Gardner Dozois’s annual anthology, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, began publication in 1984 and by now is a series that comprises twenty hefty volumes, which require close to three and a half feet of shelf space. You will find that three-and-a-half-foot expanse of Dozois anthologies in any science-fiction library worthy of the name. Their presence is essential, for the Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the most fertile twenty years in the history of the science-fiction short story. Volume by volume, each anthology is an exciting and memorable collection. Taken all in all, though, they form a whole rather greater than the sum of their parts: an extraordinary editorial achievement, a unique encyclopedic text. And now we are given a book that offers us The Best of the Best—editor Dozois’s selection of the finest of the hundreds of stories that make up those twenty anthologies.
In no way does this book, good as it is, replace those twenty anthologies. No one volume possibly could. It serves, rather, as a marker, a signifier, which by the luminous excellence of its material reminds us of the magnitude of Gardner Dozois’s total accomplishment in assembling this wondrous series.
The science-fiction short story’s illustrious history goes back a long way. Beyond doubt the Greeks and the Romans wrote them—tales of robot warriors and imaginary voyages, some of them voyages to the moon. Closer to our own day, Hawthorne, Poe, and Verne produced what was unquestionably science fiction. More than a century ago H. G. Wells, the first great modern master of the form, filled the popular magazines of his day with dozens of s-f stories—“The Country of the Blind,” “The Crystal Egg,” “The Star,” and many more—of such surpassing inventiveness that they have held their own in print ever since. From 1911 on, the Luxembourg-born gadgeteer Hugo Gernsback began publishing science fiction as a regular feature of his magazines Modern Electrics and Science and Invention, and it proved so popular that in 1926 Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted entirely to it. (Because new stories were so hard to find at first, Gernsback filled many of the early issues with the work of Poe, Verne, and Wells.) Amazing built an avid readership and before long had a vigorous pair of competitors: Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories. Those were followed by a host of others, gaudy pulp magazines with names like Startling Stories, Planet Stories, Cosmic Stories, and Super Science Stories, and then, after World War II, came a group of less flamboyant-looking magazines aimed at more sophisticated readers, most notably Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Though much of the material in the science-fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s was crude and ephemeral, some was not, and, inevitably, book publishers began to collect the best of it in anthologies. The first such volume was Phil Stong’s The Other Worlds (1941), which drew on the pulps for stories by Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, Harry Bates, and other well-known s-f masters of the day. Two years later, the knowledgeable Donald A. Wollheim edited The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, with stories by Sturgeon, Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, and more. Then, just after the war, came two major collections, both of them still of major significance: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, and The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin. The Healy-McComas book, studded with classics like Asimov’s “Nightfall” and Don A. Stuart’s “Who Goes There?”, was drawn largely from the pages of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, the dominant magazine in the field during the 1940s. The Conklin anthology also leaned heavily on Campbell’s magazine, but cast a wider net, with extensive representation of stories from the previous decade, including many from the Gernsback magazines, as well as work by Poe, Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
As the science-fiction magazines grew in number and quality in the post-war years, an inevitable next development was the coming of anthologies devoted to the best stories of a single year. The first of these was edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, a pair of scholarly science-fiction readers with long experience in the field, and it was called, not entirely appropriately (since it drew entirely on material published in 1948), The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949.
Science fiction then was a very small entity indeed—eight or nine magazines, a dozen or so books a year produced by semi-professional publishing houses run by old-time s-f fans, and the very occasional short story by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein in the Saturday Evening Post or some other well-known slick magazine. So esoteric a species of reading-matter was it that Bleiler and Dikty found it necessary to provide their book, which was issued by the relatively minor mainstream publishing house of Frederick Fell, Inc., with two separate introductory essays explaining the nature and history of science fiction to uninitiated readers.
In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors of The Best Science Fiction: 1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both later incorporated in The Martian Chronicles; Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story “In Hiding;” an excellent early Poul Anderson story, one by Isaac Asimov, and half a dozen others, all of which would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by the modest sales standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for another decade or so.
Toward the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the Year anthology edited by Judith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines founded, shows like Star Trek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.
When word went forth in 1983 that one more Year’s Best anthology was being assembled, this one under the editorship of Gardner Dozois, it was reasonable to expect a creditable job. Dozois was, after all, a capable and well-known writer himself, who had begun his career precociously with a short story in 1966 and from 1971 on had brought forth a great deal of impressively powerful work; he had edited a string of theme anthologies (A Day in the Life, 1972, Future Power, 1976, Another World, 1977, and many others); and for five years beginning in 1977 had taken over the editorship of Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year anthology. But no one, I think, was quite prepared for the magnitude and comprehensiveness of The Years Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection, the 1984 inaugural volume of the new Dozois anthology, nor could anyone have anticipated that the series would, in time, come to be the defining summation of a glorious era in science fiction.
I have the first volume of the Dozois series before me now. It looks surprisingly like the most recent one: a thick book (575 pages; the twentieth volume has 648) that announces its name in bold letters emphasizing the words SCIENCE FICTION, proudly asserts that it offers “Over 250,000 words of Fantastic Fiction” (the subhead on the most recent volume reads, “More than 300,000 words of Fantastic Fiction”), and lists on its cover the names of thirteen of its twenty-five contributors.
Those contributors were a stellar group, of course: Poul Anderson, Kim Stanley Robinson, George R. R. Martin, Joe Haldeman, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Dan Simmons, Avram Davidson, R. A. Lafferty, etc., etc., etc. Some, like Bear and Willis and Simmons and Robinson, were just entering their years of greatness. Some, like Davidson and Lafferty, were nearing the end of important careers. Taken all together, the stories represent a shrewd cross-section of what was already a potent period in the history of the s-f short story, a period that would see even greater accomplishments a couple of years later when Dozois became editor of the ranking s-f monthly, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
But that first volume was not distinguished merely by the excellence of its fiction. What gave it special importance and, eventually, immense historical value, was the sixteen-page essay “Summation: 1983,” in which Dozois provided a penetrating, closely analytical account of the year’s activities in the world of science-fiction publishing: comings and goings among editors and publishers, sales figures for best-selling books, circulation figures for magazines, thematic trends in current science fiction, news of awards and conventions, comments on recent s-f movies, obituaries. No previous best-of-the-year anthology had provided anything comparable. Each of the nineteen subsequent volumes has had a similar summation section, each at least as lengthy as the first and some much longer indeed; in and of themselves they form a continuing chronicle of the evolution of science fiction in the late twentieth century that will be of value to critics, historians, and readers for decades to come.
The stories chosen by Dozois in these first twenty volumes also constitute a statement about the nature of the s-f short story in that two-decade period—a statement filtered through the sensibility of just one reader, of course, but a highly informed one, steeped in the history of the field, imbued with a sense of science fiction’s value both as entertainment and intellectual stimulation, and further augmented by the editor’s own innate knowledge, as a skilled practitioner himself, of the art of the short story. Over the years Dozois’s story-picking expertise has been confirmed by reader approval, demonstrated through the great number of Hugo awards conferred on Dozois-chosen stories and by the many awards given to the anthology itself.
Dozois’s task as anthologist was complicated, in an odd way, when he became editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1985. Asimov’s had already established itself as the outstanding magazine of the field by then, but under Dozois’s guidance it attained an even more powerful position of dominance, as is shown by the unparalleled fourteen Hugo awards for Best Editor that he received during the nineteen years of his stewardship of the magazine. John Campbell’s Astounding was similarly dominant in its day, more than half a century ago—but Campbell was not also the editor of a Best of the Year anthology. When Healy and McComas, in 1946, chose twenty-five of their thirty-three stories from the Campbell Astounding, no one was particularly surprised or upset: everyone knew that most of the superior stories of the era had been published there. And, since science-fiction writers tend naturally to gravitate toward their era’s top magazine, a similar concentration of the best work began appearing in the Dozois-edited Asimov’s. But Dozois as anthology editor could not allow himself to draw as extensively on his own magazine as Healy and McComas had drawn on Campbell’s, lest his book seem merely self-promoting; and so he was faced with the perplexing necessity of finding worthy stories for his anthology that had originally appeared in magazines competitive with his own.
Examining a few randomly chosen volumes of the Dozois series, we can see how well he managed this tricky task. The seventh volume, published in 1990, contains twenty-five stories, of which just nine originated in Asimov’s: an admirable show of objectivity. The eleventh volume, from 1994, includes only seven Asimov’s items out of twenty-three. The twentieth volume, released in 2003, shows an eight-for-twenty-six ratio. Surely the practice of this sort of discipline required Dozois to eliminate from his anthology a great many stories from his magazine that must have seemed as worthy of reprinting as the ones he did choose for the book; but the fact remains that he compelled himself to look far and wide for stories and the contents pages of his anthologies display a broad range of fiction from every appropriate source in the field.
One does see a certain group of authors appearing regularly in volume after volume: Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Ian McDonald, John Kessel, Nancy Kress, Lucius Shepard, Mike Resnick, Greg Egan, Walter Jon Williams, and four or five others. The presence of such a cast of constant favorites would hardly be a surprise in any ongoing series of anthologies, which, after all, represent by definition the personal tastes of the series’ editor; but in fact Dozois’s little group of regulars were chosen for one anthology after another primarily because they were consistently doing the best work in the field. New writers joined the group every year: Robert Reed, for example, an unknown writer when the series began, came in with the ninth volume and has scarcely missed one since. The contents page of the twentieth volume gives us Maureen F. McHugh, Charles Stross, Alexander Irvine, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Coleman Finlay, and three or four more whose names would have meant nothing to readers a decade or so ago, but who can be expected to turn up on future contents pages of the Dozois anthology with great regularity in the years to come. More than thirty years after he first edited a science-fiction anthology, Gardner Dozois still maintains the ability to spot fresh new talent.
And now, to mark the completion of the first twenty years’ run of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Dozois has selected The Best of the Best. Every writer whose work is included here knows what an immense honor it is to be chosen. For Gardner Dozois himself the book is the capstone of two decades of remarkable work. Let him revel in the pleasure of knowing that he has given us, here, a volume that takes its place instantly among the classic science-fiction anthologies of all time.