The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Finally, Collier Books is to be congratulated on their line of classic reprints, which, under the editorship of James Frenkel, has gotten some long-out-of-print titles such as Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time back on the newsstands where they deserve to be. Buy them now, before they become unavailable again.

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  This was another strong year for short-story collections. The best collections of the year were: Gravity’s Angels, Michael Swanwick (Arkham House), Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories, Howard Waldrop (Ziesing), and Remaking History, Kim Stanley Robinson (Tor). Also excellent were: Mirabile, Janet Kagan (Tor); Sexual Chemistry, Brian Stableford (Simon & Schuster UK); Playgrounds of the Mind, Larry Niven (Tor); The King of the Hill, Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz); The Time Patrol, Poul Anderson (Tor); The Bone Forest, Robert Holdstock (Grafton); and The Book of the Dead, Tanith Lee (Overlook). Also first-rate were The Best of James H. Schmitz (NESFA Press), which brings some of the best work of this long-forgotten author back into print; One Side Laughing, Damon Knight (St. Martin’s); Old Nathan, David Drake (Baen); Transreal!, Rudy Rucker (WCS Books); The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley (Pulphouse); More Shapes Than One, Fred Chappell (St. Martin’s); and Courting Disasters and Other Strange Affinities, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Wildside). R. A. Lafferty’s collection Mischief Malicious (United Mythologies Press, Box 390 Station A, Weston, Ont. Canada M9N-3N1) will probably appeal mostly to Lafferty completists, but the collection Lafferty in Orbit (Broken Mirrors Press, Box 473, Cambridge, MA 02238—$13.95 plus $1.00 for postage) contains some of Lafferty’s very best work, and so, by definition, some of the best work of the late sixties and early seventies.

  Small press publishers such as Arkham House and Ziesing continue to publish the bulk of the year’s outstanding collections, although trade publishers such as Tor and St. Martin’s can be seen to be doing collections a good deal more frequently these days than in previous years.

  Special mention should again be made of Pulphouse Publishing, which has maintained for a couple of years an ambitious program of publishing a new short story collection every month. I had my doubts initially as to whether these collections would go over with the buying public, since, unlike the kind of big handsome hardcover editions produced by publishers like Ziesing or Ursus or Arkham House, these are slender little chapbooks that sometimes contain only three or four stories, and, quite frankly, feature some of the most consistently awful cover art I’ve ever seen in the field (and the artwork is even worse on the new Short Story Paperback covers). They are also, however, cheaper than the more elaborately produced small-press collections, and they do seem to be finding an audience. These Author’s Choice Monthly collections are now up to issue 27, with another dozen slated for release in 1992. They seem to be selling well, and Pulphouse is to be congratulated for getting some very worthwhile material, much of it long unavailable, back into print. I was even more dubious about the chances of survival of the new Short Story Paperback line—individual short stories (both reprint and original) published in chapbook form as individual books—that Pulphouse started last year, but I may turn out to be wrong there, too. It seemed—and still seems—unlikely to me that people were going to be willing to part with $1.95 for a book containing a single short story, when they could buy a paperback anthology containing a dozen stories for $3.95.… But they seem to be selling well, so far, anyway, and Pulphouse may have just pulled off another unlikely success in the teeth of dire predictions by pessimistic pundits like me.

  On the downhill side, as mentioned elsewhere, the Tor Doubles novella line, which had also been getting some excellent material back into print in recent years, was cancelled in 1992—thus making some of the above-mentioned pessimistic pundits shake their heads gloomily over the chances for success of the new Axolotl/Bantam novella line. Let’s hope that they’re wrong again, because the field can use all the short fiction in print that it can get, from as many diverse sources as possible.

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  As usual, your best bets in the reprint anthology market in 1991 were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, although this year there were also a few other “historical overview”—type anthologies worth buying. Last year, there were three “Best” anthologies covering science fiction (my own, Donald Wollheim’s, and a British series called The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook, edited by David S. Garnett). This year, two of the “Best” anthology series covering science fiction are dead, and we are left with only one, the one you are holding in your hand at this moment; even though ostensibly I should be happy about this winnowing of the competition, this still strikes me as an unhealthy situation—surely science fiction is a wide and various enough field that it deserves to be covered from more than just one individual perspective. There are still three “Best of the Year” anthologies covering horror: Karl Edward Wagner’s long-established Year’s Best Horror Stories, a newer British series called Best New Horror, edited by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones, and a mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. My own personal opinion is that three “Best” anthologies covering horror is too many, especially as we no longer have a “Best” series devoted entirely to fantasy, the coverage of the entire fantasy genre having been squeezed down to just the Windling half of the Windling/ Datlow anthology. (The long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories series, edited by Art Saba, died last year too.) At any rate, these surviving “Best” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award volume, are the most solid values for your money in the reprint anthology market. Other good buys for the money this year, though, particularly for readers serious about building up a solid science fiction library, include: The New Hugo Winners: Volume II (Baen), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 22 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 23 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (St. Martin’s), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and a retrospective “Best” anthology, Future on Fire (Tor), edited by Orson Scott Card. Noted without comment is another representative “Best” anthology, The Legend Book of Science Fiction (Legend), edited by Gardner Dozois, which has just been issued in America as Modern Classics of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s).

  Also worthwhile were: Welcome to Reality. The Nightmares of Philip K. Dick (Broken Mirrors Press), edited by Uwe Anton; and Hollywood Ghosts (Rutledge Hill Press), edited by Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Charles C. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. Noted without comment are Little People! (Ace) and Magicats II (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Isaac Asimov’s Mars (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois; and Isaac Asimov’s Robots (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

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  Nineteen ninety-one was another unexceptional year in the SF-oriented nonfiction SF reference-book field. Your best bets for reference this year were: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror: J990 (Locus Press), edited by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento, and the somewhat technical Science Fiction: The Early Years (Kent State University Press), by Everett F. Bleiler, a book perhaps better suited for libraries than for the casual reader. The most controversial reference work of the year is The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History (Mirage Press), by Jack L. Chalker and Mark Owings, which drew both rave notices and bitterly hostile reviews (and some threats of lawsuit!) when it appeared.… But I fear that you have to be an expert in this rather specialized field yourself in order to evaluate this controversy fairly, and I am not such an expert; the $75 cover price will certainly keep the book out of the range of the casual reader anyway, so for the most part this is a call that librarians will have to make. Fritz Leiber fans will want Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber (Necronomicon Press), by Bruce Byfield and Fafhrd & Me: A Collection of Essays (Wildside), by Fritz Leiber
, which I missed last year; Lovecraft fans will want An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), edited by David E. Schulz and S. T. Joshi; Clive Barker fans will want Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden (Underwood-Miller), edited by Stephen Jones; and no doubt Phil Dick fans will want The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick (Underwood-Miller) to add to their five-foot shelf of books about Philip K. Dick, practically a genre in its own right now. There was also a how-to-write book edited by the staffs of Analog and IAsfm, Writing and Selling Science Fiction (St. Martin’s).

  A new edition of Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers was released early in 1992, but I had yet to see a copy of it by press time; I’ll report on it next year. The long-promised update of Peter Nicholls’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia still didn’t appear in 1991, but it is definitely (no, really!) promised for publication early next year. I hope so, since the old edition has never really been adequately replaced in the years since its first publication in 1975, and it is a reference source that is urgently needed here in the nineties as the field becomes ever more complex and multifaceted and difficult to keep up with.

  Of the art books that I saw, I most enjoyed Dreamlands (Paper Tiger), a collection of the work of British artist Mark Harrison, although Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition (Workman) was also very intriguing. For those who like that sort of thing, which I don’t, I’m sure that Clive Barker, Illustrator (Eclipse), compiled by Fred Burke, was well worth having, too—or at least my friends who are into splatter seem to think so.

  In the general nonfiction field, the book I enjoyed the most this year was Last Chance to See (Harmony Books), by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, a mention of which can be rationalized here because of Adams’s familiarity to the science fiction audience, because he refers to himself throughout the book as “a science fiction writer,” which gives his views associational interest, and because the book can be read as an ecological speculation as to how long our planet’s biosphere is going to last under the onslaught of the human race. Adams is pretty pessimistic about our chances, and the book is at the same time very funny and almost unrelievedly bleak (the most science-fictional part is on pages 48–50, where Adams spends some time speculating on how in another 350 million years or so, some other now-humble species may evolve to the point where they get their chance to fuck up). Highly entertaining, but not a book to read when you’re feeling depressed. Along the same lines, and, if anything, even more angry and vehement (with none of Adams’s weird humor to leaven it), is Our Angry Earth (Tor), by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, a detailed handbook of what we as a species are doing to destroy the Earth, and of techniques by which we can try to save it. Unlike the Adams book, there are some hopeful notes struck here—although Asimov and Pohl also admit that the odds are against us, and that time is running out. Things are getting scary here in the last decade of the twentieth century, boys and girls—or hadn’t you heard how much the hole in the ozone layer has grown since last year?

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  Nineteen ninety-one seemed to me to be a somewhat stronger year for genre films than 1990—or at least there were more films this year that I liked … no doubt the ultimate aesthetic criterion as far as the rest of you are concerned, right? (Right?) My favorite this year was Terry Gilliam’s brilliant The Fisher King, which doesn’t even show up on Locus’s list of 1991 genre films. I have no idea how it did at the box office (probably not very well, if Gilliam’s other movies—like the also-brilliant Brazil—are anything to judge by), but The Fisher King is a deeply disturbing and bleakly funny movie, gorgeously art-directed and photographed, as is usual with a Gilliam film, and with two star-turn performances by Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges at its heart. I wonder about the sincerity of the film’s ending (“Happy endings? The bastards want happy endings, do they? Well, then, take this!”), but the film is a major accomplishment nonetheless, and you should make a point of seeing it if you can find it. I surprised myself by also enjoying the year’s top-grossing movie, Terminator 2, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Good Robot this time, rather than the Bad Robot he played in the original Terminator film. In fact, I don’t think that T2 is as good a movie overall as Terminator, a minor classic of sorts, but the special effects are absolutely awesome, as much State of the Art for the nineties as Star Wars’s effects were State of the Art in 1976, and the action, if not quite as relentless as that in the original movie, is still fast-paced enough to keep you on the edge of your seat most of the time. The only thing that annoyed me about T2 was its tendency to plant rather heavy-handed nonviolent/pacifistic messages in the midst of a very violent movie in which Arnold is busily shooting dozens of people and blowing up everything in sight—which strikes me as rather questionable, like coursing with the hounds and running with the hare at the same time. Still, an entertaining way to blow seven bucks.

  I made up for liking T2 by hating the year’s second-highest-grossing film, the absolutely dreadful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. What a turkey! Robin Hood was the only movie this year I actually wanted to walk out on—and I might have done it, too, if I hadn’t been flying at 30,000 feet at the time. The Silence of the Lambs, the third-highest-grossing film of the year, was actually a very good movie, but it doesn’t count as a genre film by my standards—no supernatural/SF/fantastic elements. Steven Spielberg’s Hook, which shared some elements (including a good performance by Robin Williams) with The Fisher King, was a handsome and stylish film, but a bit slow-moving at times—it also helps to have read the play or the novel (the novel by Barrie, for goodness’ sake, not the—feh!—novelization) before seeing the film, as it depends heavily on your knowledge of Peter Pan lore for much of its effect. Another film I liked, which was somewhat disappointing at the box office, was Disney’s The Rocketeer—cartoonish, of course, but also lots of fun, and a much better adventure film than Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which, released at almost the same time, may have drawn attendance away from The Rocketeer. An actual cartoon, Disney’s full-length animated feature Beauty and the Beast, had no such trouble with attendance, and was still packing them in at press time. It’s interesting to see the strong comeback the animated film, once almost extinct, has made in recent years. In addition to Beauty and the Beast, there was another big-budget animated film this year, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, with more such films slated for next year. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country also did well at the box office, well enough anyway to redeem the disaster of Star Trek V, the failure of which had raised serious doubts about the continuation of the series. I didn’t see The Addams Family, but I know people who speak well of it; ditto for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, although most of the people in that case are under ten years old. I also missed Naked Lunch, although I doubt that it appeals to ten-year-olds. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey had its moments, but it wasn’t as successful as the first movie, or as successful at the box office, either. Drop Dead Fred had a cute fantasy idea that it didn’t handle as well as it might have. But I was also surprised to find myself enjoying a sleeper called Late for Dinner—once you get by the absurdity of the sci-fi gimmick that sets up the premise of the movie (and it is very silly indeed), the rest of the film turns out to be rather intelligently handled and unexpectedly sweet, not at all the kind of slob comedy it looks like it’s going to be from the coming attractions. As usual, there were lots of horror/slasher/serial killer/exploding head movies, but I don’t go to see them anymore, so you’re on your own there.

  I can’t leave the movie section without a mention of another very strange film, although it slipped in and out of town so furtively that I can’t be sure it’s actually a 1991 release—but, in its quiet way, Tune In Tomorrow is almost as brilliant as The Fisher King, literate and funny, with a hilarious and absolutely over-the-top performance by Peter Falk as a soap-opera writer who is also clearly an avatar of the Trickster; the fantasy elements are very subtly handled, but they’re there, which is to be expected
in a film loosely adapted from a magic realist novel (Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). You can probably find this one in your local video store, and I recommend it highly. A more recent movie with a very similar theme, Delirious, starring John Candy, is nowhere near as good, but does have some funny bits of business, notably the “typos” that get the reality-creating writer “cold deer” instead of “cold beer.”

  Turning to television, I’ve given up on The Sci-Fi Channel, the proposed new cable channel; although it was once again hyped and talked about all year, it once again failed to materialize, and my attitude now is, I’ll Believe It When I See It. Somewhat to my surprise, since I didn’t much like the first couple of seasons, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” remains probably the best actual science fiction show on the air; for me, the show is carried by the performances of the actors who play Captain Picard and Data, the two best actors in the cast, and by the flamboyant semiregular appearances of John DeLancie as Q; most of the rest of the cast could be beamed into deep space with no discernible loss, as far as I’m concerned, but the writing hasn’t been bad this season, and the production values are excellent for television. I also like an odd little show called “Eerie, Indiana,” although clearly adults aren’t watching it and it’s over the heads of the kids at whom it’s ostensibly aimed, so it’s probably doomed. Lest you think I’ve mellowed entirely, I don’t much like the much ballyhooed “Dinosaurs,” which strikes me as a routine sitcom in spite of the excellent makeup the actors wear; I didn’t like “Charlie Hoover” or “Hi, Honey, I’m Home”; I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for “Quantum Leap”; and I’m growing tired of “The Simpsons.” The best show on television at the moment is “Northern Exposure”—a show that does have occasional traces of a fantastic element (the show with Ed and the old Indian ghost, for instance), but where the fantastic element is usually played very subtly—sometimes (as in the case of the show about the Flying Man) so subtly as to be almost subliminal. There was also a good one-shot fantasy movie on HBO, Cast a Deadly Spell, which was enjoyably stylish and packed full of genre in-jokes; they did make the mistake, though, of actually showing you the Indescribable Horror at the end of the movie—at which point, it became a rubber octopus. Lovecraft knew better than that—or why did you think he kept calling them Indescribable?