I’m sure Gentle Readers all are in no need of more whinging from YHB about how I’ve just gone right off the short story format. So I’ll try to keep things as specific and positive as I can, when noting that I’ve finally finished slogging my way through The Year's Best Science Fiction 2001: Nineteenth Annual Collection. I will, however, admit to wondering if these stories really do represent the year’s best, as they seem, well, pretty crappy on the whole. But enough of that.
There are twenty-six stories in the collection. I have no idea how many Hugo-eligible short-stories get published in a year, or whether Mr. Dozois, the editor of the series, extends his reach beyond what is Hugo- or Nebula-eligible. Anyway, my point is that I really don’t know if twenty-six is, say, a twentieth of the five hundred stories for that year, and therefore a pretty good idea of the range of things (allowing for editorial taste), or whether it’s more like a hundredth, or what. I’m mostly curious because although there was a pretty wide variety in quality, style, subject, the hard/soft business, etc., the overall effect for me was a sort of sameness. I’m finding it hard to identify what the sameness is. Maybe it’s that the stories seem to reject cinematic action as a good narrative tool, leaning more towards a ‘literary’ style, where the conflict is emotional, or ontological if you will, and people are groping, rather than questing. Also, of course, many of the stories are world-presenting, rather than story-telling; the core of the story is an image or two of alien-ness; not necessarily extra-terrestrial but aiming at what we might call the unheimlich. I’m a fiend for narrative, myself, of course, so a world-presenting story without a protagonist with an obvious goal has a pretty high bar for me, if I’m going to like it. Oh, and way too many of the stories appear to be attempting to evoke a bittersweet feeling, a feeling of sadness and loss combined with nostalgia or sentiment. I’m not against that altogether, but there are other feelings out there (wonder, fright, joy, and triumph, among others) that might make good stories, too.
OK, specifics. “On K2 with Kanakaredes”, by Dan Simmons, was frustrating, as it was a perfectly enjoyable mountain-climbing story with totally irrelevant specfic interludes. OK, not totally irrelevant, just mostly. Nancy Kress’ “Computer Virus” was frustrating, as it set itself up as a perfectly good how-do-I-outwit-the-computer story, and not only clutters it up with irrelevancies but makes the main story too obvious and manipulative to be really exciting. “The Days Between” has a lovely set-up (due to a screw-up, the protagonist is revivified partway through a cold-sleep voyage instead of the villain), but settles for a quiet, supposedly disturbing, ending, rather than a big payoff of any kind.
“The Dog Said Bow-Wow”, by Michael Swanwick, was probably my favorite, although I found most of the rococo styling annoying, rather than entertaining. James Patrick Kelly’s “Undone” had some very nice bits, although in the end I didn’t really care very much. Simon Ings’ “Russian Vine” had a nice line in evocative world-creation, and somehow I actually liked the sketched-out characters. Brenda Clough’s “May Be Some Time” seemed like a really fine first chapter to a novel, but doesn’t go anywhere in itself. “One-Horse Town”, by Howard Waldrop & Leigh Kennedy has a few lovely Waldropian bits, but overall, eh. Maureen F. McHugh’s “Interview: On Any Given Day” was entertaining in places, and I enjoyed the form, but it didn’t strike very deep.
Ian R. Macleod has two stories here, and I’m not sure which is more tedious than the other, as I didn’t manage to finish either. “Have Not Have”, by Geoff Ryman, and “Raven Dream”, by Robert Reed, both struck me as offensive Noble Savage pieces with nothing to sell but their supposed sensitivity. Charles Stoss’ “Lobsters” totally failed to grab me as a story and irritated me with the embedded futurism lecture, although it wasn’t anywhere near as bad in that respect as “The Real Thing”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Paul McAuley’s “The Two Dicks” is not so much a short story as an idea for a short story, and essentially I could get more pleasure out of reading the phrase “homage to Philip K. Dick”. Eleanor Arnason’s “Moby Quilt” seemed altogether pointless, and annoyingly so. There were others, too, which I either don’t remember or didn’t finish.
Well, that was crabby. I don’t think I’ll pick up another one of these for a while. I can’t help wondering if it’s more than my own crankiness (and, you know, idiosyncratic taste). But how would I know?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I find myself wondering why there’s no audiobook with the authors reading their own stories. The best part of Readercon has always been the readings, and while they’re not all great, there are always some great ones.
I’d probably choose different stories for a best-of, since the quality of the reading makes a difference, and since some stories work better out loud vs. on the page.
Maybe I should really be asking Readercon to consider taping all the readings and putting out a CD of the best ones. Would anyone buy it?
Perhaps the subscription model is better, podcasting one a week from the recordings made at last year’s Readercon, with a few weeks of sneak previews before registration deadline?
Thanks,
-V.
Some comments:
Gardner considers all the science fiction stories published in all the major magazines and anthologies, and quite a few of those published in the less major venues (if the editors send them to him). The Honorable Mentions list at the back of the book contains roughly 300 stories (though possibly as many as half of those are fantasy stories that Gardner liked but couldn’t include in a science fiction-only volume); for a more complete overview of all the sf stories published in a given year, see Rich Horton’s market summaries. I would guess there are somewhere between 500 and 1000 pieces of short science fiction published each year in professional and semiprofessional venues, but that’s a very rough guess.
My feeling is that in his Year’s Best volumes, Gardner tens to focus primarily on the kind of science fiction that Analog and Asimov’s publish. He seems to me, by and large, for these volumes, to be more interested in longer works than shorter, more interested in science/tech-focused stories than in character-focused stories, and much more interested than I am in what I call travelogue stories and you call world-presenting stories.
That said, I found this particular volume worthwhile. “Lobsters” was one of my favorite stories of the past several years (though I can understand why lots of people don’t like it). Ian R. MacLeod’s two stories in this volume (“New Light on the Drake Equation” and “Isabel of the Fall”) were among my favorite stories of that year, and cemented my love of MacLeod’s work. I quite liked “When This World Is All on Fire” and thought “Have Not Have” was interesting. I enjoyed the Waldrop collaboration and “The Two Dicks.” I was delighted by the opening of “Know How, Can Do” once I figured out what the author was doing; the gimmick doesn’t actually make logical sense, but it was a lot of fun. I liked the beginning of “The Human Front,” though I seem to recall being disappointed by the ending.
And “The Chief Designer,” despite not really being a science fiction story, was also imo one of the best stories of that year, as well as sparking a lot of thought and discussion about what qualifies as sf.
Most of the rest of the stories ranged, for me, from okay to uninteresting to actively annoying. But with the above plus “Dog Said Bow-Wow” and “Undone” and “Russian Vine” and “Marcher,” I liked at least half the stories, and I didn’t dislike too many of the others. All in all, I think I liked this volume rather more than some of the others in the series. Though I haven’t gone back and looked at other recent volumes to be sure.
If Gardner’s selections aren’t to your taste, note that there are other Year’s Best Science Fiction series out there, which always overlap a little but usually have a lot of non-overlap as well: notably the Hartwell/Cramer series and the Haber/Strahan (formerly Haber/Silverberg) series. I found the first few volumes of the Hartwell/Cramer series mostly not to my liking—they focused even more than Gardner on hard sf—but I think I’ve liked recent volumes more.
Well, and different people like different things, and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun.
I’m not altogether surprised you liked the MacLeod stories; from what I gather of your taste, the things that I was looking for are not as high on your list, and the things that he was providing in such quantity are things you value more than I do. And when I call them “tedious”, I mean of course that I found reading them tedious, rather than that the tedium is inherent in the story. On the other hand, I use the terms “lousy”, “awful” and “bad” in much the same way, just as I use “good”, “magnificent” and “wonderful” in a similarly subjective sense.
I doubt I’ll pick up another big book of short stories in the near future, as I’ve been enjoying novels far more. Thanks for the suggestions, though.
Thanks,
-V.
I tend to read _very_ selectively in the _Year’s Best_ collections, and the Nineteenth was no exception, but I will put in a good word (seconding Jed’s) for “The Chief Designer,” which is a brilliant story about science, and for Ken MacLeod’s “The Human Front,” which I love as a cautionary tale about manipulating history, though it’s overly anthropocentric in its cosmology, in the end. If I were ever to teach a class on alternate history, this is a story I would want to include in it.