So kids, there are a lot of anthologies out there. More and more all the time. So, you need something you can depend on, something cool and great to read, something with dependably high standards. Deb Layne and Jay Lake have been delivering the goods for five years or so with the Polyphony series of anthologies. Deb’s just posted the table of contents for Polyphony 6. If the idea of new stories by Robert Reed, Howard Waldrop and Steve Utley (authors of Custer’s Last Jump!!), Pam Sargent, Barry Malzberg, Tim Pratt, Nina Hoffman, and top notch Aussies like Jack Dann, Ben Peek and Anna Tambour gets you interested, go order one now! This sort of book deserves your support, so go do it. Now. Go. Really.

The Locus reviews for this year’s various year’s bests aren’t out yet, but the first reviews are showing up. Many thanks to Sean Wallace who just sent on a copy of the Publishers Weekly starred review for Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005.

Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
Jonathan Strahan. Locus (www.locusmag.com), $17.95 paper (340p) ISBN 0-978-62100-9. Cover by John Picacio.
Given the existence of two long-running “best of the year” SF anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois and David Hartwell, one might wonder at the need for yet another such volume. Still, veteran Strahan (Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005) shows excellent taste in his 14 selections, starting with Michael Swanwick’s charming “Triceratops Summer,” in which a glitch at a research facility temporarily transports dinosaurs to the modern world. Other high points include James Morrow’s “The Second Coming of Charles Darwin,” in which evangelicals send an AI disguised as a tortoise back in time to destroy all evidence of evolution on the Galápagos Islands; Bruce Sterling’s “The Blemmye’s Stratagem,” which concerns an alien living on Earth at the time of the Crusades; Susan Palwick’s “The Fate of Mice,” in which an intelligent lab mouse must decide where his loyalties lie; and last but not least, Ian McDonald’s powerful “The Little Goddess,” in which a girl in a far-future Nepal becomes the latest incarnation of a deity. (Sept.)

For those who are interested, Hachette Livre Australia has set up a teaser site for The Arrival.

Exciting news faithful Coode Streeters. Earlier this year I reached agreement with World Fantasy award winning California-based publisher to Night Shade Books to edit two new year’s best anthology series. I’ve long been impressed with the books Night Shade produces, and think their designer Claudia Noble is terrific, so I was delighted to join the Night Shade posse confident that the books would look wonderful and that NS would publish the heck out of them.

That would have been good news enough, however, after some discussion, Night Shade have agreed to let me edit the book I’ve long wanted to: a single year’s best volume that will collect the best science fiction and fantasy stories in a single volume. I’ve always believed that readers have broader tastes than they’re given credit for and that science fiction and fantasy overlap far more than people want to believe. So, in March 2007 Night Shade will publish The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, a suitably enormous and gorgeous trade paperback. I can’t wait to see it. I’ve been reading like crazy, and think it’s going to be something really special.

On Tuesday I had breakfast with Shaun Tan. He brought along the proofs of his new book The Arrival for me to see. I had ten or twenty minutes to take in one hundred and twenty eight pages of graphic novel, four years of work, literally hundreds of images ranging in size from a postage stamp to full double page spreads. There was everything from small images of clouds through to sweeping cityscapes. It was breathtaking, but too much to take in.

Shaun promised to send a disk over with a copy of the book on it, but I was still surprised when it showed up in the post yesterday afternoon. I loaded it onto the laptop and spent a good part of last night pouring over the images, reading every page, every image carefully, trying to take in what Shaun was attempting with this rich ambitious work.

Rendered in black and white or sepia and without any explanatory text, the story of The Arrival is a simple one, but one that has enormous depth. At it’s most straightforward, The Arrival is an migrant story, one that could fit readily into any age. A man, a father and husband, leaves his family to travel to a new country. He intends to find work, make a home, get a job and earn enough money to send for his family so they can make a new life together in a place that doesn’t have the problems that trouble the place they are leaving.

Shaun tells the main story clearly and well. It’s impossible not to be swept along by his narrative imagery, while also being captivated by the world he builds (which is both exactly like, and nothing like, our own). I found myself wondering what this creature or that object was, whether something in a cityscape was public art or some building of unknown purpose. More than anything, though, I was struck by how it must have felt to live in an age without mass communications, where a country on the other side of the world could be so completely different, so out of context, that it would seem altogether alien, however beautiful and beguiling. There were times when I found myself wanting text to go with some of the artwork. Not because I didn’t understand what was going on in the image, but because I wanted more, I craved more context.

I’ve no doubt The Arrival will offer up a lot more on repeated readings, and I can’t wait to see the final book, but I am sure of this: The Arrival is Shaun’s masterwork, his best and most ambitious work to date. I think it’s also his most personal work too. That may be because he’s obviously the model for the lead character in the book, or because there’s an image of him as a small child in the rows of faces of immigrants that grace the book’s endpapers, or it may just be because the story seems that way to me. Regardless, I look forward to spending many more hours engrossed in this wonderful book.