1985 also saw, for the first time in a number of years, the founding of a new original SF anthology series, Far Frontiers (Baen), a quarterly anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen. Far Frontiers is, unsurprisingly, strongly reminiscent of Baen’s defunct anthology series Destinies, with the same mix of fiction and strongly-opinionated fact articles, and the same obvious (perhaps too obvious) and didactic editorial bias. Thus far, Far Frontiers has proved to be a solid and interesting series—but has yet to publish anything of really first-rank quality. Nevertheless, SF needs all the short-story markets it can find, and this one deserves our support.
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As usual, the very extensive reading at shorter lengths that editing this anthology requires (plus the demands on my time made by editing Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, to say nothing of my own writing) has left me no time to read all of the dozens and dozens of new SF and fantasy novels published this year. (Even if you devoted all your time to reading new novels, treating it as a full-time job, it might be difficult to keep up; Locus estimates that 249 new SF novels and 177 new fantasy novels were published in 1985.) So, again as usual, that means that I’ll limit myself here to commenting that of the novels I did read this year, I was most impressed by: Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling (Arbor House); Brightness Falls From the Air, James Tiptree, Jr. (Tor); In the Drift, Michael Swanwick (Ace Special); Blood Music, Greg Bear (Arbor House); Eon, Greg Bear (Bluejay); Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, Tim Powers (Ace); The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (Tor); Freedom Beach, John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (Bluejay); and CV, Damon Knight (Tor).
Other novels which have gotten a lot of attention and acclaim this year include: Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Robots and Empire, Isaac Asimov (Doubleday); Ancient of Days, Michael Bishop, (Arbor House); Artifact, Gregory Benford (Tor); The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Robert A. Heinlein (Putnam); Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper & Row; Contact, Carl Sagan (Simon & Schuster); Walk the Moon’s Road, Jim Aikin (Del Rey); Fiskadoro, Dennis Johnson (Knopf); The Remaking of Sigmund Freud, Barry N. Malzberg (Del Rey); Human Error, Paul Preuss (Tor); Tom O’Bedlam, Robert Silverberg (Donald I. Fine); Helliconia Winter, Brian W. Aldiss (Atheneum); The Book of Kells, R.A. MacAvoy (Bantam Spectra); The Dream Years, Lisa Goldstein (Bantam Spectra); Isle of Glass, Judith Tarr (Bluejay); Knight Moves, Walter Jon Williams (Tor); Saraband of Lost Time, Richard Grant (Avon); Lyonesse: The Green Pearl, Jack Vance (Underwood-Miller); Charterhouse: Dune, Frank Herbert (Putnam); The Secret of Life, Rudy Rucker (Bluejay); Child of Fortune, Norman Spinrad (Bantam Spectra); Lovecraft’s Book, Richard Lupoff (Arkham House); The Postman, David Brin (Bantam Spectra); Song of Kali, Dan Simmons (Bluejay); and Trumps of Doom, Roger Zelazny (Arbor House).
It’s interesting to note that last year three of the top novels in contention—William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, and Lucius Shepard’s Green Eyes—were first novels, and that one of them, Neuromancer, went on to win all the major awards. This year’s list is less dominated by first novels than last years, but they still made their presence strongly felt. There were a lot of first novels published in 1985—Locus lists 30 of them in its year-end wrap-up, and I’m sure that there must be a few they missed. Of this rich crop of first novels, special attention should be given to the Swanwick, the Aikin, the Simmons, and the Tarr—impressive debuts all.
There was no clear favorite this year, nothing that dominated the award lists as strongly as Neuromancer did last year (or that, say, LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, or Haldeman’s The Forever War, or Pohl’s Gateway did in their respective years). Card’s Ender’s Game was ahead in nominations going into the preliminary Nebula ballot voting, and I suspect that it will take at least one major award this year.
The most controversial novel of the year was probably Carl Sagan’s Contact … with at least one hostile critic running a review of it before it had probably even been written, let alone published! Runners-up in the most controversial category were probably Spider Robinson’s Night of Power (Baen), L. Ron Hubbard’s The Invaders’ Plan (Bridge), and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls—all of which critics seemed to either love or loathe.
Regrettably, there seemed to be fewer important small press books this year, in either the novel or the collection categories … although Arkham House in particular maintained a strong presence, as did Ziesing. Academy Chicago published Puttering About in a Small Land, a mainstream novel by the late Philip K. Dick that will probably be of strong interest to anyone who’s a fan of Dick’s SF work. Similarly, Underwood-Miller continues to publish mystery novels by Jack Vance, the most recent being Strange Notions and The Dark Ocean.
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The year’s best short story collections were: Firewatch, Connie Willis (Bluejay); Trinity and Other Stories, Nancy Kress (Bluejay); Dealing in Futures, Joe Haldeman (Viking); The Gorgon, Tanith Lee (DAW); Nightflyers, George R. R. Martin (Bluejay); Skeleton Crew, Stephen King (Putnam); and Byte Beautiful, James Tiptree, Jr. (Doubleday). Also worthwhile were: The Book of Ian Watson, Ian Watson (Zeising); Dragonfields and Other Stories, Jane Yolen (Ace); I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Philip K. Dick (Doubleday); Limits, Larry Niven, (Del Rey); Flight from Neveryon, Samuel R. Delany (Bantam); Beastmarks, A.A. Attanasio (Ziesing); and Melancholy Elephants, Spider Robinson (Tor). Special mention should be made of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, Vols. I–VI (Sphere)—these English paperbacks are available in most SF specialty bookstores, or through the mail (Ace will be reprinting the first three volumes in the United States throughout 1986), and are well worth taking a close look at if you are at all interested in the future evolution of the genre horror story. I’d also like to call your attention to Greasy Lake and Other Stories (Viking), a collection of strange stories, many of them borderline fantasies, by offbeat mainstream writer T. Coraghessan Boyle … and another book that will appeal to many SF and fantasy readers.
As usual, Chris Drumm published a few interesting collections in the form of mimeographed booklets, among them Slippery and Other Stories, by R.A. Lafferty and Cuts by Carter Scholz. These are hardly models of the bookmarker’s art (in fact, they’re pretty shoddy looking), but you can hardly go wrong at the price ($2 per booklet), and they contain interesting material that is unavailable elsewhere. (Since these booklets are completely unavailable even in Sf specialty bookstores—unlike some of the items from more prominent publishers listed above—I’m going to list their mailing address: Chris Drumm, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, Iowa 50226.)
Bluejay in particular is to be complimented for committing so strongly to short story collections this year. I know from lists of upcoming titles that Tor, Arbor House, Arkham House and others are also going to be publishing a fair number of collections in 1986—this is a trend that should be strongly encouraged, especially after the near-total absence of collections from mainline publishers that prevailed during the worst of the recession years just past. There are still not enough of them making it into print, even now.
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The reprint anthology market was very weak this year, considerably weaker than last year, with nothing coming even close to 1984’s monumental Light Years and Dark. Your best bet in the reprint market are probably the various “Best of the Year” anthologies and the annual Nebula anthology. After them, 1985’s most worthwhile reprint anthologies probably were: The Hugo Winners, Vol. 4 (Doubleday), edited by Isaac Asimov; The Third Omni Book of Science Fiction (Zebra), edited by Ellen Datlow; Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories, Vols. 13 and 14 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; Medea: Harlan’s World (Phantasia), edited by Harlan Ellison; Time Travellers (Donald I. Fine), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg; and Isaac Asimov’s Fantasy (Doubleday), edited by Shawna McCarthy. Noted without comment is Bestiary! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
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The Sf-oriented nonfiction/Sf reference book field was also wea
ker overall this year than last, although a few interesting items did appear. The best reference book of the year was probably E.F. Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror (Scribners). More fun to read were Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf (Southern Illinois University Press), by Algis Budrys, a collection of Budrys’s old Galaxy columns, and The Pale Shadow of Science (Serconia Press), a collection of articles by Brian W. Aldiss—both books opinionated, argumentative, and fascinating. My favorite SF-oriented nonfiction book of the year, though, was Tom Weller’s hilarious Science Made Stupid (Houghton Mifflin), which brilliantly does just what it says it’s going to do. Also worthwhile were Douglas E. Winter’s book of interviews Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (Berkley) and Who Says Paranoia Isn’t “In” Anymore? (Loompanics Unlimited), a book of cartoons by Alexis A. Gilliland.
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1985 did not turn out to be a particularly good year for SF/fantasy films, either artistically or economically. Many of the year’s SF/fantasy movies, in fact, were box-office disasters, with films such as D.A.R.Y.L, Weird Science, Explorers, Ghoulies, Silver Bullet, My Science Project, Re-animator, Cat’s Eye, and Day of the Dead all going down the proverbial toilet—and, in most cases, deserving to go down, although a few of them contained a nice touch or two here and there. A lot of hopes had been pinned on Enemy Mine as 1985’s potential Big SF Movie, but it fared well neither with the critics nor at the box office, and rapidly disappeared. Disney Studios probably lost the most money on SF/fantasy this year, striking out with the animated feature The Black Cauldron (which was disavowed in advance by author Lloyd Alexander), with Baby, a spectacularly-inept dinosaur movie, and with a strange (perhaps too strange) film called Return to Oz. Return to Oz is actually well worth watching, an uneven but occasionally brilliant film, with sumptuous set-dressing and awesome state-of-the-art claymation special effects … but it is also a darkly brooding film, with a sense of claustrophobic joylessness pervading even its Oz scenes, and one which clearly misjudged its audience—try to catch this on videotape, though.
The top money-maker of the year among SF/fantasy films was Back to the Future, a film whose thin storyline was redeemed by filmic ingenuity and entertaining performances (particularly that of Christopher Lloyd as a scenery-chewing, eye-rolling Mad Scientist). Also financially successful was Coccoon, which, if not as good as last year’s Splash, still managed to be slickly entertaining. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome also did well at the box office (although it was markedly inferior to The Road Warrior), as did Teen Wolf, Fright Night, and Goonies, all entertaining but fundamentally lightweight films. Young Sherlock Holmes did okay, although it outraged Holmes purists by not sticking to the Canon. Ladyhawke and The Company of Wolves didn’t do so hot, although they were admired by some critics for their touches of intelligence and style.
Rambo, Rocky IV, Invasion USA, and Red Dawn could all in a way be considered to be fantasy films—but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open here.
Three SF/Fantasy-oriented anthology shows debuted on network television this year. They were all much hyped and ballyhooed, but I was somewhat disappointed by them all. In spite of—or maybe because of—Stephen Spielberg’s expertise, Amazing Stories turns out to be slick but empty. The Twilight Zone is earnest but dull, with indifferent production values. Alfred Hitchcock Presents is markedly inferior in pacing and story-sense to the old Hitchcock show, and this is nowhere more in evidence than when they attempt a remake of one of the old episodes.
All in all, not much of a year.
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The 43rd World Science Fiction Convention, Aussiecon II, was held in Melbourne, Australia, August 22nd to 26th, and drew an estimated attendance of 1,600. The North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFIC), the “alternate Worldcon,” was held in Austin, Texas, over the Labor Day weekend, and drew an estimated attendance of 2,700. The 1985 Hugo Awards, presented at Aussiecon II, were: Best Novel, Neuromancer by William Gibson; Best Novella, PRESS ENTER■, by John Varley; Best Novelette, “Bloodchild,” by Octavia E. Butler; Best Short Story, “The Crystal Spheres,” by David Brin; Best Non-Fiction, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction, by Jack Williamson; Best Professional Editor, Terry Carr; Best Professional Artist, Michael Whelan; Best Dramatic Presentation, 2010;/ Best Semi-Prozine, Locus; Best Fanzine, File 770; Best Fan Writer, Dave Langford; Best Fan Artist, Alexis A. Gilliland; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Lucius Shepard.
The 1984 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet in New York City on May 4th, 1985, were: Best Novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson; Best Novella, PRESS ENTER■, by John Varley; Best Novelette, “Bloodchild,” by Octavia E. Butler; Best Short Story, “Morning Child,” by Gardner Dozois.
The 1985 World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Eleventh Annual World Fantasy Convention in Tucson, Arizona on November 3rd, were: Best Novel (tie), Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock and Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart; Best Novella, “The Unconquered Country,” by Geoff Ryman; Best Short Story (tie) “Still Life with Scorpion,” by Scott Baker and “The Bones Wizard” by Alan Ryan; Best Anthology/ Collection, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, Volumnes 1---3, by Clive Barker; Best Artist, Edward Gorey; Special Award (Professional), Chris Van Allsburg for The Mysteries of Harris Burdick; Special Award, Non-Professional, Stuart David Schiff for Whispers/Whispers Press; Special Convention Award, Evangeline Walton; plus a Life Achievement Award to Theodore Sturgeon.
The 1984 John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner was The Years of the City, by Frederik Pohl.
The third Philip K. Dick Memorial Award winner was Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
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Death hit the SF field hard in 1985 and early 1986. The dead included: THEODORE STURGEON, 67, one of the giants of the Golden Age of science fiction, and a writer who remained a seminal influence on the field throughout his long and brilliant career, author of the classic novel More than Human, and one of the best short story writers ever to work in the genre; L. RON HUBBARD, 75, another Golden Age giant, and the highly controversial founder of the Church of Scientology; FRANK HERBERT, 65, Nebula-and-Hugo Award winning author of the classic novel Dune, one of SF’s biggest bestsellers, as well as a number of Dune sequels and other novels such as The Green Brain and The Dosadi Experiment; JUDY-LYNN DEL REY, 41, publisher and founder of Del Rey Books, one of the most prominent SF book editors of our times; JACK GAUGHAN, 54, Hugo-Award winning SF artist; T.L. SHERRED, 69, author of the classic story “E for Effort,” as well as the novel Alien Land; LARRY SHAW, 60, highly influential editor of Infinity magazine, who also worked as a book editor for Regency, Lancer, and Dell, as well as other houses; RENE BARJAVEL, 74, one of the most successful of French science-fiction writers; ITALO CALVINO, 62, noted Italian Fabulist, winner of the 1982 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award; E.B. WHITE, 86, author of the renowned children’s fantasies Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web; LEO SUMMERS, 59, SF artist, particularly noted for his work on Astounding/Analog; ROBERT P. MILLS, 65, renowned former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Venture, and longtime literary agent; BERNARD WOLFE, 70, author of the acclaimed SF novel Limbo; JANUSZ ZAJDEL, 47, top Polish SF writer; EVGENII P. BRANDIS, Soviet literary critic who specialized in SF; OLOF MOLLER, 61, Swedish SF writer; CHRISTINE CAMPBELL THOMSON, 88, British horror anthologist; BLANCHE WILLIAMSON, 75, wife of SF writer Jack Williamson; DR. JACK HALDEMAN, 73, father of SF writers Joe Haldeman and Jack C. Haldeman II; BILL EVANS, 64, long-time SF fan and SF bibliographer, and his wife BUDDY JACOBY EVANS, herself a well-known SF fan; WALT LIEBSCHER, 66, long-time SF fan and sometime SF writer; BANKS H. MEBANE, 58, long-time fan and frequent convention-goer; SF writer J.W. SCHULTZ, 72; ROY HUNT, long-time SF fan; MARGARET L. “STEVIE” BARNES, Colorado writer and fan; MARGARET HAMILTON, 82, best known to generations of children for her portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz; EDMOND O’BRIEN, best known to SF fans for his role in 1984; GRANT WILLIAMS, GALE SONDERGAARD,
EVELYN ANKERS, and GRAYSON HALL, all known for SF/fantasy related roles; and CHESTER GOULD, 84, the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, which often featured fantastic elements.
LUCIUS SHEPARD
The Jaguar Hunter
Lucius Shepard began publishing in 1983, and in a very short time has become one of the most popular and prolific new writers to enter the science fiction field in many years. In 1985 Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer, as well as being on the Nebula Award final ballot an unprecedented three times, in three separate categories; he also showed up on the final Hugo Ballot twice, as well as being a finalist for the British Fantasy award, The John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and elsewhere. His acclaimed first novel, called Green Eyes, was an Ace Special. Upcoming is a new novel, called Psiderweb, from Bantam, and a collection, The Jaguar Hunter, from Arkham House. His stories “Salvador” and “Black Coral” were in our Second Annual Collection.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 2