I’ve been pondering science fiction a lot, this past couple weeks, and year’s best anthologies particularly. I’ve been asking myself questions like ‘what makes a good year’s best’, ‘what should go into one’, ‘how long should it be’, ‘as year’s bests have gotten longer, has the overall quality of the books increased, decreased or stayed the same’. As I’ve been pondering, I’ve been searching through all kinds of bibliographic listings, just to see what’s there. I was surprised to see Orson Welles had written an introduction for a year’s best, and even more surprised that he’d edited an SF anthology. What I didn’t expect to stumble across, though, was information on Bleiler and Dikty’s Years Best Science Fiction Novels series. Between 1952 and 1955 these two veteran anthologists compiled what I now suspect was the first ever ‘year’s best novellas’ anthology series. I was really surprised. I’d thought the Terry Carr series was the first ‘best novellas’ series, but live and learn. Bleiler and Dikty edited five volumes of Years Best Science Fiction Novels. I’m headed to Oakland again later this year, and I expect I’ll be burying myself in CHARLES’s basement for a day or so, pouring over what they did and how they did it. Always, always something more to learn.
Shouldn’t that be CHARLES’s basement?
You are correct, of course. I’ll edit the post to reflect this thoroughly reasonable change.
hey, jonathan, what was the name of the orson welles sf anthology?
The name of the book was Invasion from Mars. You can find details on it here (http://users.ev1.net/~homeville/isfac/t92.htm#A2046).
In answer to the anthology questions:
A “year’s best” should include an editor’s top picks for best stories, where best is defined by the editor. Most entertaining? Most literary? Most popular? You decide, just make it clear what the criteria is so I can determine if it’s for me. As a reader, I will judge for myself if I consider the stories entertaining. Rarely will the quality picks of one exactly match another.
A “year’s best” should be as long as possible. The more fiction the better. Dozois’ anthologies (thanks to the benefit of hardback format) have more space than most. The mass-market paperback anthologies are more affordable, but limited in the scope of stories they include. They serve a different price point – I buy them and enjoy them just as much – but as a reader, I always want more to choose from.
As “year’s bests” have gotten longer, one can argue that story selections must necessarily start dipping into the “lower quality” bucket. I say that there is plenty of high quality sf to choose from. I suppose another argument can be made that *another* anthology (like the recent ones from Prime Books) can saturate the market – there’s an economic reality there – but as a sf reader and fan, I still want more.
My 2 pennies.
I get 125,000 words for my half of YBFH. I wish I got double that. I could include at least one of the great horror novellas published annually.
I doubt there’ll be any saturation of the market any time soon, when you consider that there aren’t any cheap trade paperbacks (or any mass market paperbacks, with the exception of Hartwell’s). Perhaps there’ll be a settling-out, but that’s something entirely different. Year’s Bests sell extremely well, so far as I can tell, so the demand is there.
I have to echo Ellen. If my editors (or myself) had more to work with we would certainly include a lot more. I found it annoying hitting a ceiling, personally.
I’m genuinely torn on the length issue. First of all, from an overall perspective, I can buy more short fiction than pretty much anyone else. I have 210,000 words in the short novels books, and another 250,000 words across the two other year’s bests. If I can’t summarise my view of the best in the genre in 460,000 words I probably should be doing something else.
On a volume by volume basis, I’d love more space. I could easily have stretched Best Short Novels to 300,000 words this year (I wouldn’t do that to you, Andy, so relax :)), and both shorter volumes could easily have been 175,000 words.
I guess, though, that I have this feeling that the length limits may, at some level, be good for readers. If you look at the first 10 Terry Carr Year’s Bests, almost every story is excellent and still remembered, and virtually every writer is still hailed today as amongst the field’s best. He focussed on the best of the best, the true cream of the crop that seemed to deserve both critical acclaim, wider readership, and a good shot at entering the field’s canon. I’m not sure if he’d had twice the space, if that would have been the case. I never had the chance to ask him such a question, but I’d have been interested to hear his answer.
I’m not entirely too sure that short year’s best anthologies are a possible way to go, if only because the market expectations have shifted, in that no one can properly read everything in the field—so the bigger the anthology the better someone can get on top of affairs. Particularly and especially if libraries and institutions are the major buyers of said anthologies, with those price points.
But it could be just as easily argued that the reasonable sales for the “mass-market” paperbacks would indicate an untapped market, now, with Hartwell’s being the one on the shelves, so perhaps people do just want a sampling of the field. We may even be talking about two different markets.
I suspect the void across we look at one another may be this: you are talking about markets, about what can be sold. I’m talking about variations in form and approach for a book, irrespective of sales or market. Related, but different, things.