Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Noted without comment is When the Great Days Come (Prime Books), by Gardner Dozois.

Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: Admiralty: Volume 4 of the Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson (NESFA Press), by Poul Anderson; Shannach—The Last: Farewell to Mars (Haffner Press), by Leigh Brackett; The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Six: Multiples 1983–1987 (Subterranean Press), by Robert Silverberg; Hunt the Space-Witch: Seven Adventures in Time and Space (Paizo/Planet Stories), by Robert Silverberg; At the Human Limit, The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Eight (Haffner Press), by Jack Williamson; The Universe Wreckers, The Collected Edmond Hamilton (Haffner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; The Collected Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow, Volume Two (Haffner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; The Collected Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow, Volume Three (Haffner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One (Haffner Press), by Henry Kuttner; The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (Night Shade Books), by Clark Ashton Smith; Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant (PS Publishing), by Charles L. Grant; Collected Ghost Stories (Oxford University Press), by M. R. James; The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants (PS Publishing), by Ramsey Campbell; and Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) (Subterranean Press), by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

As has become usual, small presses again dominated the list of short-story collections, with Haffner Press and Subterranean Press being particularly active in the issuing of retrospective collections.

A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory, and the Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.

As usual, among the most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are the various Best of the Year anthologies, although this is an area in constant flux, with old series disappearing and new series being born. This year seemed to be relatively stable. At the moment, science fiction is being covered by three anthologies (actually, technically, by two anthologies and by two separate half anthologies): the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s Press, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-ninth annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Harper Voyager), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its sixteenth annual volume; the science fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan; and the science fiction half of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2011 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton (in practice, of course, these books probably won’t divide neatly in half with their coverage, and there’s likely to be more of one thing than another). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto Best of the Year anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2011 (Tor), edited by Kevin J. Anderson. (A similar series covering the Hugo winners began in 2010, but swiftly died.) There were three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Three (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 22 (Running Press), edited by Stephen Jones; and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2011 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. This year there was also The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Joe R. Lansdale, although it’s unclear whether this is going to be a continuing series. Fantasy is covered by the fantasy halves of the Stranhan and Horton anthologies (plus whatever stories fall under the Dark Fantasy part of Guran’s anthology), but with the death of Kevin Brockmeier’s Best American Fantasy series last year, the only remaining Best of the Year anthology dedicated solely to fantasy is David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy series— Year’s Best Fantasy 10 was announced as forthcoming by Kathryn Cramer in her blog, but I haven’t actually seen a copy, and it isn’t listed on Amazon, so whether this will actually appear is anyone’s guess. There was also The 2011 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association), edited by David Lunde, which compiles the Rhysling Award–winning SF poetry of the year.

There were a large number of good stand-alone reprint anthologies this year. Although it’s a bit of an oddity, a discussion of reprint anthologies published in 2011 wouldn’t be complete without mention of Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (Wildside Press), edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, which earns the odd distinction of being perhaps the largest SF anthology ever published: almost a thousand pages, roughly the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory, weighing five pounds, containing 148 stories and 62 specialized essays about various authors and categories of science fiction. At almost fifty bucks, this will probably be too expensive for most casual readers (there is an e-book version available for forty bucks), but it’s a great choice for libraries and serious collectors, practically being a one-volume library, containing memorable stories by Damon Knight, Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, Robert A. Heinlein, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Pangborn, Terry Bisson, Pat Murphy, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Maureen McHugh, Greg Bear, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many others.

Another enormous reprint anthology that spans decades of genre work, examining fantasy-horror rather than science fiction, is The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Corvus), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which devotes 1,152 pages to 110 stories from many historic periods by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Kelly Link, George R. R. Martin, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson, China Miéville, Angela Carter, Michael Chabon, and many, many others.

Also good—although considerably smaller—is Alien Contact (Night Shade Books), edited by Marty Halpern, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction (and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot- ’em-up alien invasion movies we got over the last year or so), featuring work by Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Bruce McAllister, Molly Gloss, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others. Brave New Worlds (Night Shade Books) is a reprint anthology of dystopian stories edited by John Joseph Adams, most of them pretty depressing but also pretty powerful, including stories by Shirley Jackson, Geoff Ryman, Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alex Irvine, Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and others. Lightspeed: Year One (Prime Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, is a collection of the first year’s worth of stories from electronic online magazine Lightspeed , featuring good work by Carrie Vaughn, Yoon Ha Lee, Ted Kosmatka, Vylar Kaftan, and others, and reprints by Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and others. Future Media (Tachyon Publications), edited by Rick Wilber, is an anthology of views of the media age, featuring reprint stories by Pat Cadigan, Gregory Benford, James Tiptree, Jr., and others, plus essays by Marshall McLuhan, Vannevar Bush, and others. Battlestations (Prime Books), edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett, is an omnibus of two previously published anthologies of military SF.