The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15
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The reprint anthology market this year was actually stronger than the original anthology market, pound for pound, with more worthwhile material for your money.
As usual, the most reliable bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards Showcase 2001 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by Robert Silverberg, and another volume in The SFWA Grand Master series, this one The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 3 (Tor), edited by Frederik Pohl, featuring work by Damon Knight, Lester Del Rey, A.E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, and Pohl himself.
Starting in 2002, science fiction will be covered by three “Best of the Year” anthology series (something that hasn’t been true since the days in the late ‘80s when Terry Carr, Donald Wollheim, and I all had competing volumes on the shelves at the same time): the one you are holding in your hand, (The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, now up to its nineteenth annual volume), the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its seventh annual volume, and a new science fiction “Best of the Year” series, Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, added to the mix in early 2002. Once again, there were two “Best of the Year” anthologies covering horror in 2001: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume Twelve, 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 Fourteenth Annual Collection. For perhaps the first time ever, fantasy is being covered by three “Best of the Year” anthologies, by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, by the Year’s Best Fantasy (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, now up to its second annual volume, and by a brand-new “Best of the Year” series covering fantasy, Fantasy: The Best of 2001 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, also added to the mix in early 2002.
Turning from series to stand-alone books, especially those dealing with contemporary material rather than retrospective look-backs, the best reprint SF anthology of the year by far is Futures (Warner Aspect), edited by Peter Growther. The anthology consists of four novellas that were published as individual chap books in Britain by PS Publishing in 2000, and the anthology as a whole has had a British edition as well, or I would probably have listed it as the best original SF anthology of the year, since most of the material here is probably being seen for the first time by the American audience, at least. Literary quality very high – the best of the four novellas are probably “Tendeleo’s Story,” by Ian McDonald (this year’s Sturgeon Award winner) and “Watching Trees Grow,” by Peter F. Hamilton, but the other two novellas, by Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter, are excellent as well, and also stand head-and-shoulders above almost all the other novellas published in 2000; taken together, the impact of the four novellas is staggering, and the overall quality of the book is a significant accomplishment on Crowther’s part; if you want to see what’s going on on the much-discussed cutting edge of SF, you need to buy this book. You also ought to check out a small-press item of real worth, The Ant-Men of Tibet and Other Stories (Big Engine), edited by David Pringle, made up of stories drawn from moderately recent issues of Interzone which Pringle also edits. Although some Interzone’s best writers, and some of the key players in twenty-first-century SF, are here, people such as Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, Chris Beckett, Keith Brooke, and Peter T. Garratt, are not represented by their best stories, or even by their best stories from recent issues of Interzone: a bit of a disappointment. Still, there’s nothing bad here, the bulk of the fiction is high quality, in fact, if not quite up to the very high standards of the author’s own personal bests, and this anthology does an admirable job of providing a valuable and intriguing perspective on what SF looks like from the British side of the Atlantic – something absolutely necessary these days, when so many of the best writers are British, if you’re going to understand where SF itself is going to be going in the next few years. (Big Engine Co. Ltd., Box 185, Abingdon OX14 1GR, UK – $11.53 for The Ant-Men of Tibet and Other Stories, edited by David Pringle.)
No doubt standing in the twenty-first century at last makes it an irresistible temptation to cast a reflective and summing eye back over the twentieth century just past. There were many excellent retrospective overview reprint SF anthologies this year, most of them huge volumes that provide good value for your dollar. Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (Ace), edited by Orson Scott Card, provides Card’s subjective take on the best SF of the twentieth century – which, of course, immediately began to be argued with by other critics as soon as the book appeared, who preferred their own subjective take on the matter instead. I’m no exception. I’d quibble with most of Card’s list, in fact, which, for the most part, strike me as neither “masterpieces” or “the best science fiction of the century” – or even as the best work of the authors represented. And, as always, I disagree with many of the opinions and conclusions offered in Card’s editorial front-matter. Nevertheless, if there’s little here that’s really “the best,” by my own subjective taste, anyway, there’s little or nothing that’s bad, either, most of the contents certainly falling into the “good” or even “superior” (if not quite absolute best) end of the scale. So all that will matter to the great majority of readers is that they’re getting a great deal of solid-to-superior work by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, John Crowley, Terry Bisson, Brian W. Aldiss, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Michael Swanwick, William Gibson, Joe Haldeman, and many others, for a not-unreasonable price for the length of the book they get, and that makes this a worthwhile buy. However, much the rest of us might quibble with the selection of one story over another.
Much the same sort of thing could be said about The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century (Del Rey), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. Let’s say up front that there’s almost nothing in this big volume that is worth reading, which makes it a very worthwhile purchase for the average reader, too, in terms of reading-value received for money spent. With that out of the way, let’s get to the quibbles! As Turtledove is probably the most famous and successful of living writers of alternate history, you’d think that his selections would be right on target – he ought to know alternate history when he sees it, if anyone does! – but the biggest complaint one can make about this anthology is that many of the stories aren’t really alternate history at all, as I understand the sub-genre. Anyway, most are time-travel stories, or even straightforward SF with no time-travel or alternate history element in them whatsoever. For instance, although an excellent story, what’s Allen Steele’s “The Death of Captain Future” doing here? And Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” strikes me as a time-travel story rather than an alternate history story, although admittedly there’s some degree of subjectivity in the call one way or the other. I could also question the suitability of Poul Anderson’s “Eutopia.” Even with those stories that undeniably are alternate history, it’s possible to question some of Turtledove’s choices. It’s impossible to argue with classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” William Sanders’s “The Undiscovered,” or Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee,” which undeniably belong here, but Gregory Benford’s “Manassas, Again” is far from Benford’s strongest alternate history story (I might have suggested Benford’s “We Could Do Worse”), and I myself would have picked Turtledove’s own “The Last Article” over his “Islands in the Sea.” And nothing by Howard Waldrop, the writer who has probably been the best-known for alternate history stuff in the past few decades, second only to Turtledove himself? Nothing by L. Sprague De Camp? (When his “Aristotle and the Gun” is one of the foundation stones of the whole form?) Nothing by Keith Roberts? Or Robert Silverberg? What about Ian R. MacLeod’s magni
ficent “The Summer Isles?” Or one of the numerous “Alternate Space Program” stories by Stephen Baxter? Quibble, quibble, quibble – but if you’re going to claim that an anthology contains “The Best of the Twentieth Century” in some particular form, you invite an unusual degree of scrutiny.
Of course, as with the Card anthology, few ordinary readers are going to give a rat’s ass about any of this. All they’ll care about is that they’ll get a lot of good reading for their buck – and by that standard, this is certainly one of the best anthologies of the year.
And the same kind of remarks could be made about The Best Military Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century (Del Rey), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. Some of the selections are spot-on (Joe Haldeman’s “Hero,” Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety,” Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Superiority,” Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon”), while others seem oddly inappropriate, as though they’d wandered in from some other anthology altogether (Gregory Benford’s “To the Storming Gulf” – I would have used his “Warstory” instead – or Anne McCaffery’s “Dragonrider,” or Walter Jon Williams’s “Wolf Time” – which is a spy-with-superpowers story, not a military story per se – or even Turtledove’s own “The Last Article,” turning up at last, although my own opinion is that it would have fit more comfortably into the previous anthology). Oddly, considering that his reputation is primarily as an alternate history writer, Turtledove seems to do a somewhat better job overall of assembling a reasonable list of classic military SF than he did of assembling a list of classic alternate history stories – although aficionados of the form might wonder what happened to some of the heavy hitters of the sub-genre who are not present, such as Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Feintuch, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, or David Weber.
And again, most readers will not give a rat’s ass about any of this – nor could it be argued, should they, if their main priority is getting a lot of good stories to read for a reasonable price, by which standard this anthology is also well worth having, no matter how loudly critics carp.
A thematic overview of a different sort, A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women (Warner Aspect), edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams, offers an array of feminist science fiction from the past few decades, including classics like Connie Willis’s own “Even the Queen,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” and Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” among other good stuff – although Ursula K. Guin’s wonderful novella “A Woman’s Liberation” is worth the price of the book alone.
Two other big retrospective overview anthologies, noted without comment are Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (St. Martin’s), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Supermen: Tales of the Postmodern Future (St. Martin’s), edited by Gardner Dozois.
Also of interest this year is Science Fiction 101 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg, a retitled reissue of Silverberg’s 1987 anthology Worlds of Wonder. This is one of the best teaching anthologies ever compiled, as Silverberg analyzes each story and gives his shrewd opinions as to why the story works, and what it shows us about the larger nature of science fiction itself. All that aside, the anthology is a superior reprint anthology considered just as an anthology, a collection of stories to be read, containing Jack Vance’s “The New Prime,” Alfred Besters “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain,” Brian W. Aldiss’s “Hothouse,” and nine other classics.
Also noted without comment: Genometry (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Space Soldiers (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; and Isaac Asimov’s Father’s Day (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.
There didn’t seem to be many reprint fantasy anthologies again this year, although there were two big retrospectives that were a good value for your money. The best of these probably was The Mammoth Book of Fantasy (Robinson), edited by Mike Ashley, which does a good job of bringing us classic fantasy stories by Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merrit, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Micheal Moorcock, and others, as well as good work by relatively newer authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, James Blaylock, and others. The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (Robinson), edited by Mike Ashley, is more specialized, but is still worthwhile, featuring good work by the usual suspects – Esther Friesner, Tom Holt, Avram Davidson, Craig Shaw Gardner, Fredric Brown – as well as work from authors you don’t often see in anthologies of comic fantasy, such as Damon Runyon, John Cleese, and Connie Booth.
Noted without comment is Isaac Asimov’s Halloween (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.
If there were a lot of reprint horror anthologies this year, other than the Stephen Jones “Best” anthology and Datlow’s half of the Datlow/Windling, I didn’t spot many of them – but then again, I wasn’t trying very hard, either. One I did spot was The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories Written by Woman (Robinson), edited by Stephen Jones.
It was another moderately unexciting year in the SF-and-Fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, although there was still some worthwhile material.
For the average reader, the most interesting volume would probably be Deep Future (Gollancz), a collection of speculations about both near-future and further-out scientific possibilities by Stephen Baxter, one of the most popular and acclaimed of all the “new” British hard-science writers, sometimes spoken of as a logical heir to the mantle of Arthur C. Clarke. Baxter had a similar volume out this year as well, from a smaller press, Omegatropic: Non-fiction & Fiction (British Science Fiction Association), a collection of essays (plus a couple of framing short stories) dealing with the way scientific themes have been dealt with in science fiction: the emphasis here more on the “fiction” in science fiction than was true in Deep Future, where it’s mostly the other way around. Along the same lines. Which Way To The Future? (Tor), is a collection of Stanley Schmidt’s editorials on a wide range of topics from Analog; True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (Tor), by Vernor Vinge, edited by Jim Frenkel, is a mixed fiction/nonfiction collection that reprints Vinge’s famous novella “True Names,” and accompanies it with a selection of essays about cyberspace, and especially the impact that Vinge’s pioneering novella had on science fictional thinking about cyberspace; and The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies (Forge), by Damien Broderick, offers speculations and warnings about the wave of Future Shock that may be about to swallow us all. Another book that may be of interest to casual readers, although as different as can be imagined in tone from the edgy, technology-heavy volumes above, is Meditations on Middle (St. Martin’s), edited by Karen Haber, a collection of personal appreciations of J.R.R. Tolkein’s work rather than of scholarly critical pieces per se – among the more interesting and insightful appreciations here are those by Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Swanwick.
Most of the rest of the year’s SF-and-Fantasy oriented nonfiction will be primarily of interest to scholars and specialists, including The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool University Press), by Mike Ashley; Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820-1950 (The British Library), by Neil Wilson; Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction (Greenwood Press), by Gary Westfahl; and Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (Routledge), by Jack Zipes.
There were several books about individual writers or their works that might (or might not) be of interest to you, depending, I suppose, on what you think of the authors being showcased. They included The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (Nitrosyncretic Press), edited by William H. Patterson, Jr. & Andrew Thornton; The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee: Themes and Subtexts from Dionysos to the Immortal Gene (McFarland), by Mavis Haut; Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fi
ction (Liverpool University Press), by S.T. Joshi; and Storyteller: The Official Orson Scott Card Bibliography and Guide (Overlook Connection Press), by Michael R. Collings. This year saw two book-length interviews with SF writers, fairly rare items: Being Gardner Dozois (Old Earth Books), by Michael Swanwick, and What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick (Overlook Press), edited by Gwen Lee & Doris Elaine Sauter. A memoir that functions as an interesting study of a whole historical period of the genre and of the featured players who peopled it is Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others (Arkham House), by E. Hoffmann Price.
The art book field was strong once again in 2001, especially notable for the many good retrospective art collections by top artists. For my money, the best of them, and a must for every lover of SF art, was The Art of Chesley Bonestell (Paper Tiger), Chesley Bonestell, compiled by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III. Bonestell was perhaps the ancestral SF artist, the artist upon whose bedrock-foundation vision the work of almost all subsequent SF artists has been based, especially in the area of “astronomical art” or “space art” . . . and he may still be the best such artist to have ever lived, rivaled only by the very best of today’s crop of space artists, such as Kim Poor and Ron Miller, who in a very real sense are Bonestell’s children. The best of Bonestell’s astronomical paintings are still capable of taking your breath away – and still make great covers for SF books and magazines, forty or fifty years later! Although Bonestell’s collection is my favorite, the year’s other art collections aren’t chopped liver either and provide excellent value for your money if you enjoy SF/Fantasy art. They include: Hardyware: The Art of David A. Hardy (Paper Tiger), David A. Hardy, compiled by Chris Morgan; The Art of Richard Powers (Paper Tiger), Richard Powers, compiled by Jane Frank; Ground Zero (Paper Tiger), Fred Gambino; Testament: The Life and Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), Frank Frazetta, compiled by Cathy and Arnie Fenner; Wings of Twilight: The Art of Michael Kaluta (NBM), Michael Kaluta; Offerings: The Art of Brom (Paper Tiger), Brom; and The Art of Stephen Youll: Paradox (Paper Tiger), Stephen Youll,