The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The most expensive of these is Bradbury’s Summer Morning, Summer Night, which sells for $750.00 (!); one wonders if they’re flying out the door at that price, although there probably are a few collectors willing to pay that much. The bulk of the retrospective collections sells somewhere in the $40 range. The paperbacks from Baen and Tor are much less expensive.

  As usual, small press publishers were important – indispensable, really – to the short story collection market, since, with only a few occasional exceptions, the big trade publishers largely don’t do them anymore. Without them, collections would barely exist. As you can see, Subterranean (with the more contemporary stuff) and Haffner Press (with the retrospective stuff) had especially active years. Among trade publishers, Baen seems the most active, particularly in publishing omnibus volumes that contain both short stories and novels.

  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.

  The reprint anthology market seemed a bit weaker overall this year than last year. As usual, the bumper crop of “Best of the Year” anthologies were probably your best bet for your money in this market. It’s sometimes hard to tell how many of these there are, as they come and go so quickly, but the field seems to have been winnowed a bit from last year’s record total of fourteen. Science fiction was covered by three and a half anthologies, down from six anthologies last year: the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from Robinson, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-sixth (in the US) twenty-second (in the UK) annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its thirteenth annual volume; Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007 (Prime), edited by Richard Horton; and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan (this is where the “half a book” comes in, although I doubt that it’ll divide that neatly in practice). Jonathan Strahan’s Best Short Novels series has died, as has Richard Horton’s announced but never appearing Space Opera Best series. The annual Nebula Awards anthology usually covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functioning as a de facto “Best of the Year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them (and thanks to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” practice, the stories in it are often stories that everybody else saw a year and sometimes even two years before); this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (Roc), edited by Ben Bova. There were two and a half Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, up to its nineteenth volume; Horror: The Best of the Year 2008 Edition (Prime), edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace; and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, this year up to its twenty-First Annual Collection. Fantasy was covered by four anthologies (if you add two halves together): by the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the Datlow/Link & Grant anthology; by Year’s Best Fantasy 8 (Tachyon) edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer; by Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (Prime), edited by Rich Horton; by Best American Fantasy (Prime), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer; and by the fantasy half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan. There was also The 2008 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association/Prime), edited by Drew Morse, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year. If you count the Nebula anthology and the Rhysling anthology, there were eleven “Best of the Year” anthology series of one sort or another on offer this year, down from last year’s fourteen.

  At the beginning of 2009 it was announced that the long-running Datlow/Link & Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series had died. Ellen Datlow has announced that she will begin doing a different “Best Horror” series for Night Shade Books, exact title as yet undetermined, to be published sometime in 2009 and covering stories published in 2008. So next year we’ll be half a book down in this category, losing the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the former Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror book.

  The last few years have featured big retrospective anthologies, but there were none of them this year and, as a result, fewer stand-alone reprint anthologies of exceptional merit. The best of the reprint anthologies was probably Steampunk (Tachyon), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, which featured good reprint stories by Michael Chabon, James Blaylock, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian R. MacLeod, Neal Stephenson, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, and others. Also good was Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, which featured stories about the you-know-what and its aftermath by George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Octavia Butler, and others. If you like zombies (which were so frequently encountered this year, even in the science fiction anthologies, that they seemed to be taking over the field), you’ll want The Living Dead (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams and packed full of zombie stories by Dan Simmons, Michael Swanwick, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Andy Duncan, and others. Another attempt at subgenre definition and canon-forming was The New Weird (Tachyon), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, a mixed anthology of reprint stories (the best by M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, and Jeff Ford), some original material, critical essays, and transcribed blog entries which had some good stuff in it but which ultimately left me just as confused as to what exactly The New Weird consisted of when I went out as I’d been when I went in. Good work was also to be found in The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe II (Baen), edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Volume Two (Tor), edited by Edmund R. Schubert and Orson Scott Card, volumes of stories from two of the most prominent ezines.

  Otherworldly Maine (Down East), edited by Noreen Doyle, was a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology which featured strong reprints by Edgar Pangborn, Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, and others, as well as good original work by Gregory Feeley, Lee Allred, and Jessica Reisman. Just exactly what qualifies one to be a Savage Humanist is a bit unclear, in spite of a long analytical introduction, but The Savage Humanists (Robert J. Sawyer Books), edited by Fiona Kelleghan, features good reprint stories by Tim Sullivan, Greg Frost, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others. When Diplomacy Fails (Isfic Press), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, is a reprint anthology of military SF by Harry Turtledove, Gene Wolfe, David Weber, Tanya Huff, Resnick and Flint themselves, and others. The Best of Abyss & Apex: Volume One (Hadley Rille Books), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, is drawn from the website of the same name. And a perspective on SF from another part of the world is given by The Black Mirror and Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Austria (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Franz Rottensteiner.

  Reprint fantasy anthologies included Tales Before Narnia (Del Rey), edited by Douglas A. Anderson; and The Dragon Done It (Baen), edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of fantasy/mystery crosses. There was a big retrospective reprint horror anthology, Poe’s Children: The New Horror (Doubleday), edited by Peter Straub, featuring reprints by Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Straub himself, and others.

  Reissued anthologies of merit this year included The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2B (Tor), edited by Ben Bova; The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy (Running Press), edited by Mike Ashley; A Science Fiction Omnibus (Penguin Modern Classics), edited by Brian W. Aldiss; and The Reel Stuff (DAW), edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg. There were almost no SF-and-fantasy-oriented reference books this year, with the closest approach probably being Lexicon U
rthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, Second Edition (Sirius Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi. There were a number of critical books about SF and fantasy, including Maps and Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeneys), by Michael Chabon; Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press), by Farah Mendlesohn; The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 2 (Aqueduct), by Eileen Gunn and L. Timmel Duchamp; and What Is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction? (Beccon), by Paul Kincaid. There were autobiographies by or biographies/critical studies of specific authors, including Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (HarperCollinsUK), by J. G. Ballad; H. Beam Piper: A Biography (McFarland), by John F. Carr; An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (Greenwood), by Andrew M. Butler; Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography (McFarland), by Jeffrey Marks; The Vorkosigan Companion (Baen), by Lillian Stewart Carl and Martin H. Greenberg (a guide to the work of Lois McMaster Bujold); Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (St. Martin’s Press), by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette; Basil Cooper: A Life in Books (PS Publishing), edited by Stephen Jones; The Richard Matheson Companion (Gauntlet Press), by Stanley Wiater and Matthew R. Bradley; and a posthumously published collection of articles on diverse subjects by Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect (Putnam).

  The year also saw the publication of two books of a kind that I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of: collections of articles previously published electronically online in blogs and in other Internet sources. They were Your Hate Mail Is Being Graded: Ten Years of Whatever (Subterranean Press), by John Scalzi, Whatever being the very popular blog that Scalzi won a best fanwriter Hugo for his work in this year, and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (Tachyon), by Cory Doctorow.

  It was another weak year in the art book field, after several fairly strong ones earlier in the decade. Once again your best buy was probably Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art. Also worthwhile were The Other Visions: Ralph McQuarrie (Titan Books), by Ralph McQuarrie; The Paintings of J. Allen St. John: Grand Master of Fantasy (Vanguard), by Stephen A. Korshak; As I See: The Fantastic World of Boris Artzybashoff (Titan Books), by Boris Artzybashoff; Virgil Finlay: Future/ Past (Underwood Books), by Virgil Finlay; A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Centipede Press), edited by Jerad Walter; Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess (Dark Horse Books), by Charles Vess; and Telling Stories: The Comic Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), edited by Edward Mason.

  There were a fair number of genre-related non-fiction books of interest this year. The most central of these was probably Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (Atlas), a collection of futurist articles, many by scientists or SF writers, edited by Damien Broderick. The edges of the possible in science, as we understand them today, is also explored in Physics of the Impossible (Doubleday), by physicist Michio Kaku, and in 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense (Doubleday), by Michael Brooks. Fans may also be interested in an examination of superhero science, Superheroes! (I. B. Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year), You Call This the Future? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning Life in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell.

  There were lots of genre movies that did big box-office business this year, although few critical darlings or films thought of as “serious” movies.

  According to the Box Office Mojo site (boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (counting in stuff like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as fantasy/SF – Hell, it’s even got aliens! – rather than “action/adventure”, and including animated movies but excluding the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, which is probably stretching the definition of “genre movie” too far); thirteen out of twenty of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films; and at least twenty-seven out of the hundred top-earning movies (depending on where you draw the lines – and for reasons of my own personal prejudices, I’m not counting horror/slasher/thriller movies) – were genre films.

  In fact, it’s clear that genre films of one sort or another have come to dominate Hollywood at the box-office, producing most of the year’s really big money-makers, and that’s been true for a while now. During the last decade, each year’s top-grossing film has been a genre film of some sort: superhero movies (three of this year’s top-earners are superhero movies, and 2007’s biggest earner was Spider Man 3, a lesson that I doubt has been lost on the movie-makers), or fantasy/adventures such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or The Return of the King, or SF/adventures such Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, or even fantasy movies ostensibly for children such as Shrek 2 or The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. You have to go all the way back to 1998 before you find a non-genre film as the year’s top-earner, Saving Private Ryan.

  Of course, the kicker is, what do you mean by “genre film”?

  Of the year’s top ten highest-grossing films, of the nine that can be considered to be genre movies of one sort or another, three are superhero movies (The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Hancock, with The Incredible Hulk finishing in fourteenth place and Hellboy II: The Golden Army finishing in thirty-eighth place); one is fantasy/adventure (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with the comparable The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian finishing in thirteenth place); four are animated films (Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, with superhero – sort of – animated feature Bolt finishing in nineteenth place, and The Tale of Despereaux, released at the end of the year, perhaps destined to climb the charts); and one is a glossy vampire/romance movie (Twilight). (For those interested, other than Quantum of Solace, the two highest-earning non-genre films were Sex and the City and Mamma Mia!, which finished in eleventh and twelfth places respectively – unless you want to make the somewhat arch argument that they’re fantasy films as well.)

  Like last year, there were almost no actual science fiction films on the list at all, even in the top hundred, let alone the top ten. The closest approach to a real SF film out this year was the animated film Wall-E, which did make the top ten list, in fifth place, in fact, and although its science was a bit shaky (you can’t make an ecosystem out of one plant and one cockroach), for the most part it treated its science fiction tropes with respect and intelligence, and what satiric needling there was at the genre was affectionate. In fact, with its humans who have become so pampered and constantly waited on by machines that they’ve lost the ability to walk, it may be the purest expression of 1950s’ Galaxy-era social satire of the Pohl/Kornbluth variety ever put before the general public. Wall-E itself got treated with an amazing amount of respect for an animated film ostensibly for children, as Ratatouille and The Incredibles had been before it, and is probably the one out of the top-grossing genre films that came the closest to being treated as a “serious movie”. At least some animated films are big money-makers these days and are clearly not being watched only by children anymore (if they ever were only watched solely by children in the first place, which I doubt).

  The year’s other Great White Hope as far as SF movies were concerned was a glossy $80-million remake of the old fifties’ movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which, in spite of a good opening weekend, made it only to thirty-ninth place. Some fans protested that the movie wasn’t a faithful remake of the original film – but, of course, the original film itself wasn’t faithful to the ostensible source material, Harry Bates’ Asto
unding story “Welcome to the Master,” so that’s nothing new. Major plot-logic holes were the real problem here. Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated continuation or at least elaboration of the Star Wars saga, looking at stuff that happened between the cracks of the major movies, may have gone to the Star Wars well once too often, or perhaps people were thrown by the change in medium from live-action to animated, since it only finished seventy-ninth on the list of year’s top-earners. A remake of the classic Jules Verne novel Journey to the Center of the Earth was not even as watchable as the fifties’ version, in spite of having better special effects and the considerable advantage of not having Pat Boone in it. The only other science fiction film I could find (unless you count Space Chimps, which I don’t intend to) was Jumper, adapted with very little fidelity from a YA SF novel by Steven Gould, although it could with excellent justification be considered to be a superhero movie instead; it was supposed to be the start of a franchise, but since it earned $80 million but cost $85 million to make, that seems dubious – although the foreign revenues were better.

  That was it for science fiction films, as far as I can tell. When I say “genre film” from here on down, we’re talking about fantasy films or superhero movies.

  The top-grossing film of the year, by a huge margin, was The Dark Knight, which also got treated with a good deal of respect by critics for a superhero movie, mostly because of the late Heath Ledger’s riveting turn as the Joker, bringing a scary intensity to the part that surpassed and probably supplanted even Jack Nicholson’s famous interpretation of the role. You have to wonder if Christian Bale, who played Batman, and whose movie this ostensibly was, was bemused at the fact that nearly every review of the film spent all of its time raving about Heath Ledger and often didn’t mention Bale at all. (Still, at least he gets to collect his residuals, which may be some consolation.) Ledger’s performance will be long remembered by fans and would alone push The Dark Knight into the realm of classic superhero movies such as Spiderman and The X-Men, although the rest of the movie is pretty good too, dark and creepily elegant, but overlong and perhaps a bit muddled. The sly and frequently amusing Iron Man finished in second place in the top-grossing list, mostly because of a snarky performance by Robert Downey, Jr. The Big Green Angry Guy did better in his second outing as a film star, The Incredible Hulk, easily outdrawing Ang Lee’s muddled and overly complex previous Hulk movie, although not doing as well as his fellow superhero and Avengers teammate Iron Man (you could see them setting up the forthcoming Avengers movie throughout both Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, by the way). Although it seemed like two movies jammed together, neither of which the filmmakers really knew what to do with, Will Smith delivered enough of a star turn as a degenerate drunken superhero to put Hancock into fourth place. Wanted was about a guild of super-powered assassins.