The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 5

  Space Opera (DAW), edited by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, an original anthology of stories about music in its various forms, is an odd book, ostensibly a science fiction anthology (“symphonies of the starways by the modern-day maestros of science fiction”), although many if not most of the stories actually turn out to be fantasy instead. (I wonder if they decided to publish it as SF because of the title? The joke wouldn’t work if it had been published as fantasy.… Although several anthologies in recent years have given me the uneasy feeling that the distinction between fantasy and science fiction is disappearing, and that perhaps no one even really knows what that distinction is anymore.) At any rate, in spite of the misleading classification, this is a pretty good anthology, with several worthwhile stories, and a good buy as a mass-market paperback. The kingpiece here, Peter S. Beagle’s wonderfully evocative fantasy novella “The Last Song of Sirit Byar,” is worth the cover price all by itself. Space Opera also features good work by Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Suzette Haden Elgin, Charles de Lint, Robin Wayne Bailey, and others.

  High Fantastic: Colorado’s Fantasy, Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction (Ocean View Books), edited by Steve Rasnic Tem (technically a late 1995 release, although we didn’t catch up with it until 1996), is an example of that curious subcategory of anthology, the “regional” anthology, collecting stories ostensibly written by writers who all come from one particular region of the country, or written about one particular region of the country. High Fantastic is a handsome book, a mixed reprint and original anthology that also contains regional-themed poetry, critical essays, cartoon strips, and art in addition to the fiction; the fiction itself is a mixture of (mostly) fantasy and horror, science fiction, and mainstream historical fiction. As usual with “regional” anthologies, the rationale for including some of these writers as Colorado authors is slender—they once lived briefly in the state, before moving elsewhere—but High Fantastic scores points by reprinting stories from long-dead Coloradians as well as by current residents, and actually manages to deliver more of a distinct “regional” flavor and feeling than most such anthologies do. The best of the fiction, both reprint and original, is by Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, Ed Bryant, Don Webb, Wil McCarthy, Michael Bishop, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tern himself, and others. On the whole, it’s an interesting and worthwhile package—although the steep cover price may daunt some readers. (Ocean View Books, P.O. Box 102650, Denver, CO 80250, $29.95 for High Fantastic.)

  Another odd small-press item is Buried Treasures: An Anthology of Unpublished Pulphouse Stories (Eugene Professional Writers Workshops, Inc), edited by Jerry Oltion, which is exactly what the subtitle says that it is: thirty-eight stories left unpublished in inventory when Pulphouse magazine went out of business, collected in a hardcover anthology made to look as much like the old Pulphouse “Hardback Magazines” as possible. Not surprisingly, many of the stories here are minor, and many of them are quite short, only a page or two long, mostly the kind of weird black-humored vignettes (often on the far edge of horror, pun stories, and gross-out jokes, although some of them are surreal enough to be hard to classify) that Pulphouse: The Magazine itself was known for publishing. Nevertheless, there is some interesting stuff here, including a substantial story by Kate Wilhelm that you’re not going to find anywhere else, and worthwhile stuff by Kij Johnson, Leslie What, Robert J. Howe, and others. (Eugene Professional Writers Workshops, Inc., P.O. Box 50395, Eugene, OR 97405, $25 plus $3 shipping and handling for Buried Treasures.)

  Future Net (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, an original anthology about computer networks and virtual reality, has an interesting theme, although the actual stories are mostly rather weak—there is worthwhile work here by Gregory Benford, Josepha Sherman, and others. Virtually Now: Stories of Science, Technology and the Future (Persea), a mixed original and reprint anthology edited by Jeanne Schinto, covered much the same sort of territory, as did two of the year’s reprint anthologies. Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear (Baen), edited by Jody Lynn Nye, is one of those one-joke anthologies, like last year’s Chicks in Chainmail; this time, the joke is that these are stories about nagging mothers in space (although a few stories are set in fantasy worlds as well), and, as usual, the joke quickly wears thin, and even becomes a bit tiresome as the authors relentlessly drag out every you’ll-poke-your-eye-out-clean-up-your-room-don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth-you-don’t-know-where-it’s-been Mother cliche you’ve ever heard, weakly rationalized in SF and fantasy settings; it would help to read these one at a time instead of all at once, widely spaced. Other SF anthologies included L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XII (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, which, as usual, presented novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents; The Resurrected Holmes (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Marvin Kaye, Sherlock Holmes pastiches by various hands, many with fantastic elements; and Swords of the Rainbow (Alyson), edited by Eric Garber and Jewelle Gomez, an original (mostly) anthology of gay-themed SF and fantasy.

  There was an anthology of Australian feminist stories, She’s Fantastical, which I was unable to find; I’ll try to catch up with it next year.

  The year’s few shared-world anthologies included: Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace (Bantam), edited by Kevin J. Anderson; Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (Bantam), edited by Kevin J. Anderson; Sandman: Book of Dreams (HarperPrism), edited by Neil Gaiman and Edward E. Kramer; The Ultimate Spiderman (Berkley/Boulevard), edited by Stan Lee; The Ultimate Super-Villains (Berkley/Boulevard), edited by Stan Lee; and In Celebration of Lammas Night (Baen), edited by Josepha Sherman.

  There were fewer important fantasy anthologies this year than there were last year. The big fantasy anthology of the year would probably be The Shimmering Door (HarperPrism), edited by Katharine Kerr, but it didn’t strike me as being as strong overall as last year’s preeminent fantasy anthology, Immortal Unicorn, although it did still feature a good deal of strong work; the best story here is M. John Harrison’s elliptical but evocative “Seven Guesses of the Heart,” although the anthology also features good work by Gregory Feeley, Esther M. Friesner, Susan Shwartz, Richard Parks, Connie Hirsch, Charles de Lint, and others. I was unable to obtain a copy of the year’s other big fantasy anthology from HarperPrism, David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination (HarperPrism), edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner. I’ll save it for consideration for next year’s anthology. Otherwere: Stories of Transformation (Ace), edited by Laura Anne Gilman and Keith R. A. DeCandido, plays the shapeshifter theme mostly for laughs, with stories about were-guppies and were-hamsters and so forth, and the stories do manage to generate a few good laughs, most notably in the stories by Esther M. Friesner and Josepha Sherman—but the aesthetic slant of the anthology kills the power of the theme as well, which makes this another of those anthologies that is like eating a gallon of caramel popcorn at one sitting. Warrior Enchantresses (DAW), edited by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch and Martin H. Greenberg, takes its theme a good deal more seriously (perhaps even a bit too seriously, since the overall tone here is rather solemn), but the theme is specialized enough that many of the stories here seem too much alike; there are good stories here, though, by Pamela Sargent, Deborah Wheeler, Tanith Lee, Rebecca Ore, and others. Castle Fantastic (DAW), edited by John DeChancie and Martin H. Greenberg, also suffered from an overly restrictive theme, but featured interesting work by S. N. Dyer, Pamela Sargent, Mike Resnick and Linda Dunn, and others. Sisters in Fantasy 2 (Roc), edited by Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg, a more generalized fantasy anthology, features good work by Tanith Lee, Beth Meacham, Jane Yolen, Susan Casper, Rebecca Ore, Valerie J. Freireich, and others. Other fantasy anthologies included CatFantastic IV (DAW), edited by Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg and Sword and Sorceress XIII (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  I haven’t been following the horror field closely for some time now, but it seemed to me that the most prominent orig
inal horror anthologies of the year probably included Dante’s Disciples (White Wolf), edited by Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer, Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium (Darkside Press), edited by John Pelan, and Touch Wood (Warner Aspect), edited by Peter Crowther, the first US publication of an anthology that came out in the UK a few years ago. Ellen Datlow’s Off Limits, if considered as a horror anthology rather than a science fiction anthology, would probably rank right up there too. Diagnosis: Terminal: An Anthology of Medical Terror (Tor), edited by F. Paul Wilson, is being marketed as a horror anthology, but the best stories in it, by Ed Gorman, Karl Edward Wagner, and F. Paul Wilson himself, are actually science fiction; the book also has interesting work by Steven Spruill, Chet Williamson, and others. Twists of the Tale: An Anthology of Cat Horror (Dell), edited by Ellen Datlow, a mixed original (mostly) and reprint anthology of horror stories about cats, features good work by Nancy Kress, Susan Wade, Harvey Jacobs, Sarah Clemens, Tanith Lee, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and others (cats are the villains in many of the stories here, though, unlike most of the other fantasy cat anthologies, and I wonder if cat lovers—who, after all, love their cats—are going to respond well to that. It’ll be interesting to find out).

  Other horror anthologies this year included: Phantoms of the Night (DAW), edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg; Night Screams (Roc), edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg; The Time of the Vampires (DAW), edited by P. N. Elrod and Martin H. Greenberg; Fear the Fever: Hot Blood #4 (Pocket), edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett; White House Horrors (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and It Came From the Drive-In (DAW), edited by Norman Partridge and Martin H. Greenberg.

  Last year I speculated that someone would surely soon combine 1995’s two trends in horror anthologies and give us an anthology called Arthurian Vampires or Vampire Arthurs!. Well, it hasn’t showed up yet … but there actually was a King Arthur-is-a-vampire story this year, so can the anthology be far behind? Maybe next year.

  An associational small-press anthology of surreal slipstream stories, the supposed beginning of an anthology series, is Leviathan, Volume No. I, Into The Gray (Mule Press and the Ministry of Whimsy), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Luke O’Grady; this will probably be too far out on the edge for most genre readers, but it does contain interesting work by Kathryn Kulpa, Stepan Chapman, Mark Rich, and others. (Mule Press and The Ministry of Whimsy, P.O. Box 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315, $8.50 postpaid for Leviathan.)

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  It was a bad year in the novel market, in terms of overall sales (although some individual books sold very well indeed), something that doesn’t show up much (yet) in the number totals of new books published; those totals may well drop a lot more next year when publishers, pinched by losses, begin to tighten their belts. In some ways, the news was almost as bad here as it was in the magazine market, with sales down and returns up dramatically, with the chaos in the independent distribution system affecting the book market as well. The kind of books that sells continues to drift from one end of the spectrum to the other. It was a very bad year for mass market original paperbacks, with at least one major editor unequivocally saying “Mass market is dead.” More and more, genre books—once almost exclusively a mass-market paperback phenomenon—are being published as hardcover originals or as trade paperbacks, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as book prices continue to climb and consumers figure that they might as well shell out a few bucks more to get a hardcover or a trade paperback rather than spend nearly the same sort of money for a mass-market paperback. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term effect of the upheavals in the distribution systems will be, as well as of the increase in returns—Publishers Weekly reported one rumor that a major bookstore chain was preparing several railroad box-cars full of returns to ship back to a publisher—but it’s unlikely to be good.

  The statistics themselves only reflect some of this turmoil. According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,121 original books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1996, as opposed to 1,250 such books in 1995, a 6 percent drop—not good, but there’s probably worse news to come. The number of new SF novels published actually went up slightly, with 253 novels published as opposed to 239 in 1995, fantasy was down some, with 224 fantasy novels published instead of the 227 novels that were published in 1995, and horror was down substantially, with only 122 horror novels published as compared to last year’s total of 193. (It should be noted that although the number of adult horror novels was shrinking, the Young Adult and children’s horror markets, which practically didn’t exist a few years ago, are booming, with R. L. Stine’s megaselling Goosebumps series only part of the flood—and that many of those books, particularly the ones without an overt supernatural element, are not reflected in these totals.)

  In spite of the decline in new titles released, there are still a lot of science fiction/ fantasy/horror books coming out every year. Even if you count only the science fiction novels, it’s obviously just about impossible for any one individual to read and review 253 new novels, or even a significant fraction of them—let alone somebody like me, who has enormous amounts of short material to read, both for Asimov’s and for this anthology.

  As usual, therefore, I haven’t read a lot of novels this year; of those I have read, I would recommend: Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra), Bruce Sterling; Idoru (Putnam) William Gibson; Blue Mars (Bantam Spectra), Kim Stanley Robinson; Whiteout (Tor), Sage Walker; River of Dust (AvoNova), Alexander Jablokov; The Bones of Time (Tor), Kathleen Ann Goonan; A Game of Thrones (Bantam Spectra), George R.R. Martin; Humpty Dumpty: An Oval (Tor), Damon Knight; Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles (Tor), Pat Murphy; Distress (Millennium), Greg Egan; and a special mention of Jack Vance’s best novel in years, Night Lamp (Tor), Jack Vance.

  Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1996 include: The Ringworld Throne (Del Rey), Larry Niven; Beggars Ride (Tor), Nancy Kress; Endymion (Bantam Spectra), Dan Simmons; Voyage (HarperPrism), Stephen Baxter; The Other End of Time (Tor), Frederik Pohl; Starplex (Ace) Robert J. Sawyer; North Wind (Tor), Gwyneth Jones; Widowmaker (Bantam Spectra), Mike Resnick; Clouds End (Ace), Sean Stewart; Wildside (Tor), Steven Gould; Excession (Bantam Spectra), Iain M. Banks; Pirates of the Universe (Tor), Terry Bisson; Bellwether (Bantam Spectra), Connie Willis; The Tranquillity Alternative (Ace), Allen Steele; Lunatics (St. Martin’s Press), Bradley Denton; Exodus from the Long Sun (Tor), Gene Wolfe; Ancient Shores (HarperPrism), Jack McDevitt; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (Bantam Spectra), Sheri S. Tepper; The Two Georges (Tor), Harry Turtledove & Richard Dreyfuss; The Transmigration of Souls (Warner), William Barton; Remnant Population (Baen), Elizabeth Moon; Expiration Date (Tor), Tim Powers; Dreamfall (Warner Aspect), Joan D. Vinge; Godmother Night (St. Martin’s Press), Rachel Pollack; Walking the Labyrinth (Tor), Lisa Goldstein; Oaths and Miracles (Forge), Nancy Kress; Automated Alice (Crown), Jeff Noon; Blameless in Abaddon (Harcourt Brace), James Morrow; The Unicorn Sonata (Turner), Peter S. Beagle; The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires (Ziesing), Brian M. Stableford; The Pillow Friend (White Wolf), Lisa Tuttle; Ancient Echoes (Roc), Robert Holdstock; Night Sky Mine (Tor), Melissa Scott; Firestar (Tor) Michael F. Flynn; Shards of Empire (Tor), Susan Shwartz; Fisherman’s Hope (Warner Aspect), David Feintuch; The Gap into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die (Bantam Spectra), Stephen Donaldson; One for the Morning Glory (Tor), John Barnes; The Prestige (St. Martin’s Press), Christopher Priest; Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (Tor), Orson Scott Card; Inheritor, (DAW) C. J. Cherryh; The Dragon and the Unicorn (HarperPrism), A. A. Attanasio; Murder in the Solid State (Tor), Wil McCarthy; Cetaganda (Baen), Lois McMaster Bujold; The Time Ships (HarperPrism), Stephen Baxter; The Shift (Bantam) George Foy; The Virgin and the Dinosaur (Avon) R. Garcia y Robertson; Winter Rose (Ace) Patricia A. McKillip; Panda Ray (St. Martin’s Press), Michael Kandel, The Wild (Bantam Spectra), David Zindell; Paris in the Twentieth Century (Random House), Jules Verne; and The 37th Mandala (St. Martin’s Press), Marc
Laid-law.

  It was another pretty good year for first novels, a good deal stronger than 1995. The first novel that received the most attention and acclaim this year was Sage Walker’s Whiteout (Tor), mentioned above, which showed up on several year’s-end wrap-up lists, and which was touted as best first novel of the year by Locus reviewer Farren Miller. The next most frequently reviewed first novels would probably be Celestial Matters (Tor), Richard Garfinkle, and Top Dog (Ace), Jerry Jay Carroll. Other first novels included: Looking for the Mahdi (Ace), N. Lee Wood; Reclamation (Warner Aspect), Sarah Zettel; Mordred’s Curse (AvoNova), Ian McDowell; The Jigsaw Woman (Roc), Kim Antieau; The Sparrow (Villard), Mary Doria Russell; Anvil of the Sun (Roc), Anne Lesley Groell; The Nature of Smoke (Tor), Anne Harris; First Dawn (Ace), Mike Moscoe; The Fortunate Fall (Tor), Raphael Carter; Luck in the Shadows (Bantam Spectra), Lynn Flewelling; Door Number Three (Tor), Patrick O’Leary; and The Wood Wife (Tor), Terri Windling. In spite of recessionary talk, first novelists don’t seem to be having much trouble getting into print (although, the way the field works now, they may find it considerably more difficult to sell their third or fourth novels, ironically enough, if the sales figures on the earlier books have not been impressive); there were a lot of first novels published this year—more of them by women than by men, for whatever that’s worth. Come to think of it, it seems as though most of the most impressive first novels of the last few years (by writers such as Maureen F. McHugh, Nicola Griffith, Mary Rosenblum, Patricia Anthony, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Valerie J. Freireich, Linda Nagata, Tricia Sullivan, Catherine Asaro, and others) have been written by women. Does this represent an ongoing (and largely unnoticed) demographic shift in the ranks of science fiction writers? Up until now, the perception has been that male SF writers outnumber female SF writers by a large margin. Judging from all these new women writers coming along, though, that may no longer be true in a few years. Tor, Ace, and Roc in particular seem to be publishing a lot of first novels these days, and they are to be commended for it, as are all imprints that take a chance on new talent—without a steady influx of new writers growing and developing, SF wouldn’t have much of a future, and if the market was hard enough that first novelists couldn’t break into print, things would look considerably bleaker than they do.