The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection Page 3

  There was a somewhat upscale shared-world anthology this year: Murasaki (Bantam Spectra), edited by Robert Silverberg. There is excellent material in Murasaki, by such people as Nancy Kress, Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, and others, but for once the cover line, “a novel in six parts,” is accurate—none of the sections is really independent enough from the others to stand on its own feet as an individual story, which is why you find none of them reprinted here; this book—novel, anthology, whatever it is—contains some first-rate SF ideas and extrapolation, though, and is well worth a look.

  Other shared-world anthologies this year included: Tales of Riverworld (Warner Questar), edited by Philip José Farmer and Martin H. Greenberg; Wild Cards XI: Dealer’s Choice (Bantam), edited by George R. R. Martin; Wild Cards: Card Sharks (Bantam—listed as “Book One of a New Series”), edited by George R. R. Martin; The Further Adventures of Batman 2: Featuring the Penguin (Bantam Spectra), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and The Crafters, Book Two (Ace), edited by Christopher Stasheff and Bill Fawcett.

  Turning to the non-series anthologies, the best anthology of the year is probably Alternate Presidents (Tor), edited by Mike Resnick, a strong mixed reprint-and-original anthology featuring excellent work by Pat Cadigan, Eileen Gunn, Judith Moffett, Jack Chalker, Janet Kagan, Susan Shwartz, Lawrence Person, and others. Alternate Kennedys (Tor), edited by Mike Resnick, is also a strong anthology—featuring very good work by David Gerrold, Pat Cadigan, Barry N. Malzberg, Nancy Kress, Nicholas A. DiChario, Resnick himself, and others—but it suffers a bit from the same thing that afflicted What Might Have Been Volume 4: the theme is specialized enough—much more specialized than in Alternate Presidents—that many of the stories are too similar to each other, and others are driven to rather dubious extremes in order to try to avoid doing what everyone else is doing (“Suppose JFK and his brothers formed a rock group and were the big hits of the decade instead of the Beatles?”). Also unlike Alternate Presidents, which was solidly SF for the most part, there is a rather curious vein of fantasy that runs throughout this volume, wherein writers mix JFK and the other Kennedys with standard genre mermaids/leprechauns/wizards/druids, and so on—the result is rather queasy, and not often successful, although it does give one the uncomfortable feeling (perhaps not unintentionally on Resnick’s part) that JFK himself is now a mythological figure, no less rare and fabulous than a unicorn. I prefer the stories here that work solidly and centrally with the kind of Alternate History that actually might have happened—and, fortunately, they make up the bulk of the book, and make this a very worthwhile anthology. Resnick’s other 1992 science fiction anthology, Whatdunits (DAW), moves away from Alternate History and closer to the center of the field, with many of the stories dealing with aliens and distant worlds, but, unfortunately, it is also by far the weakest of Resnick’s anthologies this year; 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, but very few of the writers rise adequately to the challenge, and most of the stories here are at best competent, making for a rather lackluster anthology. Much better is the British anthology In Dreams (Gollancz), edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman. This anthology “in celebration of the 7-inch single”—in other words, for the most part, it’s a collection of SF and fantasy rock ‘n roll stories—also suffers a bit from overspecialization, and contains several stories that wander so far off the ostensible theme that they might just as well be in some other anthology altogether, but it also features a brilliant story by Ian R. MacLeod, a first-rate jape by Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger, and good work by Ian McDonald, Lewis Shiner, Greg Egan, Lisa Tuttle, and Stephen Baxter, among others. Another interesting British anthology was a mixed science fiction/fantasy/horror/ suspense anthology called Narrow Houses (Little Brown), edited by Peter Crowther, which featured excellent to good work by Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Ian McDonald, Ian Watson, and others. The Ultimate Dinosaur (Bantam Spectra), edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg, is a handsome book, but, like most of these big glossy Byron Preiss coffee-table volumes, it’s more notable for the lavish artwork and the nonfiction articles included than for the fiction, although there is good work here by Connie Willis, L. Sprague de Camp, Paul Preuss, and others. Ark of Ice (Pottersfield Press), edited by Lesley Choyce, is this year’s only “regional” SF anthology (Future Boston has still not come out), a mixed reprint/original anthology that purports to be “Canadian Futurefiction”—as usual with such anthologies, the rationale for selecting certain stories here is sometimes rather weak, but many of the stories are interesting, including good work by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Phyllis Gotlieb, Eileen Kernaghan, and others, and I enjoyed it. I’m afraid I can’t say the same thing for the most part about Abortion Stories: Fiction on Fire (MinRef Press), edited by Rick Lawler, but the majority of the stories here are not very good, and a few are both offensive and not very good, of the deliberately offensive watch-me-eat-my-own-snot variety. There was also an interesting mixed original/reprint anthology called Life Among the Asteroids (Ace), edited by Jerry Pournelle with John F. Carr.

  Unusually—and encouragingly—there were several strong original fantasy anthologies this year. The strongest, and one of the strongest of the year in any genre (and certainly the strongest Greenberg anthology of 1992) was After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien (Tor), edited by Martin H. Greenberg. I’m sure that many Tolkien fans who bought this were disappointed to find none of the familiar Tolkien charcters or settings or plot materials used herein, but ignoring the whole J.R.R. Tolkien connection (which you might as well, since it is subjective to the point of being invisible), this is an interesting and very eclectic book that spans a wide range of different kinds of fantasy, and even includes a science fiction story or two; the best work here is by Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Emma Bull, Gregory Benford, Judith Tarr, Terry Pratchett, and Jane Yolen, among others. Another good fantasy anthology, somewhat more specialized in theme than After the King but also showing a fairly wide range of moods and attacks, is Grails: Quests, Visitations, and Other Occurrences (Unnameable Press), edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer; not surprisingly, it’s mostly Arthurian fantasy/Holy Grail Quest stuff here, but the tone varies nicely, and sometimes quite widely, from story to story—there’s good work here by Neil Gaiman, S. P. Somtow, Pat Cadigan, Lee Hoffman, Robert Sampson, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, and others. Aladdin: Master of the Lamp (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg also has some interesting high spots, although it may suffer more from uniformity of tone than Grails (at least most of the stories are short: 43 stories packed into a 351-page book); there’s good work here by Maureen F. McHugh, Susan Casper, Pat Cadigan, Judith Tarr, Jane Yolen, Janet Kagan, Beth Meacham, and others. Also interesting were: Christmas Bestiary (DAW), edited by Rosalind M. Greenberg and Martin H. Greenberg; The Magic of Christmas (Roc), edited by John Silbersack and Christopher Schelling; and Dragon Fantastic (DAW), edited by Rosalind M. Greenberg and Martin H. Greenberg. Starting in 1993, there will be an annual original fantasy anthology series called Xanadu, from Tor, edited by Jane Yolen, something I also find quite encouraging. (There were also a couple of British fantasy anthologies edited by Brian Stableford that I was unable to find this year; I’ll catch up with them next year.)

  I’m not following the horror field as closely as I used to, since it’s now being covered by three separate Best of the Year anthologies, but there the big original anthologies seem to have been MetaHorror (Dell Abyss), edited by Dennis Etchison, a mixed original/reprint anthology called Midnight Graffiti (Warner), edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise, and Still Dead (Ziesing), edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector.

  * * *

  This seemed to be a pretty strong year for novels, as far as literary quality is concerned, although the overall number of novels published declined somewhat as publishing cutbacks began to take hold,
and will probably decline further in the future. According to Locus, there was an overall 8 percent decrease in the number of books published in 1992, with mass-market paperbacks down 16 percent, and mass-market paperback-originals down a whopping 19 percent; hardcover numbers remained steady, while the small-press market is actually growing. Locus estimates there were 239 new SF novels published last year (down from 1991’s estimate of 308, and even from 1990’s estimate of 281), 278 new fantasy novels published (down slightly from last year’s estimate of 301), and 185 new horror novels (the same as last year’s in spite of cutbacks in the horror market—Locus points out, though, that although adult horror novels have been cut back, young-adult horror novels have proliferated, taking up the slack). These figures can be used—and have been—to demonstrate that the number of science fiction books is in steady decline, with their rack space being eaten up by fantasy and horror novels, but there is a bit of subjectivity built into the figures, depending on what you choose to define as a science fiction novel—every year, there are a few novels listed as “fantasy” for which a case could be made that they are “actually” science fiction instead … and very probably vice versa as well! Nevertheless, slice that as you may, the fact remains that, in spite of cutbacks, there were still almost 700 new novels published this year in the related science fiction/fantasy/horror genres, not even counting those novels that were overlooked (as inevitably some always are), or which were published under some other aesthetic heading altogether (there is a novel on this year’s Nebula Ballot, for instance, that was published completely out of genre, without a word about science fiction being mentioned on its dust jacket, and which therefore probably isn’t included in these figures). But even if we accept the figure of “only” 700 new novels, even if we restricted ourselves to considering just the 200 + new science fiction novels alone, it has obviously become just about impossible for any one individual to read and evaluate all of them. With all of the reading I have to do at shorter lengths for Asimov’s and for this anthology, I don’t have the time to read all the novels anymore, and I’m not going to try to pretend here that I have done so—in fact, I haven’t even come close.

  So, then, as usual, I am going to limit myself here to mentioning that of the novels I did have time to read, I most enjoyed: Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra); Fools, Pat Cadigan (Bantam Spectra); China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F. McHugh (Tor); Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); A Million Open Doors, John Barnes (Tor); Why Do Birds, Damon Knight (Tor); Worlds Enough and Time, Joe Haldeman (Morrow); A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov (Morrow/AvoNova); and Steel Beach, John Varley (Putnam).

  Other novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim this year included: A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge (Tor); Mining the Oort, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Glass Houses, Laura J. Mixon (Tor); Aristoi, Walter Jon Williams (Tor); Anvil of Stars, Greg Bear (Warner Questar); The Broken Land, Ian McDonald (Bantam Spectra); Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (Bantam Spectra); Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream, Judith Moffett (St. Martin’s Press); Lord Kelvin’s Machine, James P. Blaylock (Arkham House); Æstival Tide, Elizabeth Hand (Bantam Spectra); Count Geiger’s Blues, Michael Bishop (Tor); Mars, Ben Bova (Bantam Spectra); Oracle, Mike Resnick (Ace); Transcendence, Charles Sheffield (Del Rey); High Aztech, Ernest Hogan (Tor); Chanur’s Legacy, C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Last Call, Tim Powers (Morrow); Was, Geoff Ryman (Knopf); The Hollow Man, Dan Simmons (Bantam Spectra); Briar Rose, Jane Yolen (Tor); The Venom Trees of Sunga, L. Sprague de Camp (Del Rey); Labyrinth of Night, Allen Steele (Ace); The Remarkables, Robert Reed (Bantam Spectra); Bad Brains, Kathe Koja (Dell Abyss); Flying in Place, Susan Palwick (Tor); Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks (Bantam Spectra); Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (Bantam); Cold as Ice, Charles Sheffield (Tor); Sideshow, Sheri S. Tepper (Bantam Spectra); Valentine, S. P. Somtow (Tor); The Memory of Earth, Orson Scott Card (Tor); and Destroying Angel, Richard Paul Russo (Ace).

  In spite of problems and corporate shakeups, it can be seen that Bantam Spectra had a strong year, as did Tor. Morrow is not as much of a presence on the list as it had been for the last couple of years, and I suspect that some of the books from Morrow that did get noticed this year were actually bought by ex-editor David G. Hartwell before he was fired; it remains to be seen if AvoNova, the replacement program for Morrow’s SF line, can establish as strong a presence for itself.

  There were several good first novels this year, although the most excitement was stirred up by Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and Susan Palwick’s Flying in Place—particularly the McHugh, which attracted as much attention as any first novel has for a number of years. Other first novels included Steven Gould’s Jumper (Tor), Don H. DeBrandt’s The Quicksilver Screen (Del Rey), Charles Obendorfs Sheltered Lives (Bantam Spectra), Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoffs The Meri (Baen), and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (Delacorte Abyss).

  Several young editors are to be congratulated on their willingness to take a chance with new writers, among them Ellen Key Harris of Del Rey, Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor, and Gordon Van Gelder of St. Martin’s Press.

  It should be an interesting horse race this year for the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, since several of the year’s novels are stirring up unusual amounts of excitement and acclaim, especially Robinson’s Red Mars, Willis’s Doomsday Book, and Varley’s Steel Beach. It will be intriguing to see which of these—if any of them—win what … but it’s already shaping up as a strongly competitive year.

  Associational items and obscurely published novels that might be of interest to SF readers this year included: Harvey Jacobs’s Beautiful Soup: A Novel for the 21st Century ($12.95 from Celadon Press, 101 W. 12th St., New York, NY 10011); Carol Emshwiller’s Venus Rising ($6 from Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 264, Cambridge, MA 02238); Neal Barrett, Jr.’s comic Mafia novel, Pink Vodka Blues (St. Martin’s Press); and the publication of R. A. Lafferty’s novel More Than Melchisedech in three separate volumes by United Mythologies Press: Tales of Chicago, Tales of Midnight, and Argo (each volume $19.95 plus $3 postage from United Mythologies Press, Box 390, Station A, Weston, Ont., Canada M9N 3N1).

  * * *

  It was another good year for short-story collections, and, once again, many of the best of them were published by small presses. The best collections of the year were: Globalhead, Bruce Sterling (Ziesing); the massive The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1: Secret Sharers (Bantam Spectra); Home by the Sea, Pat Cadigan (WSFA Press); Slightly Off Center, Neal Barrett, Jr. (Swan Press); Meeting in Infinity, John Kessel (Arkham House); and Speaking In Tongues, Ian McDonald (Bantam Spectra). Also excellent were And the Angels Sing, Kate Wilhelm (St. Martin’s Press); When the Five Moons Rise, Jack Vance (Underwood-Miller); Iron Tears, R. A. Lafferty (Edgewood Press); Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Volume 2 (Doubleday Foundation); Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?, Mike Resnick (Tor): Kaeti on Tour, Keith Roberts (Sirius Book Company); Crosstime Traffic, Lawrence Watt-Evans (Del Rey); and The Sons of Noah & Other Stories, Jack Cady (Broken Moon Press). Young Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (United Mythologies Press), will probably appeal mostly to really hardcore Wolfe fans and Wolfe completists, but is of considerable historic interest. Kipling’s Science Fiction and Kipling’s Fantasy, both from Tor and both edited by John Brunner, should help to reintroduce genre readers to one of the seminal authors in the development of both forms, and one who often reads as freshly and vividly today as he did eighty years ago. An interesting borderline collection, with some stories reminiscent of Magic Realism and some closer to the center of the field, is Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, Kathleen Alcalá (CALYX Books). Noted without comment is Geodesic Dreams, Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s Press).

  (Several of these small press publishers are small enough that there’s little chance of finding these collections in bookstores, so I’ll list mailing address for them here: Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088—$29.95 for Globalhead; Swan Press, P.O. Box 90006, Austin, TX 78709—$9.50 for Slightly Of
f Center, WSFA Press, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951—$49.95 for Home by the Sea; Arkham House, P.O. Box 546, Sauk City, WI 53583—$20.95 for Meeting in Infinity; Underwood-Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601, $29.95 for When the Five Moons Rise; Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 264, Cambridge, MA 02238—$10 plus $1.50 shipping and handling for Iron Tears; The Sirius Book Company, P.O. Box 122, Feltham, Middlesex, England, UK—£13.95 for Kaeti on Tour, Broken Moon Press, P.O. Box 24585, Seattle, WA 98124-0585—$13.95 for The Sons of Noah & Other Stories; United Mythologies Press, Box 390, Station A, Weston, Ont., Canada M9N 3N1—$19.95 for Young Wolfe; CALYX Books, P.O. Box B, Corvallis, OR 97339—$9.95 for Mrs. Vargas and The Dead Naturalist.)

  As you can see, small-press publishers continue to publish the bulk of the year’s outstanding collections, although trade publishers such as Bantam Spectra and St. Martin’s took up some of the slack this year. Those publishers who continue to publish hardcover collections are particularly courageous, as few hardcover collections these days ever sell a mass-market paperback edition, even those by relatively Big Names, a situation I find deplorable.