The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Among the most reliable bets for your money in this category, as usual, were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies. This year, science fiction was covered by three “Best of the Year” anthology series: the one you are holding in your hand (presumably, unless you’re levitating it with your vast mental powers), The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, now up to its twentieth annual volume; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos) edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its eighth annual volume, and a new science fiction “Best of the Year” series added to the mix last year, Science Fiction: The Best of 2002 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. Once again, there were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror in 2002: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Caroll amp; Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume Thirteen, and the Ellen Dallow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Fifteenth Annual Collection. For the second year in a row, fantasy is being covered by three Best of the Year anthologies, by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, by the Year’s Best Fantasy (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, now up to its third annual volume, and by a new “Best of the Year” series covering fantasy introduced last year, Fantasy: The Best of 2002 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, now in its second year. Similar in a way, and also good, is the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards Showcase 2002 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Turning from series to stand-alone books, there were some excellent retrospective anthologies this year. The best of these is the exceptional The Hard SF Renaissance (Tor), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, probably the best reprint anthology of the decade so far, and one of the best to come out in the last ten years as well. I don’t always agree with Hartwell and Cramer’s critical opinions and rhetoric, expressed in the extensive storynotes and introductions, and I don’t always agree that all of their selections are a perfect fit for the book, but when any anthology includes 960 pages filled with stories such as Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets,” Paul McAuley’s “Gene Wars,” Poul Anderson’s “Genesis,” Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” Bruce Sterling’s “Taklamakan,” Stephen Baxter’s “On the Orion Line,” and thirty-five other good-to-great stories by writers such as Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Hal Clement, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Stableford, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Gregory Benford, and many others, then it becomes pointless to quibble about such things. This book is a great read, and an invaluable reference anthology if you want a picture of how SF is evolving in the Oughts, and even at $39.95, it’s one of the best reading bargains you’re going to find this year; buy it. The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction (Carroll amp; Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, is not quite as exceptional as the Hartwell/Cramer anthology, but is still a good solid value, featuring first-rate stories such as Connie Willis’s “Firewatch,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” Damon Knight’s “Anacron,” Greg Egan’s “The Infinite Assassin,” Geoffry A. Landis’s “Approaching Perimelasma,” Clifford D. Simak’s “A Death in the House,” and lots of others. The Great SF Stories (1964) (NESFA Press), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, takes a look back at the year 1964, when classic stories such as Jack Vance’s “The Kraken,” Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” Fritz Leiber’s “When the Change Winds Blow,” Gordon R. Dickson’s “Soldier, Ask Not,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dowry of Angyat,” and Norman Kagan’s “Four Brands of Impossible” appeared, demonstrating that it was a very good year indeed. And The Ultimate Cyberpunk (ibooks), edited by Pat Cadigan, takes a look back into the more-recent past, at the Cyberpunk Revolution of the mid-’80s, examining some of cyberpunk’s rarely mentioned roots in stories such as James Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” and Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Farenheit,” and then passing through some canonical stories such as William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” William Gibson and Michael Swanwick’s “Dogfight,” Bruce Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei,” and Cadigan’s own “Patterns,” before considering more-recent progressions of the form such as Paul McAuley’s “Dr. Luther’s Assistant.” At $16.00 for the trade paperback, this is a great reading bargain, and another valuable reference anthology.