{"id":2021,"date":"2004-05-12T17:23:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-12T21:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/12\/2021.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:05","slug":"book-report-new-voices-in-scie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/12\/book-report-new-voices-in-scie\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: New Voices in Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s a trifle awkward for Your Humble Blogger to talk about New Voices in Science Fiction<\/I><\/a> (New York: DAW<\/a> 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.\n

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.\n

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<\/I> (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.\n

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<\/a> 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<\/I>, 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.\n

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.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2021"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17018,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021\/revisions\/17018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}