The Year’s Best Science Fiction 17 (Stories from 1999) Edited by Gardner Dozois. Reviewing pages I-Liii and 1-148.
I’ve read books belonging to a few different "Year’s Best” series, but in size and format this series reminds me most of the now defunct The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror edited for many years by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This series has a narrower scope, one genre instead of two. Of course, science fiction stories which have horror can also appear. Judging by this volume, the narrow scope goes beyond focusing on a single genre. Whereas The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volumes I’ve read draw on sources ranging from genre publications well known and obscure to surprising ones not associated with genre fiction at all, Dozois pulled most of this volume's stories from a few well known genre magazines. Fifteen of the twenty-seven stories come from either The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, or Analog. I could be wrong, but on a quick scan, it looks like all 27 stories come from only 11 sources. None of them seemed like surprising places to look for science fiction. This contrast in focus shows up in the year in summation section too where Dozois reviews the major news in science fiction while touching on fantasy and horror a little too. The summations in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror are far bigger and seem like a chronicle of every little thing that happened in the genres or which were remotely related to the genres that year. I’m sure they’re excellent historical references years after the fact, but they rapidly become morasses of one thing after the other to wade through. With the tighter focus, Dozois still gives a great overview of the year while maintaining my interest. He still reports on things like fanzines which would be unknown to many outside of fandom and other things of that nature. Still, when all is said and done, he uses much less space, still informs, and ends before the reading becomes a chore.
Dozois challenges the then current complaints about the death of publishing and the demise of genre fiction. (Wow! People have been predicting doom for a long time!) Dozois backs his argument up with publishing numbers. He does admit that short fiction magazines were in trouble though. He backed that up too.
Discussing the year’s genre movies, Dozois makes his deepest foray outside of science fiction and into fantasy and horror. (He does touch on happenings in those genres elsewhere in the summation though, just not as much as he does with movies.) For instance he compares The Blair Witch Project to overdone special effects movies released in 1999 like The Haunting. He makes a good point about how The Blair Witch Project effectively used horror story telling techniques which looked like a lost art in the special effects driven movies.
It’s interesting to take a trip back in time ten years and see what held up and what didn’t. 1999 was the year of The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, and The Matrix. Dozois liked the first two, but not The Matrix. He also raved about The Iron Giant, and (a few years too late) The Whole Wide World, based on Novalyne Price Ellis’s One Who Walked Alone. It was her memoir of Conan’s creator, Robert E. Howard. Dozois called it the best movie about any genre writer.
Now on to the stories Dozois picked. . .
“The Wedding Album” by David Marusek originally appeared in the June 1999 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. In the story, people use simographs instead of photos or videos to commemorate precious moments. The problem is that the simographs – “sims” – of individual people within the larger simograph are sentient. They come to life with all the memories of their subject up to the point when the simograph was cast. They suffer momentary confusion until they realize they aren’t people, they’re sims trapped in the simograph. They’re subject to being shelved and revived at their owners whims, resetting which erases all their memories occurring after the casting and restarts them from the point of the casting, or being killed through deletion. “The Wedding Album” follows the sim of a bride cast on her wedding day. The story takes us from the disintegration of the real bride’s marriage, family, and life, and then through an age when sims and other “digitals” seek rights as human beings. Whether intentional or not, Marusek seems to comment on issues like copyright.
James Patrick Kelly’s “1016 to 1” also comes from the June 1999 Asimov’s. Set in 1962, the story contains a touch of nostalgia. The main character is a young boy who loves science fiction, comics, and genre movies and TV shows from that era. The boy gains an invisible friend. Well, “Cross” is invisible when he wears his camouflage. Is he a time traveling mutant or an alien? Whatever he is, circumstances cause Cross to enlist the boy in an attempt to save the world. The story features some new twists on some old ethical quandaries. One interesting note is the date of doomsday - - 2009.
“Winemaster,” Robert Reed’s story from the July 1999 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, occurs in a future where it’s possible for people to transmute into microscopic, yet nearly human, machines. Many people chose this option and the American government eventually outlawed it. The colonies or “nests” established before the process was outlawed have a legal status similar to Indian reservations. Terrorists secretly aided by government officials attack the nests. Some of the nests seek refuge in Canada like Vietnam era draft dodgers before them, but the government tries to prevent it. Reed implies that the terrorists are fanatical Christians although he never gives any religious reason for objecting to transmutation or allowing already established nests to just leave the country. Neither are there any Christian characters who object to the terrorism. This makes the story seem like an exercise in anti-religious bigotry.
“Galactic North” by Alastair Reynolds appeared in the July 1999 Interzone. With its vengeance driven protagonists, it evokes Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination even though they are much different stories with much different characters. Irravel, the captain of a space ship transporting thousands of colonists in suspended animation, seeks vengeance after pirates take her ship and kill her cargo. She sets off on a centuries spanning chase across many light years of space during which she and her quarry become the subjects of legend. Even though the chase occurs at near light speed, stories about her and news about what’s happening behind her somehow spreads ahead of her. How? Reynolds, “a professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy” never explains.
Although it first appeared in the September 1999 Asimov’s, Eleanor Arnason’s “Dapple: A Hwarhath Romance” doesn’t seem like science fiction at all until you remember that Dozois mentions that it takes place on another planet. Plus the characters clearly aren’t human. The story feels like fantasy. It’s set in a pre-gunpowder age and has an archaic, fairy tale quality about it. It’s about a female who defies her culture’s conventions by wanting to act in and compose plays, something limited to males. Arnason explores the creative process as well, showing how her heroine, Dapple, considers how to turn people into characters and use various experiences in her stories.
“People Came from Earth,” and their descendents on the Moon have shocking funeral customs. Stephen Baxter’s story from the anthology Moon Shots (edited by Peter Crowther and published by DAW) contains some beautiful descriptive writing. Humanity’s pitiful remnant struggles to survive on the moon after a war destroys life on Earth. However, the war also causes technology on the moon to regress to a pre-industrial state. A nanoweapon destroyed all the colonists’ iron and everything made of iron. Plus, in a process which will take many years, the colony is losing its oxygen, and the colonists must find metal to restore the technology they need to save themselves.
That's it for now. I will have more comments when I read further.
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