The Best of Ian McDonald, Ian McDonald. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848638-90-7, 536 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, Alastair Reynolds, ed. By Jonathan Strahan and William Schaffer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-766-0, $45.00. 784 pages.) Cover art by Dominic Harman.
Not So Much, Said the Cat, Michael Swanwick. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-228-9, $15.95, 288 pages). Cover art by Elizabeth Story.
Amaryllis and Other Stories, Carrie Vaughn. (Fairwood Press, 978-1-933846-63-0, $17.00.) Cover art by Elena Vizerskaya.
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Saga Press, 978-148145113090, $29.99, 816 pages.)
2016 was a strong year for short-story collections, by some of the best writers working at shorter lengths in the field.
I’ve published this review before, last year, when it turned out that the collection wasn’t actually available to be bought—so now that is for sale, I thought I run the review again, as the book I’m about to mention is one of the best collections of the year, perhaps the best, and one that shouldn’t be missed—The Best of Ian McDonald, a selection of some of Ian McDonald’s best work from 1988 to 2013. McDonald is not exactly an obscure name in the field, probably most core SF readers will recognize him, and he did win a Hugo Award in 2007 for “The Djinn’s Wife” (included here), but I’ve always felt that he doesn’t really get the level of recognition that he deserves, either. For my money, Ian McDonald is one of the best SF writers currently working in the field, perhaps one of the three or four top writers, and although he has written critically acclaimed novels, he does much of his best work at shorter lengths—so you have a treat in store for you with this hefty collection, and perhaps a revelation if you haven’t encountered McDonald’s work before. McDonald’s range is wide and varied, and well represented here, from his “Future India” stories to New Space Opera, from stories of an alien invasion of Africa to stories of the sexual interactions of Terrans with their alien conquerors, from sly superhero stories to Retro SF to YA stories set on a terraformed Mars, from high-tech future sports stories to tales of dangerous encounters with the creatures of Faerie. Nothing is weak here, but the best stories include the aforementioned “The Djinn’s Wife,” “Verthandi’s Ring,” “After Kerry,” “[A Ghost Samba],” “Toward Kilimanjaro,” “Winning,” “Digging,” and “The Queen of Night’s Aria.” McDonald has done some of his best work at novella length, and it’s too bad that practical length restrictions didn’t allow the inclusion of stories such as “The Little Goddess” or “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” but at least two of his best novellas are here, “Tendeleo’s Story” and “The Tear.” In my opinion, “The Tear” was the best SF novella of 2008, and probably worth the price of admission all by itself.
Another excellent collection is an enormous volume—784 pages—gathering some of Alastair Reynolds best work. I get the impression that Reynolds’s novels tend to sell better than McDonald’s do (certainly he struck a multi-volume deal last year for a number of novels for a price more than high enough to suggest that his publishers are betting that the novels may become bestsellers), but like McDonald, he also does some of his best work at shorter lengths. Like McDonald (and like contemporary Paul McAuley, whose 2013 collection A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley is another definitive collection that you ought to get if you want an overview of the best today’s SF can offer), Reynold’s often deals with stories that play out over a time-scale of thousands or even millions of years, and that cover immense vistas of time and space, often taking us from one end of universe to the other, and sometimes beyond, but I think it fair to say that Reynolds tends more toward traditional Space Opera of the old Superscience variety, especially in his novels, the kind of thing that once earned Edmond Hamilton the nickname of “Worldbuster” Hamilton or “Sunsmasher” Hamilton, than do McDonald or McAuley. Everything here is worth reading (and some of the stories, like “Zima Blue” or “The Water Thief” or “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter,” show him in a quieter, more personal, less Widescreen but no less effective mode), but the best stories include the three just mentioned above, plus “Troika,” “Beyond the Aquila Rift,” “Minla’s Flowers.” “Great Wall of Mars,” “Weather,” and “Thousandth Night.” Like McDonald and McAuley, Reynolds does some of this best work at novella length, and again, there was limited room for them, even in a book as big as this one. There was room for his wonderful novella “Troika,” though, which was little seen because of its appearance as an expensive small-press volume, but which I consider to have been perhaps the best novella of 2010.
While it’s moderately safe to say that Reynolds, McDonald, and McAuley are primarily science fiction writers (although all of them occasionally write different kinds of material), Michael Swanwick is a bit harder to pin down as to grouping. More creatively playful than Reynolds, McDonald, or McAuley, he produces a wide range of material, including science fiction (some of it “hard” science fiction), fantasy, the occasional horror story, fabulations, flash fiction, and whimsies and literary curiosities of all sorts, including flash fiction stories about every element in the Periodic Table, stories sealed in bottles, and even stories written on autumn leaves and scattered in parks. Unfortunately, he doesn’t usually write novellas any more, but he may be one of the best writers we have at short story and short novelette length, his stories having grown sparse, economical, and concise, and sharp enough to cut your throat without you even realizing what’s happening until after the fact. Many of the best of his recent stories are gathered in his most recent collection, Not So Much, Said the Cat. The collection features both science fiction and fantasy, but, being who I am, I like the science fiction stories the best, so my favorites here include “Passage of Earth,” “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled,” “The Scarecrow’s Boy,” “The Dala Horse,” “3 a.m. In the Mesozoic Bar,” “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” and “For I Have Laid me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”—in mood ranging from grim and bleak (and few can get bleaker than Swanwick) to stories suffused with Swanwick’s sly, razor-sharp wit.
Carrie Vaughn is by a considerable length the newest writer here, and has only moderately recently started to produce a lot of short fiction, having made her reputation before that with a series of bestselling Romantic Horror novels about the adventures of Kitty, a young werewolf who doubles as a DJ in the human world, but she already shows an impressive degree of expertise in the stories collected in Amaryllis and Other Stories. Vaughn also writes both science fiction and fantasy, with both collected here, but, again, being who I am, a lifelong science fiction fan, I like the science fiction the best, which means that my favorites here include “The Best We Can,” “Salvage,” “The Art of Homecoming,” “Astrophilia,” “Bannerless,” and “Amaryllis”—several of which have been Hugo finalists and appeared in various Best of the Year anthologies over the past few years.
A good case could be made, and many have made it, that Ursula K. Le Guin could be considered one of the best writers of the 20th Century, let alone one of the best genre writers. Certainly her impact on the SF and fantasy fields has been incalculable. She was writing seminal SF decades before McDonald, Reynolds, Swanwick, or McAuley started selling fiction, and before Carrie Vaughn was even born. Le Guin has always done much of her best work at novella length, which is what makes the publication of The Found and The Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin so significant. I consider her stories about the slave revolt on the planet Yeowe and its long-term social implications—“Betrayals,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” “A Woman’s Liberation,” and formerly collected in the book Four Ways to Forgiveness—to be Le Guin’s strongest SF work since her classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness reshaped the genre in the ‘70s. They are all included here, as are other fine novellas—some about Le Guin’s interstellar community, the Ekumen, including a few more Yeowe stories, some taking place in the world of her famous fantasy series, Earthsea, some unrelated to either series—such as “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” “Old Music and the Slave Woman,” “The Matter of Seggri,” “On the High Marsh,” and “Paradises Lost.” If you only buy one genre collection this year—and why aren’t you buying more, you cheap bastard? There’s plenty of good ones out there!—it should probably be this one.