The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 3
It was a good year for Dan Simmons, who published three of the year’s most-talked-about and extensively reviewed novels.
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If 1989 was only a so-so year for novels, it was a strong year for short-story collections.
The two best collections of the year were: Patterns, Pat Cadigan (Ursus) and Crystal Express, Bruce Sterling (Arkham House). Cadigan and Sterling produced some of the best work at short lengths done by anybody in the 1980s, and it’s all assembled here in these two extremely powerful collections, by two young writers who are already well on their way to being numbered among the Big Names of the 1990s; if you buy any collections this year, make it these two, because they are absolutely vital to an understanding of where short fiction is going in the decade ahead.
There were also quite a few other first-rate collections this year, though, including: Tangents, Greg Bear (Warner); Forests of the Night, Tanith Lee (Unwin Hyman); The Folk of the Fringe, Orson Scott Card (Phantasia); Novelty, John Crowley (Doubleday Foundation); Escape from Kathmandu, Kim Stanley Robinson (Tor); Children of the Wind, Kate Wilhelm (St. Martin’s); Winterwood and Other Hauntings, Keith Roberts (Morrigan); and Endangered Species, Gene Wolfe (Tor). Also worthwhile were: Frost and Fire, Roger Zelazny (Morrow); Heatseeker, John Shirley (Scream/Press); By Bizarre Hands, Joe Lansdale (Ziesing); The Asimov Chronicles, Isaac Asimov (Dark Harvest); A Romance of the Equator: Best Fantasy Stories, Brian W. Aldiss (Gollancz); Salvage Rites, Ian Watson (Gollancz); John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarreling Through My Head, Jessica Amanda Salmonson (W. Paul Ganley); Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Richard Matheson (Scream/Press); Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen); and Author’s Choice Monthly Issue One: The Old Funny Stuff, George Alec Effinger (Pulphouse).
As has been true for several years now, small press publishers—Arkham House, Ziesing, Ursus Press, Phantasia, Dark Harvest, Scream/Press, and several others—continue to play a vital role in bringing short-story collections to the reading public. In fact, it seems like they play a more central role every year. A decade ago, hot new writers like Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard, and Michael Swanwick would almost certainly have been able to sell their first collections as regular trade books; now, if it were not for the genre small press publishers, many of these valuable collections would not get into print at all—or, at the very best, would be delayed for several years until the writers became famous enough to tempt one of the trade publishers into taking a chance on a collection. Fortunately for us, though, small-press publishers continue to fill some of the void created by the trade publishers’ timidity about collections. One small press publisher, Pulphouse Publishing, has even committed itself to publishing a new short-story collection every month throughout the coming year; the Pulp-house collections are slender books, admittedly, more like chapbooks than like trade paperbacks, but they’re getting material to the public that wouldn’t otherwise have been seen, and they’re a welcome addition to the scene.
Having slapped the trade publishers on the wrist for being reluctant to publish collections, it would be unfair not to mention those trade houses that do publish collections with somewhat more frequency than other publishers do, notably, this year, Tor, Morrow, St. Martin’s, Warner, and Gollancz. Tor should be especially praised for instituting the Tor Doubles line, modeled after the old Ace Doubles line of short novels published back-to-back. This line is getting many of the best novellas of the last few decades back into print again, many of them long unavailable to the ordinary reader since their initial publication. Other publishers are also working this same ground, to good effect: Pulphouse is running a line of original novellas, published as individual chapbooks, as is Cheap Street, Ziesing, and others. In England, London Century will soon be coming out with a line of original novellas published as books, this one a high budget, high-publicity trade line edited by Deborah Beale; it’ll be interesting to see how it’s received. I wish all of these projects well, since a novella collection may in some circumstances be just as difficult to sell as a short-story collection … if not more so. And we need to improve the availability of short fiction to the general public if SF is to remain healthy. I remain convinced that the really vital work, the evolutionary work that reshapes the genre in its own image, is usually done at short-story length, and not in the novels, in spite of the money and attention spent on them. Without the work being done at shorter lengths, usually by ill-paid and under-appreciated new young writers, the genre would eventually sicken and die—no matter how many sharecropper books and Robotech novels were making it onto nationwide bestseller lists in the meantime.
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Nineteen eighty-nine was a solid if unexceptional year in the reprint anthology market. 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 new British series called The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook, edited by David S. Garnett), one covering horror (Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror Stories), and one covering both horror and fantasy (Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy). All of these, and the Nebula Award anthology, are solid values. We lost another of the “Best” anthologies this year, as Art Saha’s Year’s Best Fantasy Stories was canceled—a shame, since it was a good series, and covered the fantasy market from a slightly different slant than does Windling in her half of The Year’s Best Fantasy (Saha tended more toward Unknown-style modern urban fantasy than toward High Fantasy). Other solid values this year included: The New Hugo Winners (Wynwood), edited by Isaac Asimov; The Best of the Nebulas (Tor), edited by Ben Bova; The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (St. Martin’s), edited by Edward L. Ferman; The World Treasury of Science Fiction (Little, Brown), edited by David G. Hartwell; and The Mammoth Book of Golden Age Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1940s (Robinson), edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. I’m a bit put off by the premise of the Best of the Nebulas anthology, since selecting the “best” stories to win the Nebula automatically implies that the Nebula-winning stories that were left out were inferior, probably not an idea that the Science Fiction Writers of America really ought to be promulgating. (Of course, you can dismiss all that as sour grapes, if you wish, since my own two Nebula-winning stories didn’t make it into the book.) At any rate, these are anthologies that ought to be in any reasonably complete SF collection, especially the Hugo and Nebula volumes. Other worthwhile reprint anthologies this year included: The Great SF Stories: 19 (DAW), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; The Book of OMNI #6 (Zebra), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Book of OMNI #7 (Zebra), edited by Ellen Datlow; Interzone: The 4th Annual Anthology (Simon & Schuster UK), edited by John Clute, David Pringle, and Simon Ounsley; Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (Avon), edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer; and What Did Miss Darrington See? (The Feminist Press), edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Noted without comment are: Time Travellers from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois; Transcendental Tales from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Donning Starblaze), edited by Gardner Dozois; and Seaserpents! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
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It was another weak year in the SF-oriented nonfiction SF reference book field. Your best bets for reference this year were: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror (Locus Press), edited by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1988 (Meckler), edited by Robert A. Collins and Robert Latham.
There’s still no sign of the rumored update of the Peter Nicholls’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which is a shame, since it is urgently needed, not really having been adequately replaced by James Gunn’s 1988 The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Let’s hope it comes along soon.
There was some very interesting stuff in the
general nonfiction field, the best of it by experienced genre hands. Probably the most controversial critical book of the year, and one of the most valuable, was Alexei and Cory Panshin’s history/critical analysis of the early days of the field, The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (Jeremy P. Tarcher); you don’t have to agree with all of the Panshins’s critical theorizing—certainly I didn’t—to find the historical information amassed here fascinating, and I suspect that this may well be this year’s nonfiction Hugo winner. That is, unless it’s the even more fascinating Grumbles from the Grave (Del Rey), a posthumously published collection of letters and errata by the late Robert A. Heinlein; every Heinlein fan will want this one—it offers many intriguing insights into his work and the man behind the work, and, frankly, it’s far more readable and entertaining than his last few novels. Another fascinating look at Golden Age roots by a Golden Age giant (just post–Golden Age, actually, if you want to be picky) is Arthur C. Clarke’s Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography (Bantam). Clarke is drier than the pugnacious Heinlein, but clear-headed and informative, and there are hours of absorbing reading here. These three books alone make it a pretty strong year in the general nonfiction field, and they belong on the bookshelves of every serious student of the genre.
Also interesting was Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dancing at the Edge of the World (Grove) and The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (Ungar), by Dieter Wuckel and Bruce Cassiday. There were also additions to the seemingly endless parade of books about the late Philip K. Dick, this time two sometimes contradictory biographies: To the High Castle—Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928-1962 (Fragments West), by Gregg Rickman, and Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Harmony), by Lawrence Sutin. There is also a book of essays by Philip K. Dick himself, The Dark-Haired Girl (Mark V. Ziesing). Other critical studies of Famous Dead People this year include Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (Owlswick Press), by Darrell Schweitzer; The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon (Greenwood), edited by Patrick A. McCarthy, Charles Elkins, and Martin H. Greenberg; and Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Little, Brown), by Emily Sunstein.
A science book everyone interested in SF ought to read is Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Norton) by Stephen Jay Gould—I suspect that SF writers will be mining this one for new ideas for years to come. And anyone who liked space heroes, monsters, and dinosaurs when they were young really ought to pick up The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (Andrews and McMeel), by Bill Watterson, somebody who remembers what childhood was really like. Also a must for most SF fans is The PreHistory of the Far Side (Andrews and McMeel), by Gary Larson, the gonzo cartoonist who has been referred to, with good reason, as “the Gahan Wilson of the 1980s.” I had more pure fun reading the Watterson and the Larson than I got from almost anything else I read this year, and I think that most people who are interested in SF will agree.
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Nineteen eighty-nine was another good year at the box office for genre films, although I remained unimpressed by most of them. The box office blockbuster of the year was Batman, which earned enough to make it the fifth highest-grossing film of all time. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future II, and—something of a surprise high-grosser—Honey, I Shrunk the Kids also did extremely well at the box office. The new Indiana Jones movie was considerably better than the last one, the dumb and inept Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This one goes back to a script that contains some flashes of sly wit and even some outright humor, and if the ending is lame—which it is—they at least had the smarts to put Sean Connery, who twinkles better than anyone in the world, into the movie to help hold it up—in fact, Connery and Harrison Ford work extremely well with each other, and, what’s more important, off of each other as well. Field of Dreams was probably the most critically acclaimed movie of the year, and didn’t do badly at the box office, either. I personally enjoyed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, although it was a major box office disaster, and didn’t fare all that well with some of the critics, either. It is slow in spots, but it is also full of slyly intelligent touches, and is visually sumptuous almost beyond belief. Ghostbusters II and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier were greeted with general indifference by the movie-going public, and the poor reaction to Star Trek V in particular may well spell the end of the Star Trek movies. The Abyss, a big-budget and much-ballyhooed film, pretty much dogged out as well. I surprised myself by actually enjoying Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, although I was a little grumpy about the fact that a film ostensibly bemoaning historical ignorance should do so little research into what historic personages and time periods were really like; still, a fun movie. A New Zealand film, The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time, has been getting some excellent reviews, but you’ll probably have to go to your local video-rental store to find it. There were two expensive, glossy, full-length animated features this year, The Little Mermaid and All Dogs Go to Heaven; following the recent Oliver & Co., The Land Beyond Time, and the semi-animated Who Framed Roger Rabbit, this may indicate a revival of the full-length animated feature, largely moribund for many years. Let’s hope so, anyway.
On television, a new cable channel called The Sci-Fi Channel, featuring nothing but you-know-what, has been being talked about all year, but so far has yet to materialize; maybe next year. Elsewhere, the critics have been surprisingly kind to the new series Alien Nation, and it seems to be finding an audience, as is the series Quantum Leap. Star Trek: The Next Generation is still sailing along, although Beauty and the Beast finally sank low enough in the ratings to be canceled by the network, in spite of a frantic last-ditch effort to restructure the show so that it could continue without Catherine (Linda Hamilton), who refused to renew. This being the kind of world that it is, Freddy’s Nightmares and Friday the 13th: The Series, weekly TV series based on two long-running series of slasher movies, remain wildly popular, and a “Freddy glove,” a pull-on glove with long slasher claws, was one of the most popular Christmas gifts this year for children under five.
Speaking of slasher movies, since I have come to feel that my taste in films may be out of date—since, for instance, when a director gleefully announces that his upcoming movie “will set new standards for screen violence” I tend to sigh wearily instead of licking my lips in anticipation—I have once again turned to that writer, anthologist, bon vivant, and noted authority on SF/Horror films, Tim Sullivan—a man who really enjoys a good exploding-head movie every once in a while—and asked him to contribute a list of his ten favorite genre movies this year. Tim’s list of the year’s top ten films is:
1. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; 2. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer; 3. Miracle Mile; 4. Paperhouse; 5. Erik The Viking; 6. I, Madman; 7. The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time; 8. Earth Girls Are Easy; 9. Pet Sematary; 10. Tales from the Gimli Hospital. Tim adds that modesty prevents him from listing The Laughing Dead, a horror movie directed by Somtow Sucharitkul (S.P. Somtow) in which Sullivan himself plays the leading role—a priest who turns into a hideous monster—and gets to tear several hapless men and women apart on screen, surely the realization of the dream of a lifetime for Tim. Connoisseurs who have seen Tim’s performance agree that Tim could easily become the John Agar of the 1990s if he were to pursue his acting career.
My own personal favorite film this year was The Fabulous Baker Boys—but, unfortunately, it wasn’t a genre movie. So sue me.
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The Forty-seventh World Science Fiction Convention, Noreascon Three, was held in Boston, Massachusetts, from August 31 to September 4, 1989, and drew an estimated attendance of 7,100. The 1989 Hugo Awards, presented at Noreascon Three, were: Best Novel, Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh; Best Novella, “The Last of the Winnebagos,” by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, “Schrodinger’s Kitten,” by George Alec Effinger; Best Short Story, “Kirinyaga,” by Mike Resnick; Best Nonfiction, The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Pr
ofessional Artist, Michael Whelan; Best Dramatic Presentation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit; Best Semiprozine, Locus; best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Brad W. Foster and Diana Gallagher Wu (tie); plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Michaela Roessner.
The 1988 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Penta Hotel in New York City on April 22, 1989 were: Best Novel, Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold; Best Novella, “The Last of the Winnebagos,” by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” by George Alec Effinger; Best Short Story, “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge”; plus the Grand Master Award to Ray Bradbury.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Fifteenth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, Washington, over Halloween weekend, were: Best Novel, Koko, by Peter Straub; Best Novella, “The Skin Trade,” by George R.R. Martin; Best Short Story, “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station,” by John M. Ford; Best Collection, Storeys from the Old Hotel, by Gene Wolfe and Angry Candy, by Harlan Ellison (tie); Best Anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Best Artist, Edward Gorey; Special Award (Professional), Terri Windling and Robert Weinberg (tie); Special Award (Non-Professional), Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith for Pulp-house; plus a Life Achievement Award to Evangeline Walton.
The 1989 Bram Stoker Awards, presented at a banquet at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on June 17, 1989 by The Horror Writers of America, were: Best Novel, The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris; Best First Novel, The Suiting, by Kelley Wilde; Best Collection, Charles Beaumont: Selected Tales, by Charles Beaumont; Best Novelette, “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity,” by David Morrell; Best Short Story, “Night They Missed the Horror Show,” by Joe R. Lansdale; plus Life Achievement Awards to Ray Bradbury and Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes.