The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Truesdale's energy and fannish cheerfulness have made Tangent popular enough that I would not be at all surprised to see a Hugo win in the magazine's future.

  This year Dave has expanded his empire into the Virtual World as well, contributing a short-fiction review column for SESITE that's one of the few places on-line where short fiction is regularly reviewed, other than the reprint of Mark Kelly's column on Locus Online. Speculations, which features writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market news, is a useful resource for young or would-be authors, although the general reading public may be less interested.

  (Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $53.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202-0056, $42.00 for one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NTY, 10570, $31.00 per year, 12 issues; SF Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $12.50 for one year; Nova Express, White Car Publications, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Tangent, 5779 Norfleet, Raytown, MO 64133, $20 for one year, four issues; Speculations, I'll West El Camino Real, Suite 109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; On Spec, the Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Crank!, Broken Mirrors Press, P.O. Box 1110,New york,NY 101591110, $12 for four issues; Century, P.O. Box 259270, Madison, Wl 53715-0270, $27 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis: The Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, "all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars"; Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6006, $45 Australian for a 4-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Albedo I, Tachyon Productions at Albedo I, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co. Dublin, Ireland, 4 issues for $24 U.S., make checks payable to Albedo I; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield Sl 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; REM, REM Publications, 19 Sandringham Road, Willesden, London NW2 5EP, United Kingdom, E7.50 for four issues; The Third Alternative, f7A Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CBG 2LB, UK, LIO for a fourissue subscription; Xizquil, order from Uncle River/Xizquil, Blue Route, Box 90, Blue, Arizona, 85922, $11 for a three-issue subscription; Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery 6 Science Fiction, Pirate Writings Publishing, Subscriptions, P.O. Box 329, Brightwaters, NY 11718-0329, $15 for one year (four issues), all checks payable to "Pirate Writings Publishing"; Absolute Magnitude: The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, P.0 Box 13, Greenfield, NM 01302, four issues for $14, all checks payable to "D.N.A. Publications"; Transversions, Island Specialty Reports, 1019 Colville Rd., Victoria, BC, Canada, V9A 4P5, four-issue subscription, $18 Can. or U.S., "make cheques payable to Island Specialty Reports"; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Thirteenth Moon Magazine, 1459 18th Street # 139, San Francisco, CA 94107, $24 for four issues; PLOT Magazine, Calypso Publishing, PO Box 1351, Sugar Land, Texas 77487-1351, four issues for $14, " make checks payable to Calypso Publishing"; The Urbanite: Surreal 6 Lively & Bizarre, Urban Legend Press, P.O. Box 4737, Davenport, IA 52808, $13.50 for three issues, "all checks or money orders payable to Urban Legend Press " ; Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 SE 250th Pi. #104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237; Crue Magazine, Hell's Kitchen Productions, Box 370, Times Square Stn., New York, NY 10108, $14 for three issues; Aberrations, P.O. Box 460430, San Francisco, CA 94146, $31 for 12 issues; Deathrealm, 2210 Wilcox Drive, Greensboro, NC 27405, $15.95 for four issues; Adventures of Sword & Sorcery, Double Star Press, P.O. Box 285, Xenia, OH 45385, $15.95 for four issues.)

  It was a weak year for original anthologies, especially in science fiction, where there were few original anthologies published at all, and most of them that did come out were seriously flawed. (Things were somewhat better in fantasy, where there were several good-if no really outstanding-original anthologies published.) Unlike last year, most of the original SF anthologies of 1997 were published either in mass-market paperback or in trade paperback, with only one hardcover I can think of, so it would have at least been cheaper for someone to buy them all-although since, as usual, the bulk of them were theme anthologies with only one or two good stories apiece (if that many), it still doesn't seem like a very cost-effective way to find good short fiction. Still, it seems to me that you'd be better off subscribing to some of the SF magazines instead, where you're much more likely to find a consistent level of literary quality-but, of course, since I'm a magazine editor myself, you can, if you'd like, pretty much discount that opinion.

  One of the most interesting anthologies of the year will probably end up being seen by almost nobody in the SF community, especially on this side of the Atlantic. This is a very odd item called Future Histories, edited by Stephen Mcclelland, and published (sort of) in Britian. Subtitled Award-Winning Science Fiction Writers Predict Twenty Tomorrows for Communications, it was comissioned and paid for by Nokia, the communications corporation, and was published in a private printing as a subscription premium for subscribers to a Horizon House Publications trade journal called Telecommunications Magazine. Only six thousand copies were printed, none of them are available for sale (the book doesn't even have a cover price on it), it's not available in bookstores, you can't mail order it, and apparently there's no intention of doing either a regular trade edition in England or an American edition-one of the authors in the book let me borrow an author's copy or I wouldn't have been able to read it either. In spite of all the above,practically guaranteed to make the stories in the book vanish without a trace, unseen by anybody in the SF reading audience, there are some very Big Names associated with this project, an example of how much Money-by our standards; probably coffee-and-doughnuts money for them-Nokia threw at this project, supposedly paying close to three thousand dollars per item, minimum. The book is about evenly split between fiction and nonfiction, with some very well-known people contributing both. The sad part, considering bow invisibily it's been published, is that Future Histories contains some pretty good stuff, and, in fact, is the best original SF anthology of the year, by a good margin.

  The best stories here, in my opinion, are David Marusek's "Getting to Know You"-his Future History, the same here as in "We Were Out of Our Minds with joy," gets more chewy and interesting and multifaceted the more I see of it-and Nancy Kress's "Steamship Soldier on the Information Front." A step below them would be Stephen Baxter's "Glass Earth, Inc." and Paul J. Mcauley's "Back Door Man." There's nothing really bad here, though, and every story in the book is worth reading. The anthology also includes stories by Pat Murphy, Brian Stableford, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Benford. The weakest story is probably the one by Stephen Mcclelland himself-not surprising, since it's his first fiction sale-and even that has points of interest. The book also contains nonfiction articles by Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Alexander Besher, Mariko Ohara, Vernor Vinge, Nicholas Negroponte, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

  Considering that all of these stories are ostensibly about the future of the communications industry, I suppose it's inevitable that many of them seem to share a vision about what the future is going to be like. One detail common to most of them is that in the next century most people are going to stay inside all the time, telecommuting, talking to each other only on-line, living inside elaborate Virtual Reality setups, taking Virtual Reality vacations, and so forth, to the degree that the real streets outside are mostly deserted, nobody around, shops closed and boarded up, and so forth; Stephen Baxter eve
n specifically invokes "The Machine Stops" in his story. I must say that I find this future to be disspiriting and somewhat depressing. Even Gibson's streetwise hackercowboys went out to a bar and had a drink every once in a while. (They also screwed in person, in the flesh, as opposed to the nearly universal assumption here that only Virtual Reality cybersex will exist in the future.)

  I'm not sure that I entirely believe in this future, although no doubt bits and pieces of it will come to pass. For one thing, it seems like a very middle-class view of the future, ignoring-as, indeed, does most science fiction-the question of what all the poor people are going to be doing while "everybody" is leading this Maximum Urban Cocooned existence. Are all the poor people going to have Virtual Reality cocoons too? Who's picking up the garbage? Who's sweeping the streets? Who's fixing the plumbing? It's like a future where only the Eloi are around; no Morlocks. A mistake that much science fiction makes is to assume that social change affects everyone to the same degree at the same time-which . it the way it usually works. There are people living within fifty miles of my apartment in Philadelphia who don't have electricity or indoor plumbing; there are people living within a thousand miles or so of here, in rural Mexico, say, who are living a hand-farming subsistence kind of life not really different from the one their ancestors were living hundreds or even thousands of years back. For that matter, while I'm sitting here in my Urban Cocoon, enjoying the air conditioning and communicating instantly with other ghostly residents of the Virtual World, there's almost certainly somebody within a ten-block radius of my apartment sleeping on a hot-air vent-and that person is enjoying no more of the fruits of modern high-tech civilization than he would be if he were living alone in the desert as a hermit.

  The point being that the present is not at a uniform level of social development, so I doubt that the future is going to be like that either. I wonder, in fact, if, in the future, we're going to see people living at a Stone Age level living the way most of us in the West do now, for that matter-side by side with people living such a high-tech existence, at such a level of technological sophistication, that they're nearly incomprehensible to us. But the different levels of technological sophistication will be layered throughout society, like the layers in nougat, the whole spectrum from Stone Age to Incomprehensibly Advanced Singularity Folk existing side by side at the same time; it won't be all one uniform layer, Virtual Reality Cocoons ab the way down, as it is in most of the societies described here.

  It also seemed clear to me that-with the exception of David Marusek, and, to some extent, Brian Stableford-most of the authors here wouldn't really want to live in the futures that they're predicting; a faint air of distaste for this Bright New Utopian Cyberfuture comes across clearly if sometimes almost subliminally in several of these stories, with Stephen Baxter even postulating that young people several generations down the line will end up rebelling against and rejecting this information culture and will instead want to go outside and actually do things, in the real world, in the obsolete flesh.

  Considering all this, you have to wonder how much of an advertisement for the glorious Future of Communications this book actually is-and wonder whether Nokia is really getting its money's worth or not ... or at least if it's really getting what it thought it was paying for.

  A very curious project. This is what publishing would be like if it was run by major corporations-and those corporations didn't give a damn whether what they published made any money or not. By all means, read the book-if you can find it!

  New Worlds, edited by David Garnett, is a continuation by American publisher White Wolf of the English original anthology series that was dropped by Gollancz a couple of years ago after a four-book run ... which in turn was a resurrection of an older anthology series from the 70s ... which in turn was a manifestation in anthology form of the original long-running British magazine called New Worlds, which at one time in the middle and late '60s, under editor Michael Moorcock (who is still listed on the present book as "Consulting Editor"), was the flagship of the British New Wave, and is at least the spiritual ancestor of the current-day magazine Interzone. New Worlds has had a long and complex publishing history, as you can see, "dying"-or at least lying quiescent-for long periods of time before being reborn in some new form, and I'd like to think that this new American edition signals yet another rebirth of the series, a series that, in its most recent Garnett-edited incarnation, at the very least has always been provocative and interesting to read, and which sometimes has published some very good stuff indeed. Science fiction as a genre could certainly use another good, continuing, original anthology series, especially as such series, once common, have in recent years dwindled almost to the point of extinction. And this volume is advertised as the start of a new annual series of New Worlds anthologies-but scuttlebutt in professional circles has quoted David Garnett as saying recently that he's no longer going to be editing New Worlds ... and that, plus the financial shakiness of White Wolf in the last couple of years, where overextension and cash-flow problems have caused the cancellation of many proposed titles, combine to make me wonder if this is the only volume of New Worlds we'll actually see (in its current incarnation, anyway!). It would be a shame if that was true, for the field needs all the markets for short fiction it can get if it's going to continue to survive and grow, especially intellectually prestigious showcases such as New Worlds; let's hope that I'm being too pessimistic, and that another volume of New Worlds does indeed come out next year.

  Considering the five New Worlds anthologies edited by Garnett together-the four Gollancz volumes and the current White Wolf volume-this volume of New Worlds is neither the best of the lot nor the worst, falling somewhere in the middle in terms of overall quality, although perhaps closer to the high end than the low end. It's an uneven anthology, featuring some excellent work as well as more routine stuff, some of it rather dull, although little here is actively bad, and almost everything is at least worth reading. For the most part, the best stuff here is the most unclassifiable stuff, the stories that blur the lines between several different genres; the most routine and lackluster stories here are the ones that are the most clearly identifiable as core science fiction-which probably tells us something about where Gamett's interest really lies. The best stories here, by a considerable margin, are unclassifiables: Howard Waldrop's rich and antic "Heart of Whitenesse" (sort of a combination of Alternate History, historical fantasy, and a literary joke that equates Christopher Marlowe with Philip Marlowe ... in addition to the playful echoes of Conrad and others) and Michael Moorcock's bitter, sly, and eloquent "London Bone" (which, with its evocation of the lives of small-time hustlers and con men operating at the periphery of London's upscale art-and-antiques circles, might not have looked out-of-place in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, except for being set slightly in the futureand except for the fact that London Bone itself is Moorcock's own cunning and evocative invention). Next best would be Kim Newman's retelling of a Shanelike parable of persecution and oppression and the response it draws from an ex-soldier who finds himself reluctantly drawn into the role of protector of an embattled rural family in an Alternate World England-this is vivid and emotionally powerful, although the historical changes that produced this Alternate World might be hard for an American reader, who's not familiar enough with real British history, to pinpoint; I'm not sure I spotted all of them myself.

  A step down from there, Pat Cadigan gives us an amusing, although overlong, cyberjoke story in "The Emperor's New Reality"; William Gibson contributes an ambitious experiment in evoking a society of the homeless simply by describing in obsessive detail the things to be found in their shanty cardboard "houses," in "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City"-the relentless accumulation of detail here has a certain fascination, but the "story" itself, completely without plot or characters, is too abstract and dry to be more than a literary finger exercise; and in "The White Stuff" Peter F. Hamilton and Graham Joyce give us an intriguing look at how society might be totally
transformed by the quiet, street-level introduction of new technology ... although since that new technology amounts to " a magic stuff that can do anything" (the origins of which are never explained, although there are unrealized hints throughout that the origin is going to turn out to be of significance), this scenario lacks some of the sharpness and relevance it might have had if the technology had been more believable. Somewhere in the middle, not really bad but not really exciting either, are Eric Brown's "Ferryman , which sets up an interesting conflict and then backs away from it on the very last page, Ian Watson's "A Day Without Dad," which has an intriguing central idea that the author doesn't seem to quite know what to do with, and Andrew Stephenson's "The Pact," a pleasant if predictable read that could have appeared and done yeoman service in any issue of any SF magazine over the last ten years without arousing either unusual praise or remarkable censure.

  Everything below that level didn't work for me to one degree or another, for one reason or another. No doubt some critics will find Brian W. Aldiss's "Death, Shit, Love, Transfiguration" to be a brilliant cutting-edge work, but it struck me as self-indulgent and not terribly interesting. Noel K. Hannan's "A Night on the Town" has no need to be science fiction at all, not really needing its-unconvincing-futuristic setting to tell a story that could just as easily be told about a naive rich kid venturing into present-day Harlem or East L.A. Garry Kilworth's "Attack of the Charlie Chaplins" is a slight one-joke story that is milked for far more pages than it ought to be. Christine Manby's "For Life" is too arch, too long, and too familiar (it's the one about the future society where men are kept as pets and sex toys). And Graham Charnock's "A Night on Bare Mountain" shows you what happens when you cross the typical New Worlds story from the magazine version's old glory days with cyberpunk; reading it is like wading through glue.