Michael Dirda
(THIS INTRODUCTION CONTAINS NO SPOILERS.)
Not long ago, I met a young man at a literary festival who told me he was an ardent science fiction fan. He even showed me the words “Use the Force” tattooed on his upper arm. Naturally, he’d read Kurt Vonnegut and Phil Dick and Neil Gaiman. I’m sure he must have seen The Avengers and Iron Man, watched A Game of Thrones and the latest Star Trek movie.
As we chatted, he casually asked me about my favorite science fiction novels. I reeled off a few titles, almost at random: The Time Machine, Last and First Men, The Stars My Destination, More Than Human, Double Star, Pavane, The Left Hand of Darkness…I paused. He was shaking his head, looking distraught. He hadn’t read a single one.
Sigh.
So I told him the plot of The Stars My Destination and watched as he grew more and more excited. “I’ve got to read that. It sounds really amazing.” I said it was all that and more. He made me repeat my little list of novels and carefully wrote them down on a bar napkin. “I’m going to look for these.”
I hope he does.
Having taught occasionally at various colleges and universities, I’ve grown increasingly distressed over a widespread “presentism” among young people. English majors know the hot authors of the moment—whether Raymond Carver or Lorrie Moore, Cormac McCarthy or Gary Shteyngart—and well they should. But venture beyond the twenty or thirty most familiar names, or mention slightly unusual writers, such as Wilkie Collins or Stella Gibbons or Ford Madox Ford, and you will have entered what is for them terra incognita. Yet how can you love English literature, let alone major in it, while ignoring The Woman in White, perhaps the greatest “sensation” novel of the nineteenth century, or the hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, one of the world’s best comic novels, or The Good Soldier, with its famous opening sentence: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard”?
Stick with me for a moment longer. We are coming round to the superb anthology you now hold in your hands.
For a long time science fiction and fantasy fans were pretty much expected to know the classics and past masters of the field. And, if they didn’t, at least they wanted to. But in recent years some writers and readers have announced that they see no need to be familiar with the works of, say, Robert A. Heinlein. One of those old pulp writers, wasn’t he? Misogynistic and militaristic, too. Who needs him?
This is roughly like saying, “William Faulkner, didn’t he write about hillbillies and Southern degenerates?”
The great works of literature—and by literature I mean science fiction and fantasy, as well as horror and children’s books and crime novels and all the more canonical suspects—are not old or fusty or out of date or corny or irrelevant. We read the classics because they continue to deliver esthetic pleasure, because they illuminate our human experience, because they show us how varied and marvelous verbal artistry can be. Most of all, we read these stories because they are extraordinary and wonderful.
Which is also what this anthology is, i.e., extraordinary and wonderful.
Fantasy & Science Fiction has been publishing exceptional imaginative fiction for almost two-thirds of a century. While there have been other terrific magazines in the field, F&SF nonetheless possesses a special cachet, in part because it has showcased so many ground-breaking and influential works. Volume 1 of this two-part “Greatest Hits” collection features, to name just four examples, “Flowers for Algernon,” “Harrison Bergeron,” “The Deathbird,” and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.” I would hope that there’s no real need to name the authors. If you don’t already know these stories and who wrote them, you have been missing out. Or, to put it another, more positive way, you are in for a treat.
The same goes for the contents of this new volume, which is just as good as its predecessor. In “The Country of the Kind”—a shocking and heartbreaking parable about loneliness and alienation—Damon Knight reveals the cruelty of a supposedly humane society, and how achingly pitiable a monster can be. Just as powerful, in its way, is Jane Yolen’s “The Hundredth Dove,” a fairy tale so perfect you’ll think you’ve known it all your life.
And those are only two of the stories. There are a couple of dozen others.
Some, like R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Cosmic Expense Account,” and George Alec Effinger’s “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything,” are brilliantly funny, totally gonzo. Others, such as Zenna Henderson’s “The Anything Box,” Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie,” Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag,” and Stephen King’s “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates,” are tender and beautiful and quite heartbreaking. Many are fast-paced and action-movie thrilling: try James Patrick Kelly’s “Rat”—about drug-smuggling in a future New York where people can genetically alter their bodies—or Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril,” a prefiguration of Reality TV shows and The Hunger Games.
To be taxonomic, the chosen stories can be loosely divided into two sorts: The plain and the fancy. In the first, the emphasis is on transparent diction and the clear unfolding of a plot. The stories mentioned in the previous paragraph are examples of this (with the partial exception of “Rat”). In “The Lincoln Train,” to take another example, Maureen F. McHugh simply describes a young Southern girl who is being relocated by the victorious Northern Armies to some western settlement. The language is direct and unadorned, the action crisply presented and—upsetting. What gives this alternate ninteenth-century history its power is how close it comes to real and all-too-familiar twentieth-century history. In “Have Not Have” Geoff Ryman’s language is comparably plain, yet timelessly serene, perfectly cadenced. Almost nothing of consequence happens: a dressmaker in a small Asian village describes her life and the people she interacts with. We gradually recognize that technological “progress” will alter the age-old routines, and that there will be consequent cultural and personal losses. But this knowledge is only lightly touched on. Nevertheless, the delicate beauty, the tonal equipoise of this story, hold the reader enthralled.
In the fancy stories, by contrast, language draws attention to itself. The mode of narration, the style, the diction, the whole storytelling apparatus struts and frets and shouts or whimpers. In such works we value the razzle-dazzle on the page as much as the turns of the plot. Jack Vance’s slightly world-weary elegance in “Green Magic,” the psychedelic “trip” that is Robert Silverberg’s “Sundance,” the restless baroque inventiveness of Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry,” the rat-a-tat Vietnam-memoir prose of Lucius Shepard’s harrowing “Salvador”—these stories triumph through their verbal firepower. Their style is their substance. Almost.
As one reads through these sixty years of great short fiction, one occasionally detects loose patterns. The tension of past and present that haunts Harlan Ellison®’s “Jeffty Is Five” is taken up again in Ryman’s “Have Not Have.” Jack Finney’s “The Third Level” focuses on a mysterious floor of Grand Central Station; in Stephen King’s story the dead congregate in what looks to be Grand Central Station before exiting by one of its many doors. Even as Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” sends up television’s excesses, so Kit Reed’s “The Attack of the Giant Baby” reworks the clichés of 1950s monster movies.
Some stories are masterfully composed yet tantalizingly oblique—Gene Wolfe’s revenge tale “The Friendship Light,” for example, or Elizabeth Hand’s confession of desolation and desperate yearning, “Echo.” Urban fantasist Charles de Lint is represented by his signature work, “The Bone Woman,” while Robert Reed’s “Winemaster”—a combination of sf thriller and metaphysical mystery, with a few touches from a famous Outer Limits episode—reminds us that he should be more widely acknowledged as one of the best short story writers in the field. Not least, the anthology includes masterly work from the multi-talented Bruce Sterling (the funny “Maneki Neko,” which extrapolates a future based on Japan’s traditional gift economy) and the contemporary English sf master, M. John Harrison, whose “Suicide Coast” probes what one might call the risky business of life.
Overall, though, one aspect of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction stands out: the continuity of excellence. While we shouldn’t over-privilege the present or neglect the achievements of the past, neither should we undervalue the artistic mastery of contemporaries such as Liu, Hand, Ryman, or Bacigalupi. Such writers of today are by no means pygmies, even if they do stand on the shoulders of giants. Nonetheless, the fantastic in their stories, while present, may sometimes seem distinctly attenuated. As Gary Wolfe and other critics have pointed out, the traditional boundary lines of genre are breaking down even as the world we live in is growing increasingly science fictional.
Together, the two volumes of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction will, if nothing else, persuade you that great imaginative fiction was being written in the 1950s—just as it is still being written in the 2010s. This is due, at least partly, simply because of the existence of F&SF, a home for virtuoso storytelling ever since Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas founded it in 1949. That’s still the case, magnificently so, under the editorship of Gordon Van Gelder. To this day, Fantasy & Science Fiction remains, like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or The Paris Review, one of the great fiction magazines of modern American literature.