The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  As usual, there seem to be no strong favorites here for the major awards, although perhaps Haideman's Forever Peace might have a shot at the Hugo. Thanks to SFWA's bizarre "rolling eligibility" rule, most of the books up for the Nebula Award are actually novels from the previous year, making the winner even harder to call. Tor, Harperprism, and Bantam Spectra all had strong years.

  Long out-of-print classics seem to be coming back into print with greater frequency these days than in years past, an encouraging sign; an even more encouraging sign is that some of this reissuing is being done by regular trade houses, such as Tor and Bantam and Del Rey, rather than leaving this area to the small presses, as was too-often true during the last ten years or so. Reissues of classic novels this year included: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (Bantam Spectra), perhaps the classic After-the-Bomb novel; Bring the lubilee by Ward Moore (Del Rey), one of the earliest Alternate History novels, and still one of the best; The Demon Princes, Volumes One and Two, by Jack Vance (Tor), assembling the five "Demon Princes" novels, some of the most exciting and evocative hybrids of science fiction and the mystery novel ever written; Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick (Ace), one of the earliest and best of the cyberpunk novels; Three in Time (White Wolf), an omnibus volume that gathers three classic time-travel novels, by Poul Anderson, Wilson Tucker, and Chad Oliver; The Final Encyclopedia, Volume One, by Gordon R. Dickson (Tor), the first half of one of Dickson's major novels; and Triplanetary by Edward E. "Doc" Smith (Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951, $15), the first of the "Lensman" novels (and, for you Alternative Media fans, quite probably the inspiration for the comic book hero Green Lantern), classic space adventure from a time before the term "Space Opera" had even been invented. Buy them now, while you can, before they disappear into oblivion again.

  It was another pretty good year for short-story collections, including once again a number of good retrospective collections that make excellent but long-out-of-print work available, and which ought to be in the library of every serious science fiction reader.

  The best collections of the year included: Voyages by Starlight, Ian R. Macleod (Arkham House); Axiomatic, Greg Egan (Harperprism); Think Like a Dinosaur, James Patrick Kelly (Golden Gryphon); The Pure Product, John Kessel (Tor); Vacuum Diagrams, Stephen Baxter (Voyager); Giant Bones, Peter S. Beagle (Roo; Going Home Again, Howard Waldrop (Eidolon Publications); Ghost Seas, Steven Utley (Ticonderoga Publications); Eating Memories, Patricia Antheny (First Books/Old Earth Books); A Geography of Unknown Lands, Michael Swanwick (Tiger Eyes Press); Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories, Lucius Shepard (Millennium); and Fractal Paisleys, Paul Di Filippo (Four Walls Eight Windows). Among the year's other top collections were: The Forest of Time and Other Stories, Michael Flynn (Tor); The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzche and Other Odd Acquaintances, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon); Slippage, Harlan Ellison (Houghton Mifflin); Fabulous Harbours, Michael Moorcock (Avon); Exorcisms and Ectasies, Karl Edward Wagner (Fedogan & Bremer); The Arbitrary Placement of Walls, Martha Soukup (Dreamhaven), and From the End of the Twentieth Century, John M. Ford (NESFA Press).

  Special mention should be made of several excellent retrospective collections that returned long-unavailable work by dead (and in danger of being forgotten) authors to print. This year's retrospective collections feature the work of three authors who practically reinvented the science fiction short story in the '50s, expanding its boundaries and greatly extending its range, using it as a tool to do kinds of work that had never been attempted in the field before. Without these authors, modern science fiction as we know it would not exist-and so these are collections that belong in every library: His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Stories of C. M. Kombluth (NESFA Press), which lives up to its name by returning almost all of the short work of this brilliant craftsman to print; Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage), which features the best work of a writer still unmatched for daring, ambition, gall, pyrotechnics, and sheer chutzpah; and Thunder and Roses: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IV, (North Atlantic Books), which features some of the best work by one of science fiction's best stylists, and so, almost by definition, some of the best work of the last half-century.

  Fantasy fans might also enjoy a mass-market release of Tales from Watership Down, by Richard Adams (Avon), a return to the milieu of the bestselling fantasy classic Watership Down.

  As usual, small-press publishers such as NESFA Press, Golden Gryphon, Tachyon, Arkham House, Eidolon Publications, and others, were responsible for publishing the bulk of the year's best short-story collections, although it's encouraging to see a fair number of titles from trade publishers such as Tor, Roc, Vintage, and Harperprism.

  (With the exception of books by White Wolf and Four Walls Eight Windows, very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail order is your best bet, and so I'm going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203, $27 for His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Stories of C. M. Kornbluth, $21 for From the End of the Twentieth Century, by John M. Ford; Golden Gryphon Press, 364 West Country Lane, Collinsville, IL 62234, $22.95 for Think Like a Dinosaur, by James Patrick Kelly; Arkham House, Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583, $21.95 for Voyages by Starlight, by Ian R. Macleod; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701, $25 for Thunder and Roses: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IV; Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6006 A19.95 for Going Home Again; Ticonderoga Publications, P.O. Box 407, Nedlands, WA 6009 Australia, $A16.95 postage included, cheeks or M.O. in Australian dollars payable to Russell Farr, for Ghost Seas, by Steven Utley; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street # I 39, San Francisco, CA, 94107, $14 for The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzche and Other Odd Acquaintances, by Peter S. Beagle; Fedogan & Bremer, 603 Washington Avenue, SE #77, Minneapolis MN 55415, $32.00 for Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner; Tiger Eyes Press, P.O. Box 172, Lemoyne, PA 17043, $25 in hardcover, $12 in trade paperback, for A Geography of Unknown Lands, by Michael Swanwick; Dreamhaven Books, 912 West Lake St., Minneapolis, NM 55408, $25 for The Arbitrary Placement of Walls, by Martha Soukup.)

  The reprint anthology field seemed at least a bit stronger this year than last year, with several good values, although the overall number of reprint anthologies still seems to be lower than it was a few years back.

  The best bets for your money in this category, as usual, were the various Best of the Year anthologies and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 31, edited by Pamela Sargent (Harcourt Brace); this year there was also a new volume collecting recent Hugo Award-winning stories, The New Hugo Winners IV, edited by Gregory Benford (Baen). Science fiction is now being covered by two Best of the Year anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year's Best SF series, edited by David G. Hartwell (Harperprism), now upto its third volume. Since Hartwell's anthology is a direct competitor to this volume, it would be inappropriate (and suspect) to review it, but the field is certainly wide enough for there to be more than one best anthology, and the parallax provided by comparing Hartwell's slant on what was the year's best fiction to my own slant is interesting, and probably valuable. Besides, since Hartwell will almost certainly like stories that I didn't, and vice versa, having two volumes gives more authors a chance to be showcased every year, something I'm sure both of us welcome, since no anthology can be big enough or comprehensive enough to include all the worthwhile SF of various different varieties that comes out in the course of a year. Again in 1997, there were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones (Robinson), now up to volume 8, and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (St.
Martin's), this year up to its Tenth Annual Collection. Surprisingly, considering the fantasy boom that is underway in the novel category and the success of Realms offantasy magazine, fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Windling half of the Datiow/Windling anthology. This year saw the start of a new Best of the Year series, a somewhat more specialized one, The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume I (Harper collins Australia Voyager), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne. Although restricted to original fiction published in Australia, this book has a somewhat wider purview, including both science fiction and fantasy as well as horror and some harder-to-classify stuff, and features good work by Greg Egan, Terry Dowling, Cherry Wilder, Jack Dann, Stephen Dedman, and others. Turning away from the anthology series, there were several good retrospective anthologies this year that provided essential bistorical overviews and were good buys for your money. The Science Fiction Century, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor), is one of a series of big-and controversial-retrospective anthologies, such as Age of Wonder and The Ascent of Wonder that Hartwell has been editing in the last few years; this one, an overview of the evolution of the field over the last hundred years, is even more controversial than the others, because of Hartwell's decision not to use the work of authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, and others-again, as in other years, this is an argument that will bother critics and scholars far more than it does readers, who, regardless of whether they agree with Hartwell's aesthetic choices and polemics or disagree with them, will still receive a fat anthology filled with first-rate stories by many other first-rate authors at a price that makes it, pound for pound, one of the year's best reading bargains. Another excellent retrospective, although it limits itself to covering a much shorter span of time than does Hartwell's anthology, is the similarly titled A Century of Science Fiction 1950-1959 (MJF Books), edited by Robert Silverberg. This is the first volume in a projected series of anthologies that were supposed to cover the last forty some years of science fiction, focusing on one decade at a time, but the series has apparently died along with publisher Donald I. Fine, and so this will probably be the first and last-such volume we get-a real loss to the field, since Silverberg's historical notes here are almost as good as his selection of stories, quite a compliment when you're talking about a book that contains such classics as Fritz Leiber's "Coming ttractions," Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," C. M. Kornbluth's "The Mindworm," and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea," as well as fourteen other stories almost in the same class. Plus the anthology as a whole presents about as good an overview of '5Os science fiction as you're going to get anywhere. What a pity we won't get to see the rest of the series, covering subsequent decades! An overview of a somewhat different sort, covering the recent-and often rapid-evolution of British science fiction instead, is to be found in The Best of Interzone, edited by David Pringle (St. Martin's), a book that will be all the more valuable to American readers because much of the material here will be unknown to many of them, as is largely, alas, the first-rate British magazine from which they are drawn. The anthology contains good-to-excellent work by Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan, Ian R. Macleod, Brian Stableford, Nicola Griffith, Eugene Byrne, Stephen Baxter, Chris Beckett, Ben Jeapes, and others, many of them not well-known on this side of the Atlantic, as well as work by visiting Americans such as Paul Di Filippo, Paul Park, Timons Esaias, and Thomas M. Disch. Although a best from Interzone anthology was long overdue, I can't help but wonder if a best from Absolute Magnitude anthology is not perhaps a bit premature, considering that the magazine itself has only been in existence for a few years, but, nevertheless, that's just what you get with Absolute Magnitude, edited by Warren Lapine and Stephen Pagel (Tor); and although the stories here come nowhere near the level of quality of the best stuff from the Interzone anthology, there is solid, enjoyable work here by Hal Clement, Janet Kagan, Barry Longyear, Allen Steele, Don D'Ammassa, and others. Ackertnanthology, edited by Forrest J. Ackerman (General Publishing Group), provides an overview of SF largely centered on older work. An overview of an entirely different SF tradition is provided in Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg (Barricade Books).

  Other reprint SF anthologies this year included Sci-Fi Private Eye, edited by Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), a good solid reprint anthology featuring good work by Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Tom Reamy, Robert Silverberg, and others; Time Machines: The Best Ti me Travel Stories Ever Written (Carroll & Graf), edited by Bill Alder Jr., didn't quite live up to its overheated title, still it provided excellent work by Connie Willis, Steven Utley, John W. Campbell, Geoffrey A. Landis, Larry Niven, jack Medevitt, and orbers; similar territory was covered just as well in Tales in Time, edited by Peter Crowther (White Wolf Borealis), which featured first-rate work by James Tiptree, Jr., Harlan Ellison, Ian Watson, jack Finney, Ray Bradbury, and orbers. Noted without comment are Timegates, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace); Isaac Asimov's Moons, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace); and Isaac Asimov's Christmas, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace).

  There were some good reprint fantasy anthologies this year, a sort of anthology that has become moderately rare these days: An overview of modern fantasy fiction is provided in Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's), noted without comment. Similar territory is also covered in Treasures of Fantasy, edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (Harperprism), and A Magic Lover's Treasu;e of the Fantastic, edited by Margaret Weis (Aspect). Another overview, more limited in scope but more comprehensive within the period it covers, is provided by A Century of Fantasy 1980-1989, edited by Robert Silverberg (MJF Books), another excellent Silverberg anthology, similar in concept to his A Century of Science Fiction discussed above, featuring first-rate work by Joe Haldeman, Charles de Lint, Roger Zelazny, and others. A good anthology of comic fantasy is The Wizard of Odd, edited by Peter Heining (Ace), and some good fantasy stories about dragons are collected in Dragons: The Greatest Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (MJF Books).

  Reprint anthologies are also somewhat rare in horror, where most of the anthologies are originals, but this year we had A Century of Horror 1970-1979, edited by David Drake (MJF Books), the start of another promising but probably doomed anthology series-, Girls'night Out: Twenty-Nine Female Vampire Stories, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert E. Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble); Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor); Southern Blood: Vampire Stories from the American South (Cumberland House, 432-433 Harding Industrial Park Drive, Nashville TN, 37211 12.95); 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert E. Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble); Haunted Houses: The Greatest Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (MJF Books); and Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror, edited by John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg (Barnes & Noble).

  Odd but enjoyable items from smaller presses include Strange Kaddish (Aardwolf Publishing), edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, an anthology of Jewish science fiction featuring work by Harlan Ellison, Shira Daemon, Neil Gaiman, and others, and Girls for the Slime God (Obscura Press), edited by Mike Resnick, featuring old-fashioned hairy-chested pulp adventure SF stories by Henry Kuttner, a story parodying them in a genial way by Isaac Asimov, and a nonfiction look back at the sort of pulp magazines where Bugeyed Lobster Men were always carrying beautiful half-naked women off for purposes either dietary or romantic (or both), by William Knoles. (Aardwolf Publishing, 45 Park Place South, Suite 270, Morristown, NJ 07960, $9.95 for Strange Kaddish; Wunzenzierohs Publishing, P.O. Box 1992, Ames, IA 500101992, $15 plus $3 postage for Girls for the Slime God.)

  The big news in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field this year was undoubtedly the publication of John Ciute and John Grant's mammoth The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
(St. Martin's Press), a massive and exhaustively comprehensive reference book that, along with its companion volume, 1993's The Encycopedia of Science Fiction, will form the cornerstones of genre scholarship for decades to come. These are invaluable reference tools for anyone who is interested in the rapidly evolving and expanding field of modern fantasy and belong in every serious reader's library. Like its predecessor, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is expensive, but it's also worth every penny you spend on it. This was a good year in general for fantasy reference books in fact and critical studies about fantasy, especially if you count in David Pringle's St. fames Guide to Fantasy Writers, which was published late last year. Discovering Classic Fantasy, by Darrell Schweitzer (Borgo), was a useful guide to some of the old masters of fantasy, while there were several books that took a closer look at some of them, such as A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Love craft, by S. T. Joshi (Borgo); Bram Stoker's Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (Norton); and Defending Middle-Earth, by Patrick Curry (St. Martin's).

  Industry was a more generalized critical study of a specific fantasy form. Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1992-1995, edited by Hal W. Hall (Library Unlimited), was a useful reference work for both genres. There were two valuable books of insightful, articulate, and often highly opinionated essays about SF and SF-related topics: Reflections and Refractions, by Robert Silverberg (Underwood), and Outposts: Literatures of Milieux, by Algis Budrys (Borgo Press). A similar book, similarly articulate, that casts its net a bit wider is Rubber Dinosaurs and Wooden Elephants: Essays on Literature, Film, and History (Borgo Press), by L. Sprague De Camp. Critical overviews of SF as a genre could be found in a reissue of a somewhat expanded version of one of the cornerstone books of SF criticism, Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (Advent), as well as in Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars, by Brooks Landon (Twayne), and Islands in the Sky, by Gary Westfahl (Borgo Press), while literary studies of specific SF authors were available in Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition), by James Gunn (Scarecrow)-, Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, by Yvonne Howell (Peter Lang); and "The Angle Between Two Walls": The Fiction of I. G. Ballard, by Roger Luckhurst (St. Martin's). Books for the SF witer include Time Travel by Paul J. Nahin (Writer's Digest), Space Travel by Ben Bova with Anthony R. Lewis (Writer's Digest), and a new edition of Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction (St. Martin's).