Элинор Арнасон: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

Retro SF is represented by Tales from Super-Science Fiction (Haffner), edited by Robert Silverberg, which features pulp stories from Jack Vance, Daniel F. Galouye, James Gunn, and Silverberg himself.

Substantial reprint fantasy anthologies included The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (Tachyon), edited by David Hartwell and Jacob Wiseman, and Epic (Tachyon), edited by John Joseph Adams. For those not familiar with Sword & Sorcery, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is a good place to start, providing a historical overview of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre, from its beginnings in the Weird Tales of the 1930s up to the present day, with original stories by Michael Swanwick and Michael Shea. Unsurprisingly, the best stories here are classics by Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber ,Poul Anderson ,Michael Moorcock, and Joanna Russ, but there’s also good stuff by Glen Cook, Rachel Pollack ,George R. R. Martin ,and others. Epic: Legends of Fantasy, is another meaty, solid anthology, this one all reprint, that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fantasy styles; the best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is probably George R. R. Martin’s “The Mystery Knight,” an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but there are also strong stories by Robin Hobb ,Patrick Rothfuss ,Ursula K. Le Guin ,Tad Williams, Orson Scott Card ,Paolo Bacigalupi ,Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N. K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, and others.

Other reprint (mostly) fantasy anthologies included two books of Christmas stories, Season of Wonder (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and A Cosmic Christmas (Baen), edited by Hank Davis; Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (Prime Books), edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

There were a lot of reprint horror anthologies, some of which included a few original stories, and occasionally an admixture of fantasy in varying strengths: The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books), edited by Ross E. Lockhart; Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Running Press), edited by Marie O’Regan; Extreme Zombies (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Bloody Fabulous (Prime Books), edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

Anthologies of gay SF and fantasy and/or erotica included Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Connie Wilkins and Steve Berman; Fantastic Erotica: The Best of Circlet Press 2008–2012 (Circlet), edited by Cecilia Tan and Bethay Zaiatz; Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Brit Mandelo; and Wilde Stories 2012 : The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Steve Berman.

It was a somewhat weak year in the genre-oriented nonfiction category, mostly notable for books of essays by genre authors, including An Exile on Planet Earth: Articles and Reflections (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford), by Brian W. Aldiss; Distrust That Particular Flavor (Berkley), by William Gibson; London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (PM Press), by Michael Moorcock, edited by Michael Moorcock and Allan Kausch; Some Remarks (William Morrow), by Neal Stephenson; Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (Greenwillow Books), by Diana Wynne Jones; and two books of essays and film reviews by Gary Westfahl, The Spacesuit Film: A History (McFarland) and A Sense-of-Wonderful Century (Borgo Press).

There were several critical studies of various genres, including Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels (NonStop Press), by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo; Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Keith Brooke; Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction [Volume II] (Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries) (PS Publishing), by S. T. Joshi; The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge University Press), edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn; As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press), by Michael Saler; and Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts (Bloomsbury), by Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J. C. Davis. There were several studies of the work of individual authors, including a study of the work of Gene Wolfe, Gate of Horn, Book of Silk: A Guide to Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun (Sirus Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi; Judith Merril: A Critical Study (McFarland), by Diane Newell and Victoria Lamont; Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion … So Far, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs; Scanned Clean: An Analysis of the Work of Michael Marshall Smith (PS Publishing), by David Sweeney; and The Manual of Aeronautics: An Illustrated Guide to the Leviathan Series (Simon Pulse), by Scott Westerfield.

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (lulu.com), by John Conway, is not technically genre oriented, but since I’ve never meet an SF fan who wasn’t interested in dinosaurs, I’m including it anyway. If you haven’t read anything about dinosaurs for the last decade or so, this book will be an eye-opener—these definitely aren’t your father’s dinosaurs, or even the dinosaurs you used to know as a kid when you marched a plastic T. rex across the living room rug while making growling sounds; for one thing, most of them have feathers! Another book that will interest most genre readers (and which makes for a nice segue into our next section) is Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart (Titan Books), edited by Steve White.

Speaking of art (see what I did there?), 2012 was a pretty weak year in the art-book market. As usual, your best bet was probably the latest in a long-running Best of the Year series for fantastic art, Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also good were Expose 10: The Finest Digital Art in the Universe (Ballistic Publishing), edited by Ronnie Gramazio; The Art of the Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), art by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull; Art of the Dragon PB: The Definitive Collection of Contemporary Dragon Paintings (Vanguard Productions), edited by Patrick Wilshire and J. David Spurlock; Trolls (Abrams), by Brian Froud and Wendy Froud; M. W. Kaluta: Sketchbook Series 1: Sketchbook (IDW Publishing), by Michael William Kaluta; and, a bit on the edge of genre, but still vaguely justifiable because of its fantastic imagery, In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Prestel USA), edited by Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, with Terri Geis.

According to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”), as were sixteen out of the top twenty, and forty-five out of the top one hundred.