I thought the internet was supposed to tell me everything I need to know instantly, as soon as I log on, buGARDNER DOZOIS - ANOTHER FRIEND I NEVER MET
I thought the internet was supposed to tell me everything I need to know instantly, as soon as I log on, but I only just discovered that Gardner Dozois died this year, on the 27th of May. He was 70. On three shelves of a bookcase right behind me are 26 volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, the giant annual anthology, stretching from number three in 1986 (you can’t get the first two) to number 28 in 2011 – at that point I decided I really ought to get round to actually reading all this stuff before I got any more. It’s a slow but ongoing project.
But these weren’t just great one-stop anthologies, no. They were where Gardner laid down his version of The Truth. Usually the Truth about Science Fiction, but other stuff would creep in too.
Every one of these books has a SUMMATION at the beginning. It followed a strict pattern – he never deviated in all those years. Gardner would tell you which publishers and which magazines went down the drain that year, and which hopeless idealists had started up new ventures. He mapped the uncomfortable attempted transition from print to online fiction. He also charted the often horrible story of How Science Fiction Ate Planet Earth, that is, how it moved from the tiny despised ghetto it was in the 1950s to become the almost boringly mainstream entertainment it is now.
Then he would survey the original and best-of short fiction anthologies – typical comment from the one I’m looking at now : “There seemed to be fewer slipstream/fabulist/New Weird/whatever anthologies this year”. After that came the novels – Gardner always apologised for not having read many of these, but he was busy reading every single short science fiction story so he never did have the time for that many novels. Then came consideration of original short story collections and SF & fantasy reference books, and then – movies!
The War of the Worlds was fast-paced and suspenseful… that being said, I regretted the fact that Spielberg somehow managed to skew the movie into being yet another Spielberg “small child in jeopardy (Dakota Fanning sure does scream a lot in this film)/self-centred-immature-father-in-a-dysfunctional-family-learns-to-value-his-children-over-himself” movie rather than really focusing on the disaster that’s overcoming humanity at large… in some ways it’s more faithful to HG Wells’ novel than the previous Hollywood version was – and yet at the same time gave me the feeling that in spite of all that faithfulness to the text, Spielberg had somehow ended up missing the point of the novel altogether.
After movies he checks out TV shows, writes about the SF conventions and the annual awards, Hugos, Locus, Nebula, etc and after all that we get the Obituaries which in 2005/6 started with Robert Sheckley and ended with Tammy Vance, described as the daughter-in-law of Jack Vance. So the word for obituaries was : comprehensive. If you were an extra on a Doctor Who episode from 1975, or a beloved writer’s daughter-in-law, you got mentioned.
And then Gardner would equally garrulously introduce each story, usually as if it was a pearl beyond price. In the 23rd annual collection in front of me he introduces stories like this :
In the skin crawlingly tense adventure that follows...
In the bittersweet story that follows...
In the powerful novella that follows...
In the ingenious and suspenseful story that follows…
In the dazzling, crammed, high-bit-rate story that follows...
Gardner was the superfan I never could have been, he had a strong opinion about absolutely everything, and I loved his energy and his seeming ability to be able to encompass the whole of science fiction, which each year, like a galaxy, seemed to expand enormously.
Now I’m going to get all the Year’s Bests I’m missing. I hope they're not too expensive. It’ll take years to get round to reading them, but I’ll immediately check out each yearly SUMMATION, just to hear his voice again....more
This volume was published in 1993 so it is 27 years old. Here is a passage from page 324 :
I made him tell me about how capitalism caused global warminThis volume was published in 1993 so it is 27 years old. Here is a passage from page 324 :
I made him tell me about how capitalism caused global warming and he tells me all about how people wouldn't give up things because if they stop buying capitalism doesn't work, so the technology and the pollution made the earth heat up... I get the idea the people knew all this bad stuff was going to happen but they wouldn't stop buying gasoline-driven cars and stuff, and the government wouldn't stop them.
Author is Margaret McHugh, and I can hear her muttering now, well, they can't say I didn't tell 'em.......more
This one from 1991 features at least three alternative time stream stories (you know, what if Hitler was a woman, what if nobody ever discovered AmeriThis one from 1991 features at least three alternative time stream stories (you know, what if Hitler was a woman, what if nobody ever discovered America, etc) and I don’t think that stuff is science fiction at all.
What I really want them to invent is some device where you could immediately tell which stories in Gardner Dozois’s huge anthologies are worth reading. Sometimes I think Gardner, God bless him, erred more on the side of enthusiasm than discernment. ...more
I read this years ago & forgot to review it - what a crime against Goodreads! This was the Dozois annual collection that got my sf reading out of the I read this years ago & forgot to review it - what a crime against Goodreads! This was the Dozois annual collection that got my sf reading out of the deep freeze - it had been orbiting around one of Neptune's moons, it was cold, it was dead, but the first four stories in this book
Immersion by Gregory Benford The Dead by Michael Swanwick The Flowers of Aulit Prison by Nancy Kress A Dry Quiet War by Tony Daniel
made me think wow, what have I been missing. So I went on a mission to grab all these handsome Dozois annual collections and now I have a dozen or so I haven't even started and they are HUGE. It's so easy to buy a 600 page book but it takes so long to read it.
I found out recently that many people who use audiobooks listen to the books a DOUBLE speed. They want to finish books quicker too and they have devised this simple method. But when it was demonstrated to me itsoundedlikeprosewithabsolutelynopunctuationandmybraincouldnottakeit....more
Finally finished this one - they take a long time, and I have a whole ton of them to get through. But I figured out that the job is made easier if I eFinally finished this one - they take a long time, and I have a whole ton of them to get through. But I figured out that the job is made easier if I exclude two of the horrible sub-genres of sf :
1. Alternative history - bah, who cares about this stuff, it's not sf; even if it turns out Hitler was a robot or the Emperor Caligula was a genetically modified ant or if Arkansas was colonised by Charles Dickens.
2. Science fiction comedy stories. They're never very funny. It must be admitted that Gardner Dozois, bless him, had a soft spot for both these types.
In this Dozois the best story is Papa by Ian R MacLeod, a real heart-wrencher about growing old in a near future society where there is just too much assistance available from technology. Second best is Flashback by Dan Simmons, all about a near future where they've got this drug called flashback - when you take it your mind inhabits 20 minutes of one of your best ever memories (sex for most people) - everybody is hooked on it, and the story follows a small gang of 15 year-olds who've got themselves a gun in order to do a random murder and then replay the murder via flashback, so they can all appreciate the various details they missed when it was happening in reality.
Both these stories are so sharp. That's what I read sf for....more
After the fun and frolics of the 12th Annual Dozois, which was stuffed with good stories and was responsible for getting me interested in sf again aftAfter the fun and frolics of the 12th Annual Dozois, which was stuffed with good stories and was responsible for getting me interested in sf again after many years of ignoring it, this one thwaps back to earth and shines a screeching white light on some of the less happy aspects of modern sf. It also comes to us with a nasty hipdippy cover featuring whales and dolphins. This bunch were kind of blah, often longwinded blah, except for two great ones, making the this anthology even more annoying because you can't just write the whole anthology off as an unlucky-thirteen bag of bollocks. The two great ones were David Marusek's "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy" and "Mortimer Gray’s ‘History of Death’" by Brian Stableford - these were exciting, poetic, daring, and they left all the others in the space dust.
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