Archive – The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual Collection – Gardner Dozois, ed.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection
Gardner Dozois St Martin’s Griffin, 639pp, pb

After twenty-six years, Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction is not so much an anthology as an institution. Solid, reliable, it arrives punctually every year, offering over quarter of a million words of short story as well as Dozois’s summary of the year’s activities in science fiction publishing. Its arrival used to be an major event for me and I doubt I was the only one who used Dozois’s selections as a pointer for further reading. If Dozois’s word was not law precisely, his undeniable good taste in stories surely prompted readers to take a few risks in what they tackled.

Times change: there are now various annual ‘best of’ anthologies available, with each editor having his or her own take on what constitutes ‘best’ and, for that matter, what constitutes ‘science fiction’. For all the endless rehashing of the genre wars, not to mention what should and shouldn’t be part of the ‘canon’, that the sf ‘church’ is now such a broad one is in no small part thanks to Dozois’s generous promotion of the likes of Gene Wolfe, Joanna Russ and many others. So where does that leave his own Year’s Best anthology? Does anything, apart from its size and publishing longevity, continue to set this anthology apart? Looking at this year’s volume, it is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Not least on the agenda is what makes these thirty stories ‘best’? Nancy Kress’s ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ won the 2009 Hugo for Best Novella, but Elizabeth Bear, winner of the Best Novelette Award, is represented by a story co-authored with Sarah Monette, while Ted Chiang, winner of the Best Short Story, is not represented at all. On the other hand, a number of the Hugo-shortlisted stories do appear in this collection. Pick another award: how about the Nebulas? There’s very little correspondence between those shortlists and this anthology’s contents. Then again, there is very little correspondence between the Hugo and Nebula shortlists, period. I could slice and dice award shortlists all day long, but the fact remains that these are the stories Dozois considers to be the best he saw during 2008.

What strikes me is that they are mostly as solid and reliable as the anthology’s reputation. There are no bad stories here, but by the same token, there are few if any that actually excite me. Take Kress’s ‘The Erdmann Nexus’: this is a well-constructed story, as one would expect, with a neat idea at its heart. I like the fact that she engages with what it means to grow old and that her elderly characters are passionate, mindful, valuable people. Yet this story is just a little too long, teetering on the brink of sentimentality, and that’s typical of a number of stories here, from Maureen McHugh’s ‘Special Economics’ to Daryl Gregory’s ‘The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm’. As one begins reading, there is the sense of being pleasantly enveloped by the promise of a feel-good ending without being truly nourished on the way. By contrast, Ian McDonald’s ‘An Eligible Boy’, set in his future India, while it initially promises something similar, cheerfully wreaks havoc with the reader’s expectations. His other story included here, ‘The Tear’, although very different, is similarly rich in invention.

Invention, novelty (as in new rather than gimcrack): these are qualities which do seem to be lacking in this selection. I am mystified, for example, as to why Charles Coleman Finlay’s ‘The Political Prisoner’ seems to have attracted so much attention in the last year. It’s a study of wrongful imprisonment and endurance of the system, but it feels old and tired as a narrative conceit. And truly, I did not expect to see yet another alternate history featuring a Kennedy brother, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ‘G-Men’ delivers just that. The ‘alternate history’ is little more than a convenient hook on which to hang a thin story of the murder of J Edgar Hoover.

Gord Sellars’ ‘Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues’ is a cleverer and wittier alternate history, examining the fate of the jazzmen who travelled on the Frogships, and I enjoyed it for his knowing reworkings of familiar technology. However, it still feels a little too slick for its own good, and goes down a little too easily. Indeed, the same could be said of many stories in the collection, from Bear’s and Monette’s ‘Boojum’ to James L. Cambias’s ‘Balancing Accounts’ with its robot ship making its way, earning its living. Where is the story that makes one want to rush out and buttonhole one’s friends, saying ‘read this’.

In truth, apart from the two by McDonald (who is anyway one of my favourite writers), there isn’t a story that really excites me. Few that stick firmly in the memory, to re-emerge days later. The anthology feels autumnal, retrospective, conservative and cautious (it seems significant somehow that only one story is drawn from an online magazine, Jay Lake’s wonderfully-titled ‘The Sky That Wraps The World Round, Past The Blue And Into the Black’, which first appeared in Clarkesworld, and which itself reflects on the past). The autumnal chill invades Dozois’s summation of the year, which makes sobering reading as he charts the ups and downs, mostly downs, of the sf industry. And perhaps that’s what this anthology is all about: Dozois’s response to recession, fuelling a desire for stories in which good always triumphs in the best possible way. As usual, Dozois’s generous spirit is shown to best advantage at the end of the collection, with eleven pages of ‘Honorable Mentions’, the Carrollian moment when everyone gets a prize. I’ve seen him mocked in the past for doing it, but it remains a big deal for a writer to be noticed, and part of what Dozois’s Year’s Best has always been about is noticing. I may disagree profoundly with him about the story selection this year, but he remains our witness to the ebb and flow of the genre and of the industry.

Archive – Green – Jay Lake

Another Interzone review, this one from 2009.

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Green
Jay Lake (Tor, 368pp, hb

Green opens with an extraordinarily arresting image – the first memory of Green, or Girl as we first know her. She is following her father’s ox, Endurance, as her grandmother’s body is taken for burial , and her focus is on the ‘silk’ in which her grandmother’s body is wrapped, sewn as it is with a small bell for every day of her life, a custom among Girl’s people, so that ‘her soul will be carried out of this life on the music of twenty-five thousand bells’, markers of her life. This image will remain important throughout the novel, so much of which is centred on Green’s attempts to hold on to her sense of self as those around her try to bend her to their purposes.

The attempts begin when she is taken from her home and parents at a very early age – sold, as she later realises – and travels with Federo, the ‘maggot man’, to Copper Downs, city of the immortal Duke. Here she is taken into a secluded ‘Court’, to be ‘trained’ for the Duke’s purposes – either he will take her into his bed, or she will be given to someone else as a favour – and acquires a range of skills considered suitable for a noblewoman, which strikingly reflect the limited expectations for such women. Set against this is a very different, clandestine education provided by the Dancing Mistress, one focused on action and survival, suggesting that someone has another purpose in mind for Green.

We might be in familiar territory, with Green perhaps as the unrecognised last scion of a once noble house, being secretly trained to recover her destiny, but Lake doesn’t take the easy road. Instead, the novel focuses as much on Green’s intense desire to preserve her sense of self and find a future of her own choosing, as it does on the story’s broader action. Rather than following a traditional pattern of quest, discovery and resolution, significant parts of the story are driven by Green’s attempts to find her own way, using the distorted set of skills she has acquired, and then twisted by a need for her to respond to the failures of other. People plot but they don’t plan; they achieve goals but don’t consider the consequences of doing so, and Green is wrenched from the path she is attempting to follow, having trained to become a Blade of the Lily Temple, to once again become part of someone else’s scheme. One of the striking features of this novel is its low-key but persistent emphasis on how difficult it is for women to live in this world as individuals.

Having said that Green’s concerns are personal, there is a quest of sorts, but this is equally unconventional. Green lives in a world where gods and humans live more immediately with one another, and although she begins life with no more fortune than her face, others believe she has acquired a power they can use. However, Green has always been an attentive scholar and has acquired a thoughtful attitude towards religion and a belief in a personal moral authority, all of which will be put to good use as the story unfolds. To say more would be to give away the novel’s ending, but Green’s interest in issues of belief gives this novel a strong foundation.

No matter how different types of fantasy are currently proliferating, in the end it all down to two simple approaches: produce more of the same as skilfully as one can, because there’s a ready-made market for well-written formula, or else push at genre expectations and see what happens. These days, as a reader, I want the latter, and Jay Lake has produced the kind of fantasy I’m looking for, rich in detail (his invented cities seem particularly ‘real’), strong though selective in action, rich in ideas and intensely thoughtful too. It was a pleasure to read this book, and a wrench to finish it.