The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 1, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books 1597800686; 978-1597800686, $19.95, 478pp, tp) March 2007. Reviewed by Gary K. Wolfe. Locus, March 2007
Literary Standards, as a general rule, don’t work. From an author’s point of view, you can’t very well go back and put them in once you’ve finished the story (though I’ve heard of student writers trying to do this); for editors, they make for unwieldy and imprecise calipers, far less useful than Market Standards; for readers-well, there’s the real problem. Which readers? Those who peer at the ingredients labels, looking for vitamins like characterization, style, and structure, or the sensualists looking for flume rides and eyeball kicks, or, at least in our little corner of the map, the epistemological adventurers, who lust after conceptual breakthroughs the way the sensualists lust after disrobings? This is only one of the reasons that “best of the year” anthologies (and for that matter, annual awards) are polite games of deference. We are, after all, putting ourselves in the hands of an editor who has presumably read more of this stuff than we have, while at the same time remaining aware that this editor has had to work under the constraints of word lengths, permissions fees, recalcitrant agents, and-not least by far-his or her own tastes. In the end, it’s a matter of trusting the anthologists to assemble a satisfying (and, if they’re lucky, occasionally dazzling) group of stories which represent a coherent and defensible view of what the field looks like and where it may be heading. And, given the increasing diffuseness and fractalization of what we’re euphemistically calling “the field” (in many ways it’s more of a swamp), it would be a pretty useless exercise to try to identify any single set of Literary Standards that makes equal sense for the varieties of stories represented.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting at my main point. This year will see something upwards of a dozen year’s best anthologies, some focusing on specialized corners of the field (space opera, paranormal romance), some on the familiar genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror), and some combining genres in a way that suggests the fluidity of boundaries (fantasy plus horror, science fiction plus fantasy). Since these anthologies are scattered over a period of some eight or nine months, it’s no longer really feasible to do the kind of “round-up” reviews we’ve done in the past, keeping close score of overlaps and alternate choices, trying to weasel out which are really the best stories based on multiple appearances, etc. And while it’s easy to poke fun at this emerging “year’s-best-of-the-month” phenomenon, or to point out that not all these annuals are likely to survive more than a few years, my own view is that this is not at all a bad thing, for a couple of reasons. First, it gets a large variety of good short fiction back into print, often before much larger audiences than the original venues of publication. Second, it invites us to view these anthologies as anthologies, not as rival drafts of some corporate annual report. We need only ask if the editor has offered us a reasonably balanced selection of good stories, recognizing that-because of the Literary Standards problem I mentioned earlier-the very notion of “the best” is something of a chimera (a point which virtually every year’s best editor tacitly acknowledges by noting the number of excellent stories which could not be included for one reason or another).
Yet, as Jonathan Strahan notes in his informative introduction to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, these annuals are a tradition that extend back well over half a century, and that have arguably helped shape the reading habits of generations. In deciding to combine science fiction and fantasy in one volume, Strahan implicitly argues that the readership of short fiction is not as balkanized as some might suspect (or perhaps not as balkanized as the readership of novels), and cites among his own influences Terry Carr and Judith Merril. They’re reasonable choices: Merril unapologetically combined fantasy and SF in all her annuals, and while Carr edited a separate fantasy annual for a while, he seldom had more than a dozen or so selections in his annuals. With two dozen selections, Strahan has a lot of room to move around, and while strict constructionists can count an even division of 12 SF and 12 fantasy stories-like two Carr annuals–it’s not quite that simple. More than most editors, Strahan has paid attention to young adult fiction (at least five stories), and his definition of fantasy is broad enough to include a handful of horror stories as well. In fact, his lead story, Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, seems almost designed as an overture to this variety of modes. Cast in the traditional fantasy mold of a youthful incident remembered in adulthood, and featuring young adult protagonists seeking a good time in a house full of girls, it deftly turns itself into seriocomic first-contact SF and ends with a moment of Awful Recognition characteristic of horror. One of Gaiman’s stronger recent tales, it’s virtually an emblem of fluid genre boundaries.
With his second selection, Strahan underlines the YA theme that recurs throughout the anthology. Peter S. Beagle’s “El Regalo” features a teen-age girl whose petulant irritation at her little brother is exacerbated by his being a witch-playing Monopoly with the cat, causing the garbage bags to dance their way to the curb-until she finds herself in an embarrassing situation from which she needs his powers to rescue her. It’s hardly an ambitious tale, but Beagle gets the youthful voices exactly right. Equally funny is Connie Willis’s “D.A.”, a gently parodic take on Heinlein juveniles, especially Space Cadet. A past master at the exasperated tone, Willis adopts the viewpoint of a high school girl who unwittingly-and unwillingly-wins a prized scholarship to the Space Academy, where, like a teen Dorothy Parker, she has to cope with the squealing enthusiasm of her fellow cadets before learning her true role. Teen rebellion in a regimented world-surely one of the classic themes of YA SF-is also at the heart of Walter Jon Williams’s “Incarnation Day”, narrated as a girl’s imaginary conversations with Samuel Johnson, of all people. But rebellion comes with high stakes: resources are so precious in the colonies of the outer solar system that kids are raised in virtuality and only “decanted” into bodies upon maturity-unless their parents decide to erase them altogether, since the teens are mere property until decanted. There’s even a gentle form of teen rebelliousness at the end of Ellen Klages’s “In the House of the Seven Librarians”, in which a child raised from infancy in an abandoned library whose staff has refused to leave decides to make her own way in the world; it’s a charming fable of the rewards and limitations of bookishness. The remaining YA tale, Kelly Link’s “The Wizards of Perfil”, is a bit more linearly plotted than many of Link’s tales: in a war-torn world, a family of refugees is broken up when one of the children is purchased by a legendary group of mangy wizards living in a nearby wood, who prove completely useless and oblivious to human affairs. There’s a twist at the end, but the strength of the tale comes from its portrayal of the suspenseful flight of the refugees, one of whom remains telepathically linked with the sibling taken by the wizards.
Link’s refugees touch upon another complex of themes that runs strongly throughout the book, especially in two of the most powerful stories, which Strahan has placed back-to-back in the center of the volume. Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Yellow Card Man” is set in the same post-petroleum wind-up world as his “The Calorie Man”, but this time the locale is a future Bangkok where Chinese refugees, even former professionals like the protagonist, live in desperate poverty while trying to scrounge odd jobs and avoid the brutal “white shirts”. Uncompromising in its grimness, it’s perhaps Bacigalupi’s strongest story to date. Strahan has paired this with Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”-the odd parenthetical addition to the title presumably calls our attention to the story’s artifice, since Pol Pot did have a daughter with a name similar to the one here-which is essentially a ghost story whose title character Sith, initially portrayed as a clueless, almost Paris Hilton-like trust-fund bunny who wants to do nothing but spend her days at the giant mall in Phnom Penh, begins to discover her humanity first when she falls in love with a cell-phone salesman at the mall, and later when the ghosts of her father’s victims begin to appear to her, first as images generated by her computer printer. It’s a strange and moving tale in which Sith herself becomes an image of modern, westernized Cambodia bustling in the shadow of its myriad dead.
This, it seems to me, is one of the strongest arguments for combining fantasy and SF into one volume: the interest in third-world settings, in post-apocalyptic scenarios, in the plight of the displaced, is clearly a strongly emergent concern in fantastic literature, but it’s a theme-set that cuts across both fantasy and SF. Like Bacigalupi, Jay Lake offers an SF take on these ideas in “The American Dead”, set in a tattered Latin American country following an unspecified catastrophe which wiped out the rich Americans. In Paul Di Filippo’s “Femaville 29″, the catastrophe is quite specific: after a tsunami wipes out much of the eastern seaboard, children in a refugee camp begin constructing a fantasy city of their own that seems more promising than the grim fates the increasingly helpless government has in mind for the refugees. Elizabeth Hand’s elegant “The Saffron Gatherers” sets a tale of a novelist/archeologist and her muse against the dual backdrop of ancient frescoes from the doomed island of Santorini and the Big One finally hitting California. Even Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “A Siege of Cranes”, a compressed fantasy epic (it was taken from a theme anthology of such tales) involving a quest to defeat a marauding White Witch, gains its power less from the ways in which it plays with epic fantasy conventions than from the central horrific images of burning villages, crushed bodies, and a juggernaut made from human body parts. Ian McDonald’s “The Djinn’s Wife”, which deservedly gets pride of place as the closing story, is set in the future India of his River of Gods; the djinn in question is a distributed artificial intelligence who falls in love with, and eventually marries, a young dancer. Even in this tale of doomed romance, however, political and social realities intervene, as the AI divides his time between his bride and an impending war over water rights, while the government considers destroying all such high-level AIs as threats to humanity.
Not surprisingly, with so much apocalypse going on, religious mythology emerges as a theme in another cluster of tales. With “Another Word for Map is Faith”, Christopher Rowe continues to stake out the weirdly cartographical brand of fantasy he gained acclaim for with “The Voluntary State”; here he begins with what appears to be a geology professor taking his students on a field trip, until it becomes apparent that their actual mission is to bring the landscapes into conformity with maps treated as holy writ representing “Jesus’s true intentions for his world”. Tim Powers’s “The Bible Repairman” takes almost the opposite conceit, making scriptures conform to behavior: the title character partly makes his living excising Bible verses which prove inconvenient to the Bible’s owner (condemnations of remarriage or greed, for example). But the ghost-ridden world Powers conjures is more far complex, and what starts out sounding like a clever joke turns into a moving tale of sacrifice and redemption. Margo Lanagan’s “Under Hell, Over Heaven” is set in a strange, wilderness-test kind of limbo in which a group of young people trying to earn brownie points for entry into heaven escort a doomed “Miscreant” to the gate of hell; characteristically, Lanagan makes a surreal world of her own out of this Dantesque cosmology.
SF and fantasy often seems fascinated with its own mythologies and traditions as well. We’ve already noted how Benjamin Rosenbaum addressed the fantasy epic in “A Siege of Cranes” and Walter Jon Williams the coming-of-age tale in “Incarnation Day”. With characteristic slyness, Gene Wolfe deconstructs the assumptions of the horror story in the chilling “Sob in the Silence”, with its protagonist identified only as the “horror writer”. Connie Willis paid tribute to Heinlein in “D.A.”, and Cory Doctorow does something of the same thing for Asimov, albeit a bit more critically, in “I, Row-Boat”, one of his series of stories derived from familiar SF titles and the second (after last year’s “I Robot”) which interrogates some of the assumptions underlying the famous robot stories. This version concerns an intelligent excursion boat in a posthuman future where nearly anything can be “elevated” into sentience; the boat’s antagonist turns out to be a newly-elevated and quite recalcitrant coral reef. Robert Reed even takes on the phenomenon of SF cult television in “Eight Episodes”, a clever tale of a mysterious short-lived series that may actually be the work of aliens. But the real mind-bender in terms of celebrating SF’s possibilities, and perhaps the most striking discovery in the entire collection, is Benjamin Rosenbaum’s gorgeously written “The House Beneath Your Sky”, set in a future so distant it’s not only posthuman but pretty nearly post-everything; but the very remoteness of this elegiac tale of intelligences at the end of time is neatly framed, and humanized, through a tale of a little girl in a troubled family.
Of the remaining stories, Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Cartesian Theater” begins as a puzzling mystery-the protagonist is hired to secretly fund an obscure performance artist and then to insure that a completely unrelated, reclusive philosopher attends the show-but turns into a classic philosophical thought experiment on the nature of consciousness and death. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Night Whiskey” is as convincing as we’d expect in its mastery of voice and setting, but the premise is bizarre even by Ford’s standards-a community in which a rare liqueur sends people into such drunken stupors that they end up falling asleep in trees, from which the young protagonist retrieves them the next morning. And Francis Hardinge’s “Halfway House” establishes an even stranger setting, in a kind of shadow world of figures made up of the detritus from our own, and what happens when a human ventures there; I found its wildly inventive premise a bit oversold by self-conscious stylistics. Finally, one of the strongest, most unpredictable, and most sheerly rewarding pieces in the collection is M. Rickert’s “Journey into the Kingdom”, which begins as a ghost-story-within-a-story but then sends us through narrative loops we didn’t know existed. Like much of her fiction, it hardly seems to belong in any genre-but that may be part of the point of Strahan’s whole approach here. In the end, I have no idea if these are the best SF and fantasy stories of the year-though some of them, like the Rickert, the Rosenbaum “House”, the Ryman, and the Bacigalupi, would almost have to be-but there isn’t a real disappointment in the bunch, and Strahan’s implied mapping of the state of the field seems astute and convincing. –Gary K. Wolfe