The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Read online

  It was a pretty good year in the art book field, with several retrospective collections of the work of well-known genre artists, including: Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio (MonkeyBrain), by John Picacio; Kiddography: The Art and Life of Tom Kidd (Paper Tiger), by Tom Kidd; RFK: The Art of Roy G. Krenkel, by Roy G. Krenkel; Origins: The Art of John Jude Palencar (Underwood Books), by John Jude Palencar; James Bama: American Realist (Flesk Publications), by Brian M. Kane; The Fabulous Women of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (Paper Tiger), by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell; r/evolution: The Art of Jon Foster (Underwood Books), by Jon Foster; and The Art of Michael Parks (Swan King), by Michael Parks.

  Students of art history will want Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, The World’s Second-Best Comic Book Artist (Vanguard), edited by Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock, and fans of the late artist of the macabre Edward Gorey will want Amphigorey Again (Harcourt), by Edward Gorey, a compilation of uncollected stuff not featured in his previous collection, the classic Amphigorey. And as usual, one of the best bets for your money was probably the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 13: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner.

  There didn’t seem to be many general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year. The standout of the year is a reprint of the essay collection Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends (Tor), by Avram Davidson, which had long been available only as a very expensive small-press hardcover, and which is just what its subtitle says that it is: fascinating in-depth explorations of the possible factual basis behind things such as mermaids and dragons and unicorns, along with Prester John and the roc. This is the famously discursive Davidson at his most discursive, but although some modern readers may be impatient with his rambling, leisurely style, the book is a treasure trove for those who can appreciate and even savor it, and Davidson’s immense and eccentric erudition comes through in almost every line, including information on strange subjects available literally nowhere else. It’s harder to come up with a genre-related justification for mentioning 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Vintage), by Charles C. Mann, also now available in a cheaper trade paperback edition, and almost as rich with information you won’t have come across before as the Davidson, except perhaps that there’s a science-fictional kind of thrill about learning that almost everything you knew about a whole time period and region of the world is wrong, and seeing a whole new universe painted in its place to replace it. On a less profound but enjoyable level, The Book of General Ignorance (Faber and Faber), by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, demonstrates that almost everything you know about everything is wrong, and makes the perfect bathroom book, enabling you to discover how many nostrils you really have (four) or how many wives Henry VIII really had (two) during those few minutes a day that would otherwise be wasted. Similarly, the new book by John McPhee—the only writer I know who can somehow make topics usually thought of as uninteresting (shad fishing, oranges, how to construct your own birch-bark canoe, and, for me, basketball) not only interesting but fascinating—Uncommon Carriers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), shows us how systems usually unexamined and taken for granted, such as mile-long coal trains, river barges, crosscountry eighteen-wheeler freight-hauling trucks, and even UPS, really operate, in intricate minute-by-minute detail; not to be missed if you want to learn how the infrastructure of the civilization around you really works.

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  2006 somehow seemed like a rather bland, forgettable year for genre films, even though there were a lot of them made, some of them made a lot of money, and some of them were even pretty good. According to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), seven of the ten top-grossing movies worldwide in 2006 were genre films—eight out of ten if you count The Da Vinci Code as a genre film, a not-unreasonable proposition if you consider its similarity to the secret history/occult conspiracy end of the genre. Ten out of the top twenty top-grossing movies in 2006 were genre films—eleven if you count The Da Vinci Code as a genre film. (I’m resisting the urge to count the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, as a genre film; even though it’s clearly a fantasy in some ways, it seems like stretching the definition beyond the useful point to claim it’s a genre movie.)

  All of those films, though, were fantasy movies of one sort or another, or superhero/comic-book movies. If you insist on a science fiction movie, instead of a fantasy, you have to go all the way down the list of top grossers to number eighty-eight, which is where Children of Men registers, the only movie that might with some justification be called SF rather than fantasy on the entire list; A Scanner Darkly doesn’t even make the list of the top 150 movies.

  So fantasy films of various sorts are doing fine, at least at the box office; science fiction films are practically extinct.

  In fact, as far as I could tell, there were only two indisputable science fiction movies released in 2006—the aforementioned Children of Men and A Scanner Darkly, plus a few more that you might be able to make a case for being SF depending on how far you’re willing to stretch the point, such as Déjà Vu, The Fountain, and (weakly), The Prestige. Children of Men was undoubtedly the most commercially and critically successful of the SF films, by a wide margin, even if it only registered in the eighty-eighth slot on the box-office list. It’s actually a well-directed and well-produced movie (although the plot logic is weak), and mainstream audiences and critics responded positively to it; the problem with it for the SF audience, of course, is that they’ve seen this scenario before, if not in movies than in dozens of novels and stories, since at least the fifties, and so there were no surprises. A Scanner Darkly, adapted from one of Philip K. Dick’s most insular and autobiographical novels (it’s basically just a version of the author’s rather horrific experiences in the underground drug culture of Berkeley, California, in the seventies, with a thin SF rationale washed over it to justify it as genre), is a much more difficult and artistically ambitious movie that was not, in my opinion, entirely successful, even on its own terms. It does do a pretty good job of capturing the subtle aesthetic feel of Dick’s work, but it’s an off-putting and uninvolving cinematic experience, and even though much of the book is darkly hilarious, that somehow doesn’t come across on the screen, even when the book’s crazed stoner raps are transcribed almost word-for-word from the page. Myself, I think a large part of the problem comes from the rotoscoping technique that turns the whole film into an animated movie of sorts, a technique that strikes me as an unnecessary artistic pretension, and something that works to keep the viewer out of the world of the story, at arm’s length, rather than involving them intimately within it; I think the “scramble suit” effects would have worked better too if everything else in the movie wasn’t rotoscoped. Déjà Vu was a slick terrorist thriller with a not-very-well-worked-out time-travel gimmick added as an overlying plot device to enable the hero to get the girl, who was dead from the first few minutes of the film; it would have worked better as a straight thriller, without the time-travel angle. The Fountain was either subtle and profound or completely incomprehensible, depending on which critic you asked; its very complex plot mixes sixteenth-century conquistadors and twenty-sixth-century space travelers in a context that makes it difficult to tell what is real and what is not.

  Turning to the fantasy movies, the blockbuster was clearly Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which earned almost $180 million more than the next movie down on the box-office champs list, Cars. Dead Man’s Chest is nowhere near as good as the first film in this sequence, 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; the sequel is broken-backed, overlong, and overcomplicated, and keeps losing track of its own plot, but still managed to deliver enough fast-paced action, humor, and CGI special effects to satisfy its audience and to make it actually worth buying a ticket at an actual big-screen movie theater rather th
an waiting for the DVD to come out (which most households do with the vast majority of movies released these days).

  The most critically acclaimed fantasy movie of the year was probably Pan’s Labyrinth, a dark and violent film that was at the same time highly imaginative and filled with stunning visual images. Then there were the dueling “Victorian-era magician” movies, The Illusionist and The Prestige, usually counted among the year’s fantasy films, although the single fantastic element in The Prestige is actually a rather silly science fiction gimmick pulled out of a hat courtesy of the famous nineteenth-century mad scientist Nicola Tesla, and a close examination of The Illusionist shows that it contains no actual fantastic element at all (although I have my doubts that nineteenth-century stage magic was actually up to producing some of the effects the magician is shown performing during The Illusionist; but that’s arguable). Of the two, I liked The Illusionist a good deal better for being tighter and smaller, more sharply focused, than the complicated (probably overcomplicated) The Prestige, for being exquisitely photographed, and for featuring a warm, sympathetic performance by Paul Giamatti in what could easily have been the heavy-handed corrupt cop role in less expert hands. Night at the Museum was amiable if empty-headed, although it annoyed me a bit that (like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure before it) a movie ostensibly teaching the value of history didn’t bother to use real history instead of dumbed-down cartoon history. Stranger Than Fiction had an interesting metafictional premise that it largely had no idea what to do with, and Nanny McPhee was a well-intentioned children’s movie that came across sort of like Mary Poppins Lite.

  Many of the year’s fantasy movies were even less successful. Eragon seemed to have been assembled from a kit featuring bits of The Lord of the Rings, bits of Anne McCaffery’s Dragonrider series, bits of Eathsea, bits of Narnia, and so forth, and did nowhere near as well as its producers had hoped that it would. The Lake House was a romance/weeper that didn’t really make much sense at base, and Lady in the Water was the usual bizarre product from M. Night Shyamalan, who seems to have been growing more fundamentally incoherent with each passing film. Click was an attempt to mix a slob comedy with metaphysics, with not terribly encouraging results. The Wicker Man was just plain bad; the original movie had its problems, too (quite a few of them, in fact), but this lame remake made it look like a masterpiece. Sadly, much the same could be said about The Shaggy Dog. Tristan and Isolde was another big-budget sword-and-sandal “historical” that tanked at the box office; none of these has made any money since Gladiator, and yet Hollywood keeps turning them out.

  A cartoon dam must have burst somewhere this year, because there was a flood of animated features—including Cars, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Happy Feet, Over the Hedge, Flushed Away, Barnyard, Curious George, Garfield’s A Tale of Two Kitties, Charlotte’s Web, Monster House, and The Ant Bully. Most of them weren’t very good. The best of the lot, and the one that did the best at the box office, was Cars, although it wasn’t up to the standards of Pixar releases such as Toys, Finding Nemo, or The Incredibles, being earnest and well-animated but actually a bit dull. Monster House had some quirky and intelligent touches, and good CGI work, although the plot and characterization were pretty generic. I didn’t like Happy Feet, in spite of its Oscar win. The dumbest one, by a good margin, was The Ant Bully.

  It also wasn’t a very good year for superhero/comic-book movies. Best of a weak lot was Superman Returns, although it remains to be seen whether it provided enough spark to revitalize the franchise. X-Men: The Last Stand was the weakest of the three “X-Men” movies, with a nearly incoherent plot that didn’t make much sense even by comic-book standards, and which probably outraged fans by killing off several major characters (the Special Effects, though, predictably, were nice). V for Vendetta was awful, and disowned by the creator of the original graphic novel from which it was adapted. Even it wasn’t quite as stupid, though, as My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

  I couldn’t bring myself to see the hyper-violent Apocalypto, so you’re on your own there. Also didn’t take in The Hills Have Eyes, The Descent, or the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; they don’t seem to have performed as well as anticipated, although I notice there’s a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes in theaters now.

  Coming up next year: probably a new Harry Potter movie, another Spider-Man movie, another Fantastic Four movie, and a Transformers movie. Not really a lot to look forward to, in my opinion. Let’s hope for surprises.

  Science fiction seems to be doing a lot better on television, where there are several series going that are not only legitimate SF, but that are pretty good, and are doing rather well with the audience as well. Chief among these is Battlestar Galactica (although its ratings have slumped this season), which has continued to deliver tense, compelling drama, although the bleak, airless quality of the show, which is rarely if ever leavened by any humor, sometimes gets on my nerves. A new show this year, Jericho, dealing with the aftermath of an atomic war and its effect on the inhabitants of a small town in Kansas, has also been at least moderately successful commercially, and seems likely to earn itself another season; as with Children of Men, there’s nothing here that experienced genre readers haven’t seen before in dozens (if not hundreds) of after-the-bomb stories and novels, but it’s probably new territory for most mainline television watchers, and it’s well produced and well acted, and gets high marks from me for being legitimate science fiction, even if of a familiar variety. The jury is still out on whether Lost is science fiction or supernatural fantasy of some sort (it could still be tipped either way, although if it’s SF they’ve got a lot of explaining and rationalizing to do), and the back story has become so complicated that I wonder if it’s even possible any longer to come up with an “answer” that will successfully tie all the loose ends together. Plus, they face the problem, built in to the nature of the series, that the answers they come up with for the show’s mysteries are almost by definition never going to be as evocative and interesting as the mysteries themselves had been. It’s still a pretty entertaining and watchable show, although it’s wobbled in the ratings this year, perhaps a result of the ill-advised decision to launch the third season of Lost in the fall and then rest it for four months before starting new episodes up again in February, giving the audience a chance to lose interest or become frustrated or disenchanted. Let’s hope it lasts long enough to get all of its madly complex story worked out on the screen before getting canceled—if it doesn’t, there’s going to be millions of really frustrated and pissed-off viewers out there.

  The long-running Stargate: SG-1 finally died, although its spin-off, Stargate: Atlantis, continues. Invasion, the last of the three “alien invasion” shows (Invasion, Surface, and Threshold), all clearly inspired by the original huge success of Lost, followed Threshold and Surface into oblivion this year, and I think Eureka is dead as well. (Interestingly, several of the so-far successful new shows this year like Jericho and Heroes clearly show the aesthetic influence of Lost as well.)

  Speaking of which, Heroes was the surprise blockbuster hit of the season, a smartly done, complex superhero show that comes across like Lost crossed with The X-Files, with a bit of The X-Men thrown in (Jericho is more like an improbable cross between Lost, Northern Exposure, and after-the-bomb miniseries The Day After). The show has been phenomenally successful, and there’s no doubt that it’s coming back next season. The long-running Smallville, the adventures of Superman before he puts on the cape and the tights—and for awhile the only superhero show on television—also continues, although I think that their plans to spin off shows about Aquaman and Green Arrow won’t work. The very long-running “I fight supernatural menaces with magic” show, Charmed, finally died (and not above time, either, as even most of its fans would admit), but the newish “I see and/or fight dead people and other supernatural menaces” shows, Supernatural, Medium, and The Ghost Whisperer seem to be going strong.

  Desperate Housewives seems to have gotten past its “sophomore
slump,” although to continue to list it as a genre show is really kind of silly, even though it’s narrated by ghosts.

  There was an anthology series, Masters of Science Fiction, with some high-powered talent attached to it, doing TV adaptations of well-known print SF stories, but we didn’t get it here, so you’ll have to judge it for yourself; from word of mouth, it might be worth seeking out.

  Coming up next season: more “I see dead people” shows (including one where a homicide detective sees them), and a sitcom based on the series of “caveman” commercials done by www.Geico.com. Something to live for, eh?

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  The 64th World Science Fiction Convention, L.A.con IV, was held in Anaheim, California, from August 24 through 28, 2006. The 2006 Hugo Awards, presented at L.A.con IV, were: Best Novel, Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson; Best Novella, Inside Job, by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, “Two Hearts,” by Peter S. Beagle; Best Short Story, “Tk’tk’tk,” by David D. Levine; Best Related Book, Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, by Kate Wilhelm; Best Professional Editor, David G. Hartwell; Best Professional Artist, Donato Giancola; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Doctor Who, “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” (tie); Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Serenity; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Plokta; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Frank Wu; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to John Scalzi.