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Robots: The Recent A.I. eds Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-318-1, $14.95, 406 pages). Cover art by Vladislav Ociacia.

War and Space: Recent Combat, eds Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-337-2, 380 pages). Cover art by Brian Christensen.

Armored, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Baen, 978-1-4516-3817-2, $7.99, 576 pages). Cover art by Kurt Miller.

Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-315-0, $15.95, 401 pages). Cover art by Scott Grimando.

Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Random House Children’s Books, 978-0-3758-6830-6, $16.99, 432 pages).

Epic: Legends of Fantasy, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-084-1, $17.95, 612 pages). Cover design by John Coulthart.

 

Robots: The Recent A.I., edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, is a strong mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, recent stories about robots and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ‘50s). The one original story is a fine one, Lavie Tidhar’s “Under the Eaves,” a bittersweet romance between a human girl and a “robotnik,” part organic/part mechanical soldiers created to fight in a recent war and then abandoned to beg on the streets. This is one of a series of stories that Tidhar has been writing in the last couple of years about “Central Station,” an immense spaceport built near present-day Tel Aviv where spaceships to the Moon, Mars, and the Outer Solar System come and go, and the passengers, some altered in strange ways, mingle in the ancient neighborhoods below with the locals—many of whom are immigrants themselves from waves of migration decades or centuries past. It’s been clear for awhile now that Tidhar was strongly influenced by the late Cordwainer Smith, and that’s nowhere clearer than in these “Central Station” stories, that layer in references to other locations, characters, and stories from Tidhar’s busy interplanetary future, and often throw in poems and songs as well; the towering, cloud-piercing Central Station itself is clearly a homage to Smith’s own Earthport, from Smith’s Instrumentality stories, with an updated, gritty, multi-cultural ambience all its own. Of the reprint stories in Robots: The Recent A.I., the best are probably Catherynne M. Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast,” Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline,” Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot,” Ian McDonald’s “The Djinn’s Wife,” Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape,” Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Droplet,” and Aliette de Bodard’s “The Shipmaker,” but there are also good stories here from Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year.

Another good mixed reprint (mostly) and original SF anthology, by the same editorial team, is War and Space: Recent Combat, edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, an anthology of recent Military SF, although their definition of “Military SF” seems a bit broader than it sometimes is. As with Robots: The Recent A.I., there is one original story here, Sandra McDonald’s “Mehra and Jiun,” which isn’t as strong as the Tidhar story in Robots, but which does an effective job of depicting the uneasy alliance of two warring enemy soldier stranded together on the hostile surface of Europa. Of the reprint stories, the best are Ken MacLeod’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?,” David Moles’s “A Soldier of the City,” Charles Coleman Finlay’s memorable novella “The Political Officer,” Yoon Ha Lee’s “Between Two Dragons,” Paul McAuley’s “Rats of the System,” and Tom Purdom’s “Palace Resolution,” but there’s also strong stories by Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Geoffrey A. Landis, Cat Rambo, and others. Another good value for the money.

Armored, an all-original SF anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, is a bit more traditional an assemblage of Military SF—although even here, some of the stories, like those by Carrie Vaughn and David D. Levine (although they’re among the best in the book), stray somewhat from the ostensible theme: stories about armored Fighting Suits, more or less mobile, personal, wearable tanks, probably first popularized by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Starship Troopers, seen subsequently in lots of SF, including movies such as Avatar, and currently hovering right on the edge of becoming an actuality; certainly it won’t be more than ten or fifteen years at most before we have them prowling the battlefields in the real world. The best stories here are David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell’s “Jungle Walkers,” Alastair Reynolds’s “Trauma Pod,” Ian Douglas’s “The Johnson Maneuver,” Simon R. Green’s “Find Heaven and Hell in the Smallest Things,” Karin Lowachee’s “Nomad,” and Sean Williams’s “The N-Body Solution,” as well as, although they stray a bit far from the theme, Carrie Vaughn’s “Don Quixote” and David D. Levine’s “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang”—but the book also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Genevieve Valentine, Michael A. Stackpole, Tanya Huff, David Sherman, and others.

I tried to sell my own version of the next anthology for over a decade, only to have publisher after publisher turn it down on the grounds that nobody would buy it because “science fiction fans weren’t interested in rock ‘n roll, and rock ‘n roll fans weren’t interested in science fiction”—so it’s with a certain amount of jealousy that I congratulate Paula Guran for managing to sell her own version and actually get it into print: Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy. Some of the best stories here were even slated to appear in my own unsold version: Howard Waldrop’s “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Feast of Saint Janis,” Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On,” Norman Spinrad’s “The Big Flash,” Edward Bryant’s “Stone,” Lewis Shiner’s “Jeff Beck,” Lucius Shepard’s “...How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song...”, Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently”—classics all, and all stories that still hold up well even after the twenty or thirty years or more (the oldest story here is Spinrad’s, from 1969) that have passed since their initial publication. Rock On, however, in addition to the oldies, also contains more recent hits by Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Denton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly.

My favorite original fantasy anthology of the year is Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology about witches, Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, which means that Strahan has pulled off, in my own estimation, anyway, the difficult task of editing both the best fantasy anthology and the best science fiction anthology (Strahan’s Edge of Infinity, reviewed here last month) of 2012. Not surprisingly, since it’s aimed at a YA audience, Under My Hat is not as substantial and chewy as Edge of Infinity, but it has a very pleasing wit and lightness of tone about it (for the most part, there are a few darker stories) that ought to appeal to the adult fantasy-reading audience as well. The best stories here include Peter S. Beagle’s “Great-Grandmother in the Cellar,” Margo Lanagan’s “Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow,” Ellen Klages’s “The Education of a Witch,” Garth Nix’s “A Handful of Ashes,” Jane Yolen’s “Andersen’s Witch,” and Holly Black’s “Little Gods,” although there are also fine stories here by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Jim Butcher, M. Rickert, Patricia A. McKillip, Isobelle Carmody, Tim Pratt, Tanith Lee, Charles De Lint, Frances Hardinge, and Diana Peterfreund, as well as a poem by Neil Gaiman.

Another substantial fantasy anthology, this one all reprint, is Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. This makes an interesting companion volume to David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, which I reviewed earlier this year, although Epic is pitched as being an anthology of “Epic Fantasy” stories rather than as a “Sword & Sorcery” anthology. It’s sometimes difficult to make a distinction between “Epic Fantasy” and “Sword & Sorcery”—both are set in invented fantasy worlds, both have thieves and sword-wielding adventurers, both take place in worlds in which magic exists and there are sorcerers of greater or lesser potency, both feature fantasy creatures such as dragons and giants and monsters...and yet, it seems to me as if there is a subtle distinction to be made between the two, although it will need a more astute critic than me to articulate it in a satisfactory way. If that line does exist, it’s subtle enough that it’s easy to make mistakes in classification, and this anthology makes a couple of them: it seems to me that Michael Moorcock’s Elric story “While the Gods Laugh” can hardly not be a Sword & Sorcery story, call it what you will instead, considering that Elric’s roots go all the way back to the creation of S&S as an identifiable subgenre and Moorcock himself has long been considered one of its founding fathers. Similarly, Melanie Rawn’s “Mother of All Russiya” is neither Epic Fantasy nor Sword & Sorcery, but rather a well-crafted historical fantasy (with a minimal fantasy element at that) set in 10th Century Russia (or a proto-Russia, still in the process of assembling).

Quibbles about classification aside, this is a meaty, solid anthology that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fantasy styles, enabling them to decide which worlds and authors they like best; having gotten a taste of that author’s work, they can then go on to seek out more of it—and in most cases here, there’s a lot of similar work to be found, since most of these authors are very prolific. The best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is clearly George R.R. Martin’s “The Mystery Knight,” an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but also excellent are Robin Hobb’s “Homecoming,” Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Road to Levinshir,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word of Unbinding,” Tad Williams’s “The Burning Man,” Orson Scott Card’s “Sandmagic,” and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Alchemist,” and the book also features good work by Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N.K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, Mary Robinette Kowal, and the aforementioned Michael Moorcock and Melanie Rawn.