Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 30th Anniversary Anthology – edited by Sheila Williams

In many ways, this is a disappointing collection – not because the stories aren’t excellent, which they are, but because there aren’t enough of them. Asimov’s publishes so much high quality short fiction that they could easily fill ten of these anthologies – and they should. There’s certainly room in the market for a similar collection of SF novellas.

As it is, we have this collection from Tachyon publications, which is a terrific idea. Inevitably, a lot of the stories here have already been anthologised (by Gardner Dozois, for example, in his annual Best of the Year collections), but it’s useful to collect them under the Asimov’s banner. I subscribed to Asimov’s for a year or so, but got fed up of all the snail mail spam reminding me to renew my subscription, or phone-a-friend, or whatever. I also didn’t like anticipating what I’d eventually read in the annual Dozois collection.

I’d happily buy a Best of Asimov’s every year, though, publishers take note.

This collection features some of the major names in SF who have emerged in the past decade or so, including Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick; and some of the major names of earlier eras who have continued to write to a high standard or have since died, including Robert Silverberg, Octavia E. Butler, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K LeGuin. As such, it’s an excellent survey of the past 30 years and a pocket-sized reading list. Next time you’re browsing the SF on Amazon, you can safely ignore the shit being promoted on the front page and run a search on any of the names here, all of whom write readable, imaginative, and thought-provoking fiction.

The late Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” for example, is an astonishing story about a near-future situation in which a worldwide virus has attacked the human brain, leaving people mentally incapacitated but alive, unable to speak or make sense of the advanced industrial civilisation they wake up in.

Ursula LeGuin’s “Ether, OR” is a flight of fancy about a strange rural town and the people who cope with its weird ways. Kelly Link’s “Flying Lessons”, from the mid-90s, has the ancient Greek gods living out their myths in modern-day Scotland (you can read it here, by the way).

Perhaps my favourite story here is Robert Reed’s “Eight Episodes”, which is a meditation on one of those short-lived SF TV series (like Firefly, or Surface, or dozens of others) which gets cancelled by the network part-way through its run and garners a cult following. Except this one, about an alien invasion, is very strange indeed, and nobody seems to know who was responsible for producing it.

A great collection, worth having, and probably not as daunting as the 250,000-300,000 word behemoths that Gardner Dozois put out every year. Certainly one for those who want to dip their toes into contemporary SF, and as such highly recommended.

The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan

A short while ago, on my other blog, I asked for suggestions for introductory texts to science fiction for younger readers. I received quite a few useful replies, many of which I’m still following up. By coincidence, this anthology (published by Viking/Penguin) was mentioned on BoingBoing shortly afterwards, so I ordered it immediately, and decided to read it myself first, to see if it would be suitable for my ten-year-old daughter, who had expressed an interest in SF/fantasy (thanks to Doctor Who).

According to the publishers, this is for ages 12 and up, which is about right, because my daughter has an advanced reading age (she’s reading, and enjoying, Katharine Kerr, and also tackled Stephen Baxter’s H-Bomb Girl). Having read this, I’m fairly sure my daughter will find some of this quite hard to understand, though there are certainly stories she’ll “get” straight away. Still, it would be remarkable if she liked everything in here the first time she read it. The idea is to discover new writers, and to follow and develop your own tastes, and to perhaps return to the volume at a later date and discover some more.

The old Aldiss-edited Penguin Omnibus of Science Fiction did the job for me when I was a younger reader, and it’s fitting that this collection is from the same publisher. My old copy of Aldiss is over 30 years old and extremely dog-eared

I recently reviewed another Jonathan Strahan collection, Eclipse 1, and – as with that volume – I’ve got no problem with the selection of writers here, who include familiar names such as Stephen Baxter, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Gwyneth Jones, Ian McDonald, Garth Nix and Alastair Reynolds. You can read more about the book at the editor’s own blog. In fact, they’re all prominent, excellent SF writers and all have back catalogues worth exploration. As a sampler of or introduction to contemporary SF, it would be hard to find anything better than this. It’s remarkable to me how many of these writers are British-born. I don’t know if that reflects a bias on Strahan’s part, or whether the British are punching above their weight in the world of science fiction.

So, in what ways is this collection aimed at younger readers? They’re certainly not being patronised here, or otherwise talked-down-to. Like all the best SF, some of this pushes you to understand some tricky ideas. What these stories have in common is that the protagonist(s) are usually young people, making them accessible to the target demographic.

Among others, I enjoyed Garth Nix’s play on vampire hunting (featuring one of the older protagonists), “Infestation,” and the deep space adventure-horror of “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice,” though I think my favourite is the last one in the collection, “Pinocchio” by Walter John Williams, which kept me up past bed time so I could finish it in one sitting. How my daughter will cope with the idea of people uploading themselves into gorilla bodies, I don’t know. Take it in her stride, probably. I was thinking as I read it that it would make a good discussion point for an ‘A’ level Media Studies class.

If there isn’t the variety of voices and viewpoints here that I’m used to with the Gardner Dozois anthologies (which is at least partly down to the familiarity with his tastes I’ve developed over many years and volumes), it’s because of the common thread supplied by the young protagonists. I also started to feel uneasy after a while, especially in the stories that heavily featured gaming and an online existence, because I realised how much I’ve been sheltering my kids from some aspects of our modern technological world. No game consoles round here. I’m starting to feel like one of those people who doesn’t have a TV.

Good stuff, and certainly enough interest and entertainment for readers of all ages. I’m really chuffed that I got this. My only quibbles are that, first, it doesn’t advertise itself anywhere on the cover as a book suitable for younger readers; and, second, that each author’s short explanation for the story might have helped understanding if it was included at the beginning rather than the end of each entry. But those are minor quibbles, and once you know the author’s note is there, you can always cheat and read it first.

Recommended.

Eclipse One: edited by Jonathan Strahan

Most of the short story collections I buy are reprints, meaning that they’ve been through at least two layers of editorial control. First in the publication that originally printed them (Asimov’s Magazine, or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction etc.), and then by the editor of the collection (usually Gardner Dozois, whose taste nicely coincides with my own).

With Eclipse One, the first of a proposed new series from Nightshade Books, Jonathan Strahan is trying to do something different. This is not one of the many annual “best of” anthologies, but a collection of new fiction in the vein of the old Universe collections edited by Terry Carr.

When I read this in Strahan’s Introduction, I sat up and paid attention, because I have fond memories of Terry Carr’s annual Best Science Fiction of the Year collections, which all had the familiar Gollancz yellow cover and were a staple of my library borrowing in my teens and twenties. I don’t recall reading many of the Universe collections, however, which were a different beast entirely. A brand new collection of stories especially commissioned is a much riskier prospect than the quality assurance offered by a Best Of collection.

So what do we get here? Fifteen stories, some familiar names, 260-odd pages, and a fair mixture of fantasy and SF. Rather than the doorstop-style 300,000-word volumes put out by Dozois each year, this feels more like an extra thick edition of a quarterly magazine. Conspicuous by its absence is the New Space Opera or anything resembling Hard Science. Instead you get the quirky, the odd, the mysterious, and the purely fantastical. It’s a nice mixture, actually, recalling the Gollancz collections of the 70s and 80s. The opener is typical: “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” by Andy Duncan is just the type of offbeat story Terry Carr might have chosen, and it’s neither fish nor fowl, really. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s supposed to be SF or fantasy, or both, or neither. It’s just a slice of life, slightly mystical, personal, and poignant.

The well known names here include Garth Nix, Gwyneth Jones, and Bruce Sterling. Given the vast quantity of short SF I read, I wasn’t all that familiar with the writers here, partly because they come from a fantasy background. I was pleased to see the Gwyneth Jones story (because I particularly enjoyed her entry in the latest Dozois collection), and I’ve discovered quite a few writers I’ll seek out for further reading. The short length isn’t an issue, either, because the stories within are so different from each other that you find yourself reading at a more ruminative pace.

My one complaint is that the cover price ($14.95 or £7.35) is a bit steep, though I guess the price is worth paying to support new writing. There are a number of cheaper options available in the Used section on Amazon. Eclipse Two is due October 2008, according to the publisher’s web site.

Certainly worth seeking out if you have a jones for new SF beyond the Best Of annuals.

Phase Space by Stephen Baxter

This collection by British Science Fiction writer Stephen Baxter contains stories originally published between 1997 and 2002. They’re loosely linked around a couple of recurring ideas and arranged together in the book within a thematic structure with such catch-all section headings as Dreams, Worlds, Paradox, and so on.

The loose relationship, underlined by recurring names/characters and ideas, doesn’t really hang together as strongly as a novel, but leaves you instead with the impression of a writer worrying at ideas, approaching them from different angles, picking away.

Probably the best entries here are the ones that stand best alone, because in the end the idea of “thematically linked” is hardly strong enough for the collection to have any real punch. Ultimately, any collection of SF (by different writers) published around the same time is going to contain repeated ideas. So the ones I enjoyed here include one of the earliest, “The Fubar Suit” (recurring theme/idea here is nanotech); “Lost Continent” (alternate worlds, reality is a simulation); and “The Twelfth Album” (alternate world, in which The Beatles released one last record), which was the reason I bought this book in the first place.

At his best, Baxter can be thought-provoking and eerie, and can write stories you wish could go on longer; the worst here are the ones that were (to me) wilfully muddled and obscure, with only the loosest relationship to the majority of the others here.

Cautiously recommended: if you like stories about alternate universes, nanotechnology, and ponderings on the Fermi Paradox. It really does make you wonder.

The Best of the Best Volume 2 – edited by Gardner Dozois

The subtitle to this collection is “20 years of the best short science fiction novels,” referring to the fact that this follow-up to Volume 1 is concerned with that peculiarity of the science fiction genre, the novella.

Those who regularly embark on National Novel Writing Month are aiming for a minimum of 50,000 words in order to achieve their goal. Now, 50,000 words is pretty short for a novel, and I’d have thought 80,000 would be more of a standard length, and in the science fiction genre we’re used to mammoth books of 150,000 words and longer.

It’s only in the SF genre that I’ve seen mention of novellas (and their smaller siblings, novelettes), which can be thought of as either very long short stories or very short novels: 30,000 words, maybe a little more.

At their best, novellas acheive a wonderful feat: they somehow manage to flesh out the characters and settings of a short story to make them more substantial, but without leaving that sense that things have been padded out to meet some requirement of the publishers. I remember reading Tim Powers’ first two novels and appreciating the tight, concise writing in those 50,000 worders. A novella keeps things tight whilst allowing the writer longer to fully explore the new world s/he has created.

These novellas are lifted from the first 20 years of Gardner Dozois’ ever-excellent annual ‘Best of’ collections. I’ve been buying these regularly for a good while now (I review the 24th collection below), but there was still enough within these pages that I hadn’t seen before, because they date from those collections I hadn’t read. Gratifyingly, I only remembered one story with any clarity (mainly because I re-read it relatively recently), and I enjoyed re-reading even the most recent of these (from the 20th collection) without feeling I was going through the motions. In fact, though I must have read Alastair Reynolds’ “Turquoise Days” less than five years ago, I didn’t remember any of it.

This is partly a function of my reading such a devil of a lot of short SF, and also of having had a lot on my plate in the past couple of years.

Anyway, as always with Dozois, this impeccable collection is pure gold. Starting with Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, every single novella is excellent, entertaining, thought provoking, and sometimes moving. Probably my favourite here is “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, which turns an anecdote about Hemingway’s lost manuscripts (stolen from a train in Paris at the very beginning of his writing career) into a meditation upon alternate universes and time travel. This, like some of the others here, was later extended into novel length for publication, but it’s a near-certainty that the shorter version is better.

“Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress is another wondrous novella later lengthened, but included here in its original form. It takes post Human Genome project ideas about “designer children” to one of the possible conclusions. What if you could design a human being who had no need of sleep?

Other well-known writers included are Walter John Williams, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Frederick Pohl, Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald and Ian R. MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” is one of the few I’d read before. It’s a characteristically elegiac story of a lonely old man persisting in a lonely pursuit of an unfashionable scientific cause.

I’d especially recommend this collection to anyone who finds short fiction problematic but would be interested in discovering new writers. As a sampler of the best in contemporary science fiction this is hard to beat, and it makes a fine stop-gap between Dozois annual collections.

Highly recommended.

The New Space Opera – edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

This excellent collection could be seen as a riposte to the disappointing Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction. I criticised that collection for not living up to its “new generation” billing. In contrast, The New Space Opera features 18 stories, all of which are ©2007, and not a dud among them.

In spite of the “new space opera” thematic link, there is a wide variety of stories here, as well as some big names, including Ian McDonald, Robert Reed, Greg Egan, Kage Baker, Peter F. Hamilton, Gregory Benford, and Nancy Kress. I could go on. As far as variety goes, it stretches from Robert Silverberg’s 1001 (Arabian) Nights homage (“The Emperor and the Maula”) and Dan Simmons’ far future repertory theatre (“Muse of Fire”) to Tony Daniel’s usual brand of far future nanotech and post-human warfare (“The Valley of the Gardens”).

There’s something about this collection that encouraged me to take my time over it; there’s plenty to savour. As a collection of all-new stories, the vibe is very different from a “best of” anthology. I admire the decision to go for a bang-up-to-date selection, because it drives home the message that though fashions come and go in SF, somehow the sub-genre of space opera is resilient and flexible enough to survive.

Recommended.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction – Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

Seems like only yesterday that I was reading the 23rd Annual Collection edited by Gardner Doizos, and here we are with the 24th. Actually, it was almost exactly a year ago – one day difference. In fact, I could have posted this review yesterday, having just finished the book, but decided to wait till today.

Now that’s consistent reading behaviour, I’m sure you’ll grant me, and this 24th Annual represents consistent, high-quality, book editing on the part of Gardner Dozois.

For your money ($21.95 is the US cover price; I paid £9.97 on Amazon UK), you get 652 pages of original, recent, science fiction, by some of the greatest names working in the field.

The opening tale, “I Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow, apart from the cute SF pun of its title, is a sweet and interesting tale of what happens following the Singularity that sees human beings upload themselves as data, and artificial intelligences gain status as sentient beings. The rowing boat of the title is Robbie, who has chosen, in spite of his sentience, to continue to work as a boat, carrying passengers out from a larger boat on diving expeditions. But what happens when the coral reef the divers are visiting itself gains sentience? And who are these divers? People? Or downloaded intelligences occupying human shells?

Robert Charles Wilson’s “Julian: a Christmas Story,” describes a post-oil religious society which scavenges its past without ever quite believing in it. The narrator tells a story about Julian, who will become known as Julian the Agnostic or Julian Conqueror at some indeterminate point in the future. In this story he’s a kind of exiled prince, son of a deposed leader, and propagator of heretical ideas.

“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick is a claustrophobic story of planetary prospecting, a Treasure of the Sierra Madre in space. The narrator is a prospector who torments her partner to breaking point and suffers the consequences when the statutory anti-violence chip in his brain malfunctions.

“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDDonald, is one of his trademark tales of the Indian Subcontinent in the future, a place which mixes ancient religious ideas with bang up-to-date explorations of artificial intelligence.

Kage Baker’s “Where The Golden Apples Grow”, like “Tin Marsh”, takes us to one of the traditional frontiers of classic science fiction. Whereas “Tin Marsh” is set on Venus, “Golden Apples” is set on a newly colonised Mars. The title’s homage to Ray Bradbury is a bit of a giveaway. So Mars is a bit like the wild west, or the Australian outback, and there are colonists and farmers and long distance truckers who ship ice from the poles to the settlements on the equator.

Alastair Reynolds has two stories in the collection. “Signal to Noise” is a superb tale of a scientist crossing between alternate realities as a stream of data – data that gradually degrades as the noise level increases. This is also a poignant story of grief and loss: what happens if the “you” in this life suddenly loses a loved one, but can temporarily visit an alternate universe and take the place of the “you” who has suffered no such loss? His other entry, “Nightingale” couldn’t be more different. Set in the same future as his other Conjoiner/Ultra novels (see review of Absolution Gap, below), it’s an atmospheric story of an incursion into an apparently deserted hospital ship in search of a war criminal.

Gregory Benford’s excellent “Bow Shock” is a brilliant story set in the very recognisable milieu of university scientific research, complete with office politics, professional jealousy, vicious backbiting, and the pressure to publish. In the end it’s another poignant story about a scientific discovery that is much more than it initially seems.

If Benford’s world is familiar enough to be happening today, right now, in a university near you, Robert Reed’s novella “Good Mountain” takes place in an environment so alien that it takes you pages to work out what’s going on. In this strange tale, what seem to be human beings mix with what seem to be genetically engineered sub-humans (“mockmen”) and travel to unfamiliar places on board what seem to be giant worms. On a world barely able to support intelligent life, they wrestle with forces beyond their control, seeing their society gradually disintegrate into fire and suffocating darkness.

If that wasn’t weird enough for you, David D. Levine’s story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” sees an estranged son and his father try to reconcile just before the father decides to become somewhat less (or more) than human.

If some of these stories are good old-fashioned modern space operas, others are most definitely post-Singularity humans-are-just-data stories of physical transformation and interface problems. Mary Rosenblum’s “Home Movies” explores the life of a person who records experiences on behalf of clients who cannot be physically present.

On the other hand, Daryl Gregory’s compelling “Damascus” explores the link between religious psychosis and some variant of CJD (or Mad Cow Disease, if you’re a cow).

Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” manages to be both post-singularity and a kind of space opera, as humans-who-are-data decide to explore an inaccessible part of the universe at the end of an impossibly long life.

“The Ile of Dogges” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette is set in the censor’s office in the time of Ben Jonson, and features a cameo from Jonson himself, who attempts to bribe the censor into not burning the only copy of his latest play. I’ll leave you to guess where the science fiction comes in.

Ken Macleod’s “The Highway Men” is another tale of the post-oil economy, featuring the kind of accidental hero you might expect to find in the highlands of Scotland.

Stephen Baxter’s “The Pacific Mystery” is an absolute corker of an alternate history, and the only story here I’d read before (In The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF). It’s set in a world in which World War 2 didn’t really happen, because the British appeasers held sway and for some reason the Japanese were unable to cross the Pacific to make war on the USA. But why…? is the great pleasure of this lovely and ultimately sad story.

There are many great stories here, but I’ll mention just one more. “Every Hole is Outlined” by John Barnes (not that John Barnes, surely?) is another space opera involving long-lived humans who are a breed apart. It’s also a kind of deep space ghost story, which leads me to conclude that this collection is imbued with sadness, a sense of missed opportunities and loss. If you read “Every Hole” and “The Pacific Mystery” and “Good Mountain” back to back you might find yourself weeping for the fate of humanity.

These sad stories probably reflect something at large in our culture that we’re barely aware of, and probably won’t recognise properly for some time to come.

As usual, unmissable and highly recommended.

The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, edited by Mike Ashley

The subtitle of this collection is a bit of false advertising: “New Generation Far-Future SF,” is what it says, but somebody sack the editor, because he has taken considerable liberties. He’s been asked to do the job, and then somewhere along the line he’s got all het-up by the know-nothing marketing monkeys who work for his publisher, and he’s decided, as a fuck-you, to find a few stories from the Golden Age which fit the brief. But do they really? I think not.

As one slightly bitter Amazon.com reviewer points out, 11 of the 19 stories in the collection were published before 2000. Certainly, some of them were being reprinted for the first time, but it turns out that relatively few of these stories are “new generation” and precious few are set in what now passes for the “far future.” I’ve pointed out before that the current trend in SF is to throw humanity into impossibly distant futures. In the Golden Age, writers generally thought in hundreds of years at best. These days, the fashion for post-human, sigularity SF thinks in terms of tens or hundreds of thousand years.

So there are a couple of stories that fit that brief, but a whole chunk of them that do not. This is carping, of course. I’m not saying that there aren’t extreme ideas here, but some of them are most definitely not “new generation” and the effect can be jarring, to encounter, for example, the thoughtless sexism of some of the Golden Age stuff (like “The Girl Had Guts” by Theodore Sturgeon).

That carping aside, I just wonder what the point of this collection is. Pick any of the Gardner Dozois “Best SF…” collections of the last 10-20 years, and you’d have a pretty similar representation of new voices and extreme ideas, all picked with Dozois’ unerring taste. Get his “Best of the Best” and this Mammoth collection pales in comparison.

Another one of my grumpy summer reads: not recommended.

Gardner Dozois’ 23rd annual collection of the Year’s Best Science Fiction is, as ever, the perfect introduction to an eclectic mix of wonderful new fiction, selected with an unerring eye for all that’s good about contemporary SF, whether it’s the modern space opera set in an impossibly distant future, or the elegiac pastoral. The only shame of it is that at 660 pages and over 300,000 words, it still doesn’t seem quite enough.

I treasure these annual collections, and on this occasion I’m taking my sweet time over reading it, so this will be by way of a review of the first half-dozen stories, just about any of which are worth the price of admission on their own.

I first read Ian McDonald’s novella “The Little Goddess” in Asimov’s magazine last year. Once of the disappointments for me this year is that I have read a few of these stories before, which is the price of a magazine subscription. Set in a future India, this is the story of a young girl selected at birth to be a goddess, and is an exploration of the bizarre world she finds herself in, and her eventual escape from it. Those who pick up a science fiction collection with a narrow view of what constitutes the genre will be dismayed by stories such as these. I’ve read book reviewers on Amazon complain that there aren’t enough space stories in these collections, but those people are missing out on a richly textured reading experience that immerses you in a completely different reality.

Second up is Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man,” which is a zeitgeisty tale of a world gone wrong under the twin influences of fossil fuel depletion and GM crops. This is the kind of story that should be required reading, in my opinion, because it focuses the mind on precisely why GM crops are wrong: not because of “frankenstein” mixes of genetically adjusted wheat or corn entering the food chain, but because copyrighted and sterile seeds are pure evil.

In this story, everything is seen in terms of calories and joules: how much energy it is worth, and how much energy it requires to get it. Nobody can afford to travel far in this future, and suburban commuting areas have been abandoned, being slowly reclaimed by the huge multinational seed companies for calorie production. Nobody can grow anything without a licence (sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it?). There’s a hint of some horrible interlude of dying off, a Great Extinction, as people literally scrabbled in the dirt for a few calories to survive. River traffic is back, and everything runs on a kind of futuristic clockwork: powerful springs that have to be wound up by genetically modified beasts on treadmills.

This is a fantastic vision of the future with a powerful contemporary relevance.

Alastair Reynolds’ “Beyond the Aquila Drift”, third up, is a satisfying modern space opera, set in a future in which humanity has discovered and made use of an interstellar transport system. They can use it, but they don’t understand it fully, and when it throws up an occasional error, nobody knows why. The error in this story is a huge one that sneaks up on the narrator and is revealed to him piece by piece. This reminded me of one of the classic stories of the Golden Age, and makes this collection three for three.

“Second Person, Present Tense,” by Daryl Gregory was also in Asimov’s last year, but it’s another stunning tale, this one of a designer drug that separates the “self” from the “mind”, which is described in terms of the English parliamentary system. The self is the Queen, who “approves” decisions taken by the parliament (the mind), but only after they have already been made, and the neural messages sent out to the body, like so many rubberstamped laws. It’s a brilliant analogy, and the idea that the “Queen” might die, and be replaced, makes for a superb piece of short fiction. Again, recommended reading for anyone, SF fan or not.

“The Canadian who came Almost all the way Back from the Stars” is co-written by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold. It’s a story of theoretical physics set in a remote Canadian nature reserve, and it’s also a tale of doomed platonic love, conspiracy theories, and office politics. Fantastic, in all the ways you can think of.

Finally, taking us 124 pages in (what’s that? 62,000 words?), we have “Triceratops Summer” by Michael Swanwick. This one struck me as being a kind of pastoral, elegiac companion piece to Ray Bradbury’s famous story, “A Sound of Thunder.” A building contractor is on the way home one day when his journey is halted by a herd of triceratops crossing the road. As a set-up for a short story this is brilliant, and the subdued little tale that follows is just lovely. It asks that question, What would you do if…? and answers it in exactly the way that I think I would.

There you have it: the first fifth of the 23rd annual collection: every one a winner so far.

And the Angels Sing – Stories by Kate Wilhelm

Previously unpublished review

Short story collections all suffer from hit/miss syndrome. A collection by different writers is easy to cope with. You finish a slightly duff story, and the next one will be in a completely different style by a completely different writer.

Single author collections are different, because a duff story might put you off reading the next, especially if it’s written in a similar style or authorial voice.

I have to say that I found the first few stories in this collection hard going, so it took me longer to read than it might have. On the other hand, once I got into it, some of the stories were so good that I wished they’d go on longer. Some left you with no other option than to put the book down, because you wanted the thoughtful aftertaste of reading to linger on.

These stories were originally published between 1970 and 1990, in markets such as Omni, Orbit, and Redbook. Some of those outlets clearly mark this as (potentially) a Science Fiction collection. But with Wilhelm, the S in SF stands for Psychological. So this isn’t full of space operas, nanotech, and tales of the far future. It’s more like a Tales of the Unexpected collection of stories with a twist.

They were collected together in this hardback edition by St Martin’s Press in 1992. Of course, this is already out of print, so I got my copy from one of the sellers on the indispensable AbeBooks. It turns out to be a copy that was once in the Californian Orange County library system. From the OC to Buckingham, via the internet.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this collection. The first few are a bit too “interior” and cryptic for my tastes, including the opener, “The Look Alike,” which starts strongly and fades away. “The Chosen” is an interesting time travel story with a twist, but “On The Road to Honeyville” seems a little pointless.

There’s better to come, though. “The Scream” is a terrific story, classic Wilhelm. It’s the story of an ill-fated expedition to a deserted Miami following some kind of apocalyptic breakdown of society and technology. She’s great at imagining what’s going to happen to us in the post-oil economy. How much will we forget, for example, so that we can no longer hope to cure what ails us?

“The Dragon Seed” is a very moving story about an unregarded, non-academic girl who turns up to work for a horticulturist. Like many of Wilhelm’s heroines, she’s much stronger than she seems to be. “Forever Yours, Anna” is the story of a graphologist trying to unravel the mystery of some letters written by an unknown woman. Again, there’s a twist in the tale, but it’s a truly unexpected one.

The final story, “And The Angels Sing,” is in some ways the signature piece. A small coastal town’s newspaper editor rescues what he thinks is a girl from a storm. Think The Shipping News meets ET, and you get something of the flavour. Except, is the alien benign or something more sinister? And is it dying, or is it hunting?

My feeling is that Wilhelm is better at the longer form of the novel or novella. Her short fiction can be a little bit too weird for some tastes. You can see how this ended up being withdrawn from circulation. It’s a little bit too literary and psychological to appeal to the hardcore genre fan, and yet a little bit too strange for mainstream tastes.