The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  For those readers interested enough to seek out some of the short-story collections listed above, all but a very few of which will not easily be found in the average bookstore, or even the average chain store; your best bet is probably to go to a well-stocked SF specialty bookstore, or to the dealer’s room at a large science fiction convention, or, failing that, to one of the new chain “superstores,” or to a store in one of the more “literary” chains such as Borders. For many of the titles above, though, even these resources will prove to be insufficient (and many people will just not have access to them)—and then you have no choice other than to turn to mail-order, either by contacting a general mail-order catalog company such as Mark V. Ziesing, DreamHaven Books, or Barry R. Levin, or by writing directly to the small-press publishers themselves with your orders. (Mark V. Ziesing—address below; DreamHaven Books & Art, 1309 Fourth St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414; Barry R. Levin, SF & Fantasy Literature, 726 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 201, Santa Monica, CA 90401.)

  All this may seem like a lot of trouble—but it’s worth it, because it’s a way to find material that you’re otherwise just not going to find anywhere else in these days of Big Commercial Publishing and timid corporate conformity. So, just in case you are interested, I’m going to list the addresses of some of these small-press publishers, especially the hardest-to-find ones: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203—$24.95 for The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and $17.00 for Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds; Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088—$29.95 for Dirty Work; Arkham House, P.O. Box 546, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583—$20.95 for The Aliens of Earth; Incunabula Press, P.O. Box 20146, Seattle, WA 98103-0146—$25.00 for Antiquities; Headline Book Publishing, Headline House, 79 Great Titchfield Street, London W1P 7FN—£16.99 for Nightshades; Swan Press, P.O. Box 90006, Austin, TX 78709—$10.00 for Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson: The Complete Stories; Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 264, Cambridge MA 02238—$10.00 for Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands; Broken Mirror Press, P.O. Box 380473, Cambridge, MA 02338—$8.95 for Bunch!; Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211—$13.00 plus $3.00 shipping and handling for Rude Astronauts; The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, NY 11963—$22.00 for The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories; The Women’s Press, 34 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX—£6.99 for Evolution Annie and Other Stories; Wordcraft of Oregon, P.O. Box 3235, La Grande, OR 97850—$7.95 for The Seventh Day and After.

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  This was a good solid year in the reprint anthology market, although hardly an exceptional one. As is usually the case, the best bet for your money were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 27 (Harcourt Brace), edited by James Morrow (I wonder what effect the recent shakeups at Harcourt will have on the annual Nebula Award anthology? None, I hope). Science fiction is still being covered by only one anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand at this moment, and reviewers sometimes get grumpy about that when reviewing this series, but, hey, it’s not my fault! In fact, I agree that it would be healthier for the genre as a whole if it were being covered from more than one individual perspective; certainly in such a wide and various field, there should be room for volumes representing different tastes than my own, even radically different tastes. Now all someone has to do is convince the publishers. There are still three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: Karl Edward Wagner’s long-established Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW), now up to volume XXI; a newer British series called Best New Horror (Carroll & Graf), edited by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones, up to volume 4 this year; and the Ellen Datlow half of a mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Sixth Annual Collection. In spite of the fact that the short fiction fantasy market continues to expand, with a new annual anthology series in place and a new professional fantasy magazine being planned, fantasy, as distinguished from horror, is covered only by Terri Windling’s half of the Datlow/Windling anthology—a situation that I think cries out to be changed even more than does the situation in the science fiction field. Publishers have to be convinced here, too, though, and so far no one has been, in either case.

  The most controversial reprint anthology of the year was probably a big “historical overview”-type retrospective anthology called The Norton Book of Science Fiction (Norton), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, the publication of which stirred up fierce arguments in the fannish press and several “flame wars” on the various computer networks over whether its canonical selection of the most important stories of the last few decades was “valid” or “representational,” and whether or not it provided an accurate impression and overview of the science fiction field. This seemed largely to be a false controversy to me. The Norton Book is, of course, idiosyncratic and subjective in its selections, but so what? So is every book of this type, including the one you hold in your hands. The Norton Book is certainly not the book I would have put together, but then, why should it be? Le Guin and Attebery are the editors, and the book naturally reflects their tastes. I could argue with some of their historical judgments and evaluations, especially as to the relative merits of different kinds of science fiction, but it seems pointless to argue that one person’s taste is more “valid” than someone else’s. And what this argument obscures is the fact that, regardless of whether the book is “representational” or not, this is a massive anthology jammed with good stories by a large number of good writers, and certainly well worth the money; pound for pound, it’s quite a good value, in fact. Other good values for your money of the “historical overview” type were The Mammoth Book of Modern Science Fiction Short Novels of the 1980s (Carroll & Graf), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh; The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press), edited by Alison Lurie; and The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women (Carroll & Graf), edited by A. Susan Williams.

  It was also possible to argue with, or at least to question, the selections in what was probably the best one-shot reprint anthology of the year, Strange Dreams (Bantam Spectra), edited by Stephen R. Donaldson. The title makes it seem like a “theme” anthology, but, as you soon realize, there’s really no theme here, and not even really any easily discernible rationale for what is selected; the book is a hodgepodge of science fiction, fantasy, and horror of different types and moods, covering a variety of different topics. Once you realize, however, that the book isn’t a theme anthology at all, and really should have been called something like Stephen R. Donaldson’s Favorite Stories … that, in other words, in spite of Donaldson’s heroic efforts to come up with one in the introduction, there is no connecting rationale or basis for selection other than the simple fact that Donaldson liked them, then it is possible to relax and accept the book on its own terms. And, on those terms, and looked at in that way, Strange Dreams is quite a good anthology, well worth the cover price, a massive anthology containing first-rate stories (of many different sorts) by writers such as R. A. Lafferty, Jack Vance, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Bryant, Edgar Pangborn, Michael Bishop, John Varley, and many others. Also very eclectic was Elvis Rising: Stories on the King (Avon), edited by Kay Sloan and Constance Pierce, which mixes science fiction, fantasy, “magic realist,” and straight mainstream stories about (of course) Elvis; unfortunately, the overall quality of the anthology is not as high as that of the Donaldson book, since some of the stories are quite weak, but it does feature strong work by T. Coraghessan Boyle, W. P. Kinsella, Howard Waldrop, William Hauptman, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Swanwick, Jack Dann, and others. Also worthwhile were Omni Visions One (Omni Books), edited by Ellen Datlow, a collection of reprints (with one original) from Omni magazine; Simulations: 15 Tales of Virtual Reality, edited by Karie Jacobson (Citadel Press), which is just what the title says, with reprints, excerpts, and one original st
ory centered on the subject of virtual reality; Animal Brigade 3000 (Ace, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh; and Sword & Sorceress X (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  Noted without comment are: Future Earths: Under African Skies (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Gardner Dozois; Future Earths: Under South American Skies (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Gardner Dozois; Invaders! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Dragons! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Isaac Asimov’s SF Lite (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois; and Isaac Asimov’s War (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois.

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  This was a strong year in the SF-oriented nonfiction and reference-book field, if only because it saw the publication of the long-promised and long-awaited update of Peter Nicholls’s 1979 Science Fiction Encyclopedia, finally reissued in updated format and at nearly twice the length this year as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Press), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. It was worth the wait. This is a magnificent reference work, the best to appear in the field since the original Nicholls’s Encylcopedia, which had not been adequately replaced as a reference tool by the subsequent attempts of others to create a comprehensive SF encyclopedia. Yes, there are errors in the Clute/Nicholls book (although St. Martin’s has assembled an errata sheet to be used to update the forthcoming paperback and CD-ROM versions), I doubt that such a work could be produced without them, and there are omissions (a few months ago, one of the computer networks was full of messages from writers complaining that they’d been left out of the book), but it seems to me that this Encyclopedia probably is as nearly accurate and as nearly complete in its mention of newer writers as it is humanly possible to be, and the immense effort that has gone into making it so is obvious. At any rate, it is far more complete, more accurate, and more useable as a real encyclopedia than either of its most recent rivals, Gunn’s The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction or Watson and Schellinger’s Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, and I doubt that it will be superseded any time soon. Clute and Nicholls’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is likely to remain the single most valuable science fiction reference source well into the twenty-first century; it belongs in every library, and, in spite of the steep cover price, in every serious private collection as well, where it will replace a three-foot shelf of other reference titles.

  Elsewhere, your best bets for SF reference works this year (although they are all somewhat specialized) included: Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index: 1985–1991 (Libraries Unlimited), edited by Hal W. Hall; Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards, Third Edition (Borgo Press), edited by Daryl F. Mallett and Robert Reginald; and Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms for Book Collectors (Pat Hawk), edited by Pat Hawk. For those interested in SF history, PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (Advent Publishers), edited by Theodore R. Cogswell, offers a fascinating look at the kinds of things that were being talked about in professional SF circles in the fifties and early sixties; it’s a collection of articles and exchanges of letters from what essentially amounted to a fanzine for professional SF writers (today we’d call it a “criticalzine”) that the late Cogswell published in that era, and contains commentary from and occasionally some sharp infighting among most of the major professional figures of the day. Also of interest here, although in somewhat more specialized areas, might be Vultures of the Void: A History of British Science Fiction Publishing 1946–1956 (Borgo Press), by Philip Harbottle and Stephen Holland; The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (Borgo Press), by Albert I. Berger; The Search for E.T. Bell, Also Known as John Taine (Mathematical Association of America), by Constance Reid; Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography (Tor), by the irrepressible Robert Bloch; and Argyll, an interesting, posthumously published autobiographical study by Theodore Sturgeon (The Sturgeon Project, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442—$12.00 postpaid).

  In the critical studies field, there was an interesting examination of the roots of horror fiction, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Norton), by David J. Skal; a couple of scholarly examinations of fairy tales, Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton University Press), by Maria Tatar; and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, Second Edition (Routledge), edited by Jack Zipes; a study of comic book art, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Tundra Publishing), by Scott McCloud; The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov & A. E. van Vogt, edited by Perry Chapdelaine, Sr. (AC Projects, 5106 Old Harding Road, Franklin, TN 37064); and several rather heavy works of SF criticism, including Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds (University of Georgia Press), edited by George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin; Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press), by Scott Bukatman; Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (Greenwood Press), by Nicholas Ruddick; Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press), edited by Mark Dery; and A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (University of Illinois Press), by Robin Roberts.

  Turning to the year’s art books, there was nothing to rival the charm and imagination of last year’s Dinotopia (which, as I predicted, won James Gurney a Hugo), but there were some impressive art books out this year, the best of which probably were: The Art of Michael Whelan (Bantam Spectra), Michael Whelan; Dreamquests: The Art of Don Maitz (Underwood/Miller), Don Maitz; and Pastures in the Sky (Pomegranate), Patrick Woodroffe. Also good were: Carl Lundgren: Great Artist (Gator Press), Carl Lundgren (which is a partial autobiography as well as an art book); Virgil Finlay’s Phantasms (Underwood/Miller), Virgil Finlay; Virgil Finlay’s Strange Science (Underwood/Miller), Virgil Finlay; and A Hannes Bok Treasury (Underwood/Miller), Hannes Bok—these last three of considerable historic interest as well.

  In the general genre-related nonfiction field, the choice was clear for me, although I may be in a minority—for my money, the best general nonfiction book of the year, and the best book of its type since the death of Willy Ley, was the late Avram Davidson’s last book, the ornate and fascinating Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends (Owlswick Press). This is a collection of the “Adventures in Unhistory” essays that Davidson published here and there throughout the field, mostly in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Amazing, during the last decade or so, essays exploring little-known backwaters of folklore and natural history, and covering subjects as diverse as Mermaids, Dragons, Prester John, Medieval Industrial Espionage (the pirating of the silk industry from the Far East), Mandrakes, the life of Aleister Crowley, the history of and the techniques used in the practice of shrinking human heads, Extinct Flightless Birds, and much else. I freely admit that this book will not be to everyone’s taste—although anything but stuffy or pretentiously scholarly (in fact, it’s often very funny), these essays are nevertheless written in Davidson’s eccentric, flavorful, and sometimes almost unbelievably discursive style, with digression leading to digression to further digression until the main thread of thought is almost lost (it never quite is), and people schooled to the “quick read” may not have the patience to deal with this. If so, that’s a shame, because there’s information and shrewd speculation here that you will find nowhere else, no matter how many other books you read, and fascinating areas examined in a way that you may never see them examined again, because Davidson was one of the few people in recent times to have the depth of eclectic erudition and the breadth of interests needed to make the connections that he makes here between widely disparate subjects, connections that seem obvious once he has made them, but that no one else ever would have made. And for those who can respond to his quirky and eloquent style, the book is a joy to read. Certainly, reading these essays made me laugh out loud dozens of times, and moved me almost to tears on one or two occasions, and it’s hard to think of too many other nonfiction books you can say that about.
(Owlswick Press, P.O. Box 8243, Philadelphia, PA 19101-8243—$24.75 for Adventures in Unhistory.) Almost as flavorful and quirky in its own weird way is an odd item called The Cartoon Guide to (Non) Communication: The Use and Misuse of Information in the Modern World (HarperPerennial), by Larry Gonick, author of the classic The Cartoon History of the Universe (which, by the way, is intelligent and erudite and amazingly well-researched, and which I would recommend for the library of anyone interested in science fiction or scientific/historical subjects, in spite of it being a lowly “comic book”). Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to (Non) Communications is very funny and often remarkably insightful, and I think that it will appeal to anyone who is interested in computers, the rapidly evolving “electronic community,” information theory, the impact of electronic communications on the human mind, perceived reality, the coming “information superhighway,” the roots of aggression and territoriality, symbolic logic, the evolution of the brain, and much else. And it’s got pictures, too! Who could ask for anything more?

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  Well, of course, the big story of the year in genre films was the immense success of Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the largest-grossing film of all time (I’m tempted to say that it was a monster hit—ha ha—but I’ll restrain myself), which had people waiting in line for hours to see it during the first few months of its release. There is little doubt what accounted for Jurassic Park’s success: the awesome special effects, which, when they worked well (and there were a few places in the film where they didn’t work well—but only a few), gave you the hair-raising feeling that you were watching living dinosaurs in action on the screen, prompting more than one person to joke that they’d watched the credits for a reference to the “Dinosaur Wrangler” who certainly must have been in charge of the beasts. It’s a good thing for Spielberg that the effects worked as well as they did, however, because other than the mind-blowing special effects, and a few fairly suspenseful chase scenes, the movie really had little to recommend it artistically, with only competent or worse performances from everybody except the dinosaurs, very slow pacing except for the chase scenes, clumsy scripting (including a paleontologist soberly explaining the theory that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded to a group of paleontology students in the field, who listen raptly, apparently never having heard of this before), sloppy editing, including the raising of several subplots that are subsequently dropped and never heard from again (and the significance of which—and they are, or should be, quite significant—you will understand only if you happen to have read Michael Crichton’s novel), and numerous holes in the plot-logic large enough to drive an Ultrasaurus through (for instance, to name only one, how can the huge Tyrannosaurus rex, who is shown earlier as being so heavy that his footsteps literally shake the ground, like an earthquake, manage to sneak up on them without a sound later on, especially inside a building?). I was also disappointed that the human characters didn’t manage to figure out some way to defeat the smart little killer dinosaurs and save themselves by their own efforts (which it certainly seemed like they could have done, with all the equipment lying around for them to work with), rather than having to be rescued at the last moment by a Deus-Ex-Tyrannosaurus ending—but I guess that’s a lost cause; a low-budget sleeper called Tremors is the only monster movie I can think of in recent years in which the characters defeat the monsters fair-and-square by outthinking them, by using their brains; everyone else seems to rely on being in good with the scriptwriter. There will, of course, be a sequel, but it’s the development of the special effects technology necessary to film Jurassic Park, advancing various forms of computer animation even beyond the high point that Terminator 2 had taken them to a couple of years back, that will continue to be of significance to the film industry long after the movie itself is only a nostalgic curiosity. For instance, one of the action sequences in the film featured not only Special Effects Dinosaurs, but a Special Effects Jeff Goldblum as well, executed well enough that it’s hard to tell the effect from the real actor; few people seem to have noticed the significance of this, but the implications for the future are staggering, and, if I were a member of the Screen Actors’ Guild, I’d be starting to worry about technological unemployment right about now. It won’t come to that—computer animation producing footage of actors indistinguishable form the real actors—to any really major extent for quite some time yet, of course, but probably, sooner or later, come to that it will—and why bother to hire temperamental human actors when you can get Bogart or Mel Gibson or Cary Grant for any feature you want them for, and you can make them do anything you want them to do, any way you want them to do it, and you don’t have to pay them a salary, and you don’t have to provide dressing rooms for them, and you don’t have to feed them lunch?