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Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, eds. David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Tor, 9780765326003, $34.99, 576 pages.)

Twelve Tomorrows, ed. Stephen Cass. (Technology Review, Inc., $12.95, 189 pages.) Cover art by Richard Powers.

F&SF, September/October.

 

In my more than forty years working in the science fiction publishing industry, I’ve learned to expect a meme that crops up every ten years or so: “Science fiction has exhausted itself. There are no good new writers coming along anymore. The genre is finished!”

This time, it’s the turn of David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielson Hayden to refute this, with their new anthology, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, a huge reprint anthology featuring 34 stories published between 2003 and 2011 by writers “that came to prominence since the Twentieth Century changed into the Twenty-First,” stories that clearly give the lie to the idea that there are no good new science fiction writers coming along anymore. Here in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, some of these “new” writers, such as Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow, are already recognized as Big Name writers, others such as Elizabeth Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, and Hannu Rajaniemi, are well along in the process of establishing themselves as such, with multiple novels and major awards to their credit, and some, such as Ken Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias S. Buckell, and Vandana Singh, are just starting out, but will almost certainly be among the most recognizable names of the next decade.

This anthology clearly shows the continuing evolution of science fiction in the Twenty-First Century, as new types of people with new perspectives and new approaches continue to come into it, people who might not have fit comfortably into John W. Campbell’s largely white, male, middle-class, American stable of writers at the Astounding/Analog magazine of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. In addition to the usual flock of British and Canadian writers—Peter Watts, Charles Stross, Paul Cornell, Liz Williams, Ian Creasey, Karl Schroeder—the volume contains work by Indian writers such as Vandana Singh, Finnish writers like Hannu Rajaniemi, Caribbean writers such as Tobias S. Buckell, writers of Chinese-American ancestry such as Ken Liu and Yoon Ha Lee, and more women writers than you’d have probably seen in a book like this in the ‘40s and ‘50s, including, in addition to the ones already named, Rachel Swirsky, Marissa Lingen, Madeline Ashby, Jo Walton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Brenda Cooper, and Genevieve Valentine.

Such an anthology put together in Campbell’s day would certainly have had more stories in it about space travel and the exploration and colonization of other worlds, space warfare, contact with aliens, tales of the far future, and stories set on exotic alien planets than this one does (although that may say as much about the personal taste of the editors as it does about the current state of science fiction, since it would be perfectly possible to comb through stories published in the same period and find plenty of stuff dealing with those subjects). There are a few space-travel oriented stories here, notably the stories by David Moles, John Scalzi, James Cambias, and Peter Watts, and a few that involve contact with aliens, notably the stories by Watts, Neal Asher, and David D. Levine, but many of the stories stay closer to the present and many of them don’t leave Earth at all. Instead, we get a lot of stories about genetically engineered people, some so radically changed that we’d hardly recognize them as people at all (stories by Charles Stross, Liz Williams, Ian Creasey, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Cory Doctorow), a few that interrogate the nature of human consciousness itself and sometimes question whether it even exists (Daryl Gregory, Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow, Vandana Singh), some that deal with the exponentially expanding possibilities of information-processing and Virtual Surround technologies (Paolo Bacigalupi, Karl Schroeder), a few Alternate History tales (Jo Walton, Ted Kosmatka), and lots of stories about robots and sentient Artificial Intelligences of one sort or another—from Elizabeth Bear’s ancient, wearily compassionate war machine to the intelligent spaceships of John Scalzi and James Cambias to the human-mimicing dolls or companions or sexbots found in Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, Genevieve Valentine, and Madeline Ashby.

Hard to pick favorites with so many good stories on offer, but my personal selection for best stories in the book would include “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear, in which a dying robot in a devastated war-torn future teaches some of the human survivors how to become more human; “Finisterra,” by David Moles, a vivid adventure in which people colonizing huge floating islands, something like living dirigibles, in a layer of Earth-like atmosphere on a Jupiter-sized planet engage in internecine warfare; and “The Island,” by Peter Watts, in which a work-crew building a series of wormhole transport gates across the Galaxy encounters an unexpected obstacle—a living intelligent creature the size of a sun.

You could quibble with some of these choices. I’d like to have seen something here by Lavie Tidhar, who I consider to be one of the most exciting new SF writers of the last few years, as well as some work by Aliette de Bodard and Kij Johnson, and while the late Kage Baker certainly deserves to be here, I’m not sure I would have picked “Plotters and Shooters,” one of her more minor works, as the story with which to represent her. A few more such quibbles could be made with individual selections, but they are that—quibbles. Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will certainly be recognized as one of the best reprint science fiction anthologies of the year, and belongs in the library of everyone who is interested in the evolution of the genre.

Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Stephen Cass, is the second volume in a series of original SF anthologies published by the people who also produce MIT’s Technology Review magazine, following the first volume, 2011’s TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, also edited by Cass. Like the first volume, the twelve stories in Twelve Tomorrows are all solid core SF, most of them near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next twenty or thirty years. You won’t find any far future or flamboyant Space Opera stories here, which does give the volume a certain similarity if read all at once, but the literary quality of the individual stories is quite high, and, considered as an anthology, Twelve Tomorrows would certainly have to qualify as one of the year’s best SF anthologies to date, perhaps the best, certainly the most consistent in overall quality. There’s really nothing bad here, and the most minor stories would be major stories in some of the year’s other SF anthologies, but the strongest stories here are probably “Pathways,” by Nancy Kress, about a smart but uneducated woman taking part in an experimental program attempting to find a cure for the degenerative inherited disease that will inevitably kill her, “Transitional Forms,” by Paul McAuley, about a ranger patrolling the borders of a “Hot Zone” in which bizarre forms of artificial life have mutated and run riot, and “Zero for Conduct,” by Greg Egan, in which a young girl in a repressive near-future Iran makes a fundamental scientific discovery which could change the world, but who then must struggle to promulgate it (and use it to earn some desperately needed money) without drawing the dire attention of the authorities. There are also good stories here by Peter Watts, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ian McDonald, Allen M. Steele, and others—although as I say, nothing here is really bad, and the volume also contains stories by Brian W. Aldiss, David Brin, Cheryl Rydborn, Nancy Fulda, and Justina Robson, as well as an interview with Neal Stephenson and a gallery of cover art by the late Richard Powers. This doesn’t seem to be available in bookstores, so if you want it, you’ll probably have to mail-order it, either from www.technologyreview.com/sf or from Technology Review, Inc., One Main Street, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142. I have no idea if it’s available in ebook form, but the site may tell you.

The September/October issue of F&SF features three superior stories, two SF and one fantasy. The two first-rate SF stories are “Rosary and Goldenstar,” by Geoff Ryman, an eccentric and lyrical Alternate History concerning a different life-path for William Shakespeare than the path he followed here, and “Hhasalin,” by Susan Palwick, the sad and poignant story of an intelligent alien kept as a household pet by the humans who have conquered her world, told from her perspective as she slowly becomes aware of the true parameters of her existence. The superior fantasy is a novella by Rachel Pollack, “The Queen of Eyes,” a sequel to Pollack’s also-exceptional “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls,” from the July/August 2012 F&SF. Jack Shade is a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed. In “The Queen of Eyes,” he becomes reluctantly involved in a desperate and dangerous case, trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of one of the chief Powers of the Earth, the eponymous Queen of Eyes, an event which has thrown reality itself out of balance. This story is perhaps less emotionally involving than the previous story, which concentrated more centrally on Jack Shade’s own personal tragedy, but Pollack’s invented mythology is rich and lush and strange, making creations like The Queen of Eyes seem like mythological figures we’ve been familiar with all along, and the double vision of the world possessed by Jack Shade, so that he sees a taxicab on the Manhattan street as a taxicab but also at the same time as the Piss-Lion that it actually is, is fascinating. This is certainly one of the most vivid and unique fantasy stories published this year, and one of the best, if not the best.

The rest of the September/October F&SF doesn’t come up to this level of quality, but still contains some good stuff. Eugene Mirabelli tells an entertaining fable about the real difference between mortals and immortals (in addition to that Not Dying thing) in “The Shore at the Edge of the World,” Oliver Buckram gives us a literal—and risible—Space Opera in “Un Opera Nello Spazio,” Rob Chilson takes us to a Vancian far-future in “Half as Old as Time,” Albert E. Cowdrey tells a typically sly Cautionary Tale about the dangers of getting what you want in “The Collectors,” and Daniel Marcus, in a too-rare appearance, lets us eavesdrop on the events that happen “After the Funeral,” another sly story, although one that seems to end just when it’s really becoming interesting.

All in all, probably the best issue of F&SF to appear so far this year.