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EclipseThree, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-162-1, $14.95, 289 pages.) Cover art by Richard Powers.

When It Changed, Science into Fiction: An Anthology, Geoff Ryman, ed. (Comma Press, 978-1-90558-831-92, 273 pages.)

Postscripts 19, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing, 878-1-848630-19-2.) Cover art by Edward Miller.

Postscripts 20/21, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing)

Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse Books, 978-1-59582-146-1, $19.95, 419 pages.) Cover by Tina Alessi.

Poe, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Solaris, 978-1-84416-652-7, Pounds Sterling 7.99, 523 pages.) Cover by Darius Hinks.

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds. (Viking, 978-0-670-06141-9, $16.99, 207 pages.) Cover art by Esao Andrews.

The Vampire Archives, The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, Otto Penzler, ed. (Vintage Crime, 978-0-307-47389-9, $25.00, 1,034 pages.) Cover art: poster from the film “Le Cauchemar de Dracula.”

By Blood We Live, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-156-0, $15.95, 485 pages.) Cover Art by David Palumbo.

 

Judged on literary merit alone, without consideration of what genre the stories belong to, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse 3 is clearly one of the best anthologies of the year, with almost all of the stories excellently crafted line-by-line. And yet, I don’t think I’ll be the only genre reader to put the book down feeling vaguely disappointed. There’s very little science fiction here, and most of what is here is soft, near-future SF, no hard science fiction, no space opera, no far-future stuff, only one story that even takes place off Earth. There’s not even that much genre fantasy, although there are a few. Instead, many of the stories are slipstream. Now, I can admire in an abstract way the technical skill that goes into writing slipstream, but I rarely have any strong emotional response to it—it’s not providing what I read science fiction and fantasy for. So, as a result, many of the stories here leave me cold, in spite of the cleverness of craft that went into them.

The best story in Eclipse 3 is one of the science fiction stories (of course, with my prejudice toward SF, I would think that, wouldn’t I?), Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things,” a very near-future story, set maybe a decade from now at most if the economic recovery falters and fails, a quiet but deeply human story about a woman in an impoverished world struggling to get by while at the same time somehow hold on to her basic decency. The other science fiction stories are also good: Nicola Griffith’s “It Takes Two” is another very near-future story, about the development of behavior-modification techniques that if they aren’t secretly already here, will certainly be along the day after tomorrow, and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Galapagos,” an intense, scary technohorror piece, the only story here with a spaceship in it, rather claustrophobic in spite of taking place in outer space.

The best of the fantasy stories is Daniel Abraham’s “The Pretender’s Tourney,” although it has no obvert supernatural element in it, merely being set in an imaginary world much like our own medieval past, rather like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series or Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint stories. There’s also a somewhat predictable but evocatively rendered autumnal fantasy by Peter S. Beagle, “Slight of Hand,” a sensitive reimagining of the Secret Garden scenario, “A Practical Girl,” by Ellen Klages, a strange, anti-romantic mermaid story by Elizabeth Bear, “Swell,” a look at a really small dragon by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, “Mesopotamian Fire,” and a horror story by Nnedi Okorafor that does a good job of drawing on African folklore, “On the Road.” Those second-generation Sword & Sorcery stories we were talking about last month are represented here by Jeffrey Ford’s “The Coral Heart,” which adds a splash of flamboyance and violence to a book whose dominant mood is quiet, almost somber.

Of the slipstream stories, the strongest for me was Karen Joy Fowler’s disturbing “The Pelican Bar”. With its young female protagonist, a case could be made for considering Ellen Klages’s story to be YA, but although it too has a young female protagonist, nobody’s going to mistake Fowler’s story for YA for long—it’s one of the bleakest and most emotionally grueling stories of the year, in fact. At the end, Fowler drops a sly hint that would allow you to read the story as SF—but I found that unconvincing.

Eclipse clearly remains one the most important anthology series in the genre, especially with the deaths of Fast Forward and The Solaris Book of Science Fiction, but I hope he puts some more SF in the next volume, as he did in Eclipse Two, which was more to my taste.

Another eagerly anticipated but somehow faintly disappointing anthology, even though almost all of the stories are science fiction this time, is Geoff Ryman’s When It Changed. The idea here was to match SF stories with non-fiction articles by actual scientists discussing the real-world feasibility and consequences of the ideas which had inspired the stories. It sounded great, and had a good roster of authors, and I was really looking forward to it—but when I finally finished the book, my overall reaction was one of mild letdown. Not that the stories here are bad—in fact, there are a couple of pretty good ones—and almost all of them are worth reading, but somehow the majority of them lack that certain flair that lifts decent work to a level of excellence…and I found most of the articles by the scientists disappointingly superficial as well, clearly written for an audience less sophisticated and scientifically knowledgeable than an experienced genre audience can be expected to be. The best stories here are Ryman’s own “You,” an intricate infinite-regress cycle of video blogs, and Adam Roberts’s “Hair,” about a clandestine program of biological engineering that might change human destiny. Also good is Gwyneth Jones’s “Collision,” although it may be somewhat confusing to those readers not already familiar with her previous “Buonarotti” stories.

Postscripts, the British magazine now reinvented as an anthology series, has a similar mix as Eclipse Three—typically, little science fiction, especially of the hard science or offplanet variety, some steampunk, a few fantasy stories, the occasional Twilight Zoneish mild horror piece, lots of slipstream, everything literate and very well-crafted, but, for me at least, often uninvolving. (To be fair, Postscripts did a special “all science fiction issue!” last year, which, although it contained a number of fantasy stories in spite of its claim, did feature a number of core SF stories, and even a couple of off-world stories set on other planets. This year, though, SF was again a bit scarce in Postscripts.)

There’s a fair amount of slipstream, for instance, in Postscripts 19, but it does also feature two good SF stories, Matthew Hughes’s “Enemy of the Good,” one of his Jack Vance-like stories about the misadventures of master thief Luff Imbry in an interstellar society, and Chris Beckett’s “The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9,” in which a professional tourist is shaken and psychologically scarred by his encounter with an alien religion, as well as a steampunk Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Daniel Abraham’s “Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance,” and a violent and gripping fantasy, reminiscent in mood of Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger,” set in an American Old West where settlers must uneasily co-exist with demons, M.K. Hobson’s “The Warlock and the Man of the Word.”

Postscripts 20/21, a big Double Issue, has pretty much the same kind of feel and mix. The best stories here are probably Chris Roberson’s “Edison’s Frankenstein,” a steampunk tale of murder and mysterious doings at the Columbian Exhibition in a world where Edison’s inventions have been supplanted by strange alternate technologies, and Robert Reed’s “Tests,” one of the few SF stories here, another of several stories that have appeared in the genre in the last couple of years examining the ultimate implications of the Fermi Paradox. Stephen Baxter contributes a long steampunk take on the traditional British Boarding School story in “The Phoebean Egg,” Lisa Tuttle takes us along with a curious kind of recruiter making his rounds in a grimy future world in “Ragged Claws,” Matthew Hughes give us another brisk and entertaining Luff Imbry adventure in “Another Day in Fibbery,” and Marly Youmans tells a lovely Bradburyesque fantasy in “The Horse Angel.” I usually don’t like metafiction, but Paul Park’s “The Persistence of Memory, or, This Space For Sale” was done with such an expert and subtle touch, that I surprised myself by liking it anyway.

Ellen Datlow’s two latest horror anthologies, Lovecraft Unbound, a mixed original (mostly) and reprint anthology, and Poe, an all-original, both collecting stories “inspired” by the work of their respective authors, are a bit out of my usual purview, but I’m going to mention them anyway, because, well, they’re by Ellen Datlow, and a list of the year’s prominent anthologies really should include them. Actually, although they’re ostensibly horror anthologies, both books do contain a science fiction story (although the argument can and has been made that Lovecraft’s own work is in itself de facto science fiction, with the monsters actually coming from different dimensions or times or from space rather than of supernatural origin): in Lovecraft Unbound, a chilling story about an interdimensional pest-control officer and his unusual helper, “Mongoose,” by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, and in Poe, a During-the-Holocaust modern update on Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, “Lowland Sea,” by Suzy McKee Charnas—both among the best stories in their respective volumes.

Of the rest of the stories in Lovecraft Unbound, the strongest is probably Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell,” with other good work by William Browning Spencer, Lavie Tidhar, Holly Phillips, Richard Bowes, Marc Laidlaw, and others, and good reprint stuff by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Michael Chabon, and others. Of the rest of the stories in Poe, the best stories are probably Lucius Shepard’s “Kirikh’quru Kronkundor” and Pat Cadigan’s “Truth and Bone,” with other good work by Sharyn McCrumb, Glen Hirshberg, Laird Barron, Gregory Frost, Kim Newman, and others.

Datlow’s other 2009 anthology, co-edited with Terri Windling, Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, is quite a different sort of book, YA fantasy rather than horror. It seems to be aimed at a very young audience, younger than is usual with Datlow & Windling YA anthologies, and is certainly considerably less dark and less sophisticated than most of their other collections of fairy tale retellings have been. Best story here is Kelly Link’s “The Cinderella Game,” the only story with any real bite, although I also enjoyed Peter S. Beagle’s “Up the Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers” and Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest.” There’s also interesting work by Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Jane Yolen, and others.

The Vampire Archives, The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, edited by distinguished mystery anthologist Otto Penzler, is an anthology of reprint vampire stories (this probably doesn’t come as a surprise, once you get past the title), weighing in at a whopping 1,034 pages of extremely small type, consisting of eighty-five stories, by authors ranging from Sheridan Le Fanu and Ambroise Bierce and Arthur Conan Doyle to Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, through Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch and Frederic Brown, and on to Tanith Lee and Dan Simmons and Stephen King. There is also an extensive, not to say exhaustive, 110-page bibliography of other vampire fiction, both novels and short stories. Sharing bookstore shelves with this behemoth is another large anthology of (mostly) reprint vampire stories, By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams, which features reprint work by authors such as Garth Nix, Tad Williams, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, plus an original novella by John Langan, and original stories by Ross E. Lockhart and Sergei Lukyanenko.

Although there are duplicated authors (Tanith Lee’s in both books, as are Stephen King and Brian Stableford), out of a combined total of 121 stories, only one story, Anne Rice’s “The Master of Rampling Gate,” is used in both anthologies—which gives you some idea how many vampire stories there’ve been! Penzler’s anthology has a stronger academic emphasis, with more historical work, while Adams’s anthology mostly concentrates on contemporary work; the earliest copyright date on the acknowledgement page is 1977, while most of the stories were published in the Oughts.