The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Turning to television, some of the new genre shows that had been introduced in 1995 died, and were replaced by a raft of even newer genre shows—most of them unimpressive too.

  Among the longer-established shows, I’ve pretty much given up on “Star Trek: Voyager,” which just seems to get sillier and sillier. Many of the core Star Trek fans seem to have given up on it too, and its ratings have continued to drop. The latest attempt to shore the ratings up is to have the Voyager crew battle the Borg, but I’m not convinced that this is going to work either. Adding Lt. Worf, one of the most popular members of the old “Star Trek: The Next Generation” cast to the cast of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” has made that show a bit more interesting to watch, but it’s still nowhere near as good a show as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was during its best seasons, and I wonder how long “DS9” is going to be able to hold the attention and loyalty of the immense audience originally attracted to the franchise in the first place by “Star Trek: TNG” and the original “Star Trek.” Many of even the stone, hardcore Star Trek fans I talk to are growing restive with “DS9”—and most of them have already given up on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

  Meanwhile, the dreaded rival of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” a show called “Babylon 5,” has become a cult item in some circles, whipping up a depth of loyalty and devotion and intense emotional excitement among the core “B5” fans unlike anything I’ve seen since the original “Star Trek” left the air, and any “B5” panel or function at an SF convention (let alone at a media convention) is likely to be standing-room-only. I must admit that I don’t really understand what all the shouting is about, since to me most “B5” episodes still seem woodenly acted and leadenly directed, with mediocre-to-awful dialog, but an impressive number of SF writers and professionals seem to be closet “B5” fans, so there must be something there that I’m missing. Unfortunately, although the hardcore fans are intensely loyal, the ratings among the general television-viewing audience have reputedly been not all that good, and reportedly the producer is under heavy pressure from the network to scrap the projected fifth season of “Babylon 5” in favor of a more action-oriented spinoff series called “Babylon 5: Crusaders.” Only time will tell how this one is going to go.

  “The X-Files,” another cult show, is still quite popular, although I myself wonder how many seasons you can go on finding one unresolved cosmic conspiracy after another, even with your tongue as firmly in cheek as it often is here. “The X-Files” has a spin-off show this season, “Millennium,” which is sort of like an “X-Files” that concentrates mostly on the doings of serial killers, and without the tongue-in-cheek humor, played much more solemnly instead—somewhat disappointing, like an “X-Files” that takes itself seriously. There are also a number of “X-Files” clones, such as “Dark Skies,” most of them derivative and lacking the panache of the original. “Mystery Science Theater 3000” seems to be back, although I haven’t caught any of the new episodes. “Lois and Clark,” which was almost canceled last year, seems to be doing very well this season. “Third Rock from the Sun” is another big hit, and another case where I don’t understand what the shouting is about, since it still seems like an “Alf” retread to me. “Sliders” is a lame show that wastes a promising concept—travel among alternate worlds—by giving us alternate worlds that are mostly pretty silly and unbelievable. The quirky and interesting “StrangeLuck” died, and a new show with a somewhat similar kind of feel, “Early Edition,” is probably too limited in concept to survive; they’re already running low on new things to do with the basic gimmick, which is the old chestnut about the man who get’s tomorrow’s newspaper today (an idea that in the print genre goes back to at least 1939). I suppose that the new “The Outer Limits” is still on the air, but I’ve given up on that show too. The new the-puppets-are-really-aliens comedy, “Lost on Earth,” is, in a word, dumb.

  I consider “Highlander: The Series” to be a fantasy show rather than a science fiction one—surely it’s hard to take the initial premise seriously as anything other than fantasy—but whether you consider it to be fantasy or SF, it’s probably the best, or at least the most entertaining, genre show on television (with the possible exception of “Babylon 5”). The initial premise behind the show is as silly and as riddled with logical inconsistencies as that of the original Highlander movie, but, once you grant it that initial premise, the show itself is a fairly intelligent, stylish, and even reasonably sophisticated bit of junk food gothic, with some welcome lighter touches here and there to leaven things, and an effective lead in Adrian Paul, who plays the Byronic action hero with a nice combination of brooding dark intensity and self-depreciating humor, believable in a comic scene but able to suddenly seem menacing and formidable when the script calls for it. If nothing else, “Highlander” ought to be given credit for having been able to come up with interesting new variants on the same basic plot—MacLeod has a sword fight with another immortal, and cuts his head off just before the end titles—for four seasons now. Let’s hope they can keep it up for a while longer. “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” has also become immensely popular, as has its successful spin-off, “Xena: Warrior Princess.” “Hercules” is good cheesy fun, often deliberately silly and self-mocking, with likable performers, but its plotlines are even more limited than those of “Highlander” are, and after watching a few episodes, they all begin to seem a bit familiar; still, the deliberate anachronisms here, such as having Aphrodite look and talk like a surfer girl, usually provide a few good laughs (although the purist in me occasionally wonders, grumpily, how many kids are going to grow up believing that the Punic Wars took place in ancient Greece), and you certainly can’t complain that the show takes itself too seriously. Oddly, “Xena,” although just as absurd in concept, does seem to take itself a bit more seriously, or at least is a bit more solemn in tone, which is one reason why I like it less than “Hercules.” One unfortunate result of the success of “Hercules,” though, is that by the beginning of 1997 it was spanning a whole host of cloned imitations, such as “The New Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” and “The Adventures of Sinbad,” most of which look pretty lame even by comparison to “Hercules,” which is itself hardly high art. And there are more such shows in the pipeline behind these.

  Again this year, with a few partial exceptions, the boob tube pretty much lives up to its nickname.

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  The 54th World Science Fiction Convention, LACon III, was held in Anaheim, California, from August 29 to September 2, and drew an estimated attendance of 6,700—a good deal fewer than the 8,000–10,000 attendees who had been expected, but still enough to make it the fourth largest worldcon in history. The 1996 Hugo Awards, presented at LACon III, were: Best Novel, The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson; Best Novella, “The Death of Captain Future,” Allen Steele; Best Novelette, “Think Like a Dinosaur,” James Patrick Kelly; Best Short Story, “The Lincoln Train,” Maureen F. McHugh; Best Nonfiction, Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Original Artwork, Dinotopia: The World Beneath, James Gurney; Best Dramatic Presentation, “The Coming of Shadows,” from Babylon 5; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Ansible, edited by David Langford; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, William Rotsler; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to David Feintuch.

  The 1995 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet aboard the floating hotel the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, on April 27, 1996, were: Best Novel, The Terminal Experiment, Robert J. Sawyer; Best Novella, “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” Elizabeth Hand; Best Novelette, “Solitude,” Ursula K. Le Guin; Best Short Story, “Death and the Librarian,” Esther M. Friesner; plus a Grand Master award to A. E. van Vogt.

  The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Second Annual World Fantasy Convention in Schaumburg, Illinois, on November 3, 1996, were: Best Novel, T
he Prestige, Christopher Priest; Best Novella, “Radio Waves,” Michael Swanwick; Best Short Fiction, “The Grass Princess,” Gwyneth Jones; Best Collection, Seven Tales and a Fable, Gwyneth Jones; Best Anthology, The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones; Best Artist, Gahan Wilson; Special Award (Professional), to Richard Evans; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Marc Michaud for Necronomicon Press; plus a Life Achievement Award to Gene Wolfe.

  The 1996 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on June 8, were: Best Novel, Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates; Best First Novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities, Lucy Taylor; Best Collection, The Panic Hand, Jonathan Carroll; Best Long Fiction, “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” Stephen King; Best Short Story, “Chatting With Anubis,” Harlan Ellison; plus a Life Achievement Award to Harlan Ellison.

  The 1995 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter.

  The 1995 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “Jigoku no Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse),” by John G. McDaid.

  The 1995 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Headcrash, by Bruce Bethke.

  The 1995 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by Fairyland, by Paul J. McAuley.

  The 1995 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak (tie).

  * * *

  Dead in 1996 or early 1997 were: Horace L. Gold, 81, founding editor of Galaxy (he also edited Beyond and Worlds of If), one of the most important and influential editors in the history of science fiction, also known as the author of the classic fantasy story “Trouble with Water,” as well as other works collected in The Old Die Rich and Other Science Fiction Stories; Carl Sagan, 62, writer and scientist, one of the most influential science popularizers of the century, author of nonfiction books such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, and Cosmos, which was also a popular television series; Sam Merwin, Jr., 85, editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, in which capacity he discovered Jack Vance and published the first of Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” stories, as well as publishing classic work such as Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers”; Richard Evans, 46, acclaimed British editor, Editorial Director of Science Fiction at Gollancz, formerly Editorial Director of Science Fiction at MacDonald and Orbit; David Lasser, 94, editor of Science Wonder Stories, first president of The Interplanetary Society, author of one of the first popular books about space travel, 1931’s The Conquest of Space; Evangeline Walton, 88, author of the well-known fantasies The Island of the Mighty, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, Prince of Annwn, and other fantasy novels, winner of the World Fantasy Convention’s prestigious Life Achievement Award; Richard Powers, 75, perhaps the dominant and most frequently used SF cover artist of the fifties and early sixties, and one of the most popular SF artists of all time; Walter Sullivan, 78, longtime science reporter for The New York Times, author of an influential book about the search for alien intelligence, We Are Not Alone; Brian Daley, 48, SF writer, author of The Doomfarers of Coramonde and The Starfollowers of Coramonde, among others; Vera Chapman, 98, author of a trilogy of well-known Arthurian fantasies collected in a single volume as The Three Damosels, as well as of other fantasy novels; Richard Condon, 81, author of the classic paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was made into a movie of the same name, as well as of such novels as The Final Addiction and Prizzi’s Honor; Leigh Richmond, 84, author, in collaboration with her husband, the late Walt Richmond, of such SF novels as Shock Wave, Phase Two, and The Lost Millennium; Frank Riley, 80, co-winner with collaborator Mark Clifton of the 1955 Best Novel Hugo for a magazine serial later published in book form as They’d Rather Be Right; Claudia Peck, 43, SF writer, author of Spirit Crossings; L. A. Taylor, 57, SF and mystery writer, author of The Blossom of Erda and Catspaw; Eleanor Butler Cameron, 84, children’s book author best known to genre readers for her book The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet; P. L. Travers, 96, author of the long-running “Mary Poppins” series of children’s fantasy novels, as well as of other fantasy books; Jerry Siegel, 81, cocreator, along with the late Joe Schuster, of the original Superman comic book; Burne Hogarth, 84, comic-strip artist who worked for many years on the Tarzan newspaper comic strip, and on many other comics; Shamus Culhane, 87, pioneering animator who worked on Disney’s Snow White as well as on many other animated features and cartoons; Jon Pertwee, 76, actor, probably best known to the genre audience as the third actor to portray Doctor Who in the BBC television series; Ed Wood, 70, co-founder of the small press line Advent: Publishers, which produced many important early works of SF criticism, such as Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, also a well-known fan; Willis Conover, 75, early fan and correspondent with H. P. Lovecraft, author of the critical study Lovecraft At Last, also known for his broadcasting work with the Voice of America; Charles Burbee, 81, well-known fan and fanzine editor; Redd Boggs, 75, well-known fan, fannish humorist, and fanzine editor; Ethel Lindsay, 75, longtime fan and fanzine editor, prominent in British fannish circles, another fan who, along with her friend Ella Parker, went out of her way to be kind to me when I was a totally unknown new fan at his first science fiction convention; Joni Stopa, long-time Chicago-area fan, a friend; David R. Friesner, father of SF writer Esther M. Friesner; Neil Hudner, 55, half-brother of the late Philip K. Dick; Christopher Robin Milne, 75, son of the late children’s fantasy writer A. A. Milne, and the “Christopher Robin” about whose adventures the “Winnie the Pooh” books were written; Raymond Dozois, 80, father of SF editor Gardner Dozois.

  IMMERSION

  Gregory Benford

  Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel Timescape won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, and Tides of Light. His most recent books are the two concluding volumes of his Galactic Cluster series, Furious Gulf and Sailing Bright Eternity, a new novel in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Fear, and a collection of stories, Matter’s End. He has recently become one of the regular science columnists for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in our Seventh and Ninth Annual Collections. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.

  Here he takes us to Africa for a suspenseful and unsettling look at what it really means to be human—and how it came to be that way.

  Africa came to them in air thick with smells. In the dry, prickly heat was a promise of the primitive, of ancient themes beyond knowing.

  Warily Kelly gazed out at the view beyond the formidable walls. “We’re safe here from the animals?”

  “I imagine so. Those walls are high and there are guard canines. Wirehounds, I believe.”

  “Good.” She smiled in a way that he knew implied a secret was about to emerge. “I really urged you to come here to get you away from Helsinki.”

  “Not to study chimpanzees?”

  “Oh, that might be useful—or better still, fun,” she said with wifely nonchalance. “My main consideration was that if you had stayed in Helsinki you might be dead.”

  He stopped looking at the striking scenery. She was serious. “You think they would…?”

  “They could, which is a better guide to action than trying to guess woulds.”

  “I see.” He didn’t, but he had learned to trust her judgment in matters of the world. “You think Imperial Industrie would…?”

  “Knock you off for undermining their case? Sure. But they’d be careful.”

  “But the case is over. Settled.”

  He had made a successful sociometric prediction of
political and economic trends in central Europe. His reputation was powerful enough to cause a fall in certain product markets. Economics increasingly resembled fashion: Commodities racheted like hemlines.

  Imperial Industrie had lost considerably—a fortune, even for a world-wrapping corporation. They had accused him of manipulating the markets, but he had in all honesty merely tried to test his new model of sociohistory. His reputation among econometric circles was enough to circulate the predictions. Imperial Industrie, he thought, was simply being childish. Reason would prevail there soon enough.

  “You intend to make more predictions, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Well, once I get some better parameter fixes—”

  “There. Then they can lose again. Imperial doesn’t like losing.”

  “You exaggerate.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand.

  Then too, he thought, perhaps he did need a vacation. To be on a rough, natural world—he had forgotten, in the years buried in Helsinki, how vivid wild things could be. Greens and yellows leaped out, after decades amid steel and glitter.

  Here the sky yawned impossibly deep, unmarked by the graffiti of aircraft, wholly alive to the flapping wonder of birds. Bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. Beyond the station walls he could see a sole tree thrashed by an angry wind. Its topknot finally blew off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Distant, eroded mesas had yellow streaks down their shanks which, as they met the forest, turned a burnt orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the valley, where the chimps ranged, lay a dusky canopy hidden behind low gray clouds and raked by winds. A thin, cold rain fell there and Leon wondered what it was like to cower beneath the sheets of moisture, without hope of shelter or warmth. Perhaps Helsinki’s utter predictability was better, but he wondered, breathing in the tangy air.