Theodore Sturgeon.
It’s good to see regular trade publishers such as Tor and HarperCollins publishing collections, especially major, important collections such as the Bear, the Anderson, the Chiang, and the Le Guin, but, as has been true for many years now, it’s still the small press publishers who are publishing the bulk of the year’s collections. New book line Five Star Books exploded on the scene with an unprecedented twelve collections, but Golden Cryphon Press held its own with six, and may have had the edge in overall quality, although both houses brought out first-rate collections this year. But as you can see from the lists above, publishers such as NESFA Press, Four Walls, Eight Windows, and North Atlantic remain important as well, as do even smaller presses such as Fairwood Press. Print-on-demand collections are becoming more frequent as well, with collections from Charles Stross, Paul Park, John Sladek, and others, coming out from POD houses such as Cosmos/Wildside and Big Engine, and I suspect that this area will grow in importance as a source of short-story collections as the years go by. (Toast, by Charles Stross and If Lions Could Speak, by Paul Park can be ordered from Wildside Press at www.wildsidepress.com. Maps: the Uncollected John Sladek, by John Sladek, can be ordered from Big Engine Press at www.bigengine.com.)
“Electronic collections” continue to be available for downloading online at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory, and I expect that this area will continue to grow as we progress into the century as well.
As very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain superstore, means that mail-order is still your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above who have little presence in most bookstores: Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802-$24.95 for Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers, by Kage Baker, $25.95 for Strange but Not a Stranger, by James Patrick Kelly, $23.95 for The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories, by Jeffrey Ford, $23.95 for The Great Escape, by Ian Watson, $23.95 for Claremont Tales II, by Richard Lupoff; $24.95 for Swift Thoughts, by George Zebrowski; Midnight House, 4128 Woodland Park Ave., N. Seattle, WA 98103-$40.00 for Smoke Ghost and Other Apparitions, by Fritz Leiber; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092- $17.99 for Strangers and Beggars, by James Van Pelt; Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48G73-1239-$35.00 plus $5.00 postage for The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Four: Spider Island and Other Stories, by Jack Williamson; Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB# 132, Brooklyn, NY 11217-$16.00 for Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, by Carol Emshwiller, $6.00 including shipping for Rosetti Song: Four Stories, by Alex Irvine, $6.00 including shipping for Lord Stink and Other Stories, by Judith Berman; Obscura Press, P.O. Box 1992, Ames, 1A, 50010-$18.95 for The Ogre’s Wife, by Richard Parks; KaCSFFS Press, P.O. Box 36212, Kansas City, MO, 64171-6212-$15.00 for Through My Glasses Darkly, by Frank M. Robinson; Prime, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH 44735-$17.95 for Babylon Sisters and Other Posthuman Stories, by Paul Di Filippo; North Atlantic Press, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701-$35.00 for Bright Segment: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VIII.
2002 was another strong year for reprint anthologies; in fact, the reprint anthology market was actually stronger than the original anthology market, with a lot more value for your buck.
Among the most reliable bets for your money in this category, as usual, were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies. This year, science fiction was covered by three “Best of the Year” anthology series: the one you are holding in your hand (presumably, unless you’re levitating it with your vast mental powers), The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, now up to its twentieth annual volume; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos) edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its eighth annual volume, and a new science fiction “Best of the Year” series added to the mix last year, Science Fiction: The Best of 2002 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. Once again, there were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror in 2002: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Caroll amp; Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume Thirteen, and the Ellen Dallow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Fifteenth Annual Collection. For the second year in a row, fantasy is being covered by three Best of the Year anthologies, by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, by the Year’s Best Fantasy (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, now up to its third annual volume, and by a new “Best of the Year” series covering fantasy introduced last year, Fantasy: The Best of 2002 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, now in its second year. Similar in a way, and also good, is the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards Showcase 2002 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Turning from series to stand-alone books, there were some excellent retrospective anthologies this year. The best of these is the exceptional The Hard SF Renaissance (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, probably the best reprint anthology of the decade so far, and one of the best to come out in the last ten years as well. I don’t always agree with Hartwell and Cramer’s critical opinions and rhetoric, expressed in the extensive storynotes and introductions, and I don’t always agree that all of their selections are a perfect fit for the book, but when any anthology includes 960 pages filled with stories such as Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets,” Paul McAuley’s “Gene Wars,” Poul Anderson’s “Genesis,” Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” Bruce Sterling’s “Taklamakan,” Stephen Baxter’s “On the Orion Line,” and thirty-five other good-to-great stories by writers such as Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Hal Clement, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Stableford, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Gregory Benford, and many others, then it becomes pointless to quibble about such things. This book is a great read, and an invaluable reference anthology if you want a picture of how SF is evolving in the Oughts, and even at $39.95, it’s one of the best reading bargains you’re going to find this year; buy it. The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction (Carroll amp; Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, is not quite as exceptional as the Hartwell/Cramer anthology, but is still a good solid value, featuring first-rate stories such as Connie Willis’s “Firewatch,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” Damon Knight’s “Anacron,” Greg Egan’s “The Infinite Assassin,” Geoffry A. Landis’s “Approaching Perimelasma,” Clifford D. Simak’s “A Death in the House,” and lots of others. The Great SF Stories (1964) (NESFA Press), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, takes a look back at the year 1964, when classic stories such as Jack Vance’s “The Kraken,” Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” Fritz Leiber’s “When the Change Winds Blow,” Gordon R. Dickson’s “Soldier, Ask Not,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dowry of Angyat,” and Norman Kagan’s “Four Brands of Impossible” appeared, demonstrating that it was a very good year indeed. And The Ultimate Cyberpunk (ibooks), edited by Pat Cadigan, takes a look back into the more-recent past, at the Cyberpunk Revolution of the mid-’80s, examining some of cyberpunk’s rarely mentioned roots in stories such as James Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” and Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Farenheit,” and then passing through some canonical stories such as William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” William Gibson and Michael Swanwick’s “Dogfight,” Bruce Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei,” and Cadigan’s own “Patterns,” before considering more-recent progressions of the form such as Paul McAuley’s “Dr. Luther’s Assistant.” At $16.00 for the trade paperback, this is a great reading bargain, and another valuable reference anthology.
Noted without comment: Future Sports (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and Beyond Flesh (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
The most important reprint fantasy anthology this year (indeed, one of the only reprint fantasy anthologies this year, other than the two Fantasy Bests and the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling) was The American Fantasy Tradition (Tor), edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, which gives a comprehensive overview of the evolution of American fantasy, from stories by Nathanial Hawthorne, Stephen Vincent Benet, Mark Twain, and Robert W. Chambers on to more recent classics such as H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Manly Wade Wellman’s “O Ugly Bird!,” R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris,” Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” Orson Scott Card’s “Hatrack River,” and many others.
Other than the Stephen Jones “Best” anthology and Datlow’s half of the Datlow A Vindling anthology, there didn’t seem to be many reprint horror anthologies this year either, but then again, I wasn’t looking intensively for them either. I did spot The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology (Syracuse University Press), edited by Charlotte F. Otten, which could also be considered to be a fantasy anthology instead, I suppose, depending on how you squint at it.
It was an unexceptional year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, although there were a slew of literary biographies and studies of the work of individual authors, including L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (St. Martin’s), by Katharine M. Rogers; The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (MacFarland), by Karen L. Hellekson; A. E. van Vogt: Science Fantasy’s Icon (H. L. Drake), by H. L. Drake; Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold: A Life (Overlook), by Malcolm Yorke; Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (Ohio State), by Ellen Weil and Gary K.
