The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by Gordon Van Gelder
419 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"The Third Level" by Jack Finney (1950). A slight, cute time travel fantasy. Something I keep noticing when I read Golden and Silver Age SF is how frequently these old stories prefigure later plots, settings, even subgenres. In this sense, little has changed in genre plotting except bulk and elaboration. In the Edenic olden days, when every plot was still fresh, when original ideas could be plucked unbruised from the tree, it was enough to write five or so pages setting up a conceptual situation and delivering the punchline. Carry this story's situation into the 1980s, and you could have a novel-length treatment by Connie Willis. Carry it forward into the '90s or '00s, and the single line "Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots" could be transmogrified into a series of urban fantasy books. Which is why a story like this can leave someone of my generation not fully sated. I've been conditioned to expect, not necessarily better, but more.
"The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth (1956). I haven't read much science fiction from the 1950s -- just enough to know that some of it could be surprisingly good (even if much of the rest was undistinguished pulp). Nevertheless, I was struck by how unpredictable, how fresh, how recent this story seems. Even the cartoon satire of hippy-dippy self-help liberalism wouldn't be wholly out of place in a modern publication (though there's a somewhat stronger flavor of misogyny in the satire than one usually finds now, bad as our own cultural misogyny tends to be). Structurally, this story is superb, beginning strange and spacing out the explication of the situation to keep the reader's interest, ending with a hilarious (and, to me, not totally expected) one-two punch of revelations (and precocious postmodern genre-awareness).
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I puzzled over the authorial intent of the "uncomfortable parable," with little success.
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson (1956). Another satisfying and seemingly timeless tale, a quiet mood piece that could have been penned by Le Guin in the '80s or one of the up-and-comers in the '00s. It tiptoes up to the brink of corniness, but what the hell -- I had a couple tears in my eyes at the end. I'm not ashamed.
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley (1958). The tired old manhunt gameshow storyline -- in the 1950s? I should stop being so surprised by how far back genre staples go, but it's startling to find that the ancestry of The Hunger Games and The Running Man dates at least as far back as I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Startling, and impressive. It's sufficiently thrilling and bleakly funny, and if the points "Prize" preaches against the audience (and whom it's truly rooting for) have become stale truisms, that's the fault of its imitators. A solid entry.
"'—All You Zombies—'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959). Given the limited set of variations possible in the "time travel paradoxes" theme, it isn't surprising that peak paradox (so to speak) was reached so early. This is a well-constructed story, looser and freer than the more formal time-paradox stories of the early '50s, concealing its working parts beneath typically Heinleinian pulp sexuality. It's that overlay of Heinleinisms that sours me on this story. I used to love the guy's novels, but I got burnt out sometime around To Sail Beyond the Sunset; in Heinlein's hands, a story about a man who is his own father and mother is less apt to stir marvel at the central paradox, and more apt to raise questions about whether Heinlein just wanted to have sex with himself. Interpreting incident and character at face value as the desires of the author -- this is the most naive (puerile, even) level of textual criticism. With Heinlein, however, there's always the chance that it could be accurate.
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W. Aldiss (1962). An overbearing mother-wife and a "sinister matriarchy" are the only off-notes in an otherwise excellent piece of far-future rococo, a style that arose early and has never quite gone out of fashion, for obvious reasons. It doesn't reach the heights of what-the-fuck transcendence found in Aldiss' later "The Worm That Flies," but to repeat what I said in that review, "Artistry" feels "more fantastic and exotic than
even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be."
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance (1963). Gently wry humor breathes life into a mechanics of magic piece, prefiguring the likes of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Brief but satisfying.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, where I acerbically remarked "This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing." I keep seeing it picked up in various anthologies, so I guess I'm stuck with the minority view.
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg (1969). An interesting stylistic piece that didn't entirely click with me. At a fundamental level, I appreciated the shifting narrative perspectives as a crude but effective means of conveying the "search for realities," but I wasn't blown away by the story as a whole.
"The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed (1976). This one's just silly, too, but in a charming and legitimately funny way.
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen (1977). Rarely do "new fairy tales" rouse the sense of magic and elegance of the best of the old, but this is one of those few. Exquisite.
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison® (1977). My cynicism toward sappy nostalgia and "good ol' days" mythology wasn't armor enough. Tears flowed freely at the end of this one, it must be said. I rag on Harlan Ellison® because of how puffed up and self-important he can be, but damned if the old cock doesn't have flashes of brilliance that (almost) justify his attitude.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I mused at length on "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," and said "This story
is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to
warfare and its horrors."
"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger (1984). A delightful and funny tale of aliens as annoying know-it-all neighbors. A necessary antidote to the post-"Jeffty" blues.
"Rat" by James Patrick Kelly (1986). Proto-crustpunk, serviceable but not my bag. I am reminded of Victorian and Edwardian "sensation" stories.
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe (1989). An interestingly ambiguous tale of murder and pacts with supernatural evil. It took some time for the hints in the coda (basically, the narrator's sister was institutionalized for murdering one or more young children, presumably in connection with occult activities, if my reading is anywhere in the ballpark) to click in my brain, and that only after rereading a few passages. Solid; enjoyable but not mindblowing.
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint (1993). Urban fantasy revolving around a mentally ill homeless woman: yep, we've reached the early '90s -- the "Even Flow" years, as I like to call them. (Okay, so the fixation on Magical Homeless began in earnest in the mid-'80s, but really avalanched between '90 and '93, at least in my limited reading.) This particular story is quaint and quietly earnest, alighting on what I've already come to think of as de Lint's usual concerns of how urban life deadens our spirits and makes us all "desert" creatures, our lives more underground than on the surface. It's a slight story that goes down easy.
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh (1995). Vivid and cleverly conceived alternate history, with "recalcitrant" slave owners getting rounded up and shipped west after Lincoln survives an assassination attempt, and Quaker abolitionists running an underground railroad to rescue some few and return them to families down South. Despite the brutal press of a train platform stampede, and its aftermath, the emotional effect of the story is more numbing than crushing, but it's an excellent installment nonetheless.
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling (1998). "Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network." "Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him." "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!'" Early visions of the webbed future were adorably gawky and naive, and did not age well (kind of like contemporary electronic music). The democratic, noncommercial network and gift-exchange economy depicted here are at aphelion from the current reality of paysites and malicious doxxing and big business purchasing the end of net neutrality from corporatist government. I suppose some tightly-knit user clusters at, I don't know, Pinterest or a private P2P or something might do each other small favors and send timely gifts, but this "friendly strangers on the network" business is as quaint a future vision as anything printed in the 1950s. The story itself is a pleasant comedy of errors, with a happily networked young family man getting collared by a harassed federal agent.
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed (1999). For the most part I'm bored of transhumanist stories, but Robert Reed is usually a treat. Not as ornately bizarre as more recent transhumanist works ("Widows in the World" by Gavin J. Grant comes to mind, reviewed here), "Winemaster" nonetheless manages to mix in a dystopian Christian America and a Stapledonian "huge and cold, and slow" interstellar race, wishing to upgrade to organic forms and snap up terrestrial real estate once everybody earthside goes micromachine. It's a satisfactory tale; if it isn't as superb as what I've come to expect from Reed, at least it's more involving than other transhumanist stories I could name.
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison (1999). This is a dull one, a dreary ennui of modern life piece stringing together cliches of adventure sports and VR gaming into an unconvincing, unappealing mash (though it's a well-written mash). Stories like this helped push me away from sci-fi, which these days is rote regurgitation of nanotech or transhumanism when it isn't despondent, too-plausible visions of future scarcity and rising sea levels, and toward fantasy, which at least preserves some remnant of vitality.
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman (2001). An absorbing and unexpectedly moving window into a near-future culture on the verge of vanishing into an allegory of globalization. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in a vaguely Central Asian milieu.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2004). In a grimdark nanotech future, a world of mountain-devouring machines, regenerating limbs, flammable oceans, and acidic tailing pits across the surface of the globe, a gang of modified soldiers finds a living, fully biological dog eking out its existence in the toxic wastes of Montana. It turns out that pairing a standard bleak military-nanotech setting with the world's last "the dog dies at the end" story produces a solid entry. Not an all-time classic, but pretty good.
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand (2005). A prime example of 21st century melancholia, exquisite and haunting, a dislocating drift across years as the world warms, towers collapse, and civilization, unseen, goes silent and satellites wink out one by one.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King (2008). A decade or so into this century, the hot new idea seemed to be stories that made death mundane, bureaucratic, a place of waiting rooms and broken escalators and waiting, lots of waiting. This story taps into that vibe, turning out a weeper that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2011). I forgot how I found out about Ken Liu. I certainly wasn't encountering his fiction in the magazines -- I can't afford the subscription rates, and my library only has copies of Analog, my least favorite of all the pro rags still in print. Maybe I came across his name on Twitter while setting up my short-lived online magazine a few years ago. However it happened, I remember going to Liu's website and despairing at how prolific and consistently excellent his stories were, this wunderkind just barely older than me bursting upon the scene with exquisite, perfectly crafted delicacies and marvels. This story is, naturally, one such delicacy, folding together two generations of sorrow and identity and displacement, loss and love and the quiet magic between parent and child. It deserves every award it won.
Of all the stories in this collection, only "The Paper Menagerie," "Jeffty Is Five," and perhaps (at a stretch) "Echo" can match the excellence of "All Summer in a Day," "Flowers for Algernon," "Solitude," "The Women Men Don't See," and the other all-time classics reprinted in the first Very Best anthology. And unlike the first volume, Volume Two includes a few stories I just don't care for, such as "Suicide Coast," "Narrow Valley," and "Rat." But the general quality of the other stories remains high, so I won't knock the grade down too harshly.
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