The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was not a particularly exciting year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and referee book field—although it was a pretty good year in the related art book field.

  There were no populist histories or sociological overviews of the genre this year, of the sort that have dominated this market for the past few years. There were some critical studies, including Transrealist Fiction (Greenwood Press), by Damien Broderick, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan/New England), by Carl Freedman, and a few academically oriented reference books such as French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction (MacFarland & Co.), by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, and The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford), by Jack Zipes.

  Most of the books in this category this year, though, revolve around individual writers, being either about them or by them. The autobiographical pieces include Algernon, Charlie and I (Challcrest Press), by Daniel Keyes, and Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics (HarperCollins), by Julius Schwartz with Brian M. Thomsen. Collections of correspondence by well-known authors include 1984: Selected Letters (Voyant Publishing), by Samuel R. Delany, and Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (Ohio University Press), by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Books about writers, or critical studies of their work, include Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (The British Library), edited by A. E. Cunningham, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion (Nitrosyncretic), by James Gifford, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (HarperCollins UK), by Tom Shippey, Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (The Science Fiction Foundation), edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Faarah Mendelsohn, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Fantagraphics), by Alexander Theroux, At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub (Subterranean Press), by Bill Sheehan, and Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake (Peter Owen), by G. Peter Winnington. A book of writing advice, with much autobiographical material worked in around the edges, is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner), by Stephen King. A more generalized book of writing advice is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (Alpha Books), by Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder. Also of interest is a book of writing advice that doubles as a short-story collection, with Hugo- and Nebula-winner Mike Resnick reprinting five of his stories and then taking them apart to analyze what makes them tick, in Putting It Together: Turning Sow’s Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories (Wildside Press), by Mike Resnick.

  As mentioned, the art book field was strong in 2000, with many good retrospective art collections by top artists seeing print (most of them from Paper Tiger, which had an astonishingly productive year), including Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton (Paper Tiger), by Bob Eggleton, Frank Kelly Freas: As He Sees It (Paper Tiger), by Frank Kelly Freas and Laura Brodian Freas, Inner Visions, The Art of Ron Walotsky (Paper Tiger), by Ron Walotsky, Journeyman: The Art of Chris Moore (Paper Tiger), by Chris Moore, Mass: The Art of John Harris, by Ron Tiner, Josh Kirby: A Cosmic Cornucopia (Paper Tiger), by David Langford, The Art of Rowena (Paper Tiger), by Doris Vallejo, Titans: The Heroic Visions of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (Paper Tiger), and Dreams: The Art of Boris Vallejo (Thunder Mouth Press), by Boris Vallejo.

  There were also some good general overviews and/or illustrated retrospectives, including Out of Time: Designs for a Twentieth-Century Future (Abrams), by Norman Brosterman, The Frank Collection: A Showcase of the World’s Finest Fantastic Art (Paper Tiger), by Jane and Howard Frank, and, as usual, the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 7: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), by Kathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Overviews of the comics field were presented in Comic Book Culture (Collectors Press), by Ron Goulart, and Vertigo Visions: Artwork from the Cutting Edge of Comics (Watson Guptill), by Alisa Kwitney. A similar art-oriented overview of the horror field is provided in Horror of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History (Collectors Press), by Robert Weinberg.

  There were still a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, although not as many as in some years past. Most SF fans will probably be interested by Chasing Science: Science As Spectator Sport (Tor), by SF writer Frederik Pohl, and it’s a fair bet that at least some will be want to get the essay collections Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (W. W. Norton), by Martin Gardner and The Lying Stones of Marrakech (Harmony Books), by Stephen Jay Gould … and from there it’s not a very far stretch to guess that some at least will be intrigued by The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years (Simon & Schuster), edited by John Brockman. Those struggling to make sense of the somewhat spooky implications of modern-day cosmology might find some useful insights in Just Six Numbers (Basic Books), by Martin Rees. And I’ll close with two highly controversial books that are challenging existing paradigms and attempting to establish new ones, and which at the very least are already inspiring a flood of stories (particularly the first one), Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus), by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownie (which puts forth the heretical thought that maybe we are alone after all) and The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Simon & Schuster), by Julian Barbour (which, as far as I can understand it, seems to be saying that time doesn’t actually exist—a notion which will no doubt inspire as many stories as the other book as soon as more authors are able to figure out what in the world Barbour is talking about).

  This was a pretty disappointing year for genre movies all in all, both artistically and commercially. There were lots of genre movies of one sort or another released in 2000, but few that stuck in the mind for longer than it took to walk out of the theater, and, with a few exceptions, such as the megahit The X-Men, not that many that really burned up the box office either; there were a few films that did okay-but-less-well-than-anticipated, and a few outright financial bombs.

  Somewhat depressingly, the rule seemed to be that the closer to the center of the genre the movies got, the worse they did; the big hits were on the margins of the genre, or in related genres like fantasy, while the several big-budget movies that took place in outer space or in a future society were bombs, or at least performed well under expectations.

  The year featured two big, glossy, expensive movies with all-star casts about the first manned mission to Mars, both of which were critically savaged, and both of which performed well under expectations, probably especially disappointing to the producers considering how expensive they were to make in the first place. Mission to Mars was a well-meaning movie, with stunning special effects and beautiful set-dressing, and even moderately intelligent once allowance is made for the now-traditional scientific errors and plot holes, but it seems to have been assembled with a kit from pieces of other movies, a bit of 2001 here, a chunk of Contact there, a hint of Red Planet Mars, and even, curiously enough, a dash of Robinson Crusoe on Mars. The good cast struggled manfully with the material, and probably even served it a bit better than it deserved, but the almost total familiarity of the plot, with hardly a stretch of footage which didn’t prompt a feeling of hey-haven’t-I-seen-this-before-somewhere?, drained the movie of all suspense and helped make a film that by rights ought to have been exciting curiously bland instead. I didn’t catch the other big Mars movie, Red Planet, which was even more sliced up by critics than Mission to Mars, and which went through town quicker than green corn through the hired man (probably an indication that it didn’t make much money), but the reviews would seem to indicate that it suffered from some of the same problems as the other movie, particularly the feeling of covering familiar ground less well than it had been covered before (critic Roger Ebert liked it a good deal better than Mission to Mars, though, and as Ebert is a longtime SF fan who’s quite familiar with Prior Art in both the film and print SF genres, you might want to take this—almost lone—dissenting voice into consideration when deciding whether to rent Red Planet or not).

  Overfamiliarity was also the big downcheck f
or an otherwise pretty good SF/ horror thriller called Pitch Black. In spite of being edited like a rock video, especially in the early part of the movie, with lots of jump-cuts, odd close-ups, and swirling camera movement (an annoying and counterproductive way to film an action movie, in my opinion), it eventually settles down a bit (perhaps they gave the cameraman—or the director—Prozac) and ultimately delivers an engrossing and fast-paced traditional thriller, with some genuinely suspenseful moments. The emphasis here is on the word “traditional,” though—no thriller movie or horror movie fan will be in the least bit surprised by what happens, with most of the plot turns guessable long in advance; in fact, within the first half hour I’d managed to guess precisely which of the cannon-fodder cast were going to end up surviving at the end of the movie and which were going to be chomped by the monsters; in spite of the necessary strictures imposed by the basic deep structure of the form, a really first-rate thriller ought to be able to figure out some way to be less predictable than that. The cast is uneven, but Vin Diesel is very impressive as the brooding, brutal killer whom the other colonists come to depend on for their only chance of survival. The ambitious “adult” animated movie Titan AE also suffers from predictability (is there really anybody in the audience who isn’t going to be able to guess both of the major “surprise” character turnarounds the film has in store within the first twenty minutes?), but unlike the more tightly plotted Pitch Black, it’s a collection of loosely linked picaresque adventures (with many of the plot elements seemingly lifted from various old Star Trek episodes), that could have been extended arbitrarily forever, full of gaping holes in what passes for plot logic—it plays as if it had been plotted by a roomful of writers who never bothered to compare notes about what was going to happen next. If you can check your forebrain at the door, there is some fun to be had here, although perhaps we should not be surprised, considering that it is a cartoon, that it’s cartoonish one-dimensional fun. In fact, in spite of its expensive and sometime quite impressive animation, in spite of the top-level star voice talent, in spite of the fact that they spent eighty million dollars (!) on this, Titan AE is ultimately just a Saturday morning cartoon with an unusually big budget—no worse, but, sadly, not much better, either.

  Of course, it could be worse. Supernova makes Titan AE look like it was plotted by Jane Austen, and seems to be a movie made by someone who saw Event Horizon and had a terrible but murky dream about it that night.

  (Space Cowboys, widely if unofficially known as Geezers In Space, did fairly well at the box office, better than these others, anyway, but although it delivers some of the same kind of eyeball-clicks, it’s off at a bit of a tangent to the movies above—an Astronaut Movie, like Apollo 13, rather than a Space Movie per se.)

  After this parade of immensely expensive failures and near failures, you have to wonder how long it will be before a studio takes a chance on a space movie again? Probably a long time, unless one hits big next year. Which is too bad, because I actually like space movies—and even the worst of them these days have great Sense of Wonder visuals. (A coherent plot and some effective writing would be nice, though. There’s not one of these movies that couldn’t have been greatly improved by hiring some real SF writers to work on them—at a cost of considerably less than coffee-and-doughnuts-for-the-crew money, too, since most print SF people work dirt-cheap by Hollywood standards. Instead, the moviemakers seem to think that they don’t need writers—but they’re wrong … and saving money by doing without them is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Some of these movies might well have succeeded with them.)

  Other kinds of SF movies didn’t do much better than the Space Movies, for the most part. Battlefield Earth, based on the novel by the late SF writer L. Ron Hubbard, was a box-office disaster of monumental proportions, and undoubtedly the most critically savaged genre movie of the year—perhaps the most critically savaged movie of the year of any sort. The futuristic thriller The Sixth Day did better, but doesn’t seem to have been enough of a hit to pull star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career out of its downward spiral. Hollow Man, an expensive, special-effects-heavy remake (of sorts) of The Invisible Man, tromped heavily on the horror-and-gore pedal, but although it did modestly well, was somehow less compelling, for all of the Big Bucks sunk into the visual effects, than Claude Raines had been in the old version with nothing but some bandages wrapped around his face.

  A bit further away from the core of the genre, and more successful this year both artistically and commercially, are those movies that examine (usually as comedy, sometimes as drama) the intrusion of one fantastic element (usually one with a thin and improbable “scientific” rationale) into an otherwise “normal” everyday world, our world—at least as Hollywood sees it. Sliding Doors may have popularized this kind of movie, a few years back. The best of these this year was Frequency, in which a freak accident enables a son in the present day to communicate by shortwave radio with his long-dead (from the son’s perspective) father in the past. This is a nicely bittersweet conceit, and is well played by the principal actors, and the first part of the movie is quite good—unfortunately, rather than having the courage of their convictions and sticking to the main concept, the filmmakers felt they had to spice things up by throwing in a track-down-a-serial-killer suspense plot and a cold porridge of time paradoxes, all of which the movie would have been better off without, so that the second half of the film is less effective than the first half. Along the same lines, What Women Want invests Mel Gibson with the sudden ability to hear women’s thoughts (what at least some of them turn out to be thinking is that they want Me/ Gibson, unsurprisingly enough), The Family Man, Me Myself I, and Disney’s The Kid surprise a self-involved character with miraculously appearing family members (in the former two, the families the main characters might have had, in an Alternate World; in the latter, a visitation through time from a child to the adult he would later grow up into), and Me, Myself, and Irene plays with the idea of multiple personalities who are in love with the same woman, and vie for her affections while running Jim Carrey through lots of There’s Something About Mary-style slapstick, while What Planet Are You From? is a broad comic take on the old Aliens-Trying-to-Impregnate-Our-Women theme, complete with an alien whose dick rings when he sees a likely prospect.

  The biggest successes commercially this year were out on the tenuous, fraying edge of the SF genre. The X-Men, of course, is not really a science fiction film at all, but rather a filmed version of a superhero comic book, a genre related to but by no means identical with SF, one with a different set of values and an internal logic all its own—once that’s understood, you can enjoy The X-Men as a sleek and stylish vehicle, probably the best filmed version of a superhero comic since the original Tim Burton Batman—although I’m not at all sure that the convoluted plot made sense even by comic-book standards (nobody seemed to care, though). Chicken Run was a clever, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining children’s fantasy (a sly postmodern homage to The Great Escape, done with claymation chickens), The Grinch That Stole Christmas a crude, ham-handed, and hugely annoying one, polluting the original classic with a double shot of Dumb and Dumber aesthetics, but they both made immense amounts of money. There were a lot of other children’s fantasy movies too, including Fantasia 2000 (which was disappointing by comparison with the original, although the computer animation for “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” section was interesting), 102 Dalmatians, Pokemon the Movie 2000, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (which tanked, big time), The Road to El Dorado, Dinosaur (which went to a lot of time, trouble, and expense making sure that their dinosaurs were drawn as realistically and scientifically accurately as possible—and then gave them lips and had them talk. And cohabit with lemurlike creatures that in the real world wouldn’t evolve for millions of years to come. Disney! Go figure!), and The Emperor’s New Groove. The martial arts movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which most of the combatants have supernatural powers of one sort or another, was a surprise hit at the end of
the year, as was the erotic fantasy Chocolat. Shadow of the Vampire seems to be becoming a succès d’estime, a recursive postmodern study about a real vampire playing a vampire in a vampire movie, although I’m not sure how it’s doing at the box office. Mission Impossible 2 and Gladiator, among the year’s biggest hits, seem too far out on the edge to really be justifiable as genre films, although Mission Impossible 2 is certainly a fantasy of some sort, and I suspect that Gladiator appeals to many of the same readers who enjoy Alternate History and Heroic Fantasy.

  Unbreakable, the sophomore effort by new director M. Night Shyamalan, was a bit of a disappointment after last year’s immensely successful (both critically and commercially) The Sixth Sense, although perhaps expectations for the new one had been built so high by the triumph of the previous movie that no film would have measured up to them; Unbreakable is still a stylish, well-crafted, and well-acted movie, although most people seemed to find it slow and uninvolving after The Sixth Sense, and missed the stinger in that movie’s tail. Highlander: Endgame seemed to disappoint even most stone Highlander fans, Dungeons & Dragons was, well, a filmed version of a D&D game, and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps was about what you’d expect, a half dozen different flavors of Eddie Murphy in a convenient Variety Pack. Bedazzled was a remake of the classic old Peter Cook/ Dudley Moore comedy, lame and disappointing by comparison.

  There was another herd (a slither?) of horror movies, ranging from the stylish, beautifully art-directed dip into the mind of a serial killer, The Cell (sort of What Dreams May Come meets Silence of the Lambs) to the crude but occasionally funny slasher-movie spoof Scary Movie, with lots of the usual stops on the way (Satanistic Apocalypse movies; dead people harassing the living; knife-wielding serial killers, and so forth). I could not overcome my ennui enough to bring myself to see Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 or American Psycho, so you’re on your own there.