It’s a trifle awkward for Your Humble Blogger to talk about New Voices in Science Fiction (New York: DAW 2003), as my gracious host and some of my Gentle Readers may well have friends and associates among those new voices, and, um, most of the stories seemed dopey. Not badly written, on the whole, but dopey. Juvenile stuff, if you know what I mean. The sort of thing that anybody more or less my age who grew up reading science fiction short stories would have read at thirteen and thought was original and clever, but wasn’t actually original or clever even in 1982, as we learned to our chagrin.
There are twenty stories in the anthology. Ten take place either in the current world or in our near future with a few changes. Three take place in our past (I’m including a time-travel story of sorts) with a supernatural element. Three take place in well-known fictional worlds, the point of which is (a joke on) our familiarity with the world. Two take place on earth in a really different future, and two take place on another world. Actually, I’m assuming one of those last is on another world because of the word ‘dirtside’, which I take to mean ‘on-planet’ rather than ‘on-land’. Otherwise, the ships in the story could be sea-going warships, and Fleet Orientation Station could well be a floating platform, rather than an orbital one.
Anyway, in the twenty stories, there were four which took place in a world that had to be described. The other sixteen could well take for granted that we know the world in which they take place. Not that all the sixteen were unimaginative, but their imagination was used in a totally different direction. I thought that was interesting; I suspect in New Voices in Science Fiction 1953 (if there were such a thing) there would be perhaps four stories on a contemporary, past, or near-future Earth, and the rest would be set in space or on distant planets. Further, the actual 2003 version has (if I remember correctly) all of two alien races in the twenty stories, together with a small handful of non-human terrestrials (animals, mythical figures, pseudo-humans and such). In the two stories with aliens, the aliens and the do not communicate well; the stories are thematically, more or less, about the lack of communication across species, if not the impossibility of communication across species. That would not have been a big theme in a 1953 version.
I’m not the first person to notice this sort of thing, I’m sure. And I don’t mean to rant that the world is going to hell in a mag-lev handbasket just because an editor I don’t know puts together a bunch of stories that aren’t to my taste. After all, I suspect a lot of people would be clam-happy to think of a science fiction anthology with a bunch of stories about people, where imagination is primarily used to make the relationships between people real, nuanced, and recognizable, and where more effort is put into good writing than into a new and different world or a complicated and suspenseful plot.
So, anyway. I didn’t enjoy the book much. Oh, and the editor, in the introduction says that “Babe Ruth retired, and suddenly baseball was blessed with Joe Dimaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial.” Yes, Ted Williams came up in 1935, the same year Babe Ruth retired, Joe DiMaggio the next year and Stan Musial a few years later, but if he’s suggesting that any of the three (and, let’s be clear, one of these things is not like the others) were as good as the Babe, well, he’d just be wrong. Similarly, Seattle Slew was no Secretariat. Yes, every generation has people who are the best of their generation; that’s pretty much tautological. But if he’s suggesting that somebody writing now can dominate science-fiction like Isaac Asimov did, he’s just wrong. Ted Williams didn’t dominate the way the Babe did, nor does even Tiger Woods dominate golf the way Sam Snead did. It just doesn’t work that way. And if it did, it would be a terrible reason to read an anthology like this one. That’s just ranting, but it seemed to fit into this Tohu Bohu of a note anyway.
,
-Vardibidian.
Hmm. Three separate threads to my comments here:
1. There are a lot of new voices in sf, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in any claims Resnick might make about this particular group representing the best of the new voices. I know and like several of the authors in this book (that is, like them as people, as well as liking them as authors), and I’ve read and liked a couple of the stories (though I wasn’t so fond of a couple of the others), but I think many of the best of the new voices aren’t represented in this book. For some other new voices, see SH and a host of other small-press and/or online publications—and a bunch of the new voices have recently been selling stories to the major print prozines and have been publishing novels and so on. …Interesting side note: in a quote I found online, Resnick indirectly describes the people in this book at having broken into the field “within three years, either direction, of the millennium”—which means that some of the “new” voices have been publishing in major venues since about 1997, while others made their first pro sales in 2003. They’re certainly all newer than, say, Asimov, or Resnick, but some of them are already high-profile and well-established (having been in the spotlight for six or seven years), while others are basically unknown.
2. If you want sf that’s not set on Earth in the recent past or near future, pick up any of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction volumes. There’s lots of this kind of thing being published, including plenty by authors who’ve risen to prominence in the last ten years. Like Resnick, we at SH don’t publish much of it; partly that’s ’cause a lot of it isn’t to our tastes, but partly it’s ’cause not much of it gets submitted. I think we have a reputation as being more interested in “soft” sf than “hard” sf.
3. I think the stuff about dominating a field like Babe Ruth or Isaac Asimov is kinda tangential. It seems unlikely that anyone in the current generation of sf writers will ever have the degree of influence on the field that Asimov (or Heinlein, or even Bradbury or Clarke or Le Guin) has had, but that’s partly just ’cause the field has grown larger and more diverse; it doesn’t mean none of the current generation will ever be better writers than Asimov. Einstein was no Newton; that doesn’t mean his contributions weren’t as important as Newton’s. Le Guin and Delany rose to prominence twenty years after Asimov did, and for a variety of reasons could never have dominated the field the way Asimov did, but I’d rather read anything by them than anything by Asimov.
Thanks, Jed; I’ll reply to each.
1) I’m not actually dead set on finding New Voices; the book just happened to be on the shelf on the library. My general comments weren’t even made under the assumption that this group is either exemplary or representative; the fact that it exists reveals a trend, in much the same way that the existence of a cruise ship full of gay people tells you something. Also, I hope it’s clear in this note and in others that generally, if I don’t like something, it’s just my bad luck. I neither think that this collection is bad in some inherent sense, nor do I think that anybody who likes these stories is a moron. I mean, I do think that (most of) these stories lacked something that I particularly like, and that’s sort-of objective, but people value different things. Specifically, I think you’re swell, and we like a lot of the same stuff, but we each like things the other sure as heck doesn’t. And that’s OK—in fact, it’s great. As we keep telling our Perfect Non-Reader, people are different, which makes them fun to watch!
b) I’ll have to pick up one of the Year’s Best Science Fiction volumes. My old library categorized them as periodicals, so they didn’t circulate. I understand, sort of, but dang.
iii) Yep, I just got cranky with the analogy. It’s pretty much a given in the baseball stathead circle I know anything about that as a field gets larger, it gets harder to dominate; Mr. Resnick’s analogy brought out the crank in me, as it seemed to be ignorant of that. Actually, it was what you’d call hyperbole, and as such perfectly reasonable, I suppose. The fact that, say, Barry Bonds doesn’t dominate the game the way the Babe did doesn’t necessarily mean he is not as talented/valuable/skilled/good/whatever, since it is harder to dominate in today’s game. But saying Bonds is the new Babe is either foolish or hyperbole, and is likely the latter.
,
-Vardibidian.
Wrenching this thread to baseball for a moment:
There is indeed a case to be made that Barry Bonds _does_ dominate the game the way the Babe did. Not in terms of the charismatic aura that surrounds him, of course, but just in terms of on-the-field talent. I’m not sure I would make that case, but I would make the case that Mr. Bonds is the first player _since_ Ruth for whom such a case could be made seriously.
The baseball star/SF writer analogy is a weak one anyway in that after the Babe stopped playing, that was it. A writer’s influence begins, in some sense, when ta stops writing and other people start reading. I don’t think writers dominate a present literary landscape in any meaningful way. The works of writers exercise a long-term influence that can fall and rise long after the writer has ceased writing.
Now if a series of SF writer collectible trading cards with fun facts and figures on the back were to be printed, then we’d start to have a stronger analogy . . . I’d better get back to grading before I get any sillier.