The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton
533 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 26 to November 20
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
When I first picked this one up back in January, I was still trying to recapture the short story mania I'd so enjoyed in the final third of 2013. I got up to "As Women Fight" before sputtering out and, eventually, returning the book for the ensuing nine months. Since I'd read so much in the book (much more than I remembered reading), I decided I should make an effort to finish it this year; my organized side detests the thought of carrying a partially read book over from year to year.
Just a general warning with short story anthologies: It helps me remember each story later if I describe the plot in spoiler-y detail, so if you care about such things, maybe skip this review. I don't know if anyone actually reads these things, so that's probably not worth saying.
For reference purposes, these stories were originally published in 2009.
"A Story, with Beans" by Steven Gould. Genre fiction (or at least post-1950s SF) has a tendency toward bloat. Unnecessary worldbuilding and descriptive detail pile up, and a straightforward tale becomes a meandering, indulgent multivolume epic if the sales numbers support it. This story takes the opposite route, sketching out a post-collapse American Southwest, with suggestions of strange cults, strange cultures, strange tech, metal-eating "bugs," and unseen history, in just seven pages. I appreciate the light touch with worldbuilding -- I crave more but don't feel cheated. When it comes to the story itself, however, it's a letdown, abbreviated to an anecdote a ranger tells to some college kids over a pot of beans. There's no emotional weight to it at all. As an exercise in brevity, "A Story" is impressive, but it lacks depth. (Discovering, some months later, that Gould expanded this setting into a novel makes it somewhat less impressive, retroactively making it seem more like a teaser trailer for the upcoming book rather than a standalone story with a lot going on behind it. Oh well.)
"Child-Empress of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Another exercise in brevity, a pastiche of "Old Mars" stories parodying genre terminology and complicated worldbuilding in eight crisp, efficient pages. The point is a rather banal observation about the value of tragic hero stories, the sort of metafictional vein SF mines to exhaustion. Nonetheless a sweet and engaging little tale.
"The Island" by Peter Watts. Where "Child-Empress of Mars" used the cliche of fantasy terminology to efficiently (and with tongue in cheek) set the Old Mars scene, "The Island" belongs to a subset of hard sci-fi that uses a sleek and stylized argot to achieve an effect impenetrable to anyone without lifetime subscriptions to Analog and Scientific American. I find this style tiresome and silly. The story itself isn't that bad, though it is crammed with the usual list of hard sci-fi requirements: a high concept meant to be mind-blowing but is merely implausible, tension between humans and an AI on a space journey that lasts millions of years, an attempt at philosophical insight, incest. My interest curve climbed slowly from almost nil at the start to pretty interested toward the end, before asymptoting to nil again at the end.
"The Logic of the World" by Robert Kelly. This one would not have felt out of place in that After the King anthology. It is a consummately '90s fantasy story, smugly didactic, wherein a sensitive, thoughtful knight learns of a dragon and goes to slay it, only to get lectured with certain cliches about wisdom and how you take in a little bit of everything you slay, and then the knight is sorry and he leaves. All we need are some dated pop culture references and "irreverent" humor, and it could be 1992 all over again!
"The Long, Cold Goodbye" by Holly Phillips. Not an all-time classic, but a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding and viewing a high fantasy cliche from a fresh angle. This story mixes together colonialism, steampunk, ice zombies, a city freezing to death in a masquerade of forced jollity pasted over bone-deep despair. The tone never quite gelled with me -- too close to melodrama -- and the prose was solid but unmemorable. Still, this is the first really really good story in this collection.
"The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. There's something ineffably '90s about intelligent dinosaurs managing to invent space flight just before an asteroid plows into the Yucatan. There was a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer that built on the idea, plus (I'm told) an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Here it's dated but cute, a winsome but pointless little fantasy that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"Dragon's Teeth" by Alex Irvine. Perfectly adequate swords 'n' sorcery number, satisfying if not especially memorable. (Nine months later, in fact, I have zero idea what this story was about, and little memory of reading it, which makes the one-line review I wrote at the time less than helpful. For posterity, then, I shall specify that it appears to be a pseudo-Roman swords 'n' sorcery number, with a humble no-nonsense soldier or something going to hunt a MacGuffin among fantasy-world Inuit or something. I don't really know, I merely skimmed a few sentences to get a sense of the piece again.)
"As Women Fight" by Sara Genge. This one defeated me back in February (or whenever it was that I shelved this collection). Psyching myself up to once again wade through it took weeks, even if I didn't quite remember why I'd given up in the first place. Conceptually it's an interesting tale -- the two partners in a breeding pair must Fight each year to win the role of female, with the loser consigned to maleness until the next Fight (which is just a variation on The Left Hand of Darkness, but still has some potential juice in it). Yet, frustratingly, "Women" relies on essentialist conceits of what it "means" to be female or male. Five years of losses have left the p.o.v. character "imprinted" with the ways of male "flesh": "Silence comes easy these days," Genge writes, as if laconic affectlessness is an essential trait of manhood rather than a mutable quality specified by culture. A reasonable grounding in history and anthropology is not much to ask, especially if one wishes to spin tales of gender identity in the style of Le Guin, but we live in an era when it's fashionable once more, even among supposedly feminist authors, to ascribe all the sitcom gender norms to biology. But... overlooking all that, with a supreme effort of resignation... I must admit this isn't a bad story. In fact, the story qua story is well-constructed, fitting the concept and storyline together seamlessly, barely wasting a single noun of worldbuilding. And if I strain my (admittedly undeveloped) critical faculties, maybe I can sort of see how Genge might not have been so essentialist all along: in one bit of dialog, after the point where I'd given up all those months ago, a mouthpiece character offers, "We've learned since childhood that women do this or that and we never dare to break free of that mold. We're as pitiful as the men and women... who only know one way of living, except that we don't have the excuse of ignorance." Authorial intent here is a tough nut (for me) to crack. Let's just say that I feel this story is too gender-essentialist for my tastes, but maybe its heart is in the right place, and it really wasn't worth all the fuss I put up about it, so let's move on.
"Sylgarmo's Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard. I don't know what to expect of Shepard. He wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," which remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, but everything else I've read from him has been retreading Vietnam War ground, a sure way to bore me. Editor Horton, in his poorly proofread introduction, calls this story an "hommage" to Jack Vance; the publication history confirms it was originally printed in a Dying Earth anthology. The only Dying Earth story I've read before this was "The Overworld," in Modern Classics of Fantasy; like "The Overworld," "Sylgarmo" is purple stuff, full of imaginative imagery but expressed with a pugnacious lack of subtlety, eventually finding its way to a stock evil cousin who affects to have forgotten "that blond poppet" who got fridged all those years ago to give the hero his motivation. Perhaps the effect is meant to be tongue in cheek, or perhaps merely a pastiche of '70s spaceships 'n' sorcery. A junk food kind of story.
"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton. Characters in fables who are aware they're characters in fables have become, for me at least, almost as commonplace as the archetypal storylines they comment upon. So this string of vignettes is nothing new. That said, these interconnected tales are as delicately worked and beautiful as you'd expect from Walton.
"Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. This kind of scene-setting, where people are just like us with their Parent-Teacher nights and birthday dinners at restaurants, except everything is suffused with magic and the nuns are in the Order of Thanatos and chocolate is blue, can easily capsize into a cloying mess. This story takes its time to spool out a workmanlike domestic drama, with a widowed father, a boy figuring out his own powers (and responsibilities), and a young teacher with a past she's fleeing. It's almost like a '90s kiddie flick where the kid sets his dad up with a new mom, except with, you know, the boy's eyes weeping blood-spiders and with lifetimes of pain stored in the bones and nerves of the dead to be unleashed as magical fuel for ships and cities. "It is impossible to know where the power comes from," writes the boy, in the essay he's so proud of, "if you can't imagine how the bones hurt and scream." It is a strange ensemble, but it mostly hangs together.
"The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale" by Paul Park. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a clever little piece, all metafictional and such, but the ending is the cheap "unreliable narrator was talking about his life and ex-girlfriend all along" trick we've all seen a hundred times, which gets less satisfying each time.
"This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. A title like that deserves -- demands -- a story of uncommon excellence. Like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" or "Bears Discover Fire," or "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" later in this volume, it's a title that leaps off the contents page and effervesces in my brain, filling me with anticipation and speculation. Further, I have positive memories of the two Wilson novels I read a decade or more ago (Darwinia and The Chronoliths), so it's fair to say I had heightened expectations for this story. It turns out to be heavy material, a look at the horrors and entrepreneur-run concentration camps that could have resulted had America not gone into Civil War. My one objection is a sense that Wilson is inadvertently minimizing the real horrors of the black experience after the Civil War, a scene in American history generally swept out of sight as it is, but on its own this story is excellent and unsettling. Probably the third best in the book.
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake. More Dying Earth-esque business, but substituting latter day archetypes of crusty nanotech information brokers for the old brew of decadent wizards and sly heroes. I'm not sure it's an improvement. Neither bad nor good.
"Technicolor" by John Langan. You can kind of guess where this one is going on the first page, but there's a sort of delicious anticipation to watching the pieces of the story form a remorseless chain toward the denouement. "Classic story gets reinterpreted through a lit-crit lens" is babby's first postmodernism, but this is really well done.
"Catalog" by Eugene Mirabelli. A lightweight fancy in what I think of as a Valente-esque vein, in which a blank slate sort of guy finds himself in a reality pieced together from books and magazines, hanging out with a trio of Poe characters who've formed a rock band, before he goes off to Maine in search of a woman from the L. L. Bean catalog. Cute but something of a trifle.
"Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. I can't point to any particular stories off the top of my head (aside from "Nahiku West" by Linda Nagata, from another Year's Best volume I abandoned early this year, and consequently never reviewed), but I have the impression that hard, grimy sci-fi and noirish detective procedurals get combined much too frequently. It is a go-to stylistic shorthand that yields diminishing returns each time I see it. And this is a 45 page novelette originally published in Subterranean, the late and bafflingly overrated magazine that rivaled Analog for the title of least enjoyable pro market. "Crimes and Glory," in other words, is a slog. Characters in this story proclaim their motivations to each other in clumsy exposition straight out of a creative writing elective; tiresome technobabble dribbles along with few surprises and no zest; the set-dressings and descriptions are as familiar and unappealing as Tuesday's leftovers. "You see," the escaping criminal tells the pursuing detective, "you aren't very different from me after all," and the ending is obvious. If I weren't so determined to finish this collection sometime this year, I might have washed my hands of it once again partway through this story.
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky. Emotionally manipulative but mostly effective piece. Any story with a four year old in emotional disarray will hit me hard, of course, but this story is well-written, even if its heroine is much too leisure class for my tastes.
"A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor" by Nir Yaniv (translated from the Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar). A brief but charmingly strange fable straddling fairy tale and high technology, breathing life into the cliches of both.
"Glister" by Dominic Green. A rollickingly old-fashioned roister-doister tale of space miners on a hellish planet rife with gold and an explosive biochemistry based on heavy metals. Not an amazing story, but a fun antidote to the usual 21st century grim and grime.
"The Qualia Engine" by Damien Broderick. This reads like one of those forced, painfully dated stories from the '80s or early '90s, except updated to include fresher cliches and fumbling pop culture references to Survivor and Beauty and the Geek and Second Life, stereotype jocks "porking" cheerleaders while stereotype power-nerds sweat through "I know eight silent ways to kill a man" fantasies, all narrated in a snide voice just two steps down from excruciating. Ten years from now, someone will read this and snark at how quaintly '00s it was. It's a shame, given that imagination-stirring title. The story itself is workmanlike stuff, bravely attempting to Say Things About the Human Condition but mostly just getting lost in its own brimming-with-attitude narration.
"The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" by Catherynne M. Valente. This, thankfully, lives up to its title. Valente has a tendency to use cardboard standees as props -- here the central figure is a Generic Badass Woman in a More Commonly Male Role, a stock Valente creation. But you don't read Valente for nuanced characterization. You read Valente for lush, baffling, seductive imagery, the turns and depths of dreams you never dared to have, places as insidious as myth, clocks that flow rather than tick along their own necessary geometries. I'll be the first to say I have no idea what's going on here, and that's okay -- I am dazzled and left wordless. Valente in prime form; by a long shot the best story in this collection.
"Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. The only Garcia y Robertson book I've read, Firebird, was like stuffing my face with a pizza from Domino's. For the first little while it was tasty, a novel treat mixing Russian mythology with sexy fun adventures. As I kept gorging, though, I realized it really wasn't that good, and in fact it was gross and threatening to go out the way it came in. I've shied away from anything bearing his name ever since, in much the same way one's stomach might cringe at the thought of repeating a particularly unpleasant junk food. This story seems to confirm Garcia y Robertson's inclination to leer, yuk-yukking it up in a parody of oversexed pulp lotharios and "teenaged" seductresses (though Barsoomian years are twice as long as Earth's, so you're the one with the dirty mind, pal). The result is almost -- almost -- Piers Anthony levels of unfunny, and at least ten pages too long. I cannot believe this got published in Asimov's. I always expected better from that market.
"Images of Anna" by Nancy Kress. Competent but uninspired magical realism piece. Online dating a wizard or something, and photographs that show thoughts and worries, or something.
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Interdimensional creature feature colored by Alice in Wonderland, playful and enjoyable without treading new ground or digging in deep.
"Living Curiousities" by Margo Lanagan. Dense-packed scene-setting that tosses you in near the middle and demands you keep up, a stylistic accomplishment that ends up being a brief character study, closing abruptly once its mood is made clear. Expanding this out to give it room to breathe may have been an improvement, or maybe the slim statement here benefits from the compressed presentation.
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley. A strange and vertiginous tale of erasure and urban neglect, vivid and marvelous and sad, the second best story in this anthology after "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew."
"Secret Identity" by Kelly Link. I wound up liking this more than I thought it would. Integrating online gaming into science fiction stories is generally hokey, and often embarrassing, as is the exploration of long distance relationships and online dating (which was the focus of "Images of Anna," as well, so it must have been A Thing in 2009), all of which made for a rocky start. But the narration is so earnest and believable, a voice familiar to anyone who read their share of emotionally inexperienced introverts pouring their hearts into LiveJournal entries way back when (or was one such introvert) -- that disarming and quietly frantic reaction to life, the antithesis to the snarky swagger of, say, the narrator of "The Qualia Engine" (and any number of stories I rejected from my own short-lived magazine). The backdrop of deliberately banal superheroes is more entertaining than the similar device in Jonathan Lethem's "Super Goat Man" five years earlier (reviewed here). The sum total is really good, one of the very few really good stories in this collection. Though I had one reservation: Is it overlong, or is that just me growing impatient to finally finish this book and move on to something else?
"Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine. I don't like the word "bespoke," partly because it seems to have become an it-word in recent years, partly because it feels jammed together and awkward on my tongue. Of course, that's neither here nor there. This is an airy character study mingling the delicate imagery of current intimate fantasy with the melancholy of current post-collapse speculation, garnished with some old-school (ca. early '60s) time travel goofiness. Interesting but too brief and reserved.
"Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A cracking good time, this one. The sort of fun and imaginative far-future space adventure I get to read so seldom, and always enjoy when done well. Not nearly as ambitious as, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (reviewed here), but that's the general sort of thing Kessel was aiming for, I think. At least it isn't the sort of dreary, grimy pessimism de rigueur in this grimy and pessimistic century.
Whew. There. From January to November, it took me, but finally I can put this book back on the shelf. I think the 2012 edition of Year's Best deceived me. This book simply did not have the same ratio of outstanding stories to filler that made that anthology (the first of Horton's I read) so rewarding. Perhaps Horton had yet to develop the curatorial skills or reprint rights budget he would have in 2012, or (unlikely, but possible) perhaps the short fiction of 2009 just wasn't as happening as it would be in 2011. One of these months I need to look into the other annuals, the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy series and the Strahan SF one, even if it involves much overlap; I desire a different perspective on what might be considered the "best" stories of any given year.
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