The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection
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2011 was another weak year in the art-book market, even weaker than the year before. As usual, your best bet was probably the latest in a long-running Best of the Year series for fantastic art, Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also quite good were Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (Rockport Publishers, Inc.), assembled by Karen Haber; Exposé 9: Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe (Ballistic Publishing), by Daniel P. Wade; A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The Lord of the Rings (HarperCollins); and Fantasy + 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations (CYPI/Gingko Press), edited by Vincent Zhao.
There were a few excellent books collecting the works of single artists, the best of which was probably Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (Titan), by Chris Foss, although Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art (IDW Publishing), by Jeffrey Jones, was also very good, and Mark Schultz: Various Drawings, Volume 5 (Flesk), by Mark Schultz, was worthwhile as well. Girl Genius Book Ten: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse is the latest in the Hugo-winning series by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio, and Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books) is a collection of picture books by the creator of last year’s Oscar-nominated short film, The Lost Thing, which is included.
An odd item, straddling the line between nonfiction and art, is Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It (British Library), by Mike Ashley, a catalogue of this year’s British Library SF exhibition, a mixture of text and art that covers six centuries of speculative art from 1482 to the present.
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According to the Box Office Mojo Web site (www.boxofficemojo.com), seven out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another, if you accept animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films.” (Somewhat unusually these days, there were two nongenre movies in the top ten: The Hangover Part II and Fast Five.) Four out of five of the year’s top five box-office champs were genre movies by the above somewhat loose definition, as were twelve out of the top twenty earners, twenty-seven of the top fifty, and roughly forty out of the top one hundred, more or less (I might have missed one here or there, and there are some fuzzy calls in classification). Three of the top five were fantasy movies, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and one was a science fiction movie (albeit a rather silly one), Transformers: Dark of the Moon. (The Hangover Part II was the only nongenre movie to break the top five, coming in fourth.) The following five were made up of an animated movie (Cars 2), a superhero movie (Thor), and a science fiction movie (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), with the nongenre Fast Five and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol cutting in at sixth place and seventh place overall out of ten. Further down the list were superhero movie Captain America: The First Avenger at twelth place, the steampunkish Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (technically not a genre movie, although the physical action was unlikely enough that you could make a not unreasonable case for considering it a fantasy, and Holmes has always been associated with the genre) at ninth, animated film Kung Fu Panda 2 at fifteenth place, animated film Puss in Boots at sixteenth, superhero movie X-Men: First Class at seventeenth, semi-animated (it also featured human actors, interacting with the CGI characters) film The Smurfs at nineteenth, and Spielberg/monster-movie homage Super 8 at twenty-first.
This shouldn’t surprise anybody—genre films of one sort or another have dominated the box office top ten for more than a decade now. You have to go all the way back to 1998 to find a year when the year’s top earner was a nongenre film, Saving Private Ryan.
The year’s number one box office champ was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which so far has earned a staggering $1,328,111,219 worldwide. Transformers: Dark of the Moon also earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, as did Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, with a steep drop-off thereafter to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, which earned “only” $702,316,133.
In spite of these immense sums, it wasn’t a particularly good year at the box office overall for the movie industry. Overall profits were down 3.8 percent to 10.17 billion from 2010, and ticket sales fell 4.7 percent to 1.28 billion, the worst since 1995. I suspect that, in the grip of a worsening recession, it’s getting to be just too expensive to go to the movies for an average family, especially when most movies will be available on DVD or on the Internet in only a matter of months. The ability of 3-D to make moviegoers pay more per ticket, something that’s been propping up profits, seems to be wearing thin as well, probably because there are so few films that 3-D actually adds anything to; often, in fact, it makes the moviegoing experience worse, muddying the colors and darkening the paleatte. It should also perhaps make the movie industry uneasy that the highest-grossing nonsequel of the year was Thor; all the rest of the top ten movies were sequels. Which makes you wonder how many times you can go to the same well before it runs dry.
There were a few actual SF movies by my definition (as opposed to junk popcorn bad-science SF extravaganzas like Transformers: Dark of the Moon), and a few of them were even pretty good, but few of them were wild successes at the box office. Of the movies that got some kind of critical respect, the one that did the best was Super 8, which finished at twenty-first. It was half of a good movie, with the early Spielberg homage stuff, following kids who are trying to make an amateur monster movie, brilliant and effective; when the real monster starts showing up, things go downhill, and I couldn’t help but feel that it would have been a better movie without the monster altogether. Similarly, Cowboys and Aliens, which only made it to thirtieth on the list, was also half of a good movie, with the cowboy setup interesting, but suffered increasingly from bad writing and the ridiculous motivations for the actions of the aliens (which really made no sense) as it went along; they might have been better off making it as a straight cowboy movie if they couldn’t do a better job with the “aliens” part. Real Steel, perhaps the film that came closest this year to being a core SF movie, based on a Richard Matheson story about boxing robots, widely described as “Rocky with robots,” only finished thirty-fifth on the list. Contagion was a somber and realistic look at the spread of a worldwide pandemic, without extraneous car chases and gun battles thrown in—which is perhaps why it only made it to forty-fifth on the list. The Adjustment Bureau only made it to fifty-sixth place, perhaps indicating that people are getting tired of Philip K. Dick movies. The two best-reviewed genre movies of the year, Woody Allen’s time-travel love letter to 1920s Paris, Midnight in Paris, and Martin Scorsese’s steampunkish homage to Georges Melies (perhaps the closest anyone has yet come to putting a Howard Waldrop story on film), Hugo, finished fifty-ninth and fifty-second respectively. Paul, a mixture of slob comedy with Area 51/alien stuff in the form of a road picture, came in eighty-first.
The two worst-reviewed, most critically savaged, genre movies of the year were probably Green Lantern (twenty-fourth) and The Green Hornet (thirty-second)—although it is perhaps a bit too much to hope that this indicates that superhero movies are wearing thin too. (You’ll be seeing a lot more of them next year.)
Most of the buzz about movies coming up in 2012 so far seems to be going to The Hobbit, the Peter Jackson–directed prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies, to Prometheus, the prequel to Alien, to the Avengers movie, to the new Star Trek movie (although that probably will be in 2013 rather than in 2012), and to The Dark Knight Rises, the last of the Christopher Nolan–directed Batman movies. John Carter, a film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, is a movie I would have been absolutely wild to see when I was thirteen. There’s is a film version of the bestselling YA series, The Hunger Games, and a reboot of the pioneering TV vampire soap opera Dark Shadows as a movie, starring Johnny Depp. People seem to be divided between anticipation and dread for the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, The Amazing Spider-Man. Nobody seems to be looking forward to another
Men in Black sequel, but that won’t stop them from making it anyway. There’s also going to be the second half of the last Twilight movie, which, although it totally unexcites me, will no doubt be among the box office champs of 2012.
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The big story of 2011, as far as SF and fantasy shows on television are concerned, was the huge success of HBO’s A Game of Thrones, based on the bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. Response to A Game of Thrones was immense, generating buzz far beyond the usual boundaries of the genre, generating commentary in places like The New York Times, and inspiring references in comic strips, game shows, The Big Bang Theory, and even drawing a satire from The Onion—and making George R. R. Martin, who was already famous within the SF/fantasy genre, a widely recognizable figure outside it as well. HBO’s other genre show, the campy vampire show True Blood, had a disappointing fourth season that turned off many of its core viewing demographic; let’s hope they can do better with the upcoming fifth season (what they primarily need is to increase the quality of the writing, which sagged this season, and bring it back up to its former high standard; the actors are mostly pretty good, but they can only work with what they’re given).
The two biggest debuts of SF shows in 2011 were probably Terra Nova, in which scientists escape through time from a doomed and ruined Earth to attempt to restart the human race in a prehistoric era, and Falling Skies, in which embattled guerilla militiamen battle alien invasion forces who have destroyed much of the Earth and killed most of the people, both expensive shows for television, and both produced by movie director Steven Spielberg, in his first foray into television. Falling Skies, which is perfectly valid as a genuine bit of military SF, although offering nothing that print SF fans haven’t seen dozens of times before, seems to have established itself, but Terra Nova, the more expensive of the two to produce, because of all those CGI dinosaurs, is wobbling badly in the ratings, and may not make it. Another Spielberg-produced show, The River, which looks like a Lost-flavored horror series, is coming up.
Cult favorite SF show Fringe, another expensive show to produce, is also wobbling in the ratings, and may not make it. If Fringe and Terra Nova do die, they’ll be following many another expensive special effects heavy shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Firefly, and Stargate and its sequels into oblivion—the clear lesson being that supernatural shows, which are far less expensive to produce than SF shows (all you really need is some creature makeup), are more likely to survive on television than SF shows, particularly ones that take place in outer space. Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, The Walking Dead, Teen Wolf, and American Horror Story are all coming back, to be joined by new supernatural shows, such as The Secret Circle, about witches, The Fades, House of Anubis, and the dueling fairy-tale series, Grimm and Once Upon a Time.
No Ordinary Family and The Cape died, and the long-running Smallville finished its final season, leaving the airways momentarily cleared of superheroes, although that probably won’t last long. V died. Spy spoof Chuck will finish its fifth and final half season in 2012. A Gifted Man, a rather peculiar attempt to cross the doctor show and the ghost show, featuring a doctor who is haunted by the nagging ghost of his wife, is sinking, and may already be gone by the time you read this. A new show, Touch, which, as far as I can tell from the coming attractions is about an autistic boy with preternatural powers of some sort, started early in the year; too early to tell how it’s going to be received.
The SF comedies Eureka and Warehouse 13 are returning, as are Doctor Who and Primeval and the British version of Being Human, although the fates of the American spin-offs of Torchwood and Being Human are uncertain, and they may both be dead. The animated SF satire Futurama, after being canceled for a couple of years and spinning off a couple of special features, is returning to regular production. Another animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, is also returning. Mention should probably be made here of The Big Bang Theory, which, although not strictly a genre show, is so chockful of sly geek knowledge references to movie and television SF, print SF, online gaming, science, and comic books that I can’t imagine that it doesn’t appeal to the majority of genre readers.
A miniseries version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been promised for a couple of years now, but has yet to make an appearance.
The 69th World Science Fiction Convention, Renovation, was held in Reno, Nevada, from August 17 to August 21, 2011. The 2011 Hugo Awards, presented at Renovation, were: Best Novel, Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis; Best Novella, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” by Ted Chiang; Best Novelette, “The Emperor of Mars,” by Allen M. Steele; Best Short Story, “For Want of a Nail,” by Mary Robinette Kowal; Best Related Work, Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea; Best Editor, Long Form, Lou Anders; Best Editor, Short Form, Sheila Williams; Best Professional Artist, Shaun Tan; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Doctor Who: “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Inception; Best Graphic Story, Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio; Best Semiprozine, Clarkesworld; Best Fanzine, The Drink Tank; Best Fan Writer, Claire Brialey; Best Fan Artist, Brad W. Foster; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Lev Grossman.
The 2010 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2011, were: Best Novel, Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis; Best Novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” by Rachel Swirsky; Best Novelette, “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made,” by Eric James Stone; Best Short Story (tie), “Ponies,” by Kij Johnson and “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” by Harlan Ellison; Ray Bradbury Award, Inception; the Andre Norton Award to I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett; and Solstice Awards to Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr.) and Michael Whelan.
The 2011 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet on October 30, 2011, in San Diego, California, during the Twentieth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor; Best Novella, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon,” by Elizabeth Hand; Best Short Story, “Fossil-Figures,” by Joyce Carol Oates; Best Collection, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, by Karen Joy Fowler; Best Anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer; Best Artist, Kinuko Y. Craft; Special Award (Professional), to Marc Gascoigne, for Angry Robot; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Alisa Krasnostein, for Twelfth Planet Press; plus the Life Achievement Award to Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer.
The 2010 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America on June 19, 2011, at the Long Island Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, New York, were: Best Novel, A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub; Best First Novel, Black and Orange, by Benjamin Kane Ethridge and Castle of Los Angeles, by Lisa Morton; Best Long Fiction, Invisible Fences, by Norman Prentiss; Best Short Fiction, “The Folding Man,” by Joe R. Lansdale; Best Collection, Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King; Best Anthology, Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas; Nonfiction, To Each Their Darkness, by Gary A. Braunbeck; Best Poetry Collection, Dark Matters, by Bruce Boston; plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to Ellen Datlow and Al Feldstein.
The 2011 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald.
The 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Sultan of the Clouds,” by Geoffrey A. Landis.
The 2011 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, by Mark Hodder.
The 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes.
The 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugresic.
The 2011 Sidewise Award went to When Angels Wept, by Eric G. Swedin (Long Form) and “A Clash of Eagles,” by Alan Smale (Short Form).
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The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to Katherine MacLean.
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Dead in 2011 or early 2012 were: Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee and SFWA Grandmaster Anne McCaffery, 85, the first woman to win a Hugo and Nebula Award, author of more than a hundred books, including the famous and bestselling Pern series, whose best-known works are probably “Weyr Search,” “Dragonriders,” and The White Dragon, the first SF novel to make the New York Times Best Seller List, a friend; Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree award-winner Joanna Russ, 74, SF writer and critic, author of such acclaimed books as The Female Man, Picnic on Paradise, and And Chaos Died, as well as much short fiction years ahead of its time, such as “Nobody’s Home,” “When It Changed,” “Souls,” and the Alyx stories, and also of many books of critical essays, a friend; distinguished fantasist Diana Wynne Jones, 76, winner of the World Fantasy Convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and author of forty books, including the Chrestomanci series, Archer’s Goon, Howl’s Moving Castle, which was later made into an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, and satirical nonfiction work, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland; Russell Hoban, 86, author of more than fifty children’s books, including a long-running series about Frances the badger, perhaps best known to genre audiences for his adult SF novel Riddley Walker, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Ditmar Award; Thomas J. Bassler, 79, who wrote SF as T. J. BASS, best known for his work in the 1970s such as the SF novels Half Past Human and The Godwhale; horror writer and editor Alan Ryan, 68, World Fantasy Award-winning author of many short stories that were collected in books such as The Bones Wizard, a friend; prolific SF writer Larry Tritten, 72, particularly known for his humorous short stories; Brian Jacques, 71, children’s fantasist, author of the well-known twenty-volume Redwall series; prominent Australian fantasy author Sara Warneke, 54, who wrote many bestselling novels as Sara Douglass; prominent German SF writer, agent, and editor Hans Joachim Alpers, 67; British writer Euan Harvey, 38, a frequent contributor to Realms of Fantasy and elsewhere; Gilbert Adair, 66, Scottish writer, critic and translator; Colin Harvey, 51, British SF writer, author of six novels and more than thirty short stories; William Sleator, 66, children’s and YA novelist; Juan Carlos Planells, 61, Spanish author and critic; Leslie Esdaile Banks, 51, popular urban fantasy author who published as L. A. Banks; Joel Rosenberg, 57, SF and mystery author; John Frederick Burke, 89, British SF and mystery author who wrote as Jonathan Burke; Vittorio Curtoni, 61, Italian SF writer, editor, and translator; Minoru Komatsu, 80, Japanese SF writer, screenwriter, and essayist, who wrote under the name Sakyo Komatsu; Ion Hobana, 80, Romanian SF writer; Moacyr Scliar, 73, Brazilian fantasy author; John Glasby, 82, British SF and fantasy author; Wim Stolk, 61, Dutch fantasy artist and writer who wrote as W. J. Maryson; Lisa Wolfson, 47, YA and SF author who wrote as L. K. Madigan; John M. Iggulden, 93, Australian SF author; British SF writer Lionel Percy Wright, 87, who wrote as Lan Wright; Richard Bessière, 88, French SF author; Louis Thirion, 88, French SF author; Thierry Martens, 69, Belgian author, editor, anthologist, and comics historian; Mark Shepherd, 49, SF author; Les Daniels, 68, comics historian and author of Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, who also wrote a series of vampire novels; Glenn Lord, 80, U.S. agent for the Howard estate, author of The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard; Theodore Roszak, 77, SF writer and essayist, author of The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society; H.R.F. Keating, 84, mystery writer who also occasionally wrote SF; Craig Thomas, 69, Welsh technothriller writer of Firefox, which was later made into a well-known movie; Martin Woodhouse, 78, British author and screenwriter; Robert C. W. Ettinger, 92, cryonics advocate and occasional SF writer, author of the nonfiction books The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman; Martin H. Greenberg, 70, prolific anthologist and academic, involved in the editing of more than a thousand anthologies, founder of the book-packaging company Tekno Books; Margaret K. McElderry, 98, children’s editor and publisher, founder of children’s imprint Margaret K. McElderry Books; Philip Rahman, 59, cofounder of the weird fiction publisher Fedogan and Bremer; Malcolm M. Ferguson, 91, writer, bookseller, librarian, and collector; Darrell K. Sweet, 77, one of the most acclaimed SF and fantasy cover artists of modern times; Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 67, prominent fantasy cover artist; Gene Szafran, 69, SF cover artist and illustrator; Cliff Robertson, 88, movie and TV actor, probably best known to genre audiences as the lead in Charly, the film version of “Flowers for Algernon,” and for his role as Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man movies; Harry Morgan, 96, movie and TV actor probably best known to everybody as ‘Colonel Potter’ from the TV show M*A*S*H, but who also appeared in many films, including Inherit the Wind and The Ox-Bow Incident; Peter Falk, 83, film and television actor probably best known for his long-running role as the rumpled detective in Columbo, but who will also be familiar to genre audiences for roles in The Princess Bride, Murder by Death, and Tune in Tomorrow; Nicol Williamson, 75, British stage and film actor, probably best known to genre audiences for his roles as Merlin in Excalibur, as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and as Little John in Robin and Marian; James Arness, 88, film and television actor best known as Matt Dillion on Gunsmoke, but who also appeared as The Thing in The Thing from Another World and in Them!; John Wood, 81, stage and screen actor, probably best known to genre audiences for roles in WarGames, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Chocolat; Bob Anderson, 89, former Olympic fencer, fight director, stunt performer, and swordmaster, who staged many of cinema’s most famous duels in films such as The Princess Bride, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the Star Wars movies; James “Rusty” Hevelin, 89, longtime fan, fanzine publisher, collector, and huckster, a friend; Michael D. Glickson, 64, longtime Canadian convention and fanzine fan, who won a Hugo in 1973 for his fanzine Energumen, a friend; Susan Palermo-Piscitello, 59, musician and longtime fan, a friend; Terry Jeeves, 88, British fan artist, writer, and publisher; John Berry, 80, longtime Irish fan; Paul Gamble, 61, British fan and bookseller; Steve Davis, 72, husband of author and editor Grania Davis; musician Marty Burke, 68, husband of SF author Diana Gallagher; Elzer Marx, 86, father of SF writer Christy Marx; April B. Derleth, 56, daughter of August Derleth and co-owner of Arkham House.