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Yet again, it was a pretty weak year for original anthologies.
The best original SF anthology of the year, with almost no competition, was Mars Probes (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther. Having said that, I must admit that I found Mars Probes somewhat disappointing overall, in comparison with Crowther’s 1999 anthology Moon Shots. With all the good science fiction that’s been written about Mars at novel-length in recent years, I’d hoped for a really solid, definitive collection of core SF, reflecting some of the recent science fiction thinking about the Red Planet, and there is some of that here-but a great deal of the anthology (too much of it, in my opinion) is devoted to fabulations and homages drawing not on scientific fact but on other fictional versions of Mars, from Bradbury’s “Mars” to Burrough’s “Barsoom,” including an uncannily spot-on pastiche/homage of Leigh Brackett’s pulp-era Martian stories by Michael Moorcock. Even Paul McAuley, who has done some of the best of the recent work about Mars, contributes a near-mainstream story set in a Martian theme park rather than a hard-science story. Most of this stuff is clever, well-crafted, and entertaining, but it makes the anthology as a whole a little more insubstantial as a science fiction anthology than I was hoping it would be (perhaps the problem is with my own expectations rather than with the anthology itself); in spite of these quibbles, though, it’s still easily the best SF anthology of the year. The best story in Mars Probes is Ian McDonald’s “The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars,” but there’s also good work here by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, Gene Wolfe, Allen Steele, and others.
It’s nearly impossible to come up with a follow-up candidate for best original SF anthology this year, although there were several anthologies with one or two good stories apiece in them. The most solid of these overall was probably 30th Anniversary DAW: Science Fiction (DAW), edited by Elizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert; a lot of the stuff here is just fragments of larger story-arcs, depending on your familiarity with long-running DAW novel series for full effect, but there is some good self-contained work here by Neal Barrett, Jr., Brian Stableford, C. J. Cherryh, Charles L. Harness, Ian Watson, and others. Once Upon a Galaxy (DAW), edited by Wil McCarthy, Martin H. Greenberg, and John Heifers, an anthology of fairy-tales retold as science fiction, has some clever stuff in it. The best story here is by Paul Di Filippo, but there is also good stuff by Gregory Benford, Stanley Schmidt, Scott Edleman, Thomas Wylde, and others. Sol’s Children (DAW), edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg, features good but unexceptional stories by Timothy Zahn, Michael A. Stackpole, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, the late Jack C. Haldeman II, and others. Oceans of Space (DAW), edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, is largely unimpressive, but has decent stories by Andre Norton, Mike Resnick, Simon Hawke, and others.
PS Publishing, edited by Peter Crowther, which for the last couple of years has been bringing out novellas in individual chapbook form, produced another bunch of titles this year, including the excellent V.A.O., by Geoff Ryman, good novellas such as Riding the Rock, by Stephen Baxter, The Tain, by China Mieville, and others. Golden Gryphon Press got into the same business this year, bringing Alastair Reynold’s first-rate novella Turquoise Days out as an individual chapbook. You’re more likely to find really good science fiction in these chapbooks than you are to find it in most of the second-tier anthologies mentioned above.
There were three original Alternate History anthologies this year, the best of which was Worlds That Weren’t (Roc), edited by Laura Ann Gilman; the best story here is Walter Jon Williams’s strange novella “The Last Ride of German Freddie,” but the book also features good novellas by Harry Turtledove, Mary Gentle, and S. M. Stirling. Alternate Generals II (Baen), edited by Harry Turtledove, is also worthwhile, although it may appeal more to military history buffs than to the average reader, since a number of the stories here require more knowledge of the intricate details of past wars for full appreciation than the average reader is likely to possess. The best story here is William Sanders’s “Empire,” although there is also good work by Judith Tarr, Michael F. Flynn, Susan Shwartz, and others (I do wonder, though, how many people are going to be willing to pay $24.00 for this: I think they would have been better off bringing it out as an inexpensive mass-market paperback, like the first Alternate Generals anthology, than as an expensive hardcover). Alternate Gettysburgs (Berkley), edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, is even more specialized-if you’re not reasonably au courant with the American Civil War, and especially the Battle of Gettysburg, you might as well forget it; most of the stories in these three books are alternate history, unsurprisingly enough, but the best story in Alternate Gettysburgs is an SF story by William H. Keith, Jr., although there are also good stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Brendan DuBois, and others here, probably enough to make it worthwhile as a $6.99 paperback (I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it as a $24.00 hardcover).
There was supposedly a new volume in the assembled-online “SFF.net” annual anthology series this year, called Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, but I never saw it; I’ll have to save it for consideration for next year.
As usual, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XVIII (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys, presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents. Much the same could be said of Empire of Dreams and Miracles (Phobos), edited by Orson Scott Card, which features winners of the 1st Annual Phobos Fiction Contest.
In terms of literary quality, the line-by-line quality of the writing, the best anthology of the year may well be Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, a special issue of the literary publication Conjunctions guest-edited by Peter Straub-although some genre fans are going to find it disappointing in spite of the bravura quality of the prose. The (somewhat unclear) intention here seems to have been to produce an “all genres” anthology aimed at the mainstream literary audience, but there is almost no science fiction here-with the exception of a good Alternate History story by John Kessel, “The Invisible Empire”-and surprisingly, considering that horror superstar Peter Straub was the editor, almost no horror either; most of the stories fall somewhere on the line between fantasy and slipstream / surrealism / Magic Realism / whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-month, although several of the anthologies very best stories, such as Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” and John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroine,” strike me as straight mainstream stories (in spite of Straub’s rather too- clever attempts to argue that the Crowley is really a fantasy story after all). Although Straub does brandish the term “post-transformation fiction,” it’s hard for me to perceive that any coherent critical argument is being made here, or to discern why this particular group of authors are “New Wave Fabulists,” or what makes them so, or what that term means, or why they were selected rather than some other grouping of authors; it seems instead like the partially random selection of authors you’d get assembling any original anthology, depending largely on the luck of the draw, rather than a list of authors collected with critical rigor or to demonstrate some particular mode or emerging school of fiction. Still, if you set aside considerations of genre or of critical canon-forming, what you get is an anthology with some really good stuff to read in it. After the above-mentioned stories by Fowler, Crowley, and Kessel, the best stories here are Andy Duncan’s flamboyant “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and China Mieville’s grisly “Familiar,” but the anthology also features good-to-excellent stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Neil Caiman, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub himself, and others, plus excerpts from forthcoming novels by Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe, a book well worth the $15 cover price, especially for those who don’t insist on drinking their genre neat.
