It seemed like a pretty strong year for novels to me. As can be seen from the lists above, Tor had a very strong year, as did Bantam Spectra. I don’t see any clear favorite here for the Nebula and Hugo Awards; one of Robinson’s Mars books has already won the Hugo, Idoru is not as strong as Neuromancer was, Sterling has to date not been popular enough with the electorate to win, and so on down the line. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones is clearly the year’s Big Fantasy Novel, reviewed everywhere, and may end up a favorite for the World Fantasy Award, but it remains to be seen how it will do with the Hugo voters, who traditionally are somewhat more resistant to fantasy than the Nebula electorate has been in recent years. And, thanks to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, many of the books up against the 1996 books for the Nebula Award are holdovers from 1995 (the majority of the novels which made this year’s Preliminary Nebula Ballot, in fact, are from 1995, 15 to 8), which muddies the waters even more. So it’s anybody’s guess who’ll end up walking off with the major awards this year.
One interesting trend, showing up both in the novels and even more heavily in the short fiction this year, is what might be called the alternate space program story. Clearly fueled by nostalgia for the good old days of the Apollo program, this kind of story rewrites history to show us how we could have done the space program right and had colonies on the Moon or on Mars by now, if things had only worked out differently. It’s an interesting specialization of the alternate history story, and clearly also related to the Victorian SF (as I guess you’d have to call it) that’s been popular in Britain in the past few years, wherein various Victorian-era figures develop working space programs—although usually by cheating and using some variant of that convenient anti-gravity mineral, first refined by H. G. Wells, Cavorite—all the way back in the nineteenth century (which leads to the usually unvoiced assumption that of course by now the solar system would be up to its ass in astronauts—the triumph of the space program done right once again). A bit sad that the Space Age is now widely considered to be over, a bit of pastel nostalgia receding into the past (I feel, to the contrary, that the Space Age is just on the verge of really beginning—but that’s an argument for some other place) … but then again, perhaps this is just an example, and a rather benign one at that, of end-of-the-millennium chilistic panic. I’ve been waiting for this to show up in the form of lots of end of the world stories, but so far they don’t seem to have materialized (the apocalyptic end of the world stuff has mostly been showing up in nonfiction books such as The Hot Zone and in speculations about how we could be wiped out at any second by the impact of a dinosaur-killer asteroid). Given a choice, I’d much rather have the alternate space program stories, so I’m not complaining—but it is an interesting, and interestingly timed, phenomenon.
An associational mainstream novel (with occasional traces of a fantastic element) that would probably appeal to many genre readers was The Sweetheart Season (Henry Holt), by Karen Joy Fowler. Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax (Soho Books), a sort of alternate history of Jesus, also balances right on the edge of the genre. Mystery novels by SF writers this year, which may perhaps be of interest to their fans, included Skinny Annie Blues (Kensington Books), Neal Barrett, Jr., Draconian New York (Forge), Robert Sheckley; The Silver Chariot Killer (St. Martin’s Press), Richard A. Lupoff; and Malice Prepense (St. Martin’s Press), Kate Wilhelm. A series of historical mysteries that seem to be enjoyed by a lot of SF and fantasy fans, perhaps because of her strong and sometimes quirky (the books are often quite funny) feel for the historic milieu, are Lindsey Davis’s mysteries set in ancient Rome, the most recent of which is this year’s Last Act in Palmyra (Mysterious Press).
Once again this year there were several reissues of classic novels; small presses have been struggling to make this kind of stuff available for years now, but this year, like last year, surprisingly, and very commendably, a lot of the reissuing is being done by trade houses such as AvoNova, Tor, Baen, and Ace, bucking a well-established trend. That’s very encouraging, as over the last decade or so this has been a field where books tend to go out of print fast and stay out of print. Often things are nearly impossible to find once they are out of print, so my advice is to buy copies of these books now, while you have the chance. It may be years before you get another opportunity. Re-issued this year were: two of the best SF novels ever written, The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, both by Alfred Bester, both from Vintage; The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Tor), by Robert A. Heinlein, his best novel by a considerable margin (including the more famous Stranger in a Strange Land); Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp, still perhaps the best Alternate History novel ever written, bound in a package with David Drake’s To Bring the Light, from Baen; three novels by the Grandmaster of Australian SF, George Turner, all of them largely unknown on this side of the world, Beloved Son, The Drowning Towers, and Yesterday’s Men, all from AvoNova; Jack Williamson’s classic The Humanoids (Tor Orb); Greg Bear’s landmark Blood Music (Ace); Jack Vance’s pioneering early study of immortality, still as fresh as ever, To Live Forever (Charles F. Miller); Samuel R. Delany’s controversial SF novel Trouble on Triton (Wesleyan/New England); a package of three long out-of-print and nearly forgotten fantasies by Thomas Burnett Swann, The Minotaur Trilogy (Mathew D. Hargreaves); a package of several long-out-of-print novels by Philip José Farmer, The World of Tiers (Tor), and Michael Moorcock’s famous shocker, Behold the Man, now in a special thirtieth anniversary edition from Mojo Press. Get ‘em while you can.
(Addresses follow for the small-press items that may be hard to find in bookstores: Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA, 96088, $25 for The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, by Brian Stableford; Charles F. Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601, $60 for To Live Forever, by Jack Vance; University Press of New England, 23 South Main St., Hanover, NH 03755, $14.95 for Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany; Mathew D. Hargreaves, P.O. Box 66099, Seattle, WA 98166-0099, $50 plus $5 for shipping for The Minotaur Trilogy, by Thomas Burnett Swann; Mojo Press, P.O. Box 14005, Austin, TX 78714, $12.95 for Behold the Man: The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, by Michael Moorcock.)
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Although 1996 was perhaps not quite as strong a year for short-story collections overall as last year was, there were still some excellent collections published, including a number of good retrospective collections that offer capsule glimpses of a writer’s career in short fiction, and which ought to be in every home library.
The best collections of the year included: None So Blind (Morrow/AvoNova), Joe Haldeman; The Invisible Country (Gollancz), Paul J. McAuley; Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities (Arkham House), Mary Rosenblum; Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (HarperCollins), Ursula K. LeGuin; and The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (Harcourt Brace), Jonathan Lethem. Among the year’s other top collections were: Standard Candles (Tachyon Publications), Jack McDevitt; At the City Limits of Fate (Edgewood), Michael Bishop; All-American Alien Boy (Old Earth Books), Allen Steele; Before … 12:01 … and After (Fedogan & Bremer), Richard A. Lupoff; Blue Apes (Tesseract), Phyllis Gotlieb; and Bible Stories for Adults (Harcourt Brace), James Morrow. Paul Di Filippo’s Ribofunk (Four Walls Eight Windows), is a collection of “linked stories” tracing the development of one of Di Filippo’s stylized and deliberately outrageous future history scenarios; Di Filippo occasionally loses control of his material here, but that is made up for by the exuberance and energy of the writing, and the wild audacity of the conceptualization. Ray Bradbury’s most recent collection, Quicker Than the Eye (Avon), is, disappointingly, filled mostly with weak or minor stories, although here and there you can still hear the echo of the master’s voice as it sounded in his prime, when it sang with a beauty and a passion that had never been heard in the genre before.
There were many excellent retrospective omnibus collections published this year, collections that ought to be foundation stones in your library: Lean Times in Lankhmar (White Wolf Borealis), by the late F
ritz Leiber, is the second volume in White Wolf’s laudable attempt to return to print all of Leiber’s marvelous Gray Mouser stories, one of the indispensable works of modern fantasy. Microcosmic God: Volume II: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books) and Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books), both by the late Theodore Sturgeon, are the second and third volumes in this publisher’s epic attempt to return to print everything ever written by Theodore Sturgeon, a project of staggering dimensions, and one that may be the thing that rescues this once-famous author from the undeserved oblivion that seems to be creeping upon him. Another writer who deserves to be rescued from being forgotten, in these days of almost zero historical memory in the field, is the late Clifford D. Simak, and a small press named Tachyon has made a good start at doing that with the retrospective collection, Over the River and Through the Woods (Tachyon Publications). The feisty and controversial Harlan Ellison is still very much with us, but a good idea of his importance to the development of several genres (most notably the modern horror genre, where he has obviously been an ancestral figure of immense influence), can be gotten by the retrospective Edgeworks (White Wolf Borealis), by Harlan Ellison, part of a project by White Wolf to bring all of Ellison’s stories and essays back into print in omnibus volumes. Bruce Sterling is still a relatively young writer by any reasonable standard, in spite of being one of the big names of the nineties. but if you’re not familiar with his work, Schismatrix Plus (Ace), makes a convenient place to start, a tasty package made up of Sterling’s well-known Shaper/Mechanist stories as well as a reprint of his novel Schismatrix, one of the prime works of SF’s Cyberpunk Revolution, which is set in the same baroque and fascinating future. And All One Universe (Tor), gives us a look back over the amazing fifty-year career of Poul Anderson, who’s still writing stuff today that’s every bit as vigorous, compelling, and imaginative as the stuff he was writing back in the 1950s.
Although trade publishers continued to put out an encouraging number of collections this year, notably HarperCollins and Harcourt Brace, small presses were even more important in getting collections to the reading public, as has been true more often than not over the past decade; small presses such as White Wolf, Tachyon Publishing, Arkham House, Edgewood, North Atlantic Books, Old Earth Books, Edgewood, Tesseracts, and Four Walls Eight Windows all contributed important collections this year. Arkham House, which had been for some years now one of the prime publishers of first-rate science fiction collections, parted ways with James Turner, and presumably will now abandon science fiction and return to being an imprint primarily of interest to fans of H. P. Lovecraft and similar occult writers, a major blow to the SF short-story collection market. (Fortunately, Turner has started up Golden Gryphon Press, and has already announced an upcoming major collection from them by James Patrick Kelly, so perhaps the loss will be minimized.) And all those publishers who bucked the trend of recent publishing wisdom by bringing old material back into print are to be especially commended, including Tachyon Publishing (who are becoming very active lately in publishing collections, in spite of being a very small press indeed), White Wolf, and North Atlantic Books.
With the exception of books by White Wolf and Four Walls Eight Windows, very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail-order is your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: Arkham House, Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, WI 53583, $21.95 for Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities, by Mary Rosenblum; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701, $25 for Microcosmic God: Volume II: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, $25 for Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA, 94107, $25 for Standard Candles, by Jack McDevitt, $25 for Over the River and Through the Woods, by Clifford D. Simak; Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA, 02238, $14 for At the City Limits of Fate, by Michael Bishop; Fedogan & Bremer, 603 Washington Avenue, SE #77, Minneapolis MN 55415, $27 for Before … 12:01 … and After, by Richard A. Lupoff; Tesseract Books, 214-21 10405 Jasper Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 352, $21.95 for Blue Apes, by Phyllis Gotlieb.
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There didn’t seem to be as many reprint anthologies this year as last year, and many of the ones that did appear were rather weak, but there were still a few good values in this market.
As usual, unsurprisingly, some of the best bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 30 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent. After a number of years of being covered by only one “Best of the Year” volume, science fiction is now covered by two such anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year’s Best SF series (HarperPrism), edited by David G. Hartwell, up to its second volume. I won’t presume to review Hartwell’s Best of the Year anthology, that would be inappropriate, since it’s in direct competition with this volume, but the field is wide and various enough for there to be a number of best volumes, each representing a different aesthetic slant and perspective; you could produce five different Best of the Year volumes by five different editors, and, tastes varying as radically as they do, I’m sure that they wouldn’t overlap to any significant degree. So a bit of variety in this market is certainly a healthy thing for the genre at large, giving a larger number of authors—since Hartwell will almost certainly like stories that I didn’t, and vice versa—a chance to be showcased every year. There were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror in 1996: the latest edition in a now slightly retitled British series (last year it was just The Best New Horror), The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 7 (Robinson/Raven Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, 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 Terri Windling, this year up to its Ninth Annual Collection. Fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology.
Turning away from the anthology series, your best buy among the year’s singleton reprint anthologies was probably the big retrospective anthology Visions of Wonder: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Milton T. Wolf. This is another of those big academically oriented retrospectives, such as The Norton Book of Science Fiction or Hartwell’s own The Ascent of Wonder, that have been kicking up a lot of controversy among critics and scholars for the last few years. This one is no exception to the rule—critics are already arguing with the polemical opinions expressed in the book, or saying that it doesn’t make an effective teaching anthology for actual classroom use (something too far out of my area of expertise for me to judge), or complaining about the stories that the editors have chosen, or speculating on what stories they should have chosen instead.… I must admit that it’s true that some of the selections here, are, to put the best spin possible on it, eclectic, if not downright peculiar. None of this controversy will really matter to the average reader, however, nor should it. What will be important to the average reader is that this is a big fat anthology stuffed full of first-rate stories, a very good buy for the money. Although there are a few minor stories here that make me scratch my head in puzzlement and wonder why they were used—and some other critic might come up with a different list of just which stories those are, which, of course, is always the rub. Any anthology that brings together under the same covers stories such as Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” James Patrick Kelly’s “Mr. Boy,” Joanna Russ’s “Souls,” James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” and William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” as well as more than a dozen other first-rate stories, is a valuable anthology to have on your bookshelves, and an anthology that ought to be read. It’s also good to see some of the critical essays that are incl
uded here, stuff like Damon Knight’s “Critics” and Algis Budrys’s “Paradise Charted,” and a number of others, back in print (although again, the selection of essays used is … eclectic).
Much the same sort of thing could be said about Paragons: Twelve Master Science Fiction Writers Ply Their Craft (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Robin Wilson. The primary purpose of this book is to act as a how-to-write-SF teaching guide, to which end it contains critical essays on various areas of craftsmanship from well-known SF writers … but, since stories by those authors are also reproduced here, as examples of the craft, the book can also legitimately be viewed solely as a reprint fiction anthology. And considered as a reprint anthology, it’s quite a good one, one of the year’s best, in fact, containing as it does first-rate stories such as Nancy Kress’s “The Price of Oranges,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Glacier,” Joe Haldeman’s “Feedback,” Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover,” and eight other stories by top authors. The same kind of remarks also apply to reissues of two academically oriented retrospective anthologies, The Road to Science Fiction: Volume 3 (White Wolf), edited by James Gunn, and Those Who Can (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Robin Wilson. All of these books do double-duty as teaching artifacts and as enjoyable fiction anthologies, and they can be appreciated even by someone who doesn’t give a fig about the history of science fiction or about how to craft a saleable story.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 6