Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Read online

  After the well-publicized exchange of unpleasantries between editor T.E.D. Klein and myself in the pages of Science Fiction Chronicle over my evaluation of The Twilight Zone Magazine in last year’s Summation, there’s no way I will be able to believably defend myself against charges of bias this year. Nevertheless, whether Ted believes it or not, I do wish TZ well, and did carefully read every story in every issue this year, as I did the year before. Unfortunately, the news I have to report this year is not too much better than last year’s. Although some interesting work by Steven Millhauser, Oliver Lowenbruck, Cezarija Abartis, John Brizzolara and others did appear in TZ this year, the magazine published nothing of really first-rate quality in 1984, and the overall quality was up only slightly over 1983. Most of the stories TZ published in 1984 were mediocre at best, and the worst of them were among the worst stories published by any professional SF/fantasy magazine this year; the best things in many of this year’s issues were the review/nostalgia columns by Gahan Wilson and Ron Goulart. TZ remains a magazine of enormous potential that has never realized much of that potential in any reliable way. TZ also remained bi-monthly in 1984, in spite of rumors in 1983 that it was about to go back on a monthly schedule.

  The British SF magazine Interzone continued to survive for another year, with the help of a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britian and an intensified subscription drive, although it did lose a few more of its many editors—it’s down to a mere four editors now, from a former high of seven. Interzone is an uneven magazine. It publishes a fair amount of failed experimentation, much of it rather tired stuff reminiscent of the New Worlds stories of the late ’60s (nothing dates more quickly than yesterday’s avant-gardism)—but it also provides a home for some offbeat and innovative material that might otherwise not have seen professional print at all, and for that reason it deserves your support. Good stuff by Scott Bradfield, Keith Roberts, Bruce Sterling, M. John Harrison, and others appeared in Interzone in 1984, but the magazine’s kingpiece this year was a brilliant and disturbing novella by Geoff Ryman—if all the work in Interzone came up to this high standard, the magazine would indeed be a force to reckon with in the SF world. (Interzone is flat-out impossible to find on newsstands in this country, and sometimes unfindable even in SF specialty bookstores; American subscriptions can be obtained from Scott Bradfield, 145 E. 18th street, Apt. 5, Costa Mesa, California 92627; $13 for a one-year subscription, First Class Mail.)

  A new large-format slick version of Weird Tales was promised throughout 1984, but seems to have fallen into limbo. Was the first issue published? I’ve spoken with someone who claims to have actually received the first issue of the new Weird Tales, but by my deadline here I was unable to locate a copy of the magazine, and don’t know whether it was distributed generally or not. Even if it was, there seems to be some question as to whether Weird Tales will continue to exist. The well-publicized battle between Gil Lamont and Forrest J. Ackerman over which one of them was really the fiction editor of Weird Tales, fought out through the pages of the major newszines earlier in 1984, has only added to the confusion. Watch the newszines for possible future clarifications on the state of this market.

  Promised for 1985 is a new large-format SF magazine called L. Ron Hubbard’s To The Stars Science Fiction Magazine. Terry Carr is slated to be the fiction editor.

  Short SF continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Rolling Stone to Redbook, with Penthouse and Playboy in particular using SF with a moderate degree of regularity (thanks to fiction editors Kathy Green and Alice K. Turner, respectively). Especially noteworthy was the special SF issue of The Missouri Review, which featured good stories by Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Carter Scholz, and an interesting critical article by Algis Budrys. (I have no idea if this issue is still available, but if you want to write to ask, their address is: The Missouri Review, Department of English, 231 Arts and Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211.)

  The semiprozine market continued to shrink and collapse in 1984, with the death of The Fantasy Gamer and Gameplay, and the death stillborn of FTL. There was still no sign this year of Spectrum Stories, which probably should be considered to be nonexistent. On the brighter side, the World Fantasy Award-winning semiprozine Shayol may not be quite as dead as last reported; at the least, there will be one more issue, scheduled for 1985. The best of 1984’s crop of semiprozines was undoubtedly Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers 21—22, a double-issue which featured strong work by Alan Ryan, Fritz Leiber, Susan Casper, Al Sarrantonio, Dennis Etchison, and others. (Subscription address: 70 Highland Avenue, Binghamton, New York 13905; 2 double-issues for $10.95.) After its strong debut issue in 1983, I was somewhat disappointed by the 1984 issues of Scott Edelman’s semiprozine The Last Wave. Some interesting material still appeared here—an operetta version of Frankenstein by Tom Disch, a play by Parke Godwin, an odd novella by Richard Wilson—but much of the stuff in The Last Wave this year was failed experimentation of a type wearily familiar to any experienced magazine editor, including a workshop-joke type story about vaginas falling out of the sky, by a writer whose work is usually quite good. Let’s hope that this highly-promising magazine can shake itelf out of the doldrums in 1985, and offer us some more substantial fare. (Subscription address: P.O. Box 3206, Grand Central Station, New York, New York 10163; $8 for 4 quarterly issues.) Last year, a reader took me to task for not mentioning more of the semiprozines in this Summation, but the fact is that—in my opinion, anyway—the fiction in most of the rest of the semiprozines only occasionally comes up to the level of quality of the best semiprozines, such as Whispers and Shayol. Fantasy Book, for instance, is a well-intentioned magazine with lots of promise, but it has yet to reliably upgrade the overall quality of its fiction to a really acceptable level. Much the same could be said about Weirdbook, in spite of its high reputation in fantasy/horror circles, and about the British Fantasy Tales. A lot of earnest effort and loving care goes into the production of these magazines, but the hard fact is that much of the fiction they publish is, by professional standards, mediocre … although in fairness it should be said that all three magazines (especially Weirdbook—note, for instance, the Stephen King story in the most recent issue) will occasionally publish a good professional-level story. (Subscription addresses: Fantasy Book, P.O. Box 60126, Pasadena, California 91106, $12 for 4 issues; Weird-book, Box 149, Amherst Branch, Buffalo, New York 14226-0149, 7 issues for $22.50; Fantasy Tales, Stephen Jones, 130 Park View, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 6JU, England, Great Britain, $11 for 3 issues.) There are a lot of other, even more obscure semiprozines, but for the most part the path of kindness is not to mention them at all.

  The original anthology market was in a little bit better health this year, thanks to a number of interesting one-shot anthologies, although still far from the vitality of its glory days, when ten or more original SF anthology series were published yearly. Terry Carr’s Universe 14 (Doubleday) was very good, one of the best Universe volumes in recent years. Usually original anthology series decline in quality after several years of publication, as the editors burn out or become jaded, but Carr seems instead to have gotten his second wind, and in fact the five most recent editions of Universe have in many ways been the best of the entire series. Universe 14 contains major stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, and Molly Gloss, and interesting stuff by Pat Murphy, Carter Scholz, Gregory Benford, and others. The only other edition of an annual original SF anthology series available in 1984 was George R.R. Martin’s The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5 (Bluejay), the resurrected version of his old New Voices series, brought back to life after several years in limbo. Although there’s nothing really major in this year’s volume, there is solid, intelligent work here from C.J. Cherryh, Jack L. Chalker, Carter Scholz, and others, and I’m glad to see this anthology series back on the scene again. Two new original anthology series have been promised for 1985: Far Frontiers, from Baen Books, edited by Jim Baen and Jerry
Pournelle, and the first issue of the L. Ron Hubbard-sponsored Writers of the Future series. The best one-shot anthology of the year, and one of the best in several years, was undoubtedly Michael Bishop’s enormous Light Years and Dark (Berkley). This is a big, meaty book, containing a rich diversity of material, both reprint and original, including 40 stories (18 of them original), 4 poems, 3 short—and very funny—parodies of other SF writers by John Sladek, and—somewhat oddly—an autobiographical fanzine article by James Tiptree, Jr.; among the original stories are major pieces by Gene Wolfe, Pat Cadigan, Kate Wilhelm, John Kessel, Ian Watson, Michael Swanwick, M. John Harrison, and others. The stories in Susan Shwartz’s Habitats (DAW) feature some intriguing speculative material, but are for the most part indifferently executed, several of them coming off more as and-now-let-us-visit-the-Great-Steam-Grommet-Works travelogs of future societies than as stories; Ian Watson contributes the best story here by far, although there is also interesting stuff by Shariann Lewitt and Tanith Lee. Damon Knight may well be correct that many of the writers in his anthology The Clarion Awards (Doubleday) will turn out to be Big Name Professionals in the future, but unfortunately many of the stories they have contributed to this volume, at this point in time, prove to be no more than promising journeyman work when considered on their own merits as fiction. By far the best SF stories here are contributed by Lucius Shepard and Rena Yount, although there are also good mainstream stories by Lois Wickstrom and Jan Herschel. Tomorrow’s Voices (Dial), by “the editors of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,” is a very dissapointing anthology, all the more so because IASFM itself has recently been featuring some very good stories indeed; the material here, however, is decidedly minor, and frequently awful. There were two good “High Fantasy” anthologies this year. Maxim Jakubowski’s Beyond Lands of Never (Unicorn), is a British anthology of stories that feature an odd mix of High Fantasy and British New Wave; sometimes this works very well (as in “Draco, Draco”), sometimes not so well (as in “Caves,” probably the year’s grossest story)—best stories here are by Tanith Lee, Rob Chilson, Robert Holdstock, David Langford, and Jakubowski himself. Terry Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s Elsewhere III (Ace) is a mixed reprint and original anthology, featuring good new fantasy stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, Robin McKinley, Tanith Lee, Esther M. Friesner, Pat Murphy, and Patricia A. McKillip, among others. Sadly, Elsewhere III will be the final volume in this worthwhile new series, which is being killed because of poor sales; I’ll be sorry to see it go. I’ve never understood why High Fantasy anthologies don’t sell much better than they do, considering all the thousands upon thousands of people who flock to buy fantasy novels. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress (DAW) is yet another collection of sword & sorcery tales exploring (mostly) the theme of Amazon Warriors, a theme I am frankly starting to get a little tired of; Pat Murphy and Emma Bull probably have the best work here, although nothing is really outstanding. The horror anthology market was still healthy in 1984, although the horror novel has been going through a mini-recession of late. As usual, the best of the year’s horror anthologies was edited by Charles L. Grant—in this instance, Grant’s Shadows 7 (Doubleday), the latest edition in this award-winning series; it features first-rate work by Tanith Lee, Michael Cassutt, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Susan Casper, and Alan Ryan, among others. Alan Ryan’s Night Visions 1 (Dark Harvest) features only three authors—Charles L. Grant, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Tanith Lee—but presents us with several different stories by each of them (7 by Grant, 7 by Tem, 4 by Lee), an intriguing idea that gives us a good sampling of an individual author’s range—it works particularly well here with the versatile and chameleonic Tanith Lee, whose stories demonstrate a wide variety of styles and attacks; it’ll be interesting to see how future volumes in this projected series turn out. J.N. Williamson’s Masques (Maclay) was the most dissappointing anthology of the three. There’s some interesting work here—primarily by Gene Wolfe and Robert R. McCammon—but Williamson seems to lack the touch for modern horror demonstrated by editors like Grant and Schiff; the stories here tend to veer toward the Grand Guignol, so much so that some of them eventually come to seem silly rather than scary.

  Promising short fiction debuts were made this year by Molly Gloss, Geoff Ryman, Rena Yount, M. Sargent Mackay, Ian McDonald, Elissa Malcohn, and Jennifer Swift.

  As I stated in last year’s anthology, I have reluctantly given up the attempt to read and review every new SF and fantasy novel published during the year. There are just too many of them now—just to read them all, let alone review them, would be a full-time job, leaving no time to do the very extensive reading at shorter lengths that editing this anthology demands, let alone time for my own writing. So instead I’ll limit myself to commenting that of the novels I did read this year, I was most impressed by: Neuromancer, William Gibson (Ace Special); The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace Special); The Man Who Melted, Jack Dann (Bluejay Books); Them Bones, Howard Waldrop (Ace Special); Green Eyes, Lucius Shepard (Ace Special); Frontera, Lewis Shiner (Baen Books); The Man in the Tree, Damon Knight (Berkley); Heechee Rendezvous, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Across the Sea of Suns, Gregory Benford (Timescape); Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany (Bantam); World’s End, Joan D. Vinge (Bluejay Books); Clay’s Ark, Octavia E. Butler (St. Martin’s Press); The Digging Leviathan, James P. Blaylock (Ace); The Infinity Concerto, Greg Bear (Berkley); Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace); and Cards of Grief, Jane Yolen (Berkley).

  Other novels that have gotten a lot of attention and acclaim this year include: Demon, John Varley (Berkley); West of Eden, Harry Harrison (Bantam); Dr. Adder, K.W. Jeter (Bluejay Books); Damiano, Damiano’s Lute, and Raphael, all by R.A. MacAvoy (and all from Bantam); The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch (Harper & Row); The Final Encyclopedia, Gordon R. Dickson (Tor); Emergence, David R. Palmer (Bantam); The Peace War, Vernor Vinge (Bluejay Books); Fuzzies and Other People, H. Beam Piper (Ace); The Practice Effect, David Brin (Bantam); I, Vampire, Jody Scott (Ace); The Integral Trees, Larry Niven (Ballantine); Job: A Comedy of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein (Del Rey); and The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub (Viking).

  It’s interesting to note that in a year which saw the publication of novels by some of the very biggest names in the genre, most of the critical attention was focused on novels by new and relatively-new writers, and that those were the books that seemed to generate the most enthusiasm among the readership.

  I’ve mentioned this before, but it is also worth pointing out again here just how many extraordinary novels were available this year only from “small press” publishers: R.A. Lafferty’s Half A Sky (sequel to his 1971 historic fantasy The Flame is Green), from Corroboree Press; Michael Bishop’s Who Made Stevie Crye, from Arkham House; Gene Wolfe’s Free Live Free, from Zeising, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, also from Zeising. The Dick novel is not SF or fantasy, but will almost undoubtedly be of strong interest to anyone who’s a fan of Dick’s work (more heretofore unpublished mainstream Dick novels are coming up from Dragon Press and Academy Chicago; Dick fans should also notice the recent string of Dick reissues from Bluejay). Ads for all of these small presses, and more, can usually be found in Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle; some of these books may also be available by mail through the Waldenbooks’ Otherworlds SF Club. Similarly, we should also point out here that Robert Silverberg published two historical novels in 1984—Gilgamesh the King (Arbor House) and Lord of Darkness (Bantam)—that rank among his best work at novel length.

  The year’s best short-story collections were: Extra(ordinary) People, Joanna Russ (St. Martin’s Press); One Winter in Eden, Michael Bishop (Arkham House); The Wolfe Archipelago, Gene Wolfe (Zeising); Tamastara, or The Indian Nights, Tanith Lee (DAW); The Years of the City, Frederik Pohl (Timescape); The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Robert Silverberg (Arbor House); and Ringing Changes, R.A. Lafferty (Ace). Also worthwhile were: The Ghost Light, Fritz Leiber (Berkley); Rhialto the Marvellous, Jack Vance (Baen B
ooks); Viriconium Nights, M. John Harrison (Ace); Phoenix in the Ashes, Joan D. Vinge (Bluejay Books); The Fire When It Comes, Parke Godwin (Doubleday); Pohlstars, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Red Dreams, Dennis Etchison (Scream/Press); Past Times, Poul Anderson (Tor); In a Lonely Place, Karl Edward Wagner (Scream/Press); Daughter of Regals, Stephen R. Donaldson (Del Rey); Signs and Portents, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Dream/Press); and a paperback reprint of Kate Wilhelm’s Listen, Listen, from Berkley.

  Worth a special note are the three collections of heretofore unpublished R.A. Lafferty stories, from Chris Drumm: Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories; Snake In His Bosom and Other Stories; and The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories. These are cheap-looking, poorly-produced mimeographed booklets, and the contents, for the most part, will be of interest only to Lafferty completists … on the other hand, there are some good undiscovered Lafferty stories here (one of them appears in this anthology), and at the price ($2 per booklet), you can hardly go wrong—especially as the chances are good that these booklets will be collector’s items someday, when Lafferty is critically re-evaluated, as he is bound to be, as perhaps the most original short-story writer of the last twenty years. (Since these booklets are completely unavailable even in SF specialty bookstores—unlike some of the items from more prominent specialty publishers listed above—I’m going to list the mailing address for them: Chris Drumm, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, Iowa 50226.)