The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The art book field this year was dominated by Vincent Di Fate's huge and comprehensive retrospective look at science fiction art, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art (Penguin Studio). This is by far the best and the most complete overview of SF art that has ever been published, easily superseding earlier retrospectives, such as Brian Aldiss's Science Fiction Art or Anthony Frewin's One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration-if you're only going to buy one SF art book this year, then without question Di Fate's book should be the one you buy. Another valuable overview of what's happening in the current SF and fantasy art scene is provided in Spectrum IV. The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy Burnett, Arnie Fenner, and Jim Loehr (Underwood Books), the latest edition of a sort of Best of the Year series that compiles the year's fantastic art. There seemed to be few major art collections this year, although there were still a few substantial ones, including Knightsbridge: The Art of Keith Parkinson (FPG); Michael Whelan's Something in My Eye: Excursions into Fear, edited by Amie Fenner and Cathy Fenner (Mark V. Ziesing); and H. R. Giger's www.HRGIGER.com (Taschen). Heavily illustrated SF books this year, with the art sometimes making up a larger percentage of the book than the text, included Stephen King's The Dark Tower IV. Wizards and Glass (Donald Grant), illustrated by Davemckean, and Harlan Ellison's "Repent Harlequin!" Said the Tick Tock Man (Underwood), illustrated by Rick Berry.

  A valuable retrospective on the art of illustrated children's books, a field that shares an elusive border with fantasy art, is A Treasury of Great Children's Book Illustrators, by Susan E. Meyer (Harry N. Abrams). Illustrated children's books this year that will probably appeal to fans of fantasy art include The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese and Other Tales of the Far North by Howard Norman, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon (Harcourt Brace), The Veil of Snows, by Mark Helprin, illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (Viking Ariel), and Rapunzel, by Paul 0. Zelinsky (Dutton).

  There were only a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, none of them really exceptional, although most of them were worthwhile. An interesting if rather formidably opaque and polemic-drenched volume is Digital Delirium, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (St. Martin's). This is a collection of essays about the future of the Internet and the "digital world" in general and the effect it's all going to have on human society and even human evolution, much of it so extreme that the authors seem-to put it bluntly-to be nuts, although it's hard to say from the perspective of the present whether or not there might also turn out to have been nuggets of visionary wisdom buried in this mud slide of passionate rhetoric. Among this crew of wild-eyed, armwaving digital mystics, science fiction's own Bruce Sterling comes off as the voice of Reason, Moderation, and Caution, warning that events in the digital world don't always have the impact on the real world that digital visionaries assume they're going to have. Similar territory is covered, in a more level-headed and less didactic way, in the nonfiction half of the anthology Future Histories, edited by Stephen McClelland (Horizon House), which features essays about the Internet, the "future of communications," and related topics by authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Nicholas Negroponte, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, and others.

  Most SF fans love dinosaurs, and so most of them will probably be interested in Dinosaur Lives, by John R. Horner and Edwin Dobb (Harper collins), which takes us to the front lines and gives us a look at some of the more recent battles going on in that highly contentious science, paleontology, where even the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a deadly strike by an asteroid or comet, probably the most sacrosanct scientific theory of the last ten years, is now coming under attack by critics armed with alternative theories of their own. Most SF fans also share at least a passing interest in astronomy, and so will probably appreciate Planet Quest, the Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, by Ken Croswell (The Free Press), a comprehensive-if a bit dry-look at just what the title says it's about, a subject that would have been science fiction rather than science fact only a few years ago. The Whole Shebang, a State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (Simon & Schuster), by Timothy Ferris, is a good layman's overview of some of the classic problems in cosmology and quantum physics, of obvious applicability to the genre. Michael Palin's Full Circle (St. Martin's), a travel book tied to his recent BBC travel series, is not even remotely justifiable as a "genre-related" book, but, like Palin's other travel narratives, Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole, does offer sort of a vaguely SF-ish kick in the inside perspective it provides into various societies and cultures around the world, many of them extremely different from our familiar Western culture, and so I'll offer that-and the fact that it was one of the more enjoyable nonfiction books I read this year (plus the fact that it was a slow year in this category-as my weak rationale for mentioning it here.

  This year saw an unprecedented parade of SF Big-Screen, Big-Budget, A-Release, Special Effects-Heavy Spectaculars-a few of which were actually worth watching.

  More of these Big-Budget, Special Effects-laden giants are on the way for next year, most budgeted somewhere in the range of 60 million dollars and up; it's quite possible that it will turn out that more money was spent making SF movies for the 1997 and 1998 seasons than has ever before been spent on SF as a film genre. The unanswered question is, is SF as a film genre making money? In an overall sense, is the genre of the SF film returning the vast amount of money that the studios are sinking into it? Some of these Special Effects Extravaganzas have done spectacularly well at the box office-but others seem to have failed, and many that were expected to perform well have seemingly turned in lukewarm performances as moneymakers (this whole question of whether or not a film has made money is complicated these days by the effect of later foreign and videotape sales of the movie, a factor that has helped some notorious box-office bombs earn-out down the road).

  If the overall sense of the industry is that SF movies are making money, then we can expect to see the stream of such movies continuing into the next century; otherwise, the stream may eventually run dry, as it did after other SF films of the period were unable to match the great success of the Star Wars movies.

  The biggest hit of the year, of course, and already one of the highest-earning movies of all time in spite of also being the most expensive-to-produce movie ever, is Titanic, which some people are urging be considered a SF film because it's a movie about the uses and misuses of technology (and because it has REALLY NEAT special effects)-but that stretches the definition of a SF film beyond any useful limits, I think, and I'm not willing to go that far myself (although it wouldn't entirely surprise me to see Titanic show up on next year's Hugo ballot anyway).

  Stepping down a bit from Titanic's lofty level-although still immensely profitable, especially when you consider that it was relatively inexpensive for one of these Special Effects-heavy movies-we come to the surprise hit of the year, Men in Black, a good-natured, amiable, unpretentious, and occasionally surprisingly intelligent action-comedy about an ultrasecret government organization set up to protect Earth from "the scum of the galaxy," the alien criminals and terrorists who live among us in secret, along with more law-abiding, decent citizen-type alien immigrants and alien refugees. This movie works some of the same territory as last year's Independence Day, including the widely accepted .belief that a flying saucer crashed in Boswell, New Mexico, in the '5Os and was captured by the military and that the government has been covering up continued contact with alien races ever since. In an amazingly adroit bit of aesthetic tightrope walking, Men in Black manages to take this idea seriously enough to draw power from it and make some sharp fun of it at the very same time. The special effects are good, of course, including some of the best and most diverse " alien costumes" seen since the original Star Wars, but the real draw here is another relaxed, assured, brash, effortlessly amusing, and totally self-confident star turn by Will Smith-who surely has Bankable Megastar of the late '90s written all over him by now-supported admirably
by a deadpan but sardonic just-the-facts-ma'am performance by Tommy Lee Jones, and a wonderful portrayal-done mostly with body language-of a menacing Alien Bug stuffed into an ill-fitting Human Suit, scary and very funny at the same time, by Vincent D'Onofrio. This may not have been the best SF movie of the year, but it was certainly the one that was the most fun to watch.

  I also enjoyed two of the year's other Big-Screen Spectaculars, although not as much as Men in Black, The Fifth Element and-to a lesser extent-The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Both were worth seeing, if only for the special effects, and, in the case of The Fifth Element, the bizarre and imaginative costuming and set dressing, although it must be admitted up front that both movies were Very Dumb to one extent or another (perhaps less of an offense in The Fifth Element, which is clearly intending to be Very Dumb in a few places). Both were fastpaced, however, and enjoyable if you disengaged your frontal lobes and didn't ask too many embarrassing questions.

  The Fifth Element was the funnier and more enjoyable of the two, a richly colored, headlong, flatout, wildly extravagant Space Opera that didn't make a lick of sense but didn't really need to. This is by far the most successful attempt yet to translate the aesthetics of that specialized, and largely French, form of the comic book known as "comix"-one of Moebius's strips from Metal Hurlant, say-to the movie screen, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses of that form-, the film does a credible job of catching the kind of wild imagery and bizarre juxtapositions that are the heart of that kind of comix, an even better job than did Barbarella, since the makers of The Fifth Element have a much bigger budget and thirty years' worth of advancement in special effects technology with which to work.

  (For another excellent example of French film aesthetics-which are definitely not American aesthetics-in the SF/fantasy/comix area, check out The City of Lost Children, a wonderful movie from a couple of years back that I caught up with recently, a weird but effective mdlange of children's fantasy, surrealism, Metal Hurlant-style comix, noir cinema, and French-tinged cyberpunk; in spite of the stylish and unrelieved grimness of the surreal/noir setting, the movie is often quite funny, and, in the end, surprisingly touching and sweet.)

  Once you realized that The Fifth Element was not really a science fiction movie at all, but rather a filmed version of a comix (a realization that hit me early on, and was certainly inescapable by the time it came to the border of the Terran System, and it's a physical line drawn through space by a row of floating beacons), you could relax and stop trying to sort a coherent plot out of it all, and stop worrying about logical inconsistences and scientific plausibility (although many genre fans and critics apparently could not). "Comix" don't make a lick of sense either, of course, when viewed from the sober, rational, right-brained perspective of traditional science fiction, and seem in fact to take it as a mark of pride that they don't. The premiere French comix artist, Jean Giraud (known as Moebius), actually worked on The Fifth Element, and in many ways it's his movie, with images from his comix-and complete plot lines, including dialogue-running through it from beginning to end, including such unmistakable Moebius touches as the ponderous and benign alien creatures in turtle-shaped space suits who appear at the beginning of the movie and the sequence where the alien Diva, whose singing is so overwhelmingly effective that it reaches across almost all racial barriers, is giving a concert attended by many different alien races, a story line taken directly from a Metal Hurlant strip. I must say that it all looks great, up on the big screen in full color, and moving around too, a testimony to the sheer power of Moebius's imagery and a treat for the eye, whether it makes any sense or not. The special effects are good, but I enjoyed the costuming, the lavish set dressing, and the mind-bogglingly immense (and largely CGI-created) sets the most. The story line is serviceable as long as you don't mind extremely unlikely coincidences and huge holes in the plot logic, and it does have the advantage of being frequently played for as many laughs as it can get. The actors are okay, with Bruce Willis doing his beard-stubble-and-torn-shirt-reluctant-action-hero Die Hard routine, and being upstaged effortlessly by the female lead, Milla Jovovich, who is quite good, speaking the "divine language" babble, which makes up a good part of her dialogue, convincingly enough to make it sound like a real language, and looking very nice, mostly out of the minimal costuming they give her.

  Much the same sort of thing-entertaining, but check your forebrain at the door-could be said about The Lost World: Jurassic Park. For what it's worth, it's actually a better movie than Jurassic Park was in some ways-although lacking the first-time impact of the dinosaur effects that the first movie enjoyedwith the humans actually figuring out how to escape from the dinosaurs on their own, rather than being rescued at the last minute by a disappointing Deus-Extyrannosaurus ending, which was my major objection to Jurassic Park. Here, instead, they beat the dinos using their wits and skill at improvising on the run (literally), which, for me, makes for a much more satisfying movie (some of the characters rely on their own ingenuity, at least; the supposed "professional hunters," by comparison, react with incredible stupidity and incompetence instead, but then, of course, they are only in the movie to serve as cannon fodder-or perhaps Dino Chow would be a better term-in the first place). There are no great surprises here plotwise, of course, it's all pretty predictable-but the movie does manage to crank up a good deal of suspense in several scenes and edges out Jurassic Park on that score as well.

  In a way, though, of course, none of that matters-people went to see The Lost World for the same reason they went to see Jurassic Park: for the dinosaurs. They weren't disappointed either: the special effects here are an order of magnitude better even than in Jurassic Park; it's almost frightening how fast the whole CGI field is evolving, seeming to go through a quantum jump every three or four years. They used a combination of full-sized robot models, traditional stop-motion model animation, and CGI animation for Jurassic Park; but here they largely went with just the CGI stuff instead, and not only are the effects better, with the dinosaurs doing much more complex stuff more believably than in the first movie, but the effects cost a lot less than the effects for the first movie had. If I were a movie actor, I think I'd feel a cold wind blowing, since we surely can't be more than ten years away (and maybe considerably less) from the CGI people being able to create a movie totally without human actors that will be indistinguishable from a movie with human actors. Already, Steven Speilberg has been quoted as saying that he didn't need a Big Name Bankable Star for The Lost World, and he was right. Why pay $50 million for Mel Gibson, when you can whomp up a bunch of dinosaurs in your computer instead? How long it will be before you can whomp up Mel Gibson in your computer? I'm willing to bet that in ten years, if not in five years, the magnificent effects here are going to look crude.

  I wonder if we're going to hit a time when wonderful Special Effects will be so cheap and so common and so widespread that having them in your movie won't be enough to get people to come to see it anymore? If, instead, the Great Special Effects being a given, you'll have to start putting things like a great story and great characters and great dialogue and actually intriguing ideas in it in order to lure an audience into the theater. That would make for a nice change, wouldn't it?

  We actually had a movie this year that tried for something like the above ideal, that rare creature, a serious-minded Big-Budget SF movie, a movie that tried to combine expensive production values and great special effects with a serious adult plot, complex and sophisticated conceptualization, and well rounded human characters. It wasn't entirely successful in achieving that goal, of course, but movies that even try are rare enough that it deserves to be applauded for making an earnest effort in that direction.

  I'm talking, of course, about Contact, a film that tried hard to be the kind of intelligent, serious, adult, thinking-man's SF movie that genre fans have been saying for years they want to see, but which seem to arouse little real heat or enthusiasm within the genre for all that. The trouble may be in the source
material, Carl Sagan's best-selling novel to which the film was reasonably faithful. The novel Contact was more widely appreciated outside the genre than inside it, where it was commonly regarded as new wine in an old bottle, or perhaps even old wine in an old bottle, and I suspect the same is true for the movie, for the same reasons.

  Outside the genre, to audiences who were not already long-familiar with the basic concepts being examined here, Contact may well have played as a stunningly effective and mind-blowing film. Inside the genre, the familiarity of the material lessened the movie's impact, although it was nice to see that material being treated with respect and a reasonable amount of intelligence for a change (one glaring exception: none of the scientists seemed to be able to refute the idea, raised by skeptical bureaucrats, that the alien transmission could have been faked by a satellite in Earth orbit, although triangulation would quickly rule out that possibility; in fact, the whole "Inquisition" sequence toward the end of the movie was lame-perhaps the weakest part of the plot-at least once you got beyond the extreme improbability that they would pick the heroine as the "test pilot" for the alien machine under any circumstances).