastic imagery, In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Prestel USA), edited by Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, with Terri Geis.

  According to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”), as were sixteen out of the top twenty, and forty-five out of the top one hundred.

  Like last year; four out of five of the year’s top five box-office champs were genre movies—and if you’re willing to accept the James Bond movie Skyfall as a genre film, as some would be, then all five were (I’m not willing to go that far myself, thinking that it stretches the already somewhat stretched definition of a “genre film” past the useful point, although it certainly could be argued that some of the impossible physical action would qualify as fantasy). Two of the top five were superhero movies, Marvel’s The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, and one was a dystopian science-fiction movie based on a bestselling YA series, The Hunger Games. Skyfall finished in fourth place, and a supernatural vampire romance, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II, came in fifth. The following five of the top ten were made up of the cinematic version of a classic fantasy novel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a relaunch of a superhero franchise, The Amazing Spider-Man, an animated fantasy movie, Brave, a slob comedy about a living, talking teddy bear, Ted, and a new addition to a successful animated franchise (also about talking animals), Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. Further down the list were animated film Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax at eleventh place, SF comedy Men in Black 3 at twelfth place, animated films Wreck-It Ralph and Ice Age: Continental Drift at thirteenth and fourteenth places, fantasy film Snow White and the Huntsman in fifteenth place, animated horror comedy Hotel Transylvania in sixteenth place, and, finishing disappointingly in twentieth place, Prometheus, the prequel to Alien. The only nongenre movies in the top twenty were Skyfall, in fourth place, and Lincoln, Taken 2, and 21 Jump Street, at seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth places, respectively.

  None of this should be surprising, and is the reason why a shitload (this is a precise critical term) of genre films are coming up in 2013. Genre films of one sort or another have dominated the box-office top ten for more than a decade now. 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.

  The year’s number-one box-office champ was Marvel’s The Avengers, which so far has earned an amazing $1,511,757,910 worldwide. Directed by cult-favorite Joss Whedon, creator of the TV classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was also a pretty entertaining movie, as even those who are lukewarm about superhero movies, like me, had to admit. Next was the finale of the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, which raked in $1,081,041,287 worldwide, and which I was less enthusiastic about, not that anyone cares. There’s a long fall thereafter to the movie in third place, The Hunger Games, which earned a “mere” $686,533,290 worldwide.

  The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a prequel of sorts to the Lord of the Rings movies, was released in mid-December to scathing reviews and a moderately sluggish domestic box-office start, reaching only sixth place in the 2012 ranking; by the second week in January 2013, though, it had recovered—in my opinion, because positive word-of-mouth reviews had had a chance to kick in, balancing the critical drubbing—and has already earned $824,820,000 worldwide overall, with probably a lot more to come in the rest of the year. I liked it quite a bit myself, although it’s hard to argue against the opinion that it’s too long, and would be a better movie with at least a halfhour trimmed out of it (this seems to be a weakness of Peter Jackson movies; Jackson’s King Kong had a good movie buried in it, but would have greatly benefited from having an hour cut from it). Martin Freeman was marvelous as Bilbo, as were (as usual) Andy Serkis as Gollum and Ian McKellen as Gandalf. In a controversial move, director Peter Jackson decided to stretch The Hobbit into three movies rather than one, or even two, and the second movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, will be out late in 2013.

  I also enjoyed another of the year’s most critically savaged movies, John Carter, a film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous adventure novel, A Princess of Mars, which sends a heroic swashbuckler from Virginia to Mars to cross swords with the ferocious alien warriors who live there. Effectively sabotaged by its own studio (which dubbed it “the biggest bomb of all time” while it was still in theaters), critically drubbed, and given little real promotional or advertising support, it failed at the box office, unsurprisingly, although even so it came close to earning back its enormous production budget, earning $282,778,100 worldwide, and might have been a blockbuster with some studio support. In contrast to most reviews, word-of-mouth about it among many fans has been good to excellent, and although it’s hardly without flaws, it’s a solidly entertaining movie that deserved better.

  The much-hyped Dark Shadows remake ended up in only thirty-sixth place on the box-office list, and the similarly hyped Frankenweenie made it only to ninetieth place. Josh Whedon’s other 2012 movie, the clever postmodern horror film The Cabin in the Woods, made it only to seventy-eighth place, but got a lot of critical respect and some great reviews.

  As usual, there were few movies that could be considered science-fiction movies, as opposed to fantasy movies and superhero movies. Two of them have already been mentioned: The Hunger Games, the most successful SF movie of the year at the box office, and John Carter. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited SF movie of 2012 was Prometheus, a prequel of sorts to Alien; unfortunately, it underperformed at the box office, and was widely savaged in both professional and word-of-mouth reviews, proving a disappointment to many, although it did have a few avid supporters. The only other SF movies were a continuation of the Men in Black SF comedy franchise, Men in Black 3, which finished in twelfth place on the box-office list, a convoluted time-travel thriller, Looper, which placed fortieth, an alieninvasion movie loosely based on—or at least inspired by—a children’s board game, Battleship, in forty-second place, and a perhaps ill-advised remake of Total Recall, which managed to make it only to fifty-first place. The reincarnation saga Cloud Atlas, which had a section set in the future, and so could be considered an SF movie of sorts, got some good reviews, but finished dead last in the list of a hundred bestselling movies. Argo, one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year, has a tenuous connection to SF: the book the real-life conspirators claimed to be making as a cover story was Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. However, it would be too much of a stretch to claim it as an SF movie, or even as a genre film.

  As some of these immense sums should indicate, it wasn’t a bad year at the box office for the movie industry. Overall profits were up 6.5 percent, to 10.83 billion from 2011’s 10.17 billion, and ticket sales were up to 1.36 billion,
from 201l’s 1.28 billion—still a fair distance from 2002’s record 1.58 billion. In spite of the recession and the price of tickets, which keeps inching up, and the availability of movies on TV and via the Internet, many people are still willing to buy tickets—although I suspect that they’re more willing to shell out for widescreen big-budget spectaculars with lots of splashy special effects than they are for quieter movies, for which they might be willing to wait until they come out on DVD.

  Most of the buzz about upcoming films seems to center around the new Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness, and the second Hobbit movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but I suspect that the giant robots-fight-Godzilla-like-monsters film, Pacific Rim, is also going to make a bazillion bucks, and there’s also a fair amount of anticipation about the movie version of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game and the new Hunger Games movie, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. There’ll also be a big-budget reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, called Oz the Great and Powerful.

  There are so many fantasy/SF shows on television now that, like cowboy shows in the ’50s, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. As was true of 2011, the big success story of 2012 was probably HBO’s A Game of Thrones, based on the bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, which managed to become even more popular than it had been the year before, and is now a full-fledged Cultural Phenomenon—Game of Thrones references are now understood by just about everybody, even those who don’t usually self-identify as fantasy fans, and pop up everywhere, from The Big Bang Theory to Saturday Night Live, which ran a satire of the show, complete with a satirical take on Martin himself. Needless to say, it’s coming back in 2013. HBO’s other genre show, the campy vampire show True Blood, is also coming back in 2013, for what may or may not be its last season, depending, I would imagine, on whether or not it pulls itself out of the ratings slump that has eaten (sucked?) away its audience during the previous two seasons. The show could still be turned around, but the quality of the writing needs to improve from an awful fifth season and an only so-so sixth season to the level of the first couple of seasons.