The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Read online

  Meanwhile, over at media SF’s other most famous franchise, things weren’t much better; in fact, in some ways, they were worse. The new Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, didn’t do a lot better than Attack of the Clones with the critics (it did a little better: usually the reviews were lukewarm rather than scathing), and it did considerably worse at the box-office—not a total bomb, but certainly a disappointment, in terms of what they hoped it would draw, and what it cost to make. Again, even long-term, hardcore Star Trek fans seemed unexcited by it, and the movie generated little or no buzz even among media fans, let alone the general audience. Combined with the tepid performance of the current Star Trek television series, Enterprise, the mediocre performance of Star Trek: Nemesis is a major blow to the franchise, and radically decreases the chance of there ever being another Star Trek theatrical movie, as even the producers are ruefully admitting in public.

  Minority Report and Signs, on the other hand, did make a lot of money, although I, finicky bastard that I am, was unimpressed with either. I liked Minority Report better than Signs—a sickly blend of science fiction and horror, freighted with an inspirational message about Faith and Redemption—but found it depressing that stories drawn from Philip K. Dick’s work, as Minority Report is, somehow always seem to come out more about car-chases, action scenes, and big explosions than about the intellectual/philosophical/mystical territory that Dick explored in such intricate and unsettling detail. Men in Black II was a limp sequel that managed to be not even half as much fun as the original, in spite of pumping in more special effects, more silly aliens, and lots more gags (fewer of which were really funny). Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones do their best at being frenetic and charming, but they mostly just look tired, particularly Tommy Lee Jones, who looks throughout like he’s grumpy after being woken up from a long nap on the sofa. Solaris, the remake of the old Russian film version of Stanislaw Lem’s novel of the same name, was too lowbrow for the author, who criticized it sharply, and too highbrow for the viewing audience, who stayed away in droves. Reign of Fire had the last men on Earth earnestly fighting a plague of CGI dragons, rather than just instructing the special effects people to turn them off. And the latest Eddie Murphy vehicle, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, was such an enormous bomb that echoes of it are still washing back-and-forth between the Hollywood Hills, a sci-fi movie so bad that it makes you cry grateful tears to have something as good as Men in Black II to watch. And that was about it for science fiction films this year, live-action ones, anyway.

  Two of the most successful films last year were animated features, Monsters, Inc. and (especially) Shrek, but this year’s animated films met with varying fates at the box-office. Disney’s Lilo and Stitch was very successful, both commercially and critically, a slightly edgier film (although, of course, still “warm-hearted” at base) then is usual from Disney, with vigorous and highly stylized—although somewhat crude—animation, lots of slapstick Roadrunner-style action, and a generous sprinkling of genuinely witty lines and incidental bits of business; it reminded me more of The Emperor’s New Groove from a few years back—loose-jointed and jazzy, with a lot of anachronistic, self-referential postmodern chops—than the standard non-Pixar Disney product. On the other hand, Disney’s Treasure Planet, a film with much more traditional Disney aesthetics, storytelling choices, and animation style, was a box-office disaster, especially considering how much it cost to make. The large number of direct-to-video quick-knockoff sequels of Disney classics that the studio cranked out this year—Peter Pan II, The Little Mermaid II, and so forth—didn’t seem to be setting the world on fire either. Coupled with the failure of last year’s traditional Disney animated feature, Atlantis, and the success of films such as Shrek, far ruder and cruder than the Disney average, I wonder if this doesn’t indicate that there’s been a fundamental shift in the taste of the audience. Kids who have grown up watching cartoons on Nickleodeon, stuff like SpongeBob and Dexter’s Laboratory and Rug-Rats and The Powerpuff Girls, may now want something edgier and hipper and zanier in their full-length animated movies than anything that Disney usually gives them. Ice Age also did well at the box-office and shared some of the same kind of self-referential postmodern humor as Lilo and Stitch or The Emperor’s New Groove, but I found it more heavy-handed and not as imaginative or engaging as either of those films. And the Japanese Spirited Away, aimed at an adult rather than a children’s audience, did very well with the critics, but was hard to find anywhere except in art-houses in the very biggest cities.

  There were lots of horror movies, I’m sure, but I didn’t go see any of them, so you’re on your own there.

  Coming up next year: More Sequels! (What a surprise!) 2004 or late 2003 should see the final Lord of the Rings movie, a new Harry Potter movie, two new Matrix movies, a new X-Men movie, maybe a new Spider-Man movie, and so forth. Maybe even a couple of stand-alone movies! (Or maybe not.)

  In closing, it’s interesting to realize that all but two or three of the list of the twenty highest-grossing movies of all time are science fiction or fantasy films! No wonder the studios can swallow a bomb like The Adventures of Pluto Nash and not give up on making genre films!

  It wasn’t a very good year for SF and fantasy on television either. Although Stargate SGI is doing better than ever in the ratings, the Sci-Fi Channel canceled Farscape (which hadn’t significantly built its audience) in spite of anguished howls of protest from its devoted fan base and a hastily organized write-in and e-mail campaign petitioning the Sci-Fi Channel execs to keep it alive. (They canceled Farscape, one of the few relatively intelligent SF shows on the air, and immediately announced plans to re-run Battlestar Galactica, one of the dumbest and most pallidly horrid SF series of all time, and what’s more, a show that almost no one liked the first time around; at least Farscape had people who actually wanted to watch it, before the plug was pulled, while I’ve talked to no one who feels anything other than sadness, distaste, and vague dread that Battlestar Galactica is coming back. Go figure. Those wacky Suits!)

  The new Star Trek series, Enterprise, now in its sophomore year, is not doing badly, but it is doing worse in the ratings than any of the other Star Trek series did, and its future may also be in doubt. With the indifferent performance of the new Star Trek theatrical movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, and Enterprise’s relatively mediocre numbers, it suddenly looks as if the whole franchise may be in danger, and we might be faced with the prospect of—horror of horrors!—a world without Star Trek!! If this dire possibility actually comes to pass, fans can console themselves with the Trek novels, I suppose, which show no sign of stopping (in fact, they’re selling better than ever), with Trek computer games (ditto), and with the fact that re-runs of the various Trek shows will probably be in syndication for years—if not decades—to come. Which raises the odd possibility that the various Star Trek spin-off products may continue to sell vigorously long after there’s no longer an original franchise show running anywhere on television.

  Firefly, the much-hyped and much anticipated new “space western” from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, debuted this year, but even the hardest-core Buffy fans hated it, it failed to either carry the Buffy audience or find alternative audiences of its own, the ratings were disastrous, and it was cancelled by mid-season, in spite of all of Whedon’s clout and all the pressure he could bring to bear on network execs to save it. Meanwhile, the end is finally in sight for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer itself, after two years of disappointing episodes and decreasing ratings, with the announcement that Sarah Michelle Geller, who portrays Buffy, is leaving the show at the end of the current seventh season for greener pastures in the film world. There are rumors about another possible Buffy spin-off series, but as I type these words, nobody knows what such a series would be, who would be in it, or, most important, if there’s going to even be one in the first place. It’s also unknown as I type this whether or not the network is going to renew the original Buffy spin-off series, Angel, for another season—too ba
d if they don’t, Angel has been pretty good this year, better, in fact, than its parent series has been (Angel’s writing seeming to improve in quality as Buffy’s relentlessly declined). Again, it’s interesting to see how quickly these TV franchise empires can fall apart—at the beginning of the year, Whedon’s production company was at the top of the television food-chain, with three shows running at once; by the end of 2003, it’s possible that they’ll have none. (Although Buffy and Angel novels and other franchise products may continue on long after both shows are gone, too, in the same way that the Star Trek products might).

  Charmed and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, similar if considerably more lightweight supernatural-themed shows, still seem to be pretty successful, Smallville remains a genuine smash, and The Dead Zone seems to be doing okay, but several new shows such as Birds of Prey and Haunted came and went almost before you could notice them, and The New Twilight Zone is a pale imitation even of the previous remake of the show, let alone the original series.

  South Park and The Simpsons, if you consider them to be genre shows, are still around, but I no longer pay much attention to them. The more genre-specific Futurama is gone.

  Taken was a big hit in the ratings, and covered very similar ground as Signs, but I don’t approve of shows that pander to and encourage the already too-prevalent UFO-abductee mania, and so I didn’t watch it. Dinotopia failed to find an audience, in spite of some very nice dinosaur effects. And The History Channel produced a very disappointing “history” of science fiction, one that ignored most of the real history of the form to concentrate instead on the history of sci-fi movies, and which left many hours of recorded interviews with actual SF writers on the cutting-room floor. (Let’s hope they do a better job with their other “historical” documentaries!)

  Coming up next year, a new version of Mr. Ed, proving that the television execs are every bit as creative as the Hollywood moguls who brought us a remake of Lost in Space and who are in the process of bringing us a big-budget remake of Bewitched.

  The 60th World Science Fiction Convention, ConJose, was held in San Jose, California, from August 30-September 3, 2002, and drew an estimated attendance of 5,500. The 2002 Hugo Awards, presented at ConJose, were: Best Novel, American Gods, by Neil Caiman; Best Novella, “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” by Vernor Vinge; Best Novelette, “Hell is the Absence of God,” by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” by Michael Swanwick; Best Related Book, The Art of Chesley Bonestell, by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III, with Melvin H. Schuetz; Best Professional Editor, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Michael Whelan; Best Dramatic Presentation, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Ansible, edited by David Langford; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Teddy Harvia; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Jo Walton; and the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award to R. A. Lafferty.

  The 2001 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Westin Crown Center in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 27, 2002, were: Best Novel, The Quantum Rose, by Catherine Asaro; Best Novella, “The Ultimate Earth,” by Jack Williamson; Best Novelette, “Louise’s Ghost,” by Kelly Link; Best Short Story, “The Cure for Everything,” by Severna Park; Best Script, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, by James Schamus, Kuo Jun Tsai, and Hui-Ling Wang; plus a special Lifetime Achievement Award to Betty Ballantine.

  The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Eighth Annual World Fantasy Convention at the Hilton Towers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 3, 2002, were: Best Novel, The Other Wind, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Best Novella, “The Bird Catcher,” by S. P. Somtow; Best Short Fiction, “Queen for a Day,” Albert E. Cowdrey; Best Collection, Skin Folk, by Nalo Hopkinson; Best Anthology, The Museum of Horrors, edited by Dennis Etchison; Best Artist, Allen Koszowski; Special Award (Professional), to Stephen Jones and Jo Fletcher (tie); Special Award (Non-Professional), to Raymond Russell and Rosalie Parker; plus the Life Achievement Award to George Scithers and Forrest J. Ackerman.

  The 2002 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet in Chicago, Illinois, on June 8, 2002, were: Best Novel, American Gods, by Neil Caiman; Best First Novel, Deadliest of the Species, Michael Oliveri; Best Collection, The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists, by Norman Partridge; Best Long Fiction, “In These Final Days of Sales,” by Steve Rasnic Tern; Best Short Story, “Reconstructing Amy,” Tim Lebbon; Nonfiction, Jobs in Hell, edited by Brian Keene; Best Anthology, Extremes 2: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth, edited by Brian A. Hopkins; Best Screenplay, Memento, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan; Best Work for Young Readers, The Willow Files 2, by Yvonne Navarro; Poetry Collection, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Gray Ashes, by Linda Addison; Best Alternative Forms, Dark Dreaming: Facing the Masters of Fear, by Beth Gwinn and Stanley Winter; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to John Farris.

  The 2001 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Terraforming Earth, by Jack Williamson and The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson (tie).

  The 2001 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Chief Designer,” by Andy Duncan.

  The 2001 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Ship of Fools, by Richard Paul Russo.

  The 2001 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones.

  The 2001 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Kappa Child, by Hiromi Goto.

  Death struck the SF field heavily once again this year. Dead in 2002 or early 2003 were: DAMON KNIGHT, 79, author, editor, critic, anthologist, one of the most influential figures in the history of modern science fiction, editor of the long-running ORBIT anthology series, one of the founders of the Science Fiction Writers of America, author of dozens of classic SF stories such as “The Country of the Kind,” “Stranger Station,” “Dio,” “The Earth Quarter,” “Rule Golden,” “Mary,” and “To Serve Man,” as well as many novels such as The Man in the Tree, Why Do Birds?, and Humptey Dumptey: An Oval, a mentor and a friend to me ever since I entered this field, and an inspiration to generations of new writers; R. A. LAFFERTY, 87, eclectic and utterly individual writer, author of some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written, such as “Narrow Valley,” “Thus We Frustrate Charlemange,” “Slow Tuesday Night,” “Hog-Belly Honey,” “The Hole on the Corner,” and many others, as well as quirky and challenging novels such as The Reefs of Earth, Past Master, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, and The Devil is Dead, posthumous winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award; CHARLES SHEFFIELD, 67, scientist and Hugo-winning writer, author of The Web Between the Worlds, My Brother’s Keeper, Summertide, Transcendence, Cold as Ice, The Mind Pool, and many others, as well as much first-rate short fiction in both the SF and mystery fields, a personal friend; GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER, 55, critically acclaimed and Hugo-winning author of When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss, What Entropy Means to Me, The Nick of Time, The Wolves of Memory, and others, as well as dozens of short stories such as “Two Sadnesses,” “Schrodinger’s Kitten,” “Put Your Hands Together,” “Afternoon Under Glass,” “Everything but Honor,” “Naked to the Invisible Eye,” and many others, a personal friend for more than thirty years; JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY, Jr., 75, British writer who, as RICHARD COWPER, wrote such acclaimed SF novels as The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, A Tapestry of Time, and The Twilight of Briareus, and short fiction such as “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” “The Custodians,” and “Out There Where the Big Ships Go”; ROBERT L. FORWARD, 70, scientist and writer, author of Dragon’s Egg, Starquake, The Flight of the Dragonfly, and other novels; LLOYD BIGGLE, Jr., 79, writer and musicologist, author of All the Colors of Darkness, The World Menders, The Angry Espers, The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, and other novels and stories; CHERRY WILDER, 71, New Zealand-born author of The Luck of Brins Five, Second Nature, The Summer’s King, and other novels, as well as a large amount of eloquent short fiction; LAWRENCE M. JENIFER, 69, SF
author whose work appeared in Astounding/Analog over the course of several decades, author of the popular “Knave” series, and of novels including Survivor, Knave in Hand, Knave in the Game, and others; HENRY SLEZAR, 74, SF and mystery writer, and prolific writer of television screenplays; JERRY SOHL, 88, SF novelist and television scriptwriter, author of Costigan’s Needle and Point Ultimate; JOHN R. PIERCE, 92, author, electrical engineer, and acoustics expert; KATHLEEN M. MASSIE-FERCH, 47, author, editor, anthologist, and scientist; MARY SCOTT, 54, British author; THOMAS E. FULLER, 54, SF writer and dramatist; DAVE VAN ARNAM, SF writer and fan; STEPHEN JAY GOULD, 60, biologist and evolutionary theorist whose controversial theory of “punctured evolution” inspired many SF writers, as well as one of the most popular “science popularizers” since Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, and whose long-running columns in Natural History magazine were collected into many books such as The Panda’s Thumb; VIRGINIA KIDD, 81, one of the last of the Futurians, writer, anthologist, and for more than forty years one of the leading literary agents in science fiction, a longtime friend and colleague; LESLIE FIEDLER, 85, respected literary critic who occasionally slummed in the SF world, author of a biography of Olaf Stapledon and of the “historical-critical” anthology of science fiction, In Dreams Awake; RON WALOTSKY, 58, one of the leading SF cover artists and illustrators, whose work was recently collected in Inner Visions: The Art of Ron Walotsky, a friend; CHUCK JONES, 89, the mastermind behind decades of “Looney Tunes” cartoons, including the Roadrunner series, and also of the—far superior to the later live-action remake—original animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas; BILL PEET, 87, artist, children’s book author, and part of the animation team that created many of the most classic Disney animated features; RICHARD HARRIS, 72, actor probably best known to the genre audience for his role as Professor Dumbledore in the two “Harry Potter” movies; ROD STEIGER, 77, actor, probably best known to genre audiences for his role in the film version of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man; JONATHAN HARRIS, 87, actor, probably best known to the genre audience for his role as the villainous but loveable Dr. Smith in the old television series Lost in Space; DONALD FRANSON, 85, writer and fan, coeditor (with Howard DeVore) of the invaluable reference source, A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Award; BETSY CURTIS, 84, writer, fan, costumer; JON GUSTAFSON, 56, writer, editor, illustrator, longtime fan; WYNNE WHITEFORD, 87, Australian SF author and fan; WILLIAM SARJEANT, 66, author, geologist, and paleontologist; BRUCE PELZ, 65, longtime fan and convention organizer, chairman of the 1972 Worldcon; HARRY NADLER, 61, longtime British fan and film enthusiast; VIRGINIA HEINLEIN, 86, widow of SF writer Robert A. Heinlein, and the model for many of the female characters in his books; JOAN HARRISON, 72, wife of SF author Harry Harrison; JOAN BENFORD, 62, wife of SF writer Gregory Benford; DR. CHARLES NORTH, 62, partner of SF writer Liz Williams; DREW CHRISTIAN STAFANSON, 39, partner of SF writer M. Shayne Bell; MARY GUNN, 81, mother of SF writer and editor Eileen Gunn; and DEE L. FROST, 81, father of SF writer Gregory Frost.