The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Among the sparse crop of general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, the standout item, and probably the one that will be the most solidly appealing to many genre fans, will almost certainly be Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (Random House), by Bruce Sterling. Usually I’m skeptical of futurologists, who often seem to have an insecure grasp on The Way Things Actually Work, and produce impractical and romanticized scenarios of the Days To Come, but Sterling is as hardheaded and rational as he is vividly imaginative and incredibly well informed; we’ve been getting bits and pieces of Sterling’s future world in his fiction for decades now, and it’s not only interesting to see it laid out in this fashion, but serves to reinforce my long-held feeling that Sterling’s is one of the few science fiction futures that feels as if it might actually someday happen. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway), by Bill Bryson, makes a gallant attempt to be exactly what the title says that it is, with special emphasis on scientific topics, everything handled with Bryson’s customary wit and élan. A Brief History of the Human Race (Norton), by Michael Cook, is pretty self-explanatory too, and has some fascinating data. And Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (HarperCollins), by Simon Winchester, is a scary depiction of a natural disaster of such epic proportions that it might well be something from an apocalyptic science fiction novel.

  Once again, it was a strong year for fantasy movies, but a mediocre one – the more critical among us might be tempted to say “piss-poor” – for science fiction movies.

  The heavy-hitters at the box office this year for science fiction were the two Matrix sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. I was so disappointed in The Matrix Reloaded, which is much worse than the original movie, The Matrix (which I was only lukewarm about to begin with), that I couldn’t force myself to go see Matrix Revolutions – although fairness prompts me to add that some people have said that it was much better than its predecessor. The Matrix Reloaded is a typical “computer game” movie, where the kids duck and bob in their seats throughout, their hands twitching as if manipulating imaginary joysticks, and plot and characterization and every other consideration take a very distant backseat in comparison to the importance of the CGI effects. Of course, much the same thing could be said about the original The Matrix itself – but the sequel is more bloated and repetitive and less inventive, and a lot more self-important and self-satisfied, with lots of Talking Heads blathering pompously to each other for extended periods of time. For a movie that has little reason for existence other than to deliver one action scene after another, it’s a curiously sluggish movie, too. Even many of the action scenes seem sluggish, especially the interminable Kung Fu fighting scenes, which seem to go on forever. When you find yourself sneaking glances at your watch during the Big Fight scene you know that the movie is doing something wrong. I wasn’t all that impressed with the much-ballyhooed CGI effects, either; some of them are good, sure, but I could clearly spot it most of the time when the real-life (sort of) Neo changed into the computer-animated Neo, which sort of blunted the impact. I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourselves whether Matrix Revolutions was actually better or not.

  Terminator 3 was another lame and spavined sequel (or sequel to a sequel, really) where even the action scenes, especially the endless car-chase sequences, generated tedium and ennui rather than tension and excitement; this one makes The Matrix Reloaded look like a masterpiece, and the franchise really should have thrown in the towel after the much-superior Terminator 2. Paycheck is slicker, in some ways, and has better actors in it, but it’s yet another movie based on a Philip K. Dick short story that manages to translate it to the screen as an action movie full of car chases and paranoid intrigue while somehow leaving out most of the philosophical/metaphysical speculation that made Dick’s work so interesting. Both of these movies, not cheap to make, performed “below expectations” at the box office, Paycheck doing the least well of the two. The Core was rotten to the, with good special effects but little else to recommend it, especially not plot-logic or even a pretense of scientific accuracy.

  On the borderland between SF and fantasy, X2: X-Men United was a considerably better sequel as sequels go than either The Matrix Reloaded or Terminator 3, and was quite successful commercially. It’s not as good as the original movie, but once you make allowances for the fact that it’s a movie version of a superhero comic book, working on comic book logic, assumptions, and aesthetics, rather than a science fiction film, you can relax and enjoy it; it’s stylish and well-produced, and moves along briskly to its ultimately rather disappointing ending. Daredevil was not as enjoyable as X2, being considerably darker and more brooding, or as successful as last year’s blockbuster Spider-Man, but did well enough to probably satisfy its producers. Just to prove that comic book movies aren’t always successful, though, two of the year’s biggest commercial and critical bombs were also drawn from comics or graphic novels. I’ve heard The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen referred to as “the worst movie ever made.” Was it that bad? Well, maybe not – but Lord knows, it wasn’t good. This one was a real stinker in almost every regard, and it died a well-deserved death at the box office, which must have been especially painful since it was a very expensive movie to make. Another big-budget flop was The Hulk, a movie for which expectations were even higher, since it was directed by acclaimed director Ang Lee – which didn’t save it from being an awful movie that sank without a trace.

  And that was about it for science fiction or almost-science fiction movies this year. Coming up next year is a big-budget movie version of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, with Will Smith, that is already giving off vibes that it’s going to be remarkably dumb, and have very little, if anything, to do with Asimov’s classic. And – O joy! O rapture! – the final Star Wars movie.

  It was a much better year for fantasy movies, both in terms of quality and overall box office performance. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was the dominating movie of the year, in or out of the genre, breaking box office records as well as garnering rave reviews and winning eleven Oscars, including the prestigious Best Picture Oscar, the only genre fantasy film ever to win one. Was it really that good? Well, probably not. But it was still pretty damn good, regardless, and probably deserves a good healthy proportion of the money and accolades thrown at it. There were flaws and missteps in it, of course (the Tolkien purist in me still longs for the Scouring of the Shire sequence that got left out, while at the same time I fully understand how difficult – if not impossible – it would have been to work it into the film), including a final twenty minutes that should have insured that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, but which instead had the audience coughing and shuffling their feet impatiently. But so much of the rest of the movie was so spectacular, with good acting, good pacing, great build-up of suspense, wonderful set-dressing and costuming, spectacular battle scenes, and CGI effects a lot better (and more seamlessly integrated into the film) than those in The Matrix Reloaded, that it’s hard to quibble too much with the movie, in spite of some pretty substantial departures from The Canon. It certainly was worth the price of admission, perhaps more so than any other movie I saw that year. And although purists may niggle as they will, it’s without a doubt the best film version of The Lord of the Rings that we’re going to get during the lifetimes of most people who read these words, and a much better one than we had any reason to hope for. (Oddly, with all the high-tech special effects that saturated movies this year, one of the most mind-blowing and exhilarating moments in Return of the King was the relatively simple sequence showing the lighting of the alarm beacons, with the message being passed from peak to peak to peak from Gondor to Rohan. Now that’s entertainment!)

  The other two big fantasy movies this year were also immense hits at the box office – and both of them were actually entertaining and reasonably well-made too (what are the odds?) I must admit that I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a movie
based on a dated and corny theme-park ride at Disneyland, with something less than keen anticipation; in fact, my expectations were about as low as they could get. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, in spite of a storyline that made little real sense and plot-logic holes that you could sail a pirate ship through. I’d expected all of that, of course. What I hadn’t expected was the humor. This is a very funny movie throughout, and features a flamboyant, outrageously over-the-top performance from Johnny Depp – in fact, if Depp’s performance was one whit less over-the-top, the movie wouldn’t have worked at all. Humor isn’t Pirates only strong suit, of course. In addition to the sly humor, Pirates is also a well-directed, fast-paced action movie with some great fight scenes and some eyepopping cinematography, and some good CGI work (I think the Walking Dead People effects here are actually better than the similar effects in The Return of the King), with really good supporting acting from Geoffrey Rush (Hollywood need look no further if they ever want someone to play Long John Silver) and Orlando Bloom. The year’s other movie-inspired-by-a-theme-park-ride, The Haunted Mansion, had some funny moments as well, and featured Eddie Murphy doing his finest Willie Best imitation, but performed lacklusterly at the box office anyway. The year’s other fantasy blockbuster was the animated feature Finding Nemo, which did great business at the box office and has already become the best-selling DVD of all time. This is a typical Pixar movie (there must be great grinding of teeth at Disney that Pixar wouldn’t renew their distribution deal with them), with the usual virtues of such; I myself didn’t think that it was as good as Toy Story, my favorite of the Pixar films, or even Monsters Inc., but it’s clever, inventive, and funny, well-animated, with good voiceover work, particularly by Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of the perpetually befuddled fish Dory.

  Speaking of animated films, it was hard to find Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in 2003, except for a few big-city art theaters, but by now it should be widely available from most good movie-rental places – so rent it. It’s one of the strangest and most beautifully animated films I’ve ever seen, wildly imaginative and lushly weird, with a storyline that would have scared the pants off me when I was a little kid, and yet a real depth of human sentiment. Another animated film cut from a similar kind of stylishly weird cloth is The Triplets of Belleville; this isn’t as grand an accomplishment as Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s masterpiece, but it’s funny, surprising, and charmingly surreal, and well worth seeking out (and the song from it beat the snot out of all the other Oscar-nominated songs, in my opinion).

  Another movie that wasn’t a box office champ but scored a hit with critics as well as those small audiences that managed to actually see it was Whale Rider, a quiet, subtle, and moving fantasy with almost no special effects, and not even any monsters or swordfights, but which does deliver a fascinating look at cultures in conflict in the modern world, and a star-making turn from thirteen-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was up for a Best Actress Oscar for it.

  A weird little movie that slipped quickly through the art-house circuit, Donnie Darko, is worth catching as well; it’s not entirely successful, for my money, but it’s certainly not The Same Old Thing either, and has many flashes of intelligence and imagination (a lot of the more pretentious moments were explained for me when I found out that the writer/director is only twenty-one; I was pretty pretentious when I was twenty-one, too). The new live-action Peter Pan had a considerably bigger budget and much higher expectations attached to it, but it slipped through town just about as fast as Donnie Darko had, fast enough that it was gone by the time the holiday season was over and I never got to see it; friends who did see it tell me that it was actually pretty good, but if so, it failed to find its audience, and was a box office disappointment.

  The much-hyped big budget live-action version of The Cat in the Hat was also a disappointment, both critically and financially (I was going to say it was a dog, but I’m better than that, so I won’t).

  Next year we can look forward to a new Harry Potter movie, Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2, and a big budget remake of the old television show Bewitched, among other treats. Restrain your enthusiasm.

  Things didn’t look a whole lot better for SF and fantasy on television either; in fact, they looked worse, as several of the most popular shows on the air (among genre fans, anyway) have been cancelled, or are in danger of being cancelled. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Farscape went off the air last year, and the much-discussed new Buffy spinoff show never materialized. In early 2004, the original Buffy spinoff, Angel, was cancelled as well. With the demise of Firefly, which was cancelled after a short run last year, this means that Buffy producer Josh Whedon has gone from having three shows running at once to having no shows running at all, in the course of one year; it’s fascinating how quickly these TV franchise empires can disappear. It’s a shame about Angel, which, although not as good as it had been in its first few years, was still one of the few intelligent and witty fantasy shows left on television, and had actually been improving in quality at the time it was given the ax. Enterprise changed its name to Star Trek: Enterprise and pumped in more action in an attempt to boost ratings, but ratings have not gone up significantly, if at all, and the future of this show is also seriously in doubt; its cancellation could spell the effective end of the whole once-mighty Star Trek franchise, since the failure of last year’s Star Trek: Nemesis has pretty much killed the prospects for there ever being another Star Trek theatrical movie either. Oddly, Star Trek, Angel, and Buffy novels are still selling briskly, so we’re faced with the peculiar situation of having these series continue a ghost existence in print long after the parent shows are off the air (as first-run shows, anyway; the reruns of all of them will be around for years). Much the same is true of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, whose producers finally admitted last year that their “teenage witch” was now in her late twenties and threw in the towel; novelizations of the series still march on, though. A new version of Tarzan swung onto the WB network, and almost immediately swung off again into oblivion. Tru Calling, a new fantasy series starring Eliza Dushku, formerly Faith on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, doesn’t seem to be doing all that well either.

  I think that the current craze for “reality TV” shows has hurt the survival-chances of genre TV shows (and maybe of fictional drama shows in general – although the craze for “forensic” cop shows such as CSI runs counter to the reality-show tide). Reality shows are so much cheaper to make than regular shows, especially genre shows that call for expensive special-effects work, and you can’t seem to make them so dumb or so repugnant that people won’t watch them anyway, no matter how hard you try (and some of them are trying pretty hard). So why make anything else, when you can make reality shows that will get much higher ratings than the fiction shows ever did anyway and cost a fraction of their cost to produce?

  Not every genre show on TV was sinking in the ratings, though. Stargate SG1 and Smallville are still doing well, as is Charmed, which was renewed for another season in spite of the fact that the show – never a heavyweight show at the best of times – has become so silly in the last couple of seasons as to be nearly unwatchable (I finally gave up when they did an I Dream of Genie homage episode). Joan of Arcadia, an updated modern take on the Joan of Arc story, became a surprise hit this year, although I doubt that it’s going to go on to replicate what became of the real Joan. I don’t get HBO anymore, but a new show there, Carnivale, seems to have been at least a succès d’estime for them. A new miniseries version of Battlestar Galactica, which to me didn’t seem significantly better than the lame old version, did well enough in the ratings on the Sci-Fi Channel to have apparently earned itself a regular series slot. The Sci-Fi Channel did a new miniseries version of Children of Dune that seems to have been popular, and is going to do a miniseries version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, which could be interesting.

  Century City, a show about a law firm in the year 2030, is set to debut sometime in 2004. I suspect, somewhat cynically, that the netwo
rk Suits see this as a great chance to recycle all the scripts from all their other lawyer shows, with only a few futuristic bells and whistles added to the episodes to justify them as Sci Fi, but we’ll see. It’s worth noting that this is the first genre show (particularly an SF show) to debut in prime time on one of the so-called “regular” or Big Three networks in longer than I can remember, and it’ll be interesting to see how well it does. Besides, it’s got to be better than the new updated version of Mr. Ed, which is also coming up for us sometime in 2004. (Doesn’t it?) (To say nothing – and please don’t – about the new TV version of Lost in Space.) (And Dark Shadows. Are there any old TV shows left that they’re not recycling?)

  The Sixty-first World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon 3, was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from August 30 through September 1, 2003, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,760. The 2003 Hugo Awards, presented at Torcon 3, were: Best Novel, Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer; Best Novella, Coraline, by Neil Gaiman; Best Novelette, “Slow Music,” by Michael Swanwick; Best Short Story, “Falling Onto Mars,” by Geoffrey A. Landis; Best Related Book, Better To Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Conversations with Dead People”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Rich and Nicki Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Sue Mason; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Wen Spencer; and the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award to Edgar Pangborn.