The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (5 page)

It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing – none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet and, in fact, a few are rumoured to not be selling so well. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies at hand to choose from.

The best of them was probably
Eclipse Two
(Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan, although there was only a whisker’s thickness of difference between it and
Fast Forward 2
(Pyr), edited by Lou Anders. A half-step below them was
The Starry Rift
(Viking), edited by Jonathan Strahan;
Sideways in Time
(Solaris), edited by Lou Anders;
The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume 2
(Solaris), edited by George Mann; and
Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction
(Eos), edited by Jack Dann, all of them strong enough to have carried off the prize in a weaker year.
Postscripts 15
, edited by Nick Gevers, a double-issue of the magazine that functioned essentially as an anthology, ought to be in the hunt here somewhere too.

Below these were a number of still-substantial anthologies such as
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Del Rey), edited by Ellen Datlow;
Extraordinary Engines
(Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers;
Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
(Norilana), edited by Mike Allen;
Seeds of Change
(Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams; and
Subterfuge
(Newcon) and
Celebrations
(Newcon), both edited by Ian Whates – with yet more anthologies a couple of steps below them.

Several reviewers, including me, criticized Jonathan Strahan’s
Eclipse
last year for not having enough real science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can be levelled at his
Eclipse Two
. There are still a couple of fantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, but the bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ core science fiction. My favourite stories are by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroeder, Ted Chiang, and Daryl Gregory. Also good were stories by David Moles, Tony Daniel, Terry Dowling, Paul Cornell, and others. The best of the fantasy stories here are by Peter S. Beagle, Richard Parks, and Margo Lanagan.

Only a whisker-thickness behind is
Fast Forward 2
, edited by Lou Anders. The best stories here are probably those by Paolo Bacigalupi and Ian McDonald, but the book also contains good work by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Paul Cornell, Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Bucknell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kay Kenyon, and others.

Don’t let the fact that it’s being published as a YA anthology put you off –
The Starry Rift
, edited by Jonathan Strahan, is definitely one of the best SF anthologies of the year, everything in it fully of adult quality, and almost all of it centre-core SF as well.

Best stories here are those by Kelly Link and Ian McDonald (his gorgeously colored Future India story, “The Dust Assassin”), but there are also excellent stories by Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, and others, including an atypical near-future story by Greg Egan, more openly political than his stuff usually is. The fact that several stories are told in the first person by teenage narrators, usually young girls, may make several of the stories seem a bit familiar if read one after the other (and is also the only real indication that this is a YA anthology), so space them out over time.

Another excellent anthology is
Sideways in Crime
, edited by Lou Anders. Most Alternate History stories are SF (particularly those that add a timetravel element), but we’ve already seen a fair amount of Alternate History Fantasy in the last few years (it’s an Alternate World, but in it griffins or giants are real, or magic works), and now we’ve got Alternate History Mystery, producing a book that’s a lot of fun; most of the stories would fall under the Alternate History Mystery SF heading, I guess (including one with crosstime travel), rather than the Alternate History Mystery Fantasy heading, since although there’s a couple of fairly wild alternate possibilities here, there’s none with griffins or where magic works. The best stories in the book is probably by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, but there’s also excellent work by Kage Baker, Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Theodore Judson, S. M. Stirling, Chris Roberson, and others. The most likely Alternate, as it requires the fewest changes from our own timeline, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s story; the least likely is probably Mike Resnick and Eric Flint’s story, even more so than Chris Roberson’s story with its crosstime-travelling zeppelins.

Several of the basic plotlines here are pretty similar – important man found dead under strange, usually politically charged circumstances – although the settings change radically from story to story, so I’d recommend that you read these a few at a time rather than all in one sitting.

There are also some good solid stories in
The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II
(Solaris), edited by George Mann, which is more even in quality than the first volume – none of the stories is as bad as the worst of the stories in the first one . . . but then again, none of the stories is as good as the best of the good stories were. The best stories here, in my opinion, are by Peter Watts, Eric Brown, Mary Robinette Kowal, Karl Schroeder, and Dominic Green. If I had to narrow it down to only two picks, it would be the Dominic Green and the Mary Robinette Kowal.

In the past, I’ve criticized the British magazine
Postscripts
for not running enough core science fiction, and as if to twit me on this,
Postscripts 15
, a huge double-length (or longer) issue that is probably best consideredas an anthology rather than a magazine, edited by Nick Gevers, bills itself an “all science fiction issue!” Not that that’s true, of course. By my definitions, there’s at least six or seven fantasy stories of one sort or another here, a reprinted article by Arthur C. Clarke, a metafiction piece by Brian W. Aldiss about meeting the Queen, and a fascinating autobiographical article by Paul McAuley about growing up in post-World War II England. Nevertheless, there is plenty of core science fiction here, most of it of excellent quality. Many of the best stories here are to be found in the special “Paul McAuley section”, which features, in addition to the above-mentioned autobiographical essay, a novel excerpt from McAuley’s
The Quiet War
, and four good stories by McAuley, one of which, “City of the Dead,” may be the pick of the issue, rivalled only by Ian McDonald’s (“A Ghost Samba”), which does almost as good a job of painting an evocative picture of a future Brazil as his Cyberaid stories have done with a future India. There are other good SF stories here by Chris Robertson, Matthew Hughes, Steven Utley, Jay Lake, Robert Reed, Mike Resnick, Beth Bernobich, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Justina Robson, Jack Dann, and Paul Di Filippo.

American publishers, especially the big trade houses, seem to like their genres segregated – no fantasy in science fiction anthologies, no science fiction in fantasy anthologies, no mystery or mainstream in either. That’s not true of Australian publishers, however, where it seems to be okay to jumble different genres together in the same anthology, and it’s certainly the rule with
Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction
, edited by Jack Dann – the follow-up to 1998’s monumental
Dreaming Down Under
, edited by Dann and Janeen Webb, which brings us a similarly rich stew of fiction by Australian authors working in different genres, horror, fantasy, slipstream, science fiction. A wide variety of moods, too, with some stories horrific and grim, others seeming almost to be Young Adult pieces. There’s a bit too much horror here for my taste – a few zombie stories go a long way with me, and there’s
lots
of zombie stories here, to the point where it almost seems to become a running (or lurching) joke – but there’s also enough fantasy and science fiction stories in this huge volume to make up into respectable anthologies of their own, and if horror is your cup of blood, you’ll find the horror stories to be of high quality. Almost everything here is of high quality, in fact (even the stories I didn’t care for were excellently crafted), a rich smorgasbord, by thirty-six different authors, representative of the obviously busy Australian scene. The best science fiction is from Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Lee Battersby, Stephen Dedman, Simon Brown, Sean McMullen, Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch, Rowena Cory Daniels, and Jason Fischer. Fantasy (sometimes shading into horror) is best represented here by Terry Dowling, Rjurik Davidson, Peter A. Ball, Russell Blackford, Isobelle Carmody, Richard Harland, and Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

The question, raised in the past by Greg Egan and others, as to whether there is such a thing in the first place as specifically
Australia
n science fiction, as opposed just to
science fiction
in general, is a question too large to be settled here, but most of the stories in
Dreaming Again
that take place on Earth at least feature Australian settings, and a few of the stories – mostly the fantasies – seem to draw on Australian myths and legends.

Flying in the face of what I said above about American trade publishers,
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a cross-genre anthology featuring SF, fantasy, horror, and slipstream stories. Oddly, for a book that puts “Science Fiction” first in its title, especially from a company like Del Rey, which is known for its solid, core, rather traditional science fiction, the smallest element in the mix is science fiction, with horror, fantasy, and slipstream making up the bulk of its contents – and what science fiction there is is soft near-future SF, with Datlow herself announcing in the Introduction (rather proudly, I thought) that “you won’t find off-planet stories or hard science fiction” in the anthology. The best story in the book, by a good margin, is one of those near-future SF stories, in fact, Maureen McHugh’s “Special Economics,” although there is also good SF work by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, Pat Cadigan, and Jason Stoddard. More unclassifiable but still readable stuff, often on the borderline between slipstream and SF/fantasy, is provided by Elizabeth Bear, Jeffery Ford, Laird Barron, Christopher Rowe, Lucy Sussex, and others.

Extraordinary Engines
(Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers, is a steampunk anthology, many of whose stories double almost by definition as Alternate History. The best stories here are by Ian R. MacLeod and Kage Baker, but there’s also first-rate work by Jay Lake, Robert Reed, Jeff VanderMeer, James Lovegrove, Keith Brooke, and others.

One of last year’s strongest anthologies, appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere was
disLOCATIONS
, edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press. This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three original anthologies:
Subterfuge
,
Celebrations
, and
Myth-Understandings
. None of these is quite as strong as
disLOCATIONS
, but all contain good stories of various types, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these is
Subterfuge
, which, probably not coinciden-tally, considering my tastes, contains the highest per centage of science fiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF and fantasy). Best stories here are by Neal Asher and John Meaney, but there are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack, Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Tanith Lee and Dave Hutchinson. The best story in
Celebrations
, an anthology commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is a Phildickian SF piece by Alastair Reynolds, but there’s good work, both SF and fantasy, by Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken MacLeod, Dave Hutchinson, Brian Stableford, Liz Williams, and Molly Brown. The weakest of the three anthologies is
Myth-Understandings
, which features mostly fantasy. Best story here is Tricia Sullivan’s, although there’s also strong work by Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, and others.

One of last year’s strongest anthologies, appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere was
dis
LOCATIONS, edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press. This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three original anthologies:
Subterfuge, Celebrations, and Myth- Understandings.
None of these is quite as strong as
dis
LOCATIONS, but all contain good stories of various types, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these is
Subterfuge
, which, probably not coincidentally, considering my tastes, contains the highest per centage of science fiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF and fantasy). Best stories here are by Neal Asher and John Meaney, but there are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack, Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Tanith Lee and Dave Hutchinson. The best story in
Celebrations
, an anthology commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is a Phildickian SF piece by Alastair Reynolds, but there’s good work, both SF and fantasy, by Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken MacLeod, Dave Hutchinson, Brian Stableford, Liz Williams, and Molly Brown. The weakest of the three anthologies is
Myth-Understandings,
which features mostly fantasy. Best story here is Tricia Sullivan’s, although there’s also strong work by Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, and others.