Book Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction, 31st Collection
/The Year's Best Science Fiction
Thirty-First Annual Collection
Edited by Gardner DozoisSt. Martin's Griffin, 2014That landmark on the science-fiction cityscape, Gardner Dozois' epic "Year's Best Science Fiction" series, now older than many of the genre's readers, reaches its thirty-first installment this year with a hefty 700-page volume containing 32 stories and Dozois' long introductory essay summarizing the previous year in the genre, in print, online, on TV, at the movies, and, in the case of the industry's departed, in the morgue. The whole thing is a tour de force as always, a feat so remarkable and yet so regular now that it seems both impossible to duplicate and impossible to do without.The range of Dozois' reading is phenomenal. He quotes an estimate made by Interzone magazine that 2013 saw a little over 2600 new genre-related titles, and reading this 31st "Year's Best" genuinely yields the impression that Dozois has read them all.Whether he has or not, you can't get far into any of these great annual volumes without feeling unmistakably that you're in a sure pair of hands. Given the surging ocean of contenders, it's impossible for every reader to agree with every choice Dozois makes, but the sharp aesthetic standards at play are clear in every one of those choices. A wide variety of types, voices, and depths are represented here, chosen from across the whole spectrum of sci-fi short story publication, from tiny journals to original anthologies to industry flagships like Asimov's and Analog.As has been the trend in recent years, one of the unplanned themes running through many of these stories is a kind of post-racial, post-Singularity gauzy Bohemianism. Virtually none of these stories takes place anymore against the backdrop of the kind of implicit white Christian triumphalism that birthed the genre a century ago, flickered and receded in the two decades after WWII, and then underwent a resurgence in the Reagan '80s. Instead, these tend to be multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-denominational tales in which the gaze is more often inward than outward, and where the whole picture of spacemen planting flags on strange, new worlds has largely given way to cynical mercenaries, ironic teens, and pixie children far more concerned with tripping out than shipping out. A little epiphany in Geoff Ryman's "Rosary and Goldenstar" is fairly typical:
She looked up, and snow streaked past her face like stars. Her stomach turned over and it felt as if she were falling upward, flying into heaven where there would be angels. She could see the angels clearly; they'd be tall and thin with white hair because they were so old, but no wrinkles, with the bodies of men and the faces of women. The thought made her giggle, for it was a bit naughty trying to picture angels. She lifted up her feet, which made her feel even more like she was flying.
These are stories in which all the apocalypses have already happened; many of them are distinctly tired stories, not in their narrative inventiveness (in terms of sheer reading enjoyment, this is one of the strongest entries in this series) but rather in terms of background energy - characters tend to grow up scrounging in worlds where promise has fled or been reduced to the next big score. And generally speaking, you can forget about any kind of centrality being accorded to poor old planet Earth: it's just one colorful rock among countless others (in fact, this may be the "Year's Best" volume with the highest number of stories in which Earth plays no significant part at all). This of course goes along smoothly with the expanding knowledge of actual 21st century astronomy, which discovers dozens of new "exoplanets" every month, and it has its corollary in mankind, which is reduced everywhere in these stories to merely one more species on the chart, if sometimes the most complacent one. Characters in Robert Reed's "Precious Mental" sum things up nicely:
"One basic design is shared by twenty million species. Of course intellect and souls and the colors of our emotions vary widely, even inside the human animal. At first look and after long thought, one might come to the conclusion that it is as you say: We have what's best, and there isn't any reason to look farther."
And because science fiction is so infinitely adaptable, even this post-heroism tenor can produce intensely good stuff - and Dozois is expert, as always, at sniffing out intensely good stuff. He's also unafraid to give readers more than one story from the same writer, as he does in the case of the fantastically talented Lavie Tidhar, whose "Only Human" is smoothly competent and whose "The Book Seller" is one of the single strongest stories in the entire collection, set in the milieu of her "Central Station" stories, a future-setting in which an enormous interplanetary space station, home to hundreds of cultures and species (all of them cybernetically connected in a mental version of the Internet - another prevalent theme this year), has been built in the Middle East. Living in the shadow of this enormous station is the humble bookseller of the story's title, who early on comes into possession of a treasure only he values: a large assortment of pre-collapse books:
Achimwene's life was about to change, but he did not know it yet. He spent the rest of the morning happily cataloguing, preserving and shelving the ancient books. Each lurid cover delighted him. He handled the books with only the tips of his fingers, turning the pages carefully, reverently. There were many faiths in Central Station, from Elronism to St. Cohen to followers of Ogko, mixed amidst the larger population – Jews to the north, Muslims to the south, a hundred offshoots of Christianity dotted all about like potted plants – but only Achimwene's faith called for this. The worship of old, obsolete books. The worship, he liked to think, of history itself.
The stories here range from just a few pages - like Jake Kerr's brilliant little gem "Biographical Fragments from the Life of Julian Prince" - to near-novella length, like Neal Asher's rich and rewarding "The Other Gun." Some of the choices seemed odd to me; we get two Nancy Kress stories, for instance, "Pathways" and "One," neither of which, in my opinion, were as good as her story "Mithridates, He Died Old," which only gets an honorable mention, and likewise Stephen Baxter's honorably mentioned "Starcall" is just a bit better than the story of his that's actually reprinted here. And surely three of the weaker stories in this year's roster could have been dropped in favor of Lisa Hannett's "The Coronation Bout," or Maria Dahvanna Headley's very clever "The Psammophile," or Cory Skerry's wonderful "Breathless in the Deep"?But then, that's the price we pay for admission to Dozois' annual seminar on the state of his art: we must submit to the individuality of his vision. And as usual, we learn a lot by doing that - and have a hell of a lot of fun in the process.