The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

In terms of literary quality, the line-by-line quality of the writing, the best anthology of the year may well be Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, a special issue of the literary publication Conjunctions guest-edited by Peter Straub-although some genre fans are going to find it disappointing in spite of the bravura quality of the prose. The (somewhat unclear) intention here seems to have been to produce an “all genres” anthology aimed at the mainstream literary audience, but there is almost no science fiction here-with the exception of a good Alternate History story by John Kessel, “The Invisible Empire”-and surprisingly, considering that horror superstar Peter Straub was the editor, almost no horror either; most of the stories fall somewhere on the line between fantasy and slipstream / surrealism / Magic Realism / whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-month, although several of the anthologies very best stories, such as Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” and John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroine,” strike me as straight mainstream stories (in spite of Straub’s rather too-clever attempts to argue that the Crowley is really a fantasy story after all). Although Straub does brandish the term “post-transformation fiction,” it’s hard for me to perceive that any coherent critical argument is being made here, or to discern why this particular group of authors are “New Wave Fabulists,” or what makes them so, or what that term means, or why they were selected rather than some other grouping of authors; it seems instead like the partially random selection of authors you’d get assembling any original anthology, depending largely on the luck of the draw, rather than a list of authors collected with critical rigor or to demonstrate some particular mode or emerging school of fiction. Still, if you set aside considerations of genre or of critical canon-forming, what you get is an anthology with some really good stuff to read in it. After the above-mentioned stories by Fowler, Crowley, and Kessel, the best stories here are Andy Duncan’s flamboyant “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and China Mieville’s grisly “Familiar,” but the anthology also features good-to-excellent stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Neil Caiman, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub himself, and others, plus excerpts from forthcoming novels by Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe, a book well worth the $15 cover price, especially for those who don’t insist on drinking their genre neat.