The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

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  This was a decent but unexceptional year for original anthologies, with a couple of solid volumes of SF anthology series and the start of a promising new fantasy series, but also with a flock of average-to-weak “theme” anthologies—with a few exceptions, the really first-rate stories, the potential award-winners, were not published in the original anthology market this year, although there was a great deal of good solid second-rank work published there.

  Turning to the series anthologies, Full Spectrum 4 (Bantam Spectra—edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, and Betsy Mitchell) was greeted with the same kind of rave reviews that other Full Spectrum volumes have received, but I was disappointed by it nevertheless, and personally consider it to be the weakest in overall quality of any book in the series, containing no really outstanding stories, and a good number of weak ones; still, the book is so large, and contains so many stories, most of them competent and entertaining, that it’s a fairly good value for the money anyway. The best story here, by a good margin, is by new writer L. Timmel Duchamp, although Full Spectrum 4 also features good work by Martha Soukup, Dave Smeds, Bonita Kale, Gregory Feeley, Elizabeth Hand, Kevin J. Anderson, Danith McPherson, and others. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the Full Spectrum series now that all of its founding editors have left Bantam Spectra for editorial jobs elsewhere; supposedly the series will continue, and I understand that work is being done on volume 5 even a I type these words, but who the new editors will be on the project, and what kind of a job they will do with it, remains to be seen; let’s wish them luck, since this has been an important anthology series for the field, and it would be good to see it continue for many years to come. New Worlds 3 (Gollancz), the third volume in the British anthology series edited by David Garnett, is considerably stronger than last year’s disappointing New Worlds 2; there are still a few weak stories here, but New Worlds 3 also features a first-rate story by Brian W. Aldiss, and good work by Gwyneth Jones, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Di Filippo, Simon Ings and Charles Stross, and others, enough to make it probably the strongest volume of a series anthology this year. Its only real rival for that title, and another very good anthology, is Omni Best Science Fiction Three (Omni Books), edited by Ellen Datlow. Omni Best Science Fiction Three is the best volume of this series to date, by a considerable margin, and they’ve all been strong—it features first-rate work by Ian McDonald and Pat Cadigan, and good work by Simon Ings, Pat Murphy, Bruce McAllister, Scott Baker, and others. Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine: Issue Twelve, The Last Issue (Pulp-house), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, finally came out this year after having been delayed for a couple of years. As the self-explanatory subtitle says, this is the last issue of the long-running hardcover anthology series, and they’ve gone out on a fairly high note, not the best of the series but not the worst, either, and certainly somewhere on the high end. It’s the usual Pulphouse anthology mix of fantasy, soft science fiction, and mild horror, and while there’s no really outstanding stuff here, there is good work by Rick Wilber, Rob Chilson, Lawrence Watt-Evans, William F. Wu, Norman Spinrad, Janet Kagan, Steve Rasnic Tem, Robert Frazier, and others. (Most of the other anthologies covered here are trade books, but Pulphouse 12 is small-press, and may be hard to find in the bookstores, so here’s an address for it: Pulphouse Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440). The editorship of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (Bridge) has changed hands, from longtime editor Algis Budrys to Dave Wolverton, but Volume IX, the latest volume, remains about what you’d expect—mostly minor stories from writers who someday may—or may not—be Big Name Authors in the future, some of the stories pleasant, most very slight, all novice work. There was no volume in the Synergy anthology series out in 1993, for the third year in a row, although series editor George Zebrowski continues to assure me that the series is not dead, but will be published on an irregular basis, whenever he’s assembled enough worthwhile material.

  There seemed to be fewer shared-world anthologies this year than there have been in previous years. Those that were published included: Bolos: Honor of the Regiment (Baen), edited by Bill Fawcett; Blood and War (Baen), edited by Gordon R. Dickson; The Further Adventures of Superman (Bantam Spectra), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; The Further Adventures of Wonder Woman (Bantam Spectra), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and Battlestation Book Two: Vanguard (Baen), edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett.

  Turning to the nonseries anthologies, it was a moderately weak year for them in science fiction. The best original SF nonseries anthology of the year was probably Alternate Warriors (Tor), edited by Mike Resnick; the two strongest stories here are by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Resnick himself, first-rate stuff, and there’s also good work here by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Kathe Koja, Maureen F. McHugh, Barry N. Malzberg, Judith Tarr, Beth Meacham, and a number of others. Having said that, though, I also feel constrained to add that Alternate Warriors is a good deal weaker overall than last year’s excellent Alternate Presidents, the first in this series, and is even weaker than the second volume in the sequence, Alternate Kennedys, which was weaker than the first … all of which makes me wonder if we’re into diminishing returns here, and also makes me somewhat concerned for the quality of upcoming volumes, of which there are several in the works. Alternate Presidents was, for the most part, solid science fiction speculation on legitimate Alternate History themes, things that really could have happened, but by the time we get to Alternate Warriors, three books do
wn the line, a good deal of the stories feature scenarios so far-out and improbable (if not downright silly) that many of them function almost as self-parody … as, in fact, does the cover, which, featuring a muscle-bound Ramboesque Mahatma Gandhi ferociously brandishing a missile launcher, could easily have functioned as the cover of a parody of a book such as Alternate Presidents. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t readers out there who are going to be offended by the cover, to say nothing of stories featuring Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Saint Francis of Assisi, and even Jesus Christ Himself as violent, bloody-handed, gun- or sword-toting revolutionaries, mercenaries, and assassins. None of this particularly bothers me, personally, but this is the age of Political Correctness and of fundamentalist religious intolerance of many different stripes, and they’re certainly running the risk of offending somebody with this book; let’s hope that Resnick doesn’t end up in hiding, roommates with Salman Rushdie. Resnick’s other original “theme” anthologies this year are considerably less controversial, but also more innocuous. Dinosaur Fantastic (DAW), edited by Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, is a fun read, but the writers in it, for the most part, content themselves with working clever but superficial variations on the theme, often broadly comedic or satirical ones, and there is very little weight or (excuse the unconscious pun I see rushing down upon us even as I type) bite here; no major work in this one, but there is entertaining stuff by Frank M. Robinson (one of the few stories with some heft to it), Judith Tarr, Pat Cadigan, David Gerrold, Susan Casper, Barbara Delapalce, Gregory Feeley, and others. More Whatdunnits (DAW), also edited by Resnick, the follow-up to last year’s Whatdunnits, is even more minor; the gimmick here is that various authors write science fiction mystery stories from plot-ideas provided by Resnick himself, solving the mystery scenarios that he throws out to them; the best work here is by Martha Soukup, Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Casper, and George Alec Effinger, but few of the stories in the book manage to be much more than competent at best; this is another good, entertaining light read, a good volume to take on a bus trip with you, but you’ll have forgotten most of the stories in it by the next day. Much the same could be said of Journeys to the Twilight Zone (DAW), edited by Carol Serling, although there are a few more substantial stories here, including good work by Jack Dann, Susan Casper, Charles de Lint, Pamela Sargent, and others. Swashbuckling Editor Stories (Wildside Press, 37 Fillmore Street, Newark, NJ 07105—$7.95), edited by John Gregory Betancourt, is minor enough to make even the slightest of these other anthologies look weighty; some minor chuckles, but, after a story or two, the central conceit quickly palls, and the book become repetitive.

  I wonder if the seeming decline in “shared-world” anthologies is linked to the increase in these original “theme” anthologies, which have proliferated greatly in the last couple of years, with Resnick and Greenberg, either alone or in collaboration, having produced at least a dozen of them, with more to come. I suspect, though, that the peak for the original “theme” anthology may already be past, as it looks to me as if the market is becoming oversaturated with them, and soon there’ll be a bust. We’ll see.

  Continuing a trend from last year, a trend I find very encouraging, there were several strong original fantasy anthologies this year; in fact, pound for pound, the fantasy anthology market (as distinguished from horror) may have been stronger than the science fiction anthology market. The biggest news here this year was the founding of a new annual original series called Xanadu, the first such annual anthology series for some time; I believe, in fact, that this is the first regular non-theme original annual fantasy anthology series to be published in the United States since the death of Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s Elsewhere series in 1984 (there was another such series published later in the decade in Great Britain, Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, but that has since died as well). Edited by world-renowned fantasy writer Jane Yolen, the first volume, Xanadu (Tor), is a strong and pleasingly eclectic anthology, featuring a number of different types of fantasy (high fantasy, urban fantasy, humorous fantasy, mystical fantasy, etc.), a few poems, some mild (very, by today’s standards) horror, and even, somewhat incongruously, a pure-quill science fiction story (Eleanor Arnason’s “The Hound of Merin”—although it appears on the back cover as “The Hound of Merlin,” a very telling typo! And perhaps the reason no one in the science fiction field seems to have looked at it closely enough to notice that it is SF). The strongest stories here are the above-mentioned Eleanor Arnason story and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Poacher,” but Xanadu also features strong stories by Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Nancy Kress, Esther M. Friesner, Mike Resnick, Pamela Dean, and others. A very promising series debut, and another indication, along with the rumored new fantasy magazine from the SF Age people, that the market for short fantasy stories is expanding. The year’s other first-rate original fantasy anthology is Snow White, Blood Red (AvoNova/Morrow), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This book of “updated” fairy tales told with modern sensibilities could almost as validly be looked at as a horror anthology, and there is a strong streak of the grotesque here (much more so than in Xanadu), but the tone varies nicely from story to story, and you get an eclectic variety of types of fantasy here as well; there is powerful work here by Kathe Koja, Susan Wade, Tanith Lee, Melanie Tem, Jack Dann, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Neil Gaiman, Esther M. Friesner, Lisa Goldstein, Leonard Rysdyk, Patricia A. McKillip, and others, and it makes a nice companion piece to Tanith Lee’s similar short story collection from 1983, Red As Blood. (In fact, the Lee collection and the Datlow/Windling anthology, taken together with other books this year such as the reprint anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales and the nonfiction studies Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood seem to indicate a sharp resurgence of interest in fairy tales on the part of the modern fantasy audience.)

  Along somewhat similar lines, The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales (Dedalus), edited by Brian Stableford, is a mixed collection of “classical” reprints and original stories examining the very old folk tradition (going all the way back to the Old Testament’s Lilith, if not before) of the “femme fatale,” the supernatural seductress (and often destroyer) of hapless men. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is an archetypical figure which is still very current in the pages of modern horror fiction, where it has been given a new lease on life by the seductive female vampire, and one which—oddly, given the inevitable sexist undertones—is quite popular with women writers (disappointingly, only one woman writer appears in this particular anthology, although Tanith Lee, to name just one example, has written a great number of stories that would have fit in very nicely). The classic reprints consist of poetry and prose by John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others; the modern original section contains an excellent story by Ian McDonald, and good work by Kim Newman, Thomas Ligotti, Steve Rasnic Tem, Storm Constantine, Stableford himself, and others. It’s a curious anthology that is worth seeking out, as much for the historical information it contains on the figure of the femme fatale in art and literature as for the fiction.

  There were two new additions this year to the sleighload of Christmas anthologies that have been produced in the last few years, both original anthologies. The better of the two was Christmas Forever (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell, a mixed anthology of fantasy, horror, and some science fiction, featuring good work by Damon Knight, Dave Wolverton, Gene Wolfe, Maggie Flinn, Paul C. Tumey, Janet Kagan, Bruce McAllister, James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, and others—don’t expect a jolly lightweight read, here, though: Seasonal Theme or not, most of the stories are somewhat somber, and a few, though powerful, are depressing and downright grim (appropriate, I guess, since many people find Christmas depressing and downright grim!). Christmas Ghosts (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, is considerably lighter in tone, but also less substantial, fo
r the most part—a tradeoff. There is some good work here, by Maureen F. McHugh, Alan Rodgers, Judith Tarr, Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja, and others, but Christmas Ghosts is hampered by being too specialized—the editors were specifically requested to create a book of stories about the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, or Future, from the classic Dickens story—so that many of the stories end up being just jokes about or demythifying satirical takes on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (taking us through the familiar story from someone else’s point of view, say—that of one of the Ghosts, perhaps—or reversing things so that the Ghosts don’t reform Scrooge but he corrupts them, and so forth) and after a while it all becomes too familiar. This is probably a book that you should read a story from every once in a while, rather than try to read all the way through at once; approached that way, it would probably be worthwhile light reading.