As has become usual, small presses again dominated the list of short-story collections, with Haffner Press and Subterranean Press being particularly active in the issuing of retrospective collections.
A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory, and the Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.
As usual, among the most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are the various Best of the Year anthologies, although this is an area in constant flux, with old series disappearing and new series being born. This year seemed to be relatively stable. At the moment, science fiction is being covered by three anthologies (actually, technically, by two anthologies and by two separate half anthologies): the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s Press, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-ninth annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Harper Voyager), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its sixteenth annual volume; the science fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan; and the science fiction half of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2011 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton (in practice, of course, these books probably won’t divide neatly in half with their coverage, and there’s likely to be more of one thing than another). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto Best of the Year anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2011 (Tor), edited by Kevin J. Anderson. (A similar series covering the Hugo winners began in 2010, but swiftly died.) There were three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Three (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 22 (Running Press), edited by Stephen Jones; and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2011 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. This year there was also The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Joe R. Lansdale, although it’s unclear whether this is going to be a continuing series. Fantasy is covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan and Horton anthologies (plus whatever stories fall under the Dark Fantasy part of Guran’s anthology), but with the death of Kevin Brockmeier’s Best American Fantasy series last year, the only remaining Best of the Year anthology dedicated solely to fantasy is David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy series – Year’s Best Fantasy 10 was announced as forthcoming by Kathryn Cramer in her blog, but I haven’t actually seen a copy, and it isn’t listed on Amazon, so whether this will actually appear is anyone’s guess. There was also The 2011 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association), edited by David Lunde, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year.
There were a large number of good stand-alone reprint anthologies this year. Although it’s a bit of an oddity, a discussion of reprint anthologies published in 2011 wouldn’t be complete without mention of Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (Wildside Press), edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, which earns the odd distinction of being perhaps the largest SF anthology ever published: almost a thousand pages, roughly the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory, weighing five pounds, containing 148 stories and 62 specialized essays about various authors and categories of science fiction. At almost fifty bucks, this will probably be too expensive for most casual readers (there is an ebook version available for forty bucks), but it’s a great choice for libraries and serious collectors, practically being a one-volume library, containing memorable stories by Damon Knight, Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, Robert A. Heinlein, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Pangborn, Terry Bisson, Pat Murphy, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Maureen McHugh, Greg Bear, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many others.
Another enormous reprint anthology that spans decades of genre work, examining fantasy-horror rather than science fiction, is The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Corvus), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which devotes 1,152 pages to 110 stories from many historic periods by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Kelly Link, George R. R. Martin, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson, China Miéville, Angela Carter, Michael Chabon, and many, many others.
Also good – although considerably smaller – is Alien Contact (Night Shade Books), edited by Marty Halpern, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction (and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot-’ em-up alien invasion movies we got over the last year or so), featuring work by Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Bruce McAllister, Molly Gloss, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others. Brave New Worlds (Night Shade Books) is a reprint anthology of dystopian stories edited by John Joseph Adams, most of them pretty depressing but also pretty powerful, including stories by Shirley Jackson, Geoff Ryman, Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alex Irvine, Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and others. Lightspeed: Year One (Prime Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, is a collection of the first year’s worth of stories from electronic online magazine Lightspeed, featuring good work by Carrie Vaughn, Yoon Ha Lee, Ted Kosmatka, Vylar Kaftan, and others, and reprints by Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and others. Future Media (Tachyon Publications), edited by Rick Wilber, is an anthology of views of the media age, featuring reprint stories by Pat Cadigan, Gregory Benford, James Tiptree, Jr., and others, plus essays by Marshall McLuhan, Vannevar Bush, and others. Battlestations (Prime Books), edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett, is an omnibus of two previously published anthologies of military SF.
Less dark and more lighthearted is Happily Ever After (Night Shade Books), an anthology of retold fairy tales edited by John Klima, and featuring strong work by Howard Waldrop, Gregory Frost, Bruce Sterling, Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, Theodora Goss, Garth Nix, and others. People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime Books), edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, features SF and fantasy stories (mostly fantasy), by Peter S. Beagle, Theodora Goss, Jane Yolen, Alex Irvine, Neil Gaiman, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Michael Chabon.
There were a lot of reprint horror anthologies this year, including several urban fantasy/paranormal anthologies. The best of these was probably The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Tachyon Publications), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale, which featured good stories by Neil Gaiman, Peter S. Beagle, Tim Powers, Thomas M. Disch, Bruce McAllister, Joe R. Lansdale, Susan Palwick, Charles de Lint, Suzy McKee Charnas, Carrie Vaughn, Patty Briggs, Emma Bull, and others. The somewhat grittier Crucified Dreams (Tachyon Publications), edited by Joe R. Lansdale, features strong reprints by Harlan Ellison, Lucius Shepard, Joe Haldeman, Octavia Butler, Stephen King, and others. And 2011 brought us two reprint anthologies that give us an interesting overview of the recent work of younger writers who have been influenced by H. P. Lovecraft enough to want to play in his Cthulhu mythos universe, The Book of Cthulhu (Night Shade Books), edited by Ross E. Lockhart, and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. The best stories in The Book of Cthulhu include works by Michael Shea, Gene Wolfe, T.E.D. Klein, Bruce Sterling, and Laird Barron. The best stories in New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird include works by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, and Paul McAuley. Stories by Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, and Cherie Priest appear in both volumes. There were two reprint anthologies of zombie stories, Zombies!, Zombies!, Zombies! (Vintage Black Lizar
d), edited by Otto Penzler, and Z: Zombie Stories (Night Shade Books), edited by J. M. Lassen, and a book of vampire stories, Vampires: The Recent Undead (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran.
There were also two massive reprint anthologies, The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Volume One: 1901–1950 and The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Volume Two: 1951–2000 (Cemetery Dance Publications), both edited by John Pelan.
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It was a solid but unexciting year in the genre-oriented non-fiction category. There were a number of books of essays by or about genre authors, including Bugf#ck: The Useless Wit and Wisdom of Harlan Ellison (Spectrum Fantastic Art), by Harlan Ellison, edited by Arnie Fenner; The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem; Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels (Seven Stories Press), by Gregory D. Sumner; And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt and Co.), by Charles J. Shields; Context (Tachyon Publications), by Cory Doctorow; The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (Ace), by Charlaine Harris (which also contains a previously unpublished Sookie Stackhouse novella); The Hollows Insider (Harper Voyager) by Kim Harrison; In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Doubleday), by Margaret Atwood; Becoming Ray Bradbury (University of Illinois Press), by Jonathan R. Eller; and Musings and Meditations: Reflections on Science Fiction, Science, and Other Matters (Nonstop Press), by Robert Silverberg.
There was an autobiography, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (Tor), by Rudy Rucker; an assembly of lectures by genre figures, Thirty-Five Years of the Jack Williamson Lectureship (Haffner Press), compiled by Patrice Caldwell and Stephen Haffner; two books of reviews, Sightings: Reviews 2002–2006 (Beccon Publications), by Gary K. Wolfe, and Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Beccon Publications), by John Clute; and, as usual, several books about science fiction itself, including Evaporating Genres: Essays of Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan University Press), by Gary Wolfe; Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future (McFarland & Company, Inc.), edited by Gary Westfahl, Wong Kin Yuen, and Amy Kit-sze Chan; and Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), by David Seed. A study of the steampunk subgenre was The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (Abrams Image), by Jeff VanderMeer with S. J. Chambers (which probably earns the award for most colorful title of the year).
An offbeat item is a collection of essays about pioneering genre movies by the late Kage Baker, Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen (Tachyon Publications), by Kage Baker, edited by Kathleen Bartholomew. An even more offbeat item – in fact, perhaps the oddest book you’ll read this year – was posthumously assembled from the extensive notebooks left behind by the late Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), edited by Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, and Erik Davis. I made my way through ten or twenty pages of this, and put the book down feeling that it left the question of whether Dick was a genius or completely insane up in the air – but, whichever it was, I was much too stupid to successfully absorb his Exegesis. I suspect all but the most dedicated Phil Dick fans (or those who are geniuses themselves) will probably bounce off it as well.
Not technically genre-oriented, but a book that will interest many genre readers, and one that is sorely needed in these credulous times when more Americans believe in angels than in evolution, and many don’t even believe that the moon shines by reflected light from the sun, is Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality (Prometheus Books), by SF writer John Grant.
2011 was another weak year in the art-book market, even weaker than the year before. As usual, your best bet was probably the latest in a long-running Best of the Year series for fantastic art, Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also quite good were Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (Rockport Publishers, Inc.), assembled by Karen Haber; Exposé 9: Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe (Ballistic Publishing), by Daniel P. Wade; A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The Lord of the Rings (HarperCollins); and Fantasy + 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations (CYPI/Gingko Press), edited by Vincent Zhao.
There were a few excellent books collecting the works of single artists, the best of which was probably Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (Titan), by Chris Foss, although Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art (IDW Publishing), by Jeffrey Jones, was also very good, and Mark Schultz: Various Drawings, Volume 5 (Flesk), by Mark Schultz, was worthwhile as well. Girl Genius Book Ten: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse is the latest in the Hugo-winning series by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio, and Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books) is a collection of picture books by the creator of last year’s Oscar-nominated short film, The Lost Thing, which is included.
An odd item, straddling the line between non-fiction and art, is Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It (British Library), by Mike Ashley, a catalogue of this year’s British Library SF exhibition, a mixture of text and art that covers six centuries of speculative art from 1482 to the present.
According to the Box Office Mojo website (www.boxofficemojo.com), seven out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another, if you accept animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films.” (Somewhat unusually these days, there were two non-genre movies in the top ten: The Hangover Part II and Fast Five.) Four out of five of the year’s top five box-office champs were genre movies by the above somewhat loose definition, as were twelve out of the top twenty earners, twenty-seven of the top fifty, and roughly forty out of the top one hundred, more or less (I might have missed one here or there, and there are some fuzzy calls in classification). Three of the top five were fantasy movies, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and one was a science fiction movie (albeit a rather silly one), Transformers: Dark of the Moon. (The Hangover Part II was the only non-genre movie to break the top five, coming in fourth.) The following five were made up of an animated movie (Cars 2), a superhero movie (Thor), and a science fiction movie (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), with the non-genre Fast Five and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol cutting in at sixth place and seventh place overall out of ten. Further down the list were superhero movie Captain America: The First Avenger at twelth place, the steampunkish Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (technically not a genre movie, although the physical action was unlikely enough that you could make a not unreasonable case for considering it a fantasy, and Holmes has always been associated with the genre) at ninth, animated film Kung Fu Panda 2 at fifteenth place, animated film Puss in Boots at sixteenth, superhero movie X-Men: First Class at seventeenth, semi-animated (it also featured human actors, interacting with the CGI characters) film The Smurfs at nineteenth, and Spielberg/monster-movie homage Super 8 at twenty-first.
This shouldn’t surprise anybody – 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 non-genre film, Saving Private Ryan.
The year’s number one box office champ was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which so far has earned a staggering $1,328,111,219 worldwide. Transformers: Dark of the Moon also earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, as did Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, with a steep drop-off thereafter to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, which earned “only” $702,316,133.
In spite of these immense sums, it wasn’t a particularly good year at the box office overall for the movie industry. Overall profits were down 3.8 percent to 10.17 billion from 2010, and ticket sales fell 4.7 percent to 1.28 billion, the worst since 1995. I suspect that, in the grip of a worsening recession, it’s getting to be just too expensive
to go to the movies for an average family, especially when most movies will be available on DVD or on the Internet in only a matter of months. The ability of 3-D to make moviegoers pay more per ticket, something that’s been propping up profits, seems to be wearing thin as well, probably because there are so few films that 3-D actually adds anything to; often, in fact, it makes the moviegoing experience worse, muddying the colors and darkening the palette. It should also perhaps make the movie industry uneasy that the highest-grossing non-sequel of the year was Thor; all the rest of the top ten movies were sequels. Which makes you wonder how many times you can go to the same well before it runs dry.
There were a few actual SF movies by my definition (as opposed to junk popcorn bad-science SF extravaganzas like Transformers: Dark of the Moon), and a few of them were even pretty good, but few of them were wild successes at the box office. Of the movies that got some kind of critical respect, the one that did the best was Super 8, which finished at twenty-first. It was half of a good movie, with the early Spielberg homage stuff, following kids who are trying to make an amateur monster movie, brilliant and effective; when the real monster starts showing up, things go downhill, and I couldn’t help but feel that it would have been a better movie without the monster altogether. Similarly, Cowboys and Aliens, which only made it to thirtieth on the list, was also half of a good movie, with the cowboy setup interesting, but suffered increasingly from bad writing and the ridiculous motivations for the actions of the aliens (which really made no sense) as it went along; they might have been better off making it as a straight cowboy movie if they couldn’t do a better job with the “aliens” part. Real Steel, perhaps the film that came closest this year to being a core SF movie, based on a Richard Matheson story about boxing robots, widely described as “Rocky with robots,” only finished thirty-fifth on the list. Contagion was a somber and realistic look at the spread of a worldwide pandemic, without extraneous car chases and gun battles thrown in – which is perhaps why it only made it to forty-fifth on the list. The Adjustment Bureau only made it to fifty-sixth place, perhaps indicating that people are getting tired of Philip K. Dick movies. The two best-reviewed genre movies of the year, Woody Allen’s time-travel love letter to 1920s Paris, Midnight in Paris, and Martin Scorsese’s steampunkish homage to Georges Melies (perhaps the closest anyone has yet come to putting a Howard Waldrop story on film), Hugo, finished fifty-ninth and fifty-second respectively. Paul, a mixture of slob comedy with Area 51/alien stuff in the form of a road picture, came in eighty-first.
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