Gardner Dozois: The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

There was supposedly a new volume in the assembled-online “SFF.net” annual anthology series this year, called Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, but I never saw it; I’ll have to save it for consideration for next year.

As usual, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XVIII (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys, presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents. Much the same could be said of Empire of Dreams and Miracles (Phobos), edited by Orson Scott Card, which features winners of the 1st Annual Phobos Fiction Contest.

In terms of literary quality, the line-by-line quality of the writing, the best anthology of the year may well be Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, a special issue of the literary publication Conjunctions guest-edited by Peter Straub-although some genre fans are going to find it disappointing in spite of the bravura quality of the prose. The (somewhat unclear) intention here seems to have been to produce an “all genres” anthology aimed at the mainstream literary audience, but there is almost no science fiction here-with the exception of a good Alternate History story by John Kessel, “The Invisible Empire”-and surprisingly, considering that horror superstar Peter Straub was the editor, almost no horror either; most of the stories fall somewhere on the line between fantasy and slipstream / surrealism / Magic Realism / whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-month, although several of the anthologies very best stories, such as Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” and John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroine,” strike me as straight mainstream stories (in spite of Straub’s rather too-clever attempts to argue that the Crowley is really a fantasy story after all). Although Straub does brandish the term “post-transformation fiction,” it’s hard for me to perceive that any coherent critical argument is being made here, or to discern why this particular group of authors are “New Wave Fabulists,” or what makes them so, or what that term means, or why they were selected rather than some other grouping of authors; it seems instead like the partially random selection of authors you’d get assembling any original anthology, depending largely on the luck of the draw, rather than a list of authors collected with critical rigor or to demonstrate some particular mode or emerging school of fiction. Still, if you set aside considerations of genre or of critical canon-forming, what you get is an anthology with some really good stuff to read in it. After the above-mentioned stories by Fowler, Crowley, and Kessel, the best stories here are Andy Duncan’s flamboyant “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and China Mieville’s grisly “Familiar,” but the anthology also features good-to-excellent stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Neil Caiman, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub himself, and others, plus excerpts from forthcoming novels by Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe, a book well worth the $15 cover price, especially for those who don’t insist on drinking their genre neat.

There were four other small press anthologies this year that mixed slipstream, horror, fantasy, and science fiction in their contents lists to varying effect, usually with science fiction the smallest element in the mix by far. Polyphony, Volume 1 (Wheatland Press), edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, is more unambiguously a “slipstream” anthology than Conjunctions 39, with little that could be mistaken for any other genre, but is still worthwhile. The best story here is Maureen F. McHugh’s “Laika Comes Home Safe,” but Polyphony also contains good stuff by Andy Duncan, Lucius Shepard, Leslie What, James Van Pelt, and others. Leviathan Three (Ministry of Whimsy Press), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, mixes other fairly identifiable genres (mostly fantasy) in with the slipstream stuff, and mixes genres more within individual stories than most of these anthologies do (Brian Stableford’s story, for instance, mixes science fiction and fantasy to enough of a degree that it can only be called science-fantasy), and although there’s some over-pretentious and rather dull stuff here, there’s also some excellent work. The best stories here are “The Face of an Angel,” by Brian Stableford and “The Fool’s Tale,” by L. Timmel Duchamp, but there are also good stories by Jeffrey Ford, Carol Emshwiller, Stepan Chapman, and others. J. K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation (Subterranean Press), edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan, is an anthology of stories supposedly inspired by the work of artist J. K. Potter (included in the book); not surprisingly, considering Potter’s sometimes grotesque work and the publisher’s usual fare, Embrace the Mutation leans a good deal more toward straight horror than the other three anthologies being discussed here, but there still are visitations from other genres, notably pure fantasy in a story by Elizabeth Hand and even science fiction in a story by Lucius Shepard-those two, in fact, “Pavane for a Prince of the Air,” by Elizabeth Hand, and “Radiant Green Star,” by Lucius Shepard, are the best stories in the book, but it also features good work by Michael Bishop, Kim Newman, John Crowley, Peter Crowther, and others. In the Shadow of the Wall (Cumberland House), edited by Byron R. Tetrick and Martin H. Greenberg, is an otherwise pretty good anthology, mostly of rather Twilight Zonish fantasy stories, that hampers itself a bit by insisting that all its stories deal centrally with the Vietnam Memorial (the Wall of the title. The best story here is Michael Swanwick’s bitter little story “Dirty Little War,” but there is also good work by Barry N. Malzberg, Orson Scott Card, Nick DiChario, and Byron R. Terrick himself.

Two other small-press anthologies filled an odd and rather specialized literary niche: anthologies of stories about (or inspired by, in one case, to be precise) science fiction and fantasy bookstores. Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores (DreamHaven), edited by Gregg Ketter, the owner of the DreamHaven science fiction bookstore in Minneapolis. Shelf Life deals pretty centrally with the bookstore theme, here treated mostly as a variant of the “little magic shop” story in a sequence of mostly rather gentle fantasy stories, with some mild horror, by Gene Wolfe (with his “From the Cradle,” being, unsurprisingly, the volume’s best), P. D. Cacek, John J. Miller, and others, plus one SF story by Jack Williamson (a pleasant-enough anthology, but at $75.00, it’s wildly overpriced). The Bakka Anthology (The Bakka Collection), edited by Kristen Pederson Chew, has a looser theme, stories “inspired by” the authors having worked in the Bakka science fiction bookstore in Toronto, and, as might be expected, gathers a more eclectic crop of stories as a result, mostly science fiction, with some fantasy and harder-to-classify stuff thrown in. The best story here is Michelle Sagara West’s “To Kill an Immortal,” but there’s good work by Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Robert J. Sawyer, and others, here as well.

The best original genre fantasy anthology of the year, again with little real competition, was probably The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (Viking) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling, which contained good-to-excellent work by M. Shayne Bell, Tanith Lee, Delia Sherman, Emma Bull, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Patricia A. McKillip, and others. 30th Anniversary DAW: Fantasy (DAW), edited by Ellizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert is also worth mentioning; although it suffers from the same faults as its SF brother-volume, it contains good work by Tanith Lee, Michelle West, and others. The rest of the year’s original fantasy anthologies were pleasant but minor, including, Knight Fantastic (DAW), edited by John Heifers and Martin H. Greenberg; Pharaoh Fantastic (DAW), edited by Brittiany A. Koren and Martin H. Greenberg; and Apprentice Fantastic (DAW), edited by Russell Davis and Martin H. Greenberg.