# Review: Gardner Dozois' 31st Annual Year's Best



## J-Sun (Jul 31, 2014)

(This is an html2vbcode conversion of the original.)

*Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois*







*Overview: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust..."*

Just to make things clear, overall Gardner Dozois' 31st rendition of the _The Year's Best Science Fiction_ is pretty good (even better than the last couple) and has a little something (sometimes a very tiny something) for most everybody and most everybody should run out and get it if they haven't already.

That said, this science fiction anthology begins and ends with death. Not only that, it begins with ghosts followed by vampires (and ends with zombies) and, for the third story, we get really uptempo with a story about someone with a terminal condition - but they're not dead yet! We follow that fun up with a tale of genocide and then face an apocalyptic terrorist strike (though, to be fair, that's actually a fun story). Then, because this is science fiction, see, the next story is set in an alternate sixteenth century. Back to the future, the next tale is about radical and hopeless social inequality. Continuing with the fun, we fail to make first contact. Yes, a story about what we don't do. Then bio/nano-tech run amok. And, in the most egregious nonsense of all, this "science fiction" anthology gives us a story about a naturally habitable Mars with indigenous life just like mom used to make.

Finally, with the twelfth story, *Greg Egan* saves the day (naturally) with a tale about someone making life _better_ for a change. The irony is that the one problem with *"Zero for Conduct"* - about a young Afghan woman in Iran who is a prodigy of a chemist - is that, while I was brought to care about the protagonist and was dreading something horrible happening, things go a little too smoothly for the most part. Still, after an avalanche of death and mayhem, I'll take it. And it truly is an extraordinary story even apart from its context.

Since Egan spoiled that run, I'll work backward from the end. As mentioned, that's a story of death. Prior to that is another "failed space" story that involves sickness and death. A war that disintegrates American society and presumably much else. Another "Old Mars" fantasy. Before that, it's a post-apocalyptic future but we're so far past the apocalypse that things are actually starting to look up again. (Thank heaven for small favors.) An "electropunk" story set in the past which posits the forthcoming apocalypse as foreordained. Another apocalypse we're well past. Another apocalypse. Oddly, a story set on Titan dealing with group minds - not a lot of fun, but at least not quite apocalyptic.

And, prior to that, we have the second high point of the book ten stories from the end, when *Neal Asher* says, "Apocalypse? We don't need no steenkin' apocalypse - we blow up crap real good everyday, anyway." *"The Other Gun"* isn't exactly hard SF but it's a quintessential Asher-style New Space Opera thrill ride with lots of action and violence and with something to say, as well. Aficionados will recognize the prador and this involves the last surviving entity of a race the prador otherwise annihilated (so it was an apocalypse for them) who is out for revenge, with a human in tow.

Of the middle ten between those peaks, there's what is technically an alternate history insofar as it's part of an alternate history series, but this particular example is primarily a fairly nonsensical pseudo-space opera dealing with AIs. Then there's a sort of Shaper/Mechanist-feeling story dealing with a hateful artist and cyborgs and robots. A sort of fantastic seeming tale that tries to be rooted in neurobiology. A murder mystery on Mars. Another apocalypse done as a collage, the bulk of which takes the form of a fictional wikipedia article. An apocalyptic plague. An apocalyptic solar flare. A Gene Wolfe "tribute". (It must be good because I often like Swanwick but am repelled by Wolfe's work and I'm repelled by this story exactly as if it were written by Wolfe.) A political thriller on an asteroid. A story that's "SF" in the same way _Gravity_ was except that this is a slow, quiet tale of burying astronaut remains - more failed space, more death.

As an example of what this all generally feels like, drawn from the actual writing, here's a quote from near the middle of Ian R. MacLeod's mostly nicely foreshadowed and well structured, but maudlin and extremely dull, "Entangled", in which a woman's had half her brains blown out and her father's been taking care of her. The alleged perpetrator gets away with it...



> ...whilst Martha Chanhan's[1] father's heart gave out from grief and exhaustion, and she was left empty, damaged, and alone. (505)



And here's the dead protagonist in Damien Broderick's "Quicken" ruminating while his twice-killed former wife is undergoing her second resurrection:



> The corpse began to swell. Pulsations flexed Sybille's smashed legs, her hips writhed in a horrid parody of sexual desire. Klein watched without emotion, neither excited nor repelled. The world was comic in its meaningless surges, its appetites, its agonies, but none of what he saw brought a smile to his lips or a burning wish to vomit. Awareness of his own inanition caused him neither self-reproof nor an anxious wish to remedy this loss of emotions that had once overwhelmed his life. All of this he saw clearly, layer within layer, and all he felt was a profound bleakness. (645)



Are we having fun yet?

Two words, Dozois (and many SF writers generally): *LIGHTEN UP!*

But this is all what the stories (sub)generically are _about_ and, but for a few, doesn't speak to their individual _quality_. Indeed, a remarkable thing about these stories is that, while totally imbalanced in the uniformity of their drab neo-early-70s apocalyptic matter and usually depressed tone, they don't give the impression of otherwise reading the same story over and over but manage some individuality in their disasters. Many of them are quite good.

*Selected Stories*

As mentioned in the overview, the stories that most impressed me were *Asher's "The Other Gun"* and *Egan's "Zero for Conduct"*. Moving on from there, *Jay Lake's "Rock of Ages"* is set in the "METAtropolis" shared universe, about which I know basically nothing, and nothing about it need be known going into a tale of an old but very well-preserved superspy of sorts, and the plot to drop an asteroid on Seattle, unless that the Greens have taken over in the aftermath of ecotastrophe and splintered into more and less radical wings. I usually dislike adventure stories that try to work in "family" and character concerns a bit too obviously but this, while featuring a great deal of the man's wife and daughter, felt almost seamless and natural. It was a very exciting story, written with a nice pace and feel. Approaching the wonderfully named "Schaadt's Shack", a bar and contact point for our hero, he observes the exterior.



> The tamped clay apron in front even held a few vehicles. Unusual in these parts. He slacked his pace and scanned. A couple of small, battered hovercraft that would run slow and fat on dense, long range fuel cells. The usual assortment of bikes and seggers. An honest-to-God Hummer body, though this one was crowded with an alcohol-fueled boiler and wouldn't drive much faster than he could run. Not that he could run with a couple of metric tons of cargo on his back.
> 
> And, strangely enough, a rather peculiar helicopter. Something _very_ new. Insectile airframe, rotors folded politely, bristling with enough stingers of one kind or another to melt everything else in the yard and punch more than a few holes in Schaadt's Jack-the-giant-killer slate roof in the process.
> 
> ...



*Nancy Kress* is one of three authors with two stories in this edition (the others being Ian R. MacLeod - I wouldn't have taken either - and Lavie Tidhar, whose stuff I usually don't care for[2] and whose pieces weren't great in this but were better than usual). The best of her two is *"Pathways"*, which details a young woman's efforts to deal with Fatal Familial Insomnia. The real strength of this story, I think, is the characterization of both the woman and her doctor (and others) and the genuine but restrained emotion. An oddity is the ambivalent focus on libertarian politics which makes part of the story possible. And my one complaint is the choice of making the woman a smart but uneducated mountain woman and writing her in dialect because you just don't say "warn't either" - it's "warn't neither"[3]. But, seriously: a very good story. (Her other story, "One", is also good but a bit too fantastical with its pseudo-psychic protagonist who can read animals and labors under his being much less appealing than the protagonist of "Pathways".)

*Karl Bunker's "Gray Wings"* off-puttingly starts like a fantasy but becomes a very nicely understated tale (in a literal, explicit sense, though quite vigorous in its presentation) of the social inequality and "uneven distribution of the future", using a crashed nano-filled flying human racer and the villager who helps her. Usually, I find stories that lack a decisive ending to be sort of gutless but this ending was possibly perfect.

*Melissa Scott's "Finders"* was not at all perfect as a story because it felt like an excerpt from a novel, presumably a sort of prologue. However, if it is - or becomes - a novel, I'll probably buy it. So it's good in that sense. This involves a former triad that had been reduced to a duo but reunites with the third member on a salvage operation. Very interesting people and scenario and excitingly written with, for instance, a scene like the "Reavers passing" scene in "Serenity" episode of _Firefly_.

My next three favorite stories all come with more serious problems.

*Ian MacDonald's "The Queen of Night's Aria"* is one of two stories Dozois picks from his own _Old Mars_ anthology. The other is Steele's "Martian Blood". This is a really annoying idea for an anthology as it is ipso facto fantasy - current stories set on the pre-Space Age Mars with canals, old civilizations, indigenes, etc. It's also annoying that, in an anthology of so many slow, thickly written, depressed stories, this is an irresistible barrel o' fun. An opera singer on the downside of his career, accompanied by his... well, accompanist, is performing a sort of UK USO tour on Mars while the humans fight the aliens. The characters are so over the top and pleasingly ridiculous and the story is so exciting and resurrects the old tropes so well that you can't help being swept along. But why does it have to be set on an impossible Mars to achieve this? Why can't the earth or Gliese-whatever be the setting of tales written with such vivacity? "If it's to be taken seriously, it has to be dull and depressing. Only impossible farce may be exuberant." I'm not deaf to the idea that this is about war and is making colonial comments and so on, so it's not all fun and games, but it's a lively story, that's for sure.

(I like a lot of Steele and his isn't bad but can't overcome the drag of the anthology's theme, there's a logical problem with a dichotomy drawn between panspermia and parallel evolution and another problem with an element of the presentation (though I give him points for trying to put some kind of science into this unscientific premise), and the ending is significantly flawed, anyway.)

Then *Val Nolan's "The Irish Astronaut"* turns the blarney up to 11 in a very charming and intriguingly idiosyncratic story of a backup astronaut returning the remains of a part-Irish astronaut (with the fine Irish name of Rodriguez, if I remember correctly) to Ireland to be interred. The story takes place mostly while the American is waiting around for the priest and making friends with a couple of older characters. The problem here is that, other than the fact that it didn't happen, it's a mainstream story and not SF at all. It just talks about a space program and so is considered "of interest" to genre readers, like everything from _The Right Stuff_ to _Gravity_ to _Star Wars_.

On the other hand, *Ken Liu's "The Plague"* is a very science fictional short-short which is a kind of inverted biter bit. It's deft economy is excellent. Taken by itself, there's little more to say but this can be taken as thematically unappealing as part of an agenda. It could have been included in _We See a Different Frontier_ which, like _Old Mars_, doesn't help this anthology a lot, being another set of barbs in the whip with which the West has taken to flagellating itself, or letting itself be flagellated.

Regarding that anthology, Sunny Moraine's piece on "A Heap of Broken Images" is disappointingly like Brit Mandelo's "The Finite Canvas" from last year in that, while done well enough, it's not really SF. It sounds crazy to say about a story narrated by an alien but the narrator, after some initial potential, is not sufficiently alien and this might as well be about any human mass murder of humans. On the other hand, Sandra McDonald's "Fleet" is just a rant with irrelevant gender issues conflated and lacks any of the cleverness Liu's piece had. It's interesting to compare the stories from the other "agenda" anthology, _The Other Half of the Sky_. This is the origin of "Finders", Jablokov's "Bad Day on Boscobel" (about a revolution in an asteroid space habitat) and Aliette de Bodard's "The Waiting Stars" (the "fairly nonsensical pseudo-space opera dealing with AIs" mentioned in the overview). This is apparently a "feminist" anthology but the only requirement is to feature a female protagonist, which happens more often than not these days, anyway. While I don't like the de Bodard, that just goes for all de Bodards and the problem is not didacticism ruining the fiction. The Jablokov reads a little forced and has an almost _all_-female cast, but is not bad, and the Scott, as noted, is quite good.

Another element which I think brings this Annual down is the retro stories. There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from the past - basically every story does - and there's not even anything wrong with paying direct homage to previous works. This can be done as differently as Kelly's brilliant "Think Like a Dinosaur" from the 13th Annual or as Cory Doctorow's very good "Chicken Little" from the 28th. But this year's crop includes the previously mentioned Swanwick-from-Wolfe which seems to be just another Wolfe story, and Damien Broderick's "Quicken", which is a sequel to Silverberg's "Born with the Dead"[4]. I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm not as fond of Silverberg's novella as many are and that one reason among many was its sociological implausibility. Broderick seems to have noticed the same problem but here tries have two wrongs make a right by being excessively sociological in a sequel when the right way would be to have had more sociological care in the original or to try to mute the problem in the sequel. And, somewhat as Silverberg says he poured heart and soul into his story, I don't feel this was a crass commercial move on Broderick's part but that he really put a lot into the story, so I hate to be negative. But, while not bad, it just didn't really work for me, especially with its uncontrolled expansiveness as it wore on, like Charles Sheffield's intrinsic scope in _Tomorrow and Tomorrow_ just kind of bolted on to this one, or something which seized Broderick in a fit of passion.

And there's one specific story which _isn't_ in this anthology that I'd like to note. This year's token _Analog_ story is the adequate "Murder on the _Aldrin_ Express" by Martin L. Shoemaker. In my opinion, this was only the third best _Analog_ novella. Regardless, I suspect that in most people's opinion, it was quite clearly not the very best _Analog_ story, which was Brad R. Torgersen's "The Chaplain's Assistant". 

*Summary Fiction Ratings:*

As can be determined from the table, Gardner Dozois' _The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection_ presents thirty-two stories this year, including six (or seven) novellas, twelve (or eleven) short stories, and fourteen (or thirteen or twelve) novelettes. Fifteen stories are pulled from anthologies (three each from _Twelve Tomorrows_ and _The Other Half of the Sky_, two each from _We See a Different Frontier_, _Pandemonium_, and Dozois/Martin's _Old Mars_, and two from other sources). Ten are pulled from the SF magazines (five from _Asimov's_, two each from _F&SF_ and _Interzone_, and one from _Analog_, as well as one from _Nature_. Five are pulled from ezines, with tor.com placing two - the only digital source with more than one. And he pulled one that was original to a Baxter collection.


```
Rating                         "Title", Author                            Category             Source (type)
   4      "The Other Gun", Neal Asher                                      Novella      Asimov's (mag)
   4      "Zero for Conduct", Greg Egan                                    Novelette    Twelve Tomorrows (anth)
   3.5    "Rock of Ages", Jay Lake                                         Novella      METAtropolis (anth)
   3.5    "Pathways", Nancy Kress                                          Novelette    Twelve Tomorrows (anth)
   3.5    "A Map of Mercury", Alastair Reynolds                            Short Story* Pandemonium (anth)
   3.5    "One", Nancy Kress                                               Novella      tor.com (ezine)
   3      "Gray Wings", Karl Bunker                                        Short Story  Asimov's (mag)
   3      "Finders", Melissa Scott                                         Novelette    The Other Half of the Sky (anth)
   3      "The Queen of Night's Aria", Ian McDonald                        Novelette    Old Mars (anth)
   3      "The Irish Astronaut", Val Nolan                                 Novelette    Electric Velocipede (anth)
   3      "The Plague", Ken Liu                                            Short Story  Nature (mag)
   2.5    "Hard Stars", Brendan DuBois                                     Novelette*   F&SF (mag)
   2.5    "Precious Mental", Robert Reed                                   Novella      Asimov's (mag)
   2.5    "Bad Day on Boscobel", Alexander Jablokov                        Novelette    The Other Half of the Sky (anth)
   2.5    "The Book Seller", Lavie Tidhar                                  Novelette    Interzone (mag)
   2.5    "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince", Jake Kerr Short Story  Lightspeed (ezine)
   2      "Earth 1", Stephen Baxter                                        Novelette*   Universes (coll)
   2      "Murder on the Aldrin Express", Martin L. Shoemaker              Novella      Analog (mag)
   2      "Only Human", Lavie Tidhar                                       Short Story  Pandemonium (anth)
   2      "Martian Blood", Allen Steele                                    Novelette    Old Mars (anth)
   2      "Technarion", Sean McMullen                                      Novelette    Interzone (mag)
   2      "A Heap of Broken Images", Sunny Moraine                         Short Story  We See a Different Frontier (anth)
   2      "The Promise of Space", James Patrick Kelly                      Short Story  clarkesworld (ezine)
   2      "The Discovered Country", Ian R. MacLeod                         Novelette    Asimov's (mag)
   2      "Quicken", Damien Broderick                                      Novella      Beyond the Doors of Death (anth)
   1.5    "Entangled", Ian R. MacLeod                                      Novelette    Asimov's (mag)
   1.5    "The Waiting Stars", Aliette de Bodard                           Novelette    The Other Half of the Sky (anth)
   1.5    "Transitional Forms", Paul J. McAuley                            Short Story  Twelve Tomorrows (anth)
   1.5    "Rosary and Goldenstar", Geoff Ryman                             Short Story  F&SF (mag)
   1.5    "The Best We Can", Carrie Vaughn                                 Short Story  tor.com (ezine)
   1      "Fleet", Sandra McDonald                                         Short Story  We See a Different Frontier (anth)
   1      "The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin", Michael Swanwick                   Short Story  Shadows of the New Sun (anth)

* "A Map of Mercury" and "Hard Stars" are listed as "novelette" and "short
story", respectively by the ISFDB but I estimate "Hard Stars" to be a
novelette while "A Map of Mercury" is right on the border and feels like a
long short story, so to speak. "Earth 1" may well be a novella but, if so, is
the shortest novella by a good way and the ISFDB does list it as a novelette.
```

Final word: An anthology which has a third of excellence, a fifth of... not, and a remainder of some interest, is not a bad deal. And I suspect many would have entirely different stories go in the categories but might have similar or better ratios.

But I repeat my annual call for harder SF, crisper prose, faster paces, and more upbeat mentalities in the Annual. This is an anthology - regardless of any quality - which is filled for the most part with apocalypse, death, destruction, failed space programs, and evil colonial Westerners, and only allows itself to have fun with preposterous anti-SF.


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## Victoria Silverwolf (Jul 31, 2014)

Another complete and thoughtful review.  I suspect I might rate the stories differently (Geoff Ryman and Gene Wolfe -- even if it's a pseudo-Wolfe -- are two of my favorites) but that's all part of the game.


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## J-Sun (Aug 1, 2014)

Victoria Silverwolf said:


> Another complete and thoughtful review.  I suspect I might rate the stories differently (Geoff Ryman and Gene Wolfe -- even if it's a pseudo-Wolfe -- are two of my favorites) but that's all part of the game.



Thank you.  But, ironically, it wasn't quite complete. I wanted to discuss all my favorite stories in a little detail but, when dealing with the two Kress stories, I forgot to come back to the Reynolds. Because the review isn't long enough yet, here's what I inserted into the web page (too late to edit the post here):



> As mentioned in the overview, *Alastair Reynolds' "A Map of Mercury"* is about a failed artist and flunky trying to entice a misunderstood artist back to her stratified and commercial Jovian moons of origin from her current residence on Mercury as part of the Cyborg Artists' Collective. This has a clever, amusing ending and some great ideas for art but the most striking thing is just the depictions of the cyborgs and robots on Mercury - all but the newest of us have read of zillions of cyborgs and robots but this still rekindles a bit of "wow".



Also, I had a footnote complaining about proofreading so, of course, left out a word which has been corrected. ('in *the* "Serenity" episode' - hey, I don't have a professional staff proofreading what I wrote. )

As far as the Ryman/Wolfe, definitely part of the game. I was serious in saying that I disliked the Swanwick but disliked it _just like_ a Wolfe so I suspect it really is a good tribute and, if you like him and want such a thing, you'll like it. We all have different tastes and impressions and I just hope I give people enough information to aid their buying decision or at least provide some interest of some kind.

Oh, and since you mentioned Ryman, if you haven't read it yet, I can say that it's an alternate history set in late 16th century England, in which some foreigners arrive to discuss astronomy and a young William Shakespeare's life is affected. I found it very long and overdone and in love with its own writing for what it was doing and don't like alternate history generally anyway, so it wasn't "good" by my lights but, if you love alternate history and/or Ryman's writing, then it might be something you'd really want to check out.


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