When I started work on The Year’s Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection, back in 1983 (the book appeared in 1984), I was thirty-six, just past having been a hot young Turk in the ’70s, beginning to brown and curl a bit, my son was fourteen, most of the famous SF writers of the Campbellian Golden Age of the ’40s and the Gold/Boucher Age of the ’50s were not only still alive but available to be talked to at most science-fiction conventions, and most of my peers and contemporaries were, if not new writers anymore, still on the young ends of their careers and not really well-known yet … and I knew several young hopefuls, like a local fan called Michael Swanwick, who had only four or five sales under their belts. It would be two years yet before I took over the editorship of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Now, as I sit typing in 2004, I’m an old man, my son has two children of his own (six and eight, respectively), most of the Big-Name writers who dominated the genre then are dead, and my peers and contemporaries, those of them who are still alive, are no longer Hot Young Turks, but rather the Big-Name writers of the field, and they are as gray and wrinkled and sagging as I am. Michael Swanwick is a multiple Hugo-winner. And my almost-twenty-year career as editor of Asimov’s is behind me and being coolly evaluated by critics and historians. Time washes you away in a flood, and by the time you can turn your head and look back, the beach has dwindled to a thin tan line behind you. There is no further shore.
So, after having completed twenty-seven Best-of-the-Year anthologies over a period of twenty-eight years (the time and number discrepancy is because I turned out six volumes of an earlier Best-of-the-Year series in the ’70s, for Dutton, before starting on this series—which started out with the now-defunct publisher Blue jay Books, and switched to St. Martin’s Press in 1987, with the Fourth Annual Edition, when Bluejay folded), it seemed time for a retrospective, a look back.
By the time you read these words, there will have been twenty-one volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction published. Those twenty-one volumes together contain 6,306,634 words of fiction, written by one hundred and eighty different authors. When the idea of putting a Best of the Best retrospective anthology together first occurred to me, it seemed like a straightforward task, perhaps even an easy one. It was not. In fact, this may have been one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had to do (as far as putting anthologies together is concerned anyway; shoveling coal in the hot sun is considerably harder by any absolute standard, believe me). For one thing, in order to figure out what stories in those volumes were really the best, I had to reread a significant proportion of those 6,306,634 words, especially as I found that I barely remembered some of the stories from earlier volumes.
Doing all that reading was not the hardest part, though. Looking back through the twenty-one volumes only served to remind me how many good stories had appeared in them over the years. Even with a retrospective volume as large as this one, I couldn’t possibly get all of them, or even a significant proportion of them, into the book. Even a book twice the size of this one wouldn’t be big enough to include all the stories that probably should be included. Since all of those stories were to my taste in the first place—which should hardly come as a surprise—and since taste was the usual winnowing-screen I would employ in selecting which stories to use from someone else’s anthology or magazine, how was I going to cut the huge crop of contenders down to a manageable number?
For starters, for symmetry’s sake, I decided to limit the choice to the first twenty volumes. In the unlikely event that I live long enough to produce an additional nineteen volumes, perhaps we can have a Best of the Best II. Then, although novellas have always been among my favorite stories in the Bests, and there are easily a dozen or more that ought to be in the multidimensional, infinitely-expansible version of this book (Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg,” Frederic Pohl’s “Outnumbering the Dead,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Woman’s Liberation,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Mars,” William Barton’s “Off on a Starship,” Lucius Shepard’s “R&R,” Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain,” Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Judith Moffett’s “Tiny Tango,” Greg Benford’s “Immersion,” Greg Egan’s “Oceanic,” Ian McDonald’s “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” John Kessel’s “Stories For Men,” and so many more), here in the real world where practical considerations of length exist, I clearly had room for no more than a few of them, if I wanted to get a large selection of authors representative of twenty years’ worth of Best volumes into the book.
I was still left with the most difficult problem, though—how do you decide what the word “Best” means in this context? Do I go for the best-known stories, stories such as Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain” and James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur,” which have been reprinted very widely and which most people have already seen, or do I go with other good stories by the same authors that haven’t been as ballyhooed? If I didn’t use the most famous stories, many people were going to be disappointed that they weren’t there. On the other hand, if I used them exclusively, I’d produce a book full of stuff that everyone’s already read and that’s largely duplicate elsewhere. The only solution I could see was to walk a tightrope between the two, putting in some of the most famous stories and in other cases picking more obscure and unfairly overlooked alternatives instead—although I’m aware that I’m taking a chance of pleasing nobody with this approach.
The biggest decision I came to, though, was that I had to pick the stories that had made the strongest impression on me as a reader, stories that really moved or excited or impressed me, both on first reading years ago and on rereading now, stories that made me put down the book when I finished them, and stare off through the air, and shiver, remembering the wonders I’d just experienced—and that I had to pick them with no (or as little as possible, anyway) consideration for demographics, for whether I had enough big-name writers, or enough women writers, or enough Brits, or whatever, or whether or not I’d selected stories from all the important markets that ought to be represented. So don’t even bother to tell me that there’s too many stories from Asimov’s here (although several of them are from before I took over as editor, and Asimov’s has been the dominant American SF magazine of the ’80s and ’90s, under three different editors), I already know. Or that there’s not enough stories from Interzone, or that there ought to be something from Science Fiction Age. I picked the stories I had the strongest emotional reactions to, and let the chips fall where they may, as far as demographics were concerned, although no doubt I’m buying myself a lot of trouble with the critics by dong so. I have no doubt that a different editor could have gone through this same pool of stories and come up with a totally different selection of stories that would have been equally valid and equally defensible as deserving the title Best of the Best, that in fact no two readers would come up with the same list if asked to select one. Hell, a day earlier or a day later, I might well have come up with a different list myself.
But it’s reassuring to remember that there really have been a lot of good stories published in this series over the course of two decades. If ever the term “embarrassment of riches” applies, it applies here. So I like to tell myself that even if I’d closed my eyes, stabbed out a finger, and picked stories at random, you’d probably still be getting a pretty good anthology out of it.
In closing, I’d like to thank Jim Frenkel, my editor at Bluejay, who not only proposed the idea of me doing a new Best-of-the-Year series in the first place, after my Dutton series had died, but who insisted that it be a really big fat volume, as big as possible; I was against this idea, thinking that people wouldn’t want to spend the extra money for a big hardcover volume, but over the years almost every positive review has mentioned the size of the Best as a selling point and most reader feedback indicates that people like it big, so he was right and I was wrong. If he’d listened to me, the series might have died long ago. I’d also like to thank my own editors at St. Martin’s over the years, Stuart Moore, Gordon Van Gelder, Bryan Cholfin, and, today, Marc Resnick.
I’d also like to thank the often-unsung acquisitions editors who had the good taste to buy these stories in the first place: Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, Ed Ferman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gordon Van Gelder, David Pringle, Peter Crowther, Constance Ash, Stanley Schmidt, Greg Bear, David Bischoff, and Patrick Nielson Hayden, as well as all the editors over the last twenty years who bought all the stories in those twenty volumes that didn’t happen to make the cut for this particular retrospective. I’d like to thank the writers, who labored long into the night over keyboards in lonely rooms to write all the stories in this anthology, and all the other stories in the twenty volumes of the Best, and all the good stories that didn’t make it into any of them in the first place—because there’ve always been more good stories than we have room to use, every year from the beginning to now.
And lastly, I’d like to thank you, the readers, for buying and appreciating the volumes of this series, and thus making it a success. May you continue to enjoy future volumes, and may you enjoy the one you hold in your hands at the moment.
20 Years of
THE YEAR’S BEST
SCIENCE FICTION