2013 read #137: Modern Classics of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois.

Modern Classics of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois
672 pages
Published 1991
Read from October 28 to November 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I used to love science fiction, but over the last few years I've noticed a shift in my tastes toward fantasy, a shift that over the course of this year seems to be becoming outright exclusionary. The amateur speculative fiction magazine I intermittently run has died another ignominious death (victim of my apathy), but if I were to found a new 'zine today, I would dispense with the sci-fi without so much as a pang of conscience. In this I seem to be participating in a trend -- at least, I think I remember something about sales figures for science fiction going stagnant or declining while fantasy experiences a growth spurt. Perhaps all our realistic futures are too damn depressing and dystopian, so we all distance ourselves with a selection of alternative pasts. Or something. (I just find the cliches of sci-fi to be so much more boring than the cliches of fantasy, personally.)

Anyway, after I finished Dozois' Modern Classics of Fantasy, I resisted all of a day before putting in an order for this volume on ILL. I trust Dozois' anthologizing judgment too much at this point to be wary (perhaps that will bite me in the ass and this will prove a grim slog, we'll see). Besides, I really dig this historical approach; annual "best of" anthologies are great, but I appreciate the time depth of these selections.

After the rambling, informative minutiae of Dozois' introduction to Modern Classics of Fantasy, I was surprised and disappointed to find his intro here amounted to little more than "These stories were chosen by no criteria other than my fondness for them. Enjoy." Also, it's kind of amazing how much difference six years make in typographical quality. Modern Classics of Fantasy was a clean, polished volume with an evocative cover. This book is printed in a butt-ugly font with wildly inconsistent leading and contrast, and has a boring ol' picture of Saturn on the cover.

Onward to the stories.

"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1955). In the country of the kind, the prickish man is king. And it's lonely at the top. Or something. James Blish, Dozois reports, called this story "one of the most uncomfortable parables in our language." And like any good parable, it can be unpacked any number of ways. Is Knight suggesting that society can never be entirely "kind," that it must retain some of its primitive teeth in order to restrain those who would defy the common good? Is he saying that a "kind," liberal society is doomed and ineffectual, and that a "freethinking," presumably less emasculated libertarian man, while flawed, is superior? Is he begging people to wake up from our sheep-like cultural stupor of conformity (or liberalism or comfortable living or following orders, or whatever other social ill you might read from this tale), no matter what the means or the ends of that awakening, because no matter what, that stupor is worse? I have no idea. I'm sure I would have swallowed this stuff down uncritically a few short years ago, back when I thought some of Heinlein's political ideas kind of made sense, but nowadays I hold the view that, even if society is diseased, a man alone merely suffers from a different disease. Whatever point Knight is making here, I'm pretty sure I disagree on some level.

"Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp (1956). Time traveler changes the course of history, with unforeseen consequences! Yeah, this is one of the most obvious and predictable of sci-fi staples -- Geoffrey Landis' short story "Interview with an Artist" had the exact same punchline, but with Hitler, in 1999, forty-three years after this piece -- but this was a satisfying, entertaining example of the type.

"The Other Celia" by Theodore Sturgeon (1957). In my review of Modern Classics of Fantasy, I used my personal term "'punchline' story" for the fruits of this era. A better, more intuitive term might be "concept-based story." Most short speculative fiction I have read from this period is focused on communicating one neat fantastic or science-fictiony concept (the line between is often blurred, as it is here -- only Sturgeon's vague noises about a species adapted for protective mimicry separate this piece from vampiric or changeling folklore and the realm of urban fantasy). Characters exist only to further the revelation of the concept. Their traits, such as they are, are developed solely to precipitate the main event or help it to its denouement. This story is of the "Ordinary Joe finds something really weird" subtype. Think Twilight Zone/The Scary Door: "Whoa, look at that weird mirror." All this talk of classification and story taxonomy might lead you to suspect that, no matter how expertly they're crafted and how riveting their concepts may be, I tend to get frustrated with concept-based stories. Oh sure, this was an absorbing read, but I'm glad I live in an era when character-based stories are common.

"Casey Agonistes" by Richard McKenna (1958). Oh man, I've heard about this story and wanted to read it for a long time now. The title is so frigging clever that it alone was enough for me to build up ideas of the story's awesomeness. I can tell you right now, all my ideas were way off. For one thing, baseball has absolutely nothing to do with this story. For that matter, this has as much to do with science fiction as it does with baseball. Instead, we have a powerful gut-punch of a story that belongs in with the American literary tradition of the middle twentieth century. Comparisons to Norman Mailer come to mind, if only because it's set in a VA hospital and my impoverished reading history leaves me with few other authors for comparison. If I did not expect to be this moved by a genre short story this early in the century, it's only because, frankly, this shouldn't even be considered a genre piece. Quite excellent.

"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith (1961). Basically a prototype of sorts for the galactic-scale baroque whatthefuckery novels and stories of highly trained ubermensch crossing wits and matching scheme for scheme in the indeterminately far future. A planet that grows an immortality drug inside virus-ridden sheep protects its wealth and power with an amplified relay of telepathic hate broadcast by minks genetically engineered to be psychotic, and a thief from a planet of thieves mortgages his planet in a rather dumb, ill-considered ploy to steal past the littul kittons. The thief's general incompetency was disappointing; for once, I think this could have been tremendously improved if the two hundred year old superthief were more competent, as opposed to getting snuffed the second he feels the psychic hate-fuck of the massed mink minds. It kind of feels like the planet of thieves wasted its two hundred years of training on this guy, really. Impressive for its time, though (until the ending).

"The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance (1961). And here we have a tale of a man unexpectedly saved and elevated by his own incompetence. At first I found it a mildly interesting soft sci-fi procedural, an outworlder man attempting to locate a criminal in a city of mask-wearers, but the denouement took me completely by surprise and left me (literally) laughing with pleasure.

"The Golden Horn" by Edgar Pangborn (1961). Dozois' introduction to this story confused me, because he calls Pangborn's Davy -- which incorporated this story -- "the finest postholocaust novel ever written." I must have gotten two or three pages into "The Golden Horn" before all the scene-setting clued me in that what Dozois termed "postholocaust" would be known as "post-apocalyptic" fiction today, which makes much more sense, because seriously, I am sure someone, somewhere, has written a superior novel treating with Holocaust. Anyway. I loved the setting, upstate New York somewhere but with flooded seaways dividing the land along the old valleys of the Mohawk, the Hudson, the St. Lawrence. The story itself was very good, a sturdy bit of storytelling, nothing particularly amazing.

"The Lady Margaret" by Keith Roberts (1966, revised 1968). Another story from the Pavane novel, like "The Signaller" from Modern Classics of Fantasy. Here the story's world reminds me most of the brief technological apogee of the Connecticut Yankee's stint in Britain, though with the satiric edges sanded off; it's a medieval society stubbornly and painfully pulling itself into the steam age, Norman bandit routiers preying on road locomotives in the wolf-roamed winter. Like "The Signaller," this is less a story than a sketch of a way of life, almost a technical manual from an alternative history, spliced in with a slow-burn character sketch. I don't think road trains are as intrinsically interesting as semaphorists, so I would give the edge to "The Signaller," but still an adequate read.

"This Moment of the Storm" by Roger Zelazny (1966). This is the sort of story I liked to write when I first set pencil to paper, twenty years ago: a straightforward and frankly not all that interesting man against nature plot. Of course (and thankfully) there's more to this story than I would have managed back then, eliciting some emotional depth from the random cruelty of weather and beast and man, though that depth is muddied by a typically Zalaznyan remove in the narrator and his narration. This story wasn't a total wash (heh, I made a pun), but modern classic? I think not.

"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing.

"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany (1967). My first Delany read! I've had a copy of Dhalgren for almost twelve years, waiting for me to muster the will to break past the first page, but I've wanted a smaller, simpler introduction to Delany for a while. This fits the bill, and it's really, really good. The emotional beats were a bit muted, but the setting, the details, the flavor of the world were all magnificent. (Incidentally, these old optimistic stories from the '60s and '70s, when people imagined the ocean's resources would be bounteous and inexhaustible, depress the hell out me now, in this age of trophic collapse and jellyfish oceans.)

"The Worm That Flies" by Brian W. Aldiss (1968). I suppose you could make the argument that no story set billions (or even millions) of years in the future could possibly feel as alien as it really should, just because there are limits to the human imagination, and the limits to evolution and cosmology are much much vaster. Nonetheless, the few far-future stories I've read tend to feel more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be, probably because far-future writers take their inspiration from evolution and cosmology instead of the more circumscribed bounds of human folklore. In this story there are walking trees more alien than any ent, talking stones stranger than any palantír, and a recapitulation of Original Sin in the last days of the universe. Like only the very best stories of any genre, this one left me blinking in a daze, stoned on its imagery.

"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe (1972). Remarkable. Truly a remarkable novella, a lush, Continental setting, an Ancien Régime atmosphere of civilization and cruelty suffusing a haunting tale of midnight tortures and clones, slave markets and alien changelings and Cantonese eggrolls, its language evocative and wearied. Terrific stuff.

"Nobody's Home" by Joanna Russ (1972). Polyamorous utopian fluff, with a few chuckle-worthy touches but otherwise rather forgettable. The plot is as follows: A successful and self-actualized Woman of the Future has a brief moment of empathy toward a Boring Person, and cries about it. The end. I'm not wedded to big intricate plots by any means, but if your story is going to be so one-note, it better have other stuff going for it.

"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1974). Holy shit. This... this is devastating. Like, it left me speechless devastating. An amazing, painful, horrible, beautiful story. I don't even know what to say about it, other than I cannot believe this was published in 1974. It feels like it would be cutting edge in the late '90s, and still on top of year's-best lists today. Only the "psychic energies" stuff really dates it.

"The Barrow" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1976). Light historical fantasy. (Why's it in this book, exactly?) Those Norsemen and their barrows, am I right? Not even Le Guin can redeem the pseudo-Viking historical fantasy milieu, which always feels like the same dull stuff over and over again, but at least she keeps it brief, and manages to make it feel human, at least.

"Particle Theory" by Edward Bryant (1977). Another weeper loaded with heavy stuff, loss and cancer and supernovae. Brilliant and emotionally draining.

"The Ugly Chickens" by Harold Waldrop (1980). I was hoping for (expecting, really) something as brilliant and outré as Waldrop's "God's Hooks!" This story, alas, is merely of average goodness, the sort of base level of quality one expects from the good pro-level magazines. I could see this getting picked up by Analog as filler in the late '90s, for instance. The ending got a chuckle out of me, at least.

"Going Under" by Jack Dann (1981). Another workmanlike entry, good but hardly revelatory, neither as strange nor as "elegantly kinky" as Dozois indicated in its introduction. Affectless characters lead to affectless stories, I notice.

"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). A story by the same guy who wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," one of my all-time favorites, and published the same year too! Of course, with expectations like that hovering around it, no story could satisfy. This sort of war and mind drugs and PTSD thing doesn't interest me much, its impact blunted by repetition. I think most people (well, most people who read a lot) are well aware of the ghastliness of war. "War is bad, and if you've Seen Shit, it's hard to readjust to normal life" can't be the entirety of your story, not anymore. I'm sure there's a term in literary criticism for how every generation of stories must get ever more sophisticated, as the big revelations and hard truths of one generation become the truisms and dull cliches of the next. This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors. Not that it's a substandard story by any means, it just didn't break new ground for a 21st century reader, even if it was jaw-dropping in the mid '80s or whatever.

"Pretty Boy Crossover" by Pat Cadigan (1986). I didn't expect to like this much, but I do. The ending felt formulaic ("Life is the REAL adventure!"), but the esthetics and atmosphere of what went before were beguiling. And I'm not even into this sort of cyber-club/transhumanist scene generally.

"The Pure Product" by John Kessel (1986). Immortal far-future time traveler goes on a spree of nihilistic violence in the current day Midwest. Pretty good, I guess; a bit preachy with its Socially Relevant Message, not my favorite thing overall.

"The Winter Market" by William Gibson (1986). Cybernetic transhumanism, one of the dullest of recent sci-fi cliches, feels fresh and interesting here, although the "uncannily brilliant but disadvantaged/disabled/disaffected cyber-artist seeking apotheosis" archetype still grates on me. Each subset of genre fiction seems to attract a certain body of adherents, and it's natural enough for would-be crusty cyber-art punks to enjoy seeing their ideal selves projected in fiction (cf. Tim Burton gothic). Or perhaps it was the other way around; Gibson was writing this stuff so long ago that perhaps his characters got soaked up into the cyberpunky subculture as templates. I'm talking nonsense now, so I'll just say this was a solid enough story.

"Chance" by Connie Willis (1986). Another emotional kick in the gut, brutal and beautiful and achingly sad. It's up there with "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" as the best piece so far in this anthology.

"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). I don't remember exactly how I first read this story. It was the late '90s, I was beginning to realize that my crappy teen attempts at storycrafting were pathetic, and here this guy Michael Swanwick came in riding his dinosaur into at least two powerful, baffling, gorgeous pieces in Asimov's, daring to tread all over my chosen milieu of the dinosaur story and in mere handfuls of pages doing more with it than I could probably ever hope to do in my life. I didn't know who this Swanwick guy was, but I hated him and envied him and secretly wanted to be him. And in some random bookstore somewhere, I found some kind of sci-fi anthology, maybe one with Jupiter on the cover, I no longer recall. It strikes me now that it may even have been a softcover reprint of this very book. I couldn't own it, of course; my father was broke and controlling and paranoid, so even if we could afford it, I wouldn't be able to talk him into buying such a collection, full of unvetted and possibly homosexual writers who would surely warp my good and innocent 16 year old mind. But somehow (in retrospect I'm not sure how) I found the time, over several visits to bookstores and libraries and I don't know what else, to read this story. I read it in bits and pieces, in squirts of words separated by who knows how many weeks, and its impact on me was perhaps all the more powerful because of that. More so than any other writer's, Swanwick's influence challenged teenage Rick to put away childish things, to sit down and try my damnedest to improve, to emulate even a fraction of what I perceived as his brilliance. This is my first time rereading "The Edge of the World" since those long-gone, now alien years; if any story has ever been freighted with unreasonable expectations, it's this one. I'm very, very pleased to announce that, as with the best fiction, age and knowledge and experience have improved this simple tale beyond even my treasured memories of its power. It's not as brutally emotional as "Chance" or "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," but as a story, it is perfectly put together, and it -- all of it, not just the gunshot of an ending I had forgotten -- leaves me dizzy.

"Dori Bangs" by Bruce Sterling (1989). Bizarrely sweet and oddly affecting little "alternate history" imagining how their lives would go if Dori Seda and Lester Bangs had lived, met, and settled down. Dozois, in his 1991 innocence, claims this story is "unlike any [alternate worlds story] you've ever seen anywhere else"; here in our more debauched, crowdsourced time, it reminds me of nothing so much as the celebrity realfic clogging the muckier tubes of the internet, though "Dori Bangs" has a certain irresistible charm and sad wisdom that makes such comparisons unworthy.

And that does it for this anthology! A lot of the stories here, I thought, were average or only slightly above it, with only a handful of standouts. Modern Classics of Fantasy for sure suited my tastes better. What I want now is for some world-class editor (possibly Dozois himself) to already have taken the time to put together companion volumes for this series, bringing the range of "Modern Classics" right up through the '90s and '00s to today. In the meantime, I expect to be reading a whoooooole heap of yearly best-of anthologies. Right now I have two checked out, purporting to offer the best fantasy stories from 1987 and 2007, respectively. Wish me luck!