The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
It's hard to rate an anthology - I think the average mark for the stories (see below for individual comments, written as I read them) would not be a four. But the collection works as a whole, in its diversity.I need to remember, though, that this whole series is not a short story collection. It's mainly novellas, not even novelettes. Longer work that one should approach with different expectations.******throws her hands up* OK, I give up. I'm gonna review this one story by story as it goes. Since my head insists on having opinions on each story and wanting to write them down:John Kessel: "The Juniper Tree"-- I dunno, I really dunno. It may have worked better as a novel with more time to actually develop the characters. The society is too unexplored for me (and yeah, too much a male perspective).Charles Stross: "Antibodies"-- oh, nice idea. Very nice. As always, Charlie's characters do not sparkle to me, but the story works and they are believable. And of course: the idea! Less the twist at the end, which was good, but more the basic idea. Oh!Ursula K. Le Guin: "The Birthday Of the World"-- almost more fantasy than science fiction (because of the prophecy - this one break the sf/fantasy wall), but oh, the perfect point of view, the world, the voice. And all the little things: how God's children are inbred without it ever being explicitly addressed. How the perspective changes from a child's view to that of a growing up woman.Nancy Kress: "Savior"-- Neat. Not wow. But very neat.Paul J. McAuley: "Reef"-- Space opera. With an interesting main character and working supporting roles, with very neat biology ideas and an interesting society structure. If you like space opera, this is yours. (I miss something that I can't put the finger on, but this may be because it's space opera and space opera is usually not mine.)Susan Palwick: "Going After Bobo"-- if this were a story by someone who does not usually write science fiction but writes literary fiction, they would not have labelled this one as sf. The future elements are tiny - the story was written in 2000 and I'm pretty sure all the technology was (almost) available back then already.I love literary and I like this story a lot, even though it's ends on a bit too positive a note with too many explanations. But it's quiet and sad and feels real.Albert E. Cowdrey: "Crux"-- Grah! Are we trying to be edgy? The usual time paradox story. With some more detailed torture, some more exotic location, some even younger whores, some even more stinky aliens. It's not that bad. It's just - come on, this story has been told so often! And with more impact.Severna Park: "The Cure For Everything"-- Dreamlike and just not what one would expect. Good, definitely good. (Also one of the shortest stories of the book, with 15 pages only. A true short story, why the others tend to be novella-like.)Peter F. Hamilton: "The Suspect Genome"-- Perhaps not a story I will remember in a few years time in detail, but a good strong one that pulls of three intersecting points of view and believable characters.Michael Swanwick: "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-o"-- Thinking a bit more about it: I actually liked this one. Very short compared to all the others, but with a punch and just with enough glimpses into a world to make it work. Definitely fantasy, though, not high fantasy, but fantasy (which is what threw me off first, because this and therefore the punchline of the story was not what I *expected* in this collection - but for a fantasy story it works just perfectly).Lucius Shepard: "The Radiant Green Star"-- I liked the imagery and I loved, in parts, the language and the atmosphere created. Yet - somehow this story was lacking a heart. Also to me the setting did not seem really integral and this is something I need in a SF story. Or at least in this SF story. I mean, not a bad story per se, but also not one that would make me want to pick up more by the authors.Alastair Reynolds: "Great Wall of Mars"-- I liked this one. Now this story serves to quite a few of my reading kinks, particularly the hive-mind, the cold strong woman, and complex politics, so I may be a wee bit biased. It's also not a perfect story, but oh, one that definitely makes me want to read more. Enough to want to pick up at least some of the books set in the universe.Eliot Fintushel: "Milo and Sylvie"-- Sturgeon is indeed a good comparison and I do like Sturgeon's work, though this one is slightly uneven ...Brian Stableford: "Snowball In Hell"-- A bit preachy, but in a nice way. Really nicely done in the science part, even if not perfect in the execution. And, surprisingly, quite positive in the outlook.Stephen Baxter: "On the Orion Line"-- I read this one in some other collection (the military sf one? most likely - argh, how I hate it right now that my library is on the other side of the Atlantic) and neither remember it well enough to comment on it (which says something given how I read the military sf collection just a year ago; also here in Boston) nor remember liking it well enough to re-read it.Greg Egan: "Oracle"-- And there I am, thinking that maybe my taste changes; maybe the science fiction short story is not the perfect genre for me anymore, since so many of the stories fail to elicit real enthusiasm. And here comes Egan and writes this - clever and philosophical and real (there is Turing and there is Lewis, but not really, and the characters feel so incredibly real, so human) and yes, very, very hard when it comes to science. There is Goedel's conjecture and there are four-dimensional velocity vectors and there are rotations in complex spaces. And there is love and tragedy and meta-commentary on our own history. Just: yes, more of this please.Rick Coon and Ernest Hogan: "Obsidian Harvest"-- Another really fun one. Not super deep, but a fun, engaging read. I'd enjoy more of these!Tananarive Due: "Patient Zero"-- Not exactly bad, but neither inventive (I'm sure I've read this story more than once - and this was the most boring POV to tell it from), not especially good written.Charles Stross: "A Colder War"-- Huh. Charlie Stross writes a Lovecraftian story and I love it. Huh. Stranger things have happened, certainly, but this does not make this one not strange (I love Stross's blog, but his books so far rather underwhelmed; I much more prefer Greg Egan).Steven Utley: "The Real World"-- And another one that I read before, but did not remember in too much detail. It had a nice atmosphere, though, and was very character-driven, something I usually like.M. Shayne Bell: "The Thing About Benny"-- Most of the stories in this collection are not short stories, but rather novelettes and even novellas. This one is a short story. And a really good one.Robert Charles Wilson: "The Great Goodbye"-- micro-story with a really nice twist to it. Yay! More of those, please!Ian McDonald: "Tendeléo's Story"-- This is a slow going one, meditative almost. But also strong, honest, brutal. Deeply human. Deeply political. Deeply hopeful. (Though I feel mixed about the POV choice/changes, just needed to add that.)
Most sf/f collections are made of mildly enjoyable but ultimately forgettable short stories. There are a few truly terrible stories in each, and even fewer truly good ones. I think the idea of short stories as The way to start getting noticed doesn't help (far too many people attempt a form they suck at), but the real problem seems to be editors who accept any old drek. The only editor whose anthologies I've 100% enjoyed thus far has been Sharyn November. Even John Joseph Adams and Ellen Datlow have included some memorable stinkers in this collections. But short story collections can give you fun-sized portions of stories, a tasting menu of various authors I've never heard of or never tried before, so I keep picking them up. To my pleasure, this is one of the best collections I've read in a while--nothing awful, and only a few stories too boring to read all the way through. The default in sf seems to be straight white American cis-dudes, so it was a pleasure to read so many stories with non-white, non-American, even non-dude protagonists. Set in alien-invaded-Nairobi, in nano-fueled-China, in a Vietnamese circus, on matriarchial-Mars, these are not your standard cookie-cutter settings and characters. And what a pleasure it was to read about them!My favorite story in the collection was probably "Tendeleo's Story" by Ian McDonald. Tendeleo Bi is a fantastic main character, strong, smart, devoted but with believable moments of childish self absorption, unapologetic and fierce. Her quest, first to save her village from the encroaching alien spores, then to create another home, kept me flipping through the pages. I was reading so fast I almost missed a major plot point! Susan Palwick's "Going After Bobo" is as poignant a portrait of a kid's search for his cat as any story I had to read in English class. Palwick gives us the story in bits and pieces, only revealing a snippet at a time, and it worked beautifully. Less sf than I expected, but well-told. Another favorite was "Obsidian Harvest" by Rick Cook and Ernest Hogan. Basically a classic private-eye story, but told in an alternate version of MesoAmerica where huetlacoatls live alongside humans. Our narrator, Tworabbit, aka Lucky, has been cast out of his noble family for some heinous crime, and now makes a living as a thug and investigator for a local crime boss. I hope this idea gets turned into something longer because I was intrigued by the world and the characters.I liked the basic premises behind "Antibodies" by Charles Stross and Greg Egan's "Oracle," but the punch of it got lost. If they were half as long, they'd be twice as good.Paul McAuley's "Reef" is written well, but kinda pointless. I liked the main character (a woman without genetic mods but with a sense of fair play) and the world where citizenship must be earned or bought, but there wasn't much to the plot.Albert Cowdrey's "Crux" would have been one of my favorites except for the ending, which rather ruined the bittersweet concept of trying to prevent a cataclysm but thereby erase the present. I wanted to like Steven Utley's "The Real World," in which a robot from the future comes back to prevent Alan Turing's persecution and help him accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Weirdly enough, the story gets bogged down in a vilification of C.S.Lewis and Christianity in general. M. Shayne Bell's "The Thing About Benny" and Robert Charles Wilson's "The Long Goodbye" are both exactly long enough for the cute, classic twists on stories that they tell.Ursula K Le Guin's "The Birthday of the World" and Nancy Kress's "Savior" were both great, but I'd read each of them too many times before.Others were just too long, not well-written, or had a forgettable premise. I found these to be: Peter Hamilton's "The Suspect Genome," in which an unscrupulous businessman is framed for one murder after committing another; Lucius Shepard's "Radiant Green Star," which is an unending tale of a boy growing up in a Vietnamese circus while training to avenge his family's death; propaganda for the Singularity in Alastair Reynold's "Great Wall of Mars"; the saccharine "Patient Zero" by Tananarive Due; the just plain boring "A Colder War" by Charles Stross; and the hardly intelligible "Milo and Sylvie" by Eliot Fintshel. Overall, fewer paragraphs of infodumps and technobabble explanations (although still far too many for my tastes) and more characterization than I'm used to getting from sf. 2000 was a pretty good year for the genre, apparently!
What do You think about The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001)?
