The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Read online

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  Nineteen ninety didn’t strike me as a particularly strong year for novels overall—although, as usual, there were so many novels published that it was certainly possible to find good ones if you spent a bit of effort looking for them. Locus estimates that the total number of books published this year was up by eight percent over 1989, although most of that gain came in the collections, anthologies, and critical book categories, rather than in the novel category, which actually declined somewhat overall. (The greatest increase came in the trade paperback category, which was up thirty-four percent; last year it was up by fifty percent, which means that category has enjoyed an overall increase of one hundred percent since 1988—clearly, as hardcovers become more expensive to produce and to buy, trade paperbacks are becoming an increasingly attractive option for both the publisher and the consumer). Locus estimates that there were 281 new SF novels (a rise of less than one percent from last year), 204 new fantasy novels (down twenty-eight percent from last year’s total of 277), and 168 new horror novels (down five percent from last year’s count of 176—although, with many publishers cutting back on horror, next year may well see a dramatic drop in the number of horror titles). That brings the number of new SF/fantasy/horror novels published in 1990—according to Locus—to 653; down somewhat from last year’s total of 732, but, even so (and even if you restricted yourself to the science fiction novels alone), the novel field has clearly expanded far beyond the ability of any one reviewer to keep up with it. Busy as I am with enormous amounts of reading at shorter lengths, I don’t even try anymore, and I must admit that I was unable to find time to read the majority of new novels released this year.

  So, once again, I am going to limit myself here to mentioning those novels that have gotten a lot of attention and acclaim this year. They include: Pacific Edge, Kim Stanley Robinson (Tor); Queen of Angels, Greg Bear (Warner); The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons (Doubleday Foundation); Voyage to the Red Planet, Terry Bisson (Morrow); The Hemingway Hoax, Joe Haldeman (Morrow); Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (Atheneum); Clarke County, Space, Allen Steele (Ace); Second Contact, Mike Resnick (Tor); Redshift Rendezvous, John E. Stith (Ace); The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (Gollancz); Brain Rose, Nancy Kress (Morrow); The World at the End of Time, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Arachne, Lisa Mason (Morrow); Cortez on Jupiter, Ernest Hogan (Tor); Castleview, Gene Wolfe (Tor); The Blood of Roses, Tanith Lee (Legend); Summertide, Charles Sheffield (Del Rey); The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman (St. Martin’s); Raising the Stones, Sheri S. Tepper (Doubleday Foundation); Lucid Dreams, Charles L. Harness (Avon); The Hollow Earth, Rudy Rucker (Morrow); White Jenna, Jane Yolen (Tor); The World Next Door, Brad Ferguson (Tor); Only Begotten Daughter, James Morrow (Morrow); Winterlong, Elizabeth Hand (Bantam Spectra); The Shield of Time, Poul Anderson (Tor); In the Country of the Blind, Michael F. Flynn (Baen); Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner (Morrow); Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Workman); Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin (Doubleday); The Ghost from the Grand Banks, Arthur C. Clarke (Bantam Spectra); Moon Dance, S.P. Somtow (Tor); Fire, Alan Rodgers (Bantam); Beyond the Fall of Night, Arthur C. Clarke and Gregory Benford (Putnam); Drink Down the Moon, Charles de Lint (Ace); Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House); and Nightfall (a novel-length version of the famous story), Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg (Doubleday Foundation).

  Associational novels that might be of interest to SF readers this year included Slam (Doubleday), by Lewis Shiner, and Dotty, by R. A. Lafferty (available from United Mythologies Press, Box 390, Sta. A, Weston, Ont., Canada M9N 3N1—$17.00 postpaid).

  Morrow had a strong year this year, as did Tor and Doubleday Foundation.

  There’s no one novel here that is clearly dominant, as has been the case in other years, so it’s anyone’s guess what will win the Hugo and the Nebula in 1991. It’ll be interesting to see if Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion, the sequel to Hyperion, can take the Hugo this year, as Hyperion did last year.

  Of the first novels, the biggest stir was probably made by the novel debuts of Lisa Mason, Ernest Hogan, Elizabeth Hand, and Michael F. Flynn, although none of them managed to attract the kind of attention that some first novels—William Gibson’s Neuromancer, for instance—have attracted in years gone by.

  Special mention should probably be made here of the series of novella-length books that are being published in Britain by Legend and that will later be published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press. They are really novellas by word-count—according to SFWA’s Nebula rules, anyway—but they are being sold as individual books and reviewed as such, so I suppose that they might just as well be mentioned in the novel section. At any rate, whether you think of them as novels or novellas, the Legend series has to date produced some of the most memorable fiction of the year: Among them, Heads, by Greg Bear; Kalimantan, by Lucius Shepard; Griffin’s Egg, by Michael Swanwick; and Outnumbering the Dead, by Frederik Pohl are particularly worthy of notice. These books will probably be available in the best-stocked speciality bookstores, or you can wait for the American editions; but, one way or the other, they’re well worth seeking out. Having mentioned the Legend books, I suppose that it’s only fair to mention some of the other good novellas in book form that saw print this year: notably A Short, Sharp Shock, by Kim Stanley Robinson, from Ziesing, and Bully!, by Mike Resnick and Lion Time in Timbuctoo, by Robert Silverberg, both from Axolotl. (The Tor Doubles are published as novellas, not as individual books, so it doesn’t seem appropriate for me to mention them here.) Coming next year will be a new line of original novellas published as individual books, co-published by Bantam and Axolotl Press and edited by busy editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch in conjunction with Betsy Mitchell.

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  This was a stronger year for short-story collections overall than it was for novels, with several collections published that deserve to be in the library of any serious student of the field.

  The three best collections of the year were: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr. (Arkham House), The Leiber Chronicles, Fritz Leiber (Dark Harvest), and The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, Avram Davidson (Owls-wick Press). The Tiptree and the Leiber function pretty well as one-volume overviews of the authors’ careers, and the Davidson, although it is representative of only one part of Davidson’s output, is a marvelous book that I’ve been wanting to see preserved in hardcover for many years now (I’ve already gone through two copies of the earlier paperback version of this, read them—literally—to pieces … and this book collects the later Eszterhazy stories as well, making it the only complete Eszterhazy collection; not to be missed). Also excellent are several collections that serve as one-volume overviews of the short fiction-writing careers to date of some younger authors: Points of Departure, Pat Murphy (Bantam Spectra); The Ends of the Earth, Lucius Shepard (Arkham House); Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, Orson Scott Card (Tor); and Facets, Walter Jon Williams (Tor). Other first-rate collections this year include: Chateau d’If and Other Stories, Jack Vance (Underwood-Miller); N-Space, Larry Niven (Tor); Distant Signals and Other Stories, Andrew Weiner (Porçepic); Her Pilgrim Soul, Alan Brennert (Tor); and Prayers to Broken Stones, Dan Simmons (Dark Harvest). Also worthwhile: Four Past Midnight, Stephen King (Viking); Lunar Activity, Elizabeth Moon (Baen); The Gateway Trip, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Tales from Distant Earth, Arthur C. Clarke (Bantam Spectra); Future Crime, Ben Bova (Tor); The Atrocity Exhibition, J. G. Ballard (Re/Search); The Start of the End of it All and Other Stories, Carol Emshwiller (The Women’s Press); Lost Angels, David J. Schow (Onyx); and Houses Without Doors, Peter Straub (Dutton). There was also a new edition of a long-out-of-print collection by Keith Roberts, Anita, from Owlswick Press. Mentioned without comment is Slow Dancing Through Time (Ursus/Ziesing), a collection of stories by Gardner Dozois in collaboration (in various combinations) with Jack Dann, Michael Swanwick, Susan Casper, and Jack C. Haldeman II.

  As is clear from a look at the l
ist above, small press publishers such as Arkham House, Ziesing, Dark Harvest, Ursus Press, Owlswick Press, Underwood-Miller, and several others, continue to publish the bulk of the year’s outstanding collections—although Tor deserves credit this year for publishing collections a good deal more frequently than is customary these days for a trade publishing house (Tor also deserves credit for the Tor Double line, which is bringing some of the best novella work in the field back into print after years of almost total unavailability to the ordinary reader).

  Special mention should also be made of Pulphouse Publishing, which for the last year or so has maintained an ambitious program of publishing a new short story collection every month—admittedly they are slender books, more like chapbooks than the kind of handsome hardcover editions produced by publishers like Ziesing or Ursus or Arkham House, but they are also cheaper, and are getting some very worthwhile material into print. This year Pulphouse started an even more ambitious program with the Short Story Paperback line, individual short stories (both reprint and original) published in chapbook form as individual books, and priced at $1.95 apiece. I tend to doubt that a sufficient number of people are going to be willing to part with two bucks for a book containing a single short story, when they can buy a paperback anthology containing a dozen stories for $3.95, but who knows? At any rate, I wish Pulphouse Publishing well with all of their many projects—anything which increases the availability of short SF to the general public, or which increases the interest of the public in reading short fiction, has my support, and is, I believe, vital to the future health of the genre.

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  Nineteen ninety was another unexceptional year in the reprint anthology market, although, as always, there were some solid values for your money. As usual, your best bets in the reprint anthology market were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology. This year, there were three “Best” anthologies covering science fiction (my own, Donald Wollheim’s, and a British series called The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook, edited by David S. Garnett), three covering horror (Karl Edward Wagner’s long-established Year’s Best Horror Stories, a new British series called Best New Horror, edited by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones, and a new anthology concentrating on horror published in small-press semiprozines, Peter Enfantino’s Quick Chills), and one mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy (Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror). Next year, we are slated to lose two of the “Best” anthology series covering science fiction, as David Garnett’s Orbit Yearbook has been canceled, and Donald Wollheim’s long-running series died along with its creator. This thinning-out of the competition in the science fiction “Best” anthology market should make me happy, I suppose, but it does not—science fiction is a broad and various enough field that there is certainly room for more than one editor selecting the best stuff of the year, and I’d like to see other SF “Best” anthology series come along, reflecting perspectives and tastes other than my own: Surely that would be the healthiest thing for the genre as a whole, as well. I’d also like to see another new “Best” series devoted entirely to fantasy, rather than seeing fantasy squeezed down to just the Windling half of the Windling/Datlow anthology. As for the proliferation of horror “Bests,” two new series since 1989, I suspect that the much-discussed coming “crash” in the horror market, which has been forecast for next year by several industry pundits, if it does indeed arrive, may sink several of the new horror “Best” series; only time will tell. At any rate, these “Best” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award volume, are the most solid values for your money in the reprint anthology market. Other solid values this year include: Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 20 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 21 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s (Robinson; Carroll & Graf), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. Project Solar Sail (Roc), edited by Arthur C. Clarke and David Brin, was an interesting mixed reprint/original/nonfiction anthology of stories about the use of solar sails for spaceflight, but it’s intriguing to note that the best story in the book, in spite of more modern selections, is Clarke’s own “Sunjammer,” from all the way back in 1965; it also bemuses me that they didn’t reprint one of the best solar sail stories ever written, Cordwainer Smith’s “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.” Also interesting: Western Ghosts (Rutledge Hill Press), edited by Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg; The Fantastic World War II (Baen), edited by Frank McSherry, Jr.; Christmas on Ganymede and Other Stories (Avon), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; The Women Who Walk Through Fire (The Crossing Press), edited by Susanna J. Sturgis; and Space Dreadnoughts (Ace), edited by David Drake. Noted without comment is Dinosaurs! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

  Horror saw the publication of the highly controversial reprint anthology Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror (St. Martin’s), edited by Paul M. Sammon, which, on the whole, was a bit too gooshey for my taste; Intensive Scare (DAW), edited by Karl Edward Wagner, a good anthology of “medical horror stories” (perhaps the most shuddery kind—as anyone who’s spent time in a hospital can attest!); and Cults of Horror (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

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  This was another solid but unexciting year in the SF-oriented nonfiction SF reference book field. Your best bets for reference this year were: Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror: 1989 (Locus Press), edited by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1989 (Meckler), edited by Robert A. Collins and Robert Latham. There were also two “Reader’s Guides”—Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide (Garland) and Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide (Garland), both edited by Neil Barron—and a critical study, Understanding American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926–1970 (University of South Carolina), by Thomas D. Clareson.

  The update of Peter Nicholls’ Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which has been rumored for some time now, is reportedly underway, and is promised for next year—I look forward to it, since it is a reference source that is urgently needed; the old edition has never really been adequately replaced in the years since its first publication in 1975.

  In the general nonfiction field, the books I enjoyed the most were also those hardest to classify: Dougal Dixon’s playful and beautifully illustrated book of, I guess, “speculative biology,” Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (St. Martin’s), is a highly inventive look, filled with spectacular renderings, at the bizarre kinds of creatures that humankind might evolve into after a few million more years of relentless evolution—and, from the pages of IAsfm, a collection of Norman Spinrad’s feisty, highly controversial, and often startlingly insightful essays on science fiction, Science Fiction in the Real World (Southern Illinois University). Brian W. Aldiss’s book of literary reminiscences, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s (Hodder & Stoughton), was published in Britain, but may never get a trade publication in the United States—too bad, since many of his American fans would find it fascinating. There was an interesting study of portrayals of Dracula, Hollywood Gothic (Norton), by David J. Skal, a collection of the unsettling but queasily fascinating art of H. R. Giger, H. R. Giger’s Biomechanics (Morpheus), and two how-to-write books, the Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer’s Guide to Writing Professionally (Writers Notebook Press), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Writer’s Digest), by Orson Scott Card.

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  I remain unimpressed by the majority of genre films, and only force my way into most of them now out of a sense of duty—however, my growing disenchantment is apparently not reflected in the taste of the movie-going audience at large, since 1990 was another good year at the box office for genre movies. The surprise hits of the year, both relatively
low-budget films (by Hollywood standards) were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a kid’s movie with some sly touches to be appreciated by the adults, and Ghost, a somewhat sappy New Age-ish variant on a subgenre of films (dead husband/wife returns as ghost) common in the forties which has enjoyed a surprisng resurgence of popularity in the last few years. Total Recall had great special effects and production values, and there were a few good moments of authentically Philip K. Dickian material in it—lost, unfortunately, in a sea of chop-sock-pow James Bondian violence. (I’m still waiting for someone to do a Phil Dick movie right; the few touches of authentically Dickian aesthetics that shine through the murk in films such as Bladerunner, Total Recall, and Dark Star prove that Dick’s style and content can be brought to the screen in an adult and intelligently complex manner … if anyone were brave enough to trust the audience to be adult enough to appreciate it! So far, no one has been.) Back to the Future III was a pleasant and harmless entertainment, although for full appreciation of the complex plot you probably would have needed to have seen the first two movies again just prior to sitting down for this one. Dick Tracy was loaded with colorful and inventive set dressing and production design, but not with much verve or tension, and Warren Beatty is just not tough enough to be impressive as Tracy, a comic strip character who would often shoot criminals in cold blood rather than bring them to trial, with the explanation that he was “saving the taxpayers’ money.” The Hunt for Red October was suspenseful and professionally slick, although only marginally a genre film at best. The Handmaid’s Tale was a mild box-office disappointment, and neither RoboCop II nor Gremlins II did as well as they were expected to, either. The Jetsons: The Movie was just that, an episode of the old TV cartoon writ large. I strongly suspect that the less said about Ghost Dad, the better, although I was not able to actually bring myself to go see it. I have heard people talk enthusiastically about Edward Scissorhands, The Witches, Tremors, Jacob’s Ladder, and Jesus of Montreal, but I didn’t have time to see any of them, either, so you’re on your own—probably you should give them the benefit of the doubt and make an attempt to catch them. Robot Jox, a movie with a screenplay by Joe Haldeman, was supposedly released this year, but if it played through Philadelphia at all, it must have done so fast, because I never even saw a listing for it, let alone the movie itself. There was also supposedly a movie version of Fredric Brown’s Martians, Go Home, but that too must have gone through town “like green corn through the hired man,” as they used to say in New England. There were lots of horror/slasher/serial killer/exploding head movies, but I find I can no longer physically force myself into the theater to see them, so you’re on your own with them, too.