The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection

Beginning with Bleiler and Ditky’s Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1949 (which reprinted stories from 1948), there have been around a dozen attempts at series of “Year’s Best” anthologies. The Bleiler/Ditky series lasted for a little over a decade, as did Judith Merril’s groundbreaking Year’s Best SF, which began in 1956. Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr began their World’s Best SF series in 1965, before “breaking up” in 1971 and continuing with separate volumes. Wollheim kept the World’s Best series going until 1990, while Carr’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy ended in 1987. Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss edited a competing series in the late sixties and early seventies, as did Lester del Rey from 1972 to 1976. In 1977, Gardner Dozois took over as editor of the del Rey series, which continued under the Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year title until 1981. Wollheim and Carr had the field to themselves for two years, until Dozois took the plunge again in 1984 with the massive Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Edition.

Previous Year’s Best anthologies had mostly limited themselves to not much more than 200 pages, tending to include eight to twelve stories from the previous year (Merril’s was a little longer), but with this new series, Dozois gambled that there was a market for a yearly book nearly three times as long, containing around thirty stories. Apparently he was right, as the series has continued to the present (the twenty-ninth volume appearing in 2012), surpassing Wollheim’s record for the longest-running yearly anthology. Competing anthologies that have sprung up since, each with its own emphasis and massive table of contents, but Dozois’s book remains the biggest and best known.  My personal favorite of the current crop is Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, now up to its sixth volume. It’s inclusion of fantasy and “slipstreamy” material give the best overview of the expansiveness of the genre. At the other extreme is David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF, now up to volume 17, which sticks more closely to the traditional definition of science fiction. Dozois stays mostly on the science fiction reservation, but does venture occasionally into fantasy territory, keeping more tightly within the SF genre boundary than Strahan or Horton, but is a little more adventurous than Hartwell. Any reader’s opinion of the “best” Year’s Best will depend on how his or her personal tastes line up with those of the editor.

Given the size of these volumes, they tend to be “hit and miss” in terms of the individual stories, but I like to read at least one every year to get an idea of the “state of the genre.” With short fiction, the reader has the opportunity to sample a much greater variety of authors and types of stories than is possible with novels. It’s often argued that the short format is especially suited to science fiction, since it provides authors an opportunity to present science fictional ideas that are interesting to consider, without the need for full-scale characterization and plot development needed to support a novel. As time passes, these anthologies become time capsules, allowing us to return to the mindset of the field and the state of the science fictional dialogue at a specific point in the past.

Turning specifically to Dozois’s First Annual Collection, the Wayback Machine is set for 1983. The big novel that year was David Brin’s Startide Rising. Other award-winners and nominees include The Anubis Gates, Tea with the Black Dragon, The Citadel of the Autarch, and The Dragon Waiting. The Ewoks triumphed for the best dramatic presentation Hugo. Judging by the stories in this volume, science fiction may have been in a bit of an “in-between” stage. There are very few space exploration stories, with Poul Anderson’s “Vulcan’s Forge” being the only near-future example. Yet the implications of the information technology revolution seem not to have begun to influence the field, and cyberpunk had yet to make its impact. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the stories in this anthology can be grouped under a few thematic headings. We see the beginning of the exploration of “post-human” possibilities that continues today. Bruce Sterling pioneered this theme is his Mechanist/Shaper sequence, and “Cicada Queen” is included here. Greg Bear’s “Hardfought” and “Blood Music” and Connie Willis’s “The Sidon in the Mirror” also take steps in this direction. The implications of telepathy and brain manipulation are explored in Robert Silverberg’s “Multiples”, Jack Dann’s “Blind Shemmy”, John Kessel’s “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine” and Pat Cadigan’s “Nearly Departed”. Ecological and animal rights issues are considered in James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Beyond the Dead Reef”, Pat Murphy’s “In the Islands”, and Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face”, the latter of which brings us back to David Brin’s idea of “uplifted” animals from Startide Rising, with a sexual twist. A final theme of the science fiction stories is one of the oldest: alien encounters, represented in very different ways by Jack McDevitt’s “Cryptic”, Vernor Vinge’s “Gemstone”, and my personal favorite from this anthology, Ian Watson’s weirdly beautiful “Slow Birds”, in which a small-town rivalry is mirrored by a nearly unfathomable computerized alien war, and two brothers represent the seemingly irreconcilable impulses toward oblivion and survival. The slow birds themselves strike me as one of the classic SF ideas.

Moving away from core SF, Dozois clearly has a liking for the odd, comedic strain of the genre, with Howard Waldrop (“Man-Mountain Gentian”), Avram Davidson (“Full Chicken Richness”), and R. A. Lafferty (“Golden Gate”) all present. These stories involve, respectively, psychic sumo wrestling, a time machine and soup (you’ll just have to read it), and a tall-tale Old West-themed fantasy. Another comedy, though with a horrific twist, is George R. R. Martin’s “The Monkey Treatment” which is based on an ironic (and literal) reversal of the concept of a “monkey on your back.” This story begins with weirdness, moves into absurdity, and ends in horror. It shouldn’t have worked, but it was one of my favorites in the volume. Even further into the fantasy realm are Tanith Lee’s “Nunc Dimittis” and Dan Simmons’s “Carrion Comfort.” Both are variations on vampire horror, and are well-written and effective, but I can’t work up interest anymore in the tragic plight of immortal vampires (even “mind vampires,” as in the Simmons story). This is purely personal taste, and these are excellent examples of the genre, but I just want Van Helsing to show up and end the existential angst. Finally, I should mention World Fantasy winner (and Hugo and Nebula nominee) “Black Air” by Kim Stanley Robinson. A historical fantasy about a boy conscripted to serve on a ship in the Spanish Armada, who develops mystical powers, I must admit that I’m not sure what the fuss was about, surely a failing on my part. Dozois mentions that it is his favorite of the year, and he uses it to end the volume.

Along with “Black Air”, Dozois does a good job of anticipating which stories would become major award candidates for 1983. The book includes six Hugo nominees (including, oddly, every novelette nominee, but none of the short stories, though one of those, “The Peacemaker”, which won the Nebula, is by Dozois himself, and he may not have thought it appropriate to include his own story in his Year’s Best selection), and ten Nebula nominees (including, again, amazingly, all seven of the novelette nominees, not all of which match the Hugo shortlist). About half the stories in the anthology are on the Locus Awards longlist. “Blood Music”, “Hardfought”, “The Sidon in the Mirror”, “Slow Birds”, “Beyond the Dead Reef”, and “Her Furry Face” are among those receiving award recognition.

A Year’s Best is bound to include many of the well-known  and veteran writers from the period (Anderson, Silverberg, Davidson, Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, Dann, Vinge, Tiptree, Joe Haldeman, and Martin, in this case), but it is surprising how few were publishing prior to the seventies. On the other hand, there is a preponderance of writers who were just getting started in the early eighties, but who have since gone to the top of the field: Willis, Simmons, Robinson, Cadigan, Sterling, and Kessel fall into this category. Special mention should go to Greg Bear, who had two of the best stories of the year, and would be one of the top writers of the decade. This sense of a “passing of the torch” from the old guard to the new must have made readers in 1984 very optimistic about the future of the field. If pushed to rate stories on the ten-point scale, there are only a couple here that I would rate lower than a “seven,” and “Blood Music” and “Slow Birds” would receive “ten”s.

Dozois  picked a good year, then, in which to start his series, with lots of excellent stories to choose from, right off the bat showed readers that he was in tune with what fans were looking for (as shown by the number of award nominees he anticipated), had a good eye for up-and-coming writers, and appreciated the variety that the field had to offer. Fans of the series continue to pick up each new volume nearly thirty years later. Since many of the series’ current readers weren’t around when the series began, the early volumes, long out of print, have become hard to come by, and are expensive on the used book market, but the first two volumes were recently released as eBooks, so anyone wanting to take the Wayback Machine to 1983 can now do so for a reasonable price. If I had such a machine, 1983 would be far from my first choice of real-world destinations, but in the science fictional world, it was a very good year.