The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It would take more space than I have left here to explain in detail why I think that John M. Ford’s “Erase/Record/Play: A Drama for Print,” although vaultingly ambitious and certainly unique, wonderfully written and full of inventiveness and dry wit, is, in the final analysis, an interesting failure. For one thing, the situation is entirely artificial, set up for the author’s purposes to enable the author to make the points he wants to make, and nothing that would ever arise in the real world. Perhaps most damning for me, though, is the fact that I don’t believe that the psychological game that they’re playing in the story would actually have even a remote chance of actually producing the psychological results they claim that it will produce. (For the sake of fairness, I should probably say that at least one other critic is on record as thinking that the Ford is the best story in the book—so your millage may vary dramatically here.) Carter Scholz’s “Mengele’s Jew” has similar strengths and similar weaknesses, with some wonderful writing and some audacious conceptualization, but with the overall effect ultimately rather bloodless and abstract, it is more an interesting technical exercise than a story that most readers are going to find involving.

  The rest of the stories in Starlight 1 are worth reading, but not in the same league as the stuff mentioned above, even the “ambitious failures.” It’s interesting to compare the treatment that Emily Dickinson gets in Jane Yolen’s “Sister Emily’s Lightship” with the pitiless mocking she gets in the year’s other Emily Dickinson story, Connie Willis’s “The Soul Selects Her Own Society.” Yolen, by contrast, treats Dickinson reverentially—perhaps too reverentially; by the end, when space aliens come down and take Emily on a tour of the planet because they respect the sincerity of her poetry so much, I was beginning to find the solemnly reverential tone unintentionally amusing, and I’m afraid that the story pretty much lost me after that. Martha Soukup’s “Waking Beauty” is a reworking of a fairy tale in a modern setting, nicely done, but perhaps too long and too plotty to be completely convincing in the end; in this kind of story, you need to keep it short enough to keep the reader from having time to think about how unlikely this all is. Mark Kreighbaum contributes a Rashmon-like story with some ingenious touches, but one that wasn’t terribly emotionally involving, another interesting technical exercise. The story I liked the least here (although there’s not really anything wrong with it; just the story furthest from my taste) is Susanna Clarke’s slow and intricate mannerist fantasy, “The Ladies of Grace Adieu.”

  At any rate, Starlight 1 is one of the most promising debuts of an original anthology series since the high days of Orbit and New Dimensions—and, tastes varying as much as they do, you may like some of what I considered to be the lesser stories better than the stories I liked best. It’s all honest work, and there’s almost nothing here that isn’t, at the very least, worth reading.

  Runner-up for the title of year’s best original anthology would be Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology (Tor), edited by John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name, and Richard Butner, a collection of stories, with commentary from the participants, from the yearly session of the well-known Sycamore Hill Writers’ Workshop. This is one of several anthologies this year that serves double-duty as both a critical study and a collection of stories—the insight into the writing workshop process here, complete with comments from the workshoppers on the stories contained in the book, will be of great interest to anyone who wants to learn how to write (although the book as a whole would have been more useful if it could have printed the individual stories as they were both before and after the workshop, so you could better see the effect that the critique sessions had on the text; I suppose that considerations of the book’s length ruled that out, though). Most readers, however, will be more interested in how the anthology holds up as a fiction collection—in fact, it holds up quite well; the mix is similar to that of Starlight 1, with fantasy and a number of hard-to-classify literary experiments sharing pages with some of the year’s best SF stories.

  The best stories here, in my opinion, are Bruce Sterling’s “Bicycle Repairman,” John Kessel’s “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue,” James Patrick Kelly’s “The First Law of Thermodynamics,” and Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Marianas Islands.” The first three are all science fiction to one degree or another—fairly centrally in the case of the Sterling and the Kessel, more marginally in the case of the Kelly; the Fowler, which is beautifully crafted, skates somewhere between fantasy and a nostalgic literary story, working much the same sort of territory that James Thurber was working in his My Life and Hard Times … the story reminds me a lot of Thurber, in fact, soaked through with the same sort of nostalgic, bittersweet whimsy.

  Everything else in the book would have to be ranked somewhere below those top four stories, for one reason or another. The story that comes the closest to their level in quality is Maureen F. McHugh’s “Homesick,” another beautifully crafted story, but one that ultimately seemed disappointing to me. I’m not quite sure why I reacted to the McHugh that way, but somehow it seemed as though there was something missing from the story that should have been there, even though I’m not entirely sure what it should have been, as if the story was somehow missing its own point. This was the one story in the anthology where I would have most liked to have gotten to read the original version of the story, rather than the story as it appears after having been revised to satisfy criticisms from the workshop; I can’t help but wonder if it would have worked better without the changes inspired by the workshop criticism, since I’m puzzled as to just why the current version doesn’t work for me—it doesn’t, though, although the writing and scene-setting are very fine indeed. A step or two down from there, were Nancy Kress’s slight and melodramatic “Sex Education,” Richard Butner’s muted and hip “Horses Blow Up Dog City,” Gregory Frost’s earnest “That Blissful Height,” and Alexander Jablokov’s “The Fury at Colonus,” which features the most audacious and outrageous story idea in the book, but which can’t sustain the metaphor throughout a story as long and plotty as this one is without it all crumbling under its own weight. Much the same could be said of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Hardened Criminals,” which becomes downright silly the moment the story slows up enough to actually let you think about the central idea; this is one of the pieces here that works better as a dark, surrealistic literary joke than it does as a science fiction story. Michaela Roessner’s “The Escape Artist” has a good setting and setup—Houdini comes to the Winchester Mystery House—and then wastes it by sidestepping its own story, which obviously should have pitted Houdini against the Mystery House in some sort of contest or duel, but which instead, unsatisfyingly, swerves off in another direction.

  War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches (Bantam), edited by Kevin J. Anderson, an anthology written in honor of the 100th anniversary of the release of H. G. Wells’s famous novel War of the Worlds, although very uneven in quality, is probably your next best bet in this year’s original anthology market. These updated “War of the Worlds” stories have been appearing here and there throughout the year in the science fiction magazines, and that’s probably the best way to read them, in fact: spaced as widely as possible. Taken together, the stories actually become negatively effective, since the same scenes—most notably, the scene in which the top of a Martian capsule slowly unscrews itself, the Martians emerge, heat-ray the crowd, rear up in a tripod fighting machine, and so on—occur in story after story, which becomes annoying if you’re reading the book cover to cover in one sitting. I also think that the anthology might have worked better overall if they’d stuck just to the idea of showing what happened in other places around the world during Wells’s Martian invasion. The idea that the stories also had to be told from the perspective of a Famous Nineteenth Century Author, and written in his literary style as well, was one elaboration too many; many of these stories would be less artificial if that frame hadn’t been imposed on them—and, frankly, many of the authors here just aren’t up to an accurate pastiche of the st
yle of the authors they’ve chosen. The only reprint here, and the admitted inspiration for the anthology, is Howard Waldrop’s “Night of the Cooters,” which gives a sharp satirical spin to the material—Martians invading Texas are no match for rednecks, who just grab up guns and shoot them to pieces—that is sadly missing from most of the stories here. Some of the authors are also not really all that familiar with Wells’s original story, as is shown by a number of internal inconsistencies, which really should have been caught by the editor (who makes one mistake in chronology himself).

  Still, keeping all these caveats in mind, there are a fairly high number of entertaining stories here, especially if you clear your palate between stories with some other kind of reading. The best stories here are Walter Jon Williams’s exotic “Foreign Devils,” Connie Willis’s tart, disrespectful, and funny “study” of Emily Dickinson, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society, etc.,” and Dave Wolverton’s “After a Lean Winter,” which does a good job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of Jack London, in a story that manages at the same time to be valid as SF and believable as something London might have actually written.

  Also near the top would be Robert Silverberg’s “The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James,” M. Shayne Bell’s “To See the World End,” which, unlike most of the stories in the book, actually packs some emotional punch, and George Alec Effinger’s “Mars: The Home Front,” which does a hilarious job of capturing the atmosphere of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel (although it doesn’t end so much as stop—which is too bad, since I actually found myself wanting to read the rest of this silly adventure, which in its way is high praise indeed!).

  Everything below there is flawed to one extent or another, including a number of stories that just feel pointless. The worst story in the book by far, though, is Gregory Benford and David Brin’s monumentally silly “Paris Conquers All,” in which two of the Martian tripod fighting machines destroying Paris decide that the Eiffel Tower is a female Martian fighting machine and have sex with it. While they’re circling the tower, hooting lustfully, Jules Verne wires it up and connects it to a series of quickly assembled batteries, and when the Martian fighting machines crawl onto the tower to copulate, he throws the switch, frying them. This, of course, totally ignores the fact that the tripods are machines run by organic creatures inside them, and is rather like a Ford deciding to have sex with a Volkswagen on the freeway, or perhaps like two cars deciding to hump a gas station, ignoring the wishes of their drivers.

  In the end, what seems to be demonstrated here is that the Wells’s Martian invasion images and archetypes still have a good deal of juice when they are handled by writers of talent; when they are handled by less talented writers, or at least by writers less genuinely excited by the material, writers just fulfilling an anthology assignment, then those images and archetypes become cartoons, devoid of the power to move us. I suppose none of this is surprising. Which brings up an interesting point: Are the stories in War of the Worlds. Global Dispatches still science fiction, even though the writers know in advance that the premise is based upon obsolete science, the now-outdated premise that Mars has a climate that could support a technologically advanced alien race? Certainly most of them are written as if they are science fiction, obsolete initial premise or not. Retro science fiction? Alternate world science fiction, from a universe where Mars proved to be a more welcoming abode for life? (Whatever, the stories here seem similar somehow to the Victorian science fiction and the alternate space program stories that I discuss later, in the novel section.)

  Off Limits: More Tales of Alien Sex (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow, a follow-up to 1990’s popular Alien Sex, a mixed reprint and original anthology (mostly original), might be more fairly reviewed as a horror anthology, but since it seems to be being marketed as a science fiction anthology, I’ll talk about it here. I was a fan of Datlow’s previous Alien Sex anthology, but I found myself mildly disapped by this one.

  Although there are some science fiction stories here, including one first-rate one—Gwyneth Jones’s “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland”—most of the stuff in Off Limits is either horror or dark literary surrealism of various sorts, or mixtures of both. Even considering just the science fiction stories here, there’s a real sameness to the future worlds and the takes on the future of sex that are portrayed: all the futures are bleak and depressing, often narrated by a prostitute or featuring a prostitute as the main character, some sort of AIDS-like disease is slowly killing everybody off, the sexes are totally estranged and only touch each other in negative and sometimes horrifyingly abusive ways, there’s no valid family life, all you see is betrayal and murder and people who have become deadly monsters of perversion. Gee. I guess there’s not much future for sex. I guess there’s not much hope for relationships between men and women. I guess that the future is going to be a pretty grim and depressing place. I guess that the human race has pretty much had it. There’s very little relief from this mood here, and the horror stories are even more extreme. (There are also more original horror stories here than there are original science fiction stories—adding the reprints, all SF, ups the overall percentage of science fiction some, but ultimately, most of the stuff here would probably appeal more to the average horror reader than to the average SF reader.)

  Worse than the sameness of tone is that there’s very little imagination shown in the thinking about future or alien sex in most of the stories—the most imagination here by far shows up in the exchange of joke poems between Joe Haldeman and Jane Yolen, “Sextraterrestrials,” and I couldn’t help but feel it as a lack that the kind of science-fictional thinking that turns up in a jokey way there couldn’t have been utilized more seriously in more of the stories themselves. Of the original SF stories here, the best by far is the Gwyneth Jones. Martha Soukup’s “Fetish” manages to generate a good deal of intensity with one simple SF idea, and says what it has to say and then stops with admirable restraint and efficiency. Brian Stableford’s “The House of Mourning” is set in the same AIDS-analogue ravaged future as several of the others, and is also narrated by a prostitute, but he manages to handle the material with a bit more interest and ingenuity than some of the others do—this is far from major Stableford, however, suffering badly from one of Stableford’s big problems as a writer, the inability to smoothly and believably integrate big jagged infodumps into the story. Bruce McAllister’s “Captain China” is one of the horror stories rather than one of the SF stories, but deserves mention because of the emotional impact it generates, as an abused and dying male child prostitute in a crib in an American Chinatown dreams of rescue by the superhero whose exploits he watches from his dirt-streaked window, Captain China. There is, alas, really no fantastic element at all here, since it’s pretty clear that Captain China exists only in the child’s own mind, but it’s a strong story on its own terms, although not at all a pleasant read—rather a queasy one, in fact, all the more so because the horrors here, unlike some of the more floridly described horrors in other stories, are narrated in an understated, matter-of-fact voice: They’re just part of everyday life for the kid, and that’s where the real horror lies. The anthology also features original stories by Susan Wade, Sherry Coldsmith, Scott Bradfield, Mike O’Driscoll, Lisa Tuttle, Roberta Lannes, Neil Gaiman, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, as well as several reprint stories.

  I’m left with two general impressions of Off Limits: One, that in spite of this being supposedly an anthology of erotic tales, I found almost none of the stories to actually be erotic at all (a problem I have with most erotic horror anthologies, in fact), as the sex that is described in them is so negative and bleakly depressing and grotesque … and I’m not sure I’d want to date a person who did find them really erotic. Two, that as far as the science fiction stories here are concerned, anyway, the reprint stories—Robert Silverberg’s “The Reality Trip,” Elizabeth Hand’s “In the Month of Athyr,” Simon Ings’s “Grand Prix,” Samuel
R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…”—are for the most part stronger than the original stories; the best story in the book, “Aye, and Gomorrah…,” remains head and shoulders above almost anything else here in spite of being more than twenty years old. (There was another mixed horror/SF original anthology edited by Ellen Datlow this year, Lethal Kisses, but it came out only in the United Kingdom, so late in the year that I was unable to obtain a copy in time; I’ll save consideration of it for next year.)

  Those were the year’s top four anthologies, in the SF anthology market, anyway. Almost everything below this point is weaker than the four anthologies reviewed above, to one extent or another, although there were a few worthwhile stories to be found in almost all of them (whether there’s enough worthwhile stuff in each to make them worth their cover prices is a question that individuals will have to decide for themselves).

  The best of the remaining SF anthologies is probably Roger Zelazny’s last book, The Williamson Effect (Tor), edited by Roger Zelazny. This is a “tribute” anthology, made up of stories written in honor of Jack Williamson, with most of the authors contributing Williamson pastiches or writing new stories in various old Williamson series, a few authors writing stories that feature Williamson himself as the main character, exploring fanciful paths that his life could have taken in an Alternate Reality—all in very similar fashion to other “tribute” anthologies we’ve seen in the last few years, honoring writers such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. Hardcore Jack Williamson fans, of course, will unquestionably want to have this book; how many general readers will get enough entertainment out of it to justify the $23.95 cover price is another question. Like most such “tribute” anthologies, the quality here varies widely from story to story, with some of the authors just not having the right touch or the sympathy for the Williamson material required for an effective pastiche, and the anthology as a whole is somewhat less vigorous and entertaining than Zelazny’s two major 1995 anthologies, Warriors of Blood and Dream and Wheel of Fortune (which were also much better buys—mass-market paperbacks instead of an expensive hardcover). The best stories here are by Connie Willis, Frederik Pohl, and the late John Brunner, though there’s also worthwhile stuff here by Poul Anderson, Mike Resnick, Ben Bova, and others.