The word may be overused these days, but there’s no way around it: we inhabit the age of the curator. Given the vast, bewildering wealth of newly digitized information, representing huge jumbled treasuries of global culture from all eras, the necessity for experts who can employ discernment, knowledge, and taste to select and arrange entertaining and educational samplers, along chosen themes, from the overwhelming hoard has increased immensely. While not precisely creators, curators can in their own way create works of art, just as an interior designer can fashion beautiful domestic compositions out of furniture and fixtures made by others. Moreover, a curator can sometimes categorically and freshly define or limn a subject by assembling the essentials in a way never before imagined or accomplished. A painter’s whole career, for instance, might be transformed or reevaluated as a result of a particular museum or gallery show. At their most effective, curators create — or revise — canon.
But long before the Internet, science fiction readers were deeply familiar with a specific kind of professional literary curator: the anthologist. Out of the welter of published fiction, they would select a table of contents for their books of reprints: books that sought to define an era, a movement, a genre, or a style — or that would simply justify an eye-catching cover. Best-of-the-year compilations would even attempt to discern trends or progress and chart the ascent of new stars and the decline of old ones.
The science fiction anthology boasts a long and glorious history (much of it unfolded in a passionate volume of essays by the recently departed Bud Webster, Anthopology 101), wherein these books have shaped the field as much as they have reflected it. (I omit here all discussion of original anthologies, those featuring brand-new stories, since they always functioned more like traditional magazines in book form, with their custodians acting as traditional commissioning editors.)
Don Wollheim, a pivotal figure in the field, gets credit for the first mass-marketed SF anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943). After him, the floodgates opened. Raymond Healy and J. Francis McComas stepped forward with the landmark Adventures in Time and Space in 1946. Anthony Boucher assembled A Treasury of Great Science Fiction in two volumes in 1959, a set which, due to its being a perennial loss-leader sign-up inducement for the Science Fiction Book Club, assumed integral places in the libraries of several generations of readers. For his whole career, Groff Conklin held the title of SF anthologist par excellence, making a specialty out of mining the back issues of the pulps for gems that he could offer in general-purpose volumes like the Big Book of Science Fiction (1950) or in thematic tomes like Great Science Fiction About Doctors (1963). At the same time, all the major magazines — Galaxy, Analog, F&SF — had their own line of triple-distilled reprint collections, often annual. Judith Merril’s Best of the Year volumes, from 1956 to 1967, dominated discussion of how the field could grow and mature. The year after that series ended, 1968, Merril crystallized the New Wave movement by putting together England Swings SF. Another project from that same year, Damon Knight’s One Hundred Years of Science Fiction, has relevance to a new book at hand.
Certainly among the leading lights of contemporary anthologists in the SF field, the names of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer shine brightly. In recent years they have brought us definitive volumes on Steampunk, the New Weird, Time Travel, and Feminist SF. Now, with their latest project, The Big Book of Science Fiction, they seek to capture the dimensions of the whole famously heterogeneous genre. Like wrestling with Proteus, the task requires stamina and determination, and victory is not assured from the outset. But the prize would be a single volume that can essentially define the genre and be used by newbies and veterans alike to chart a lifetime’s reading. (Academics looking for a textbook for SF 101 will also benefit.) And surely a new selection of stories capturing the archetypical essence of science fiction will illuminate the genre’s past, present, and future.
The VanderMeers make their remit and methodology explicit in a comprehensive, passionate, and rigorously logical and convincing introduction that could also serve as a mini-survey of SF during the whole twentieth century. (They limit themselves, wisely I think, to this 100-year timespan. For while the current century is far enough along to allow us to render some judgments and observations, and has indeed supplied a large number of fine stories, we are still a bit too close to the current section of the road to identify its landmarks of significance.) To crudely nutshell their thesis: the old distinctions and battles — between literary fantastika and genre fantastika; between fine writing and rough-edged ideation; between plot-driven narratives and metafictions; between male technophilia and female sensitivities; between English speakers and “foreign” writers — are all useless, distracting, misleading, counterproductive, and inutile. We need a new synthesis to accurately capture the essence of science fiction.
Thus the stated goal of the editors becomes “building a better definition of science fiction.” (And how better to accomplish that laudable end than by showing, not telling: providing dozens of examples of the field’s variety until an emergent portrait bootstraps itself?) Without “discarding or privileging” the consensus, marketplace-dominated mode established by Hugo Gernsback and heirs, they intend to incorporate luminaries such as Borges and Jarry in roles as essential as Asimov and Heinlein. That this strategy and outlook harks back to Judith Merril’s own eclectic, inclusionary tastes is indicated by the book’s dedication: “The editors dedicate this book to Judith Merril, who helped show us the way.”
The result is an altered genre landscape where you stand on a familiar mountaintop and find the view of the plains below all changed. Moving onto the next mountaintop, a similar newness prevails. Maybe from a familiar valley, a new peak obtrudes. This is pretty much the consensual country we once knew, but with additional districts patched in, harmonizing to greater or lesser degree.
Over 100 chronologically arranged stories here — many non-English ones appearing newly or unprecedentedly translated — are accompanied by author-centric notes that further explicate motifs and precedents, connections, and dialogues, all in pursuit of the new vision of the field. Naturally, this review can only leapfrog among a few selections.
And so we start with H. G. Wells and his “The Star,” that classic tale of a destructive wandering cosmic object that invokes the fabled “sense of wonder”; humility at humanity’s negligible status; science as unriddling the cosmos; and respect for the resilience of our species — all classic traits of science fiction. An excellent opener.
Immediately, the VanderMeers put their adventuresome Big Tent tactics into play. For the second entry is “Sultana’s Dream,” by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein (1880−1932), a figure entirely missing from the familiar SF canon. This early feminist utopia could certainly have appeared in one of the more open-minded pulps and replaces a brick in the edifice of SF that we hardly realized was missing.
From here we move on in stately alteration down the timestream. For every several pulp-derived entries, we get a more literary offering or a non-Anglo outlier. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” butts up profitably against “The Microscopic Giants” by Paul Ernst. Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station” consorts with “The Visitors” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. J. G. Ballard’s “The Voices of Time” takes “The Astronaut ” by Valentina Zhuravlyova for a spin around the dance floor. This fruitful interweaving of different traditions and literary objectives goes a long way toward validating the VanderMeers’ broader definition of the genre.
This anthology is so capacious and well stocked that it could be subdivided into several theme anthologies. Particularly strong are the selections dealing with aliens. Dick, Lafferty, Le Guin, Bishop, Jones — easily a score of stories, all with different angles of attack, touch this theme. A fine book of posthuman futures could be assembled from the stories by Sterling, Banks, Pohl, Bunch, Bear, Tiptree, et al. Take all the Russian authors out and stick them between hardcovers, and you have a fine survey of modern Russian SF, and the same could be done with the Spanish-language or Asian writers included. There are not quite enough French and Scandinavian names here to compile a separate book but plenty in context. (Altogether missing, however, is the grand Italian heritage of science fiction. Oh, for a snippet of Calvino’s Cosmicomics at least!) Postmodern storytelling styles and structures are represented in numbers large enough for a separate New Wave collection as well. But the VanderMeers, like masterful disc jockeys at a rave, keep up a vibrant, oscillating mix that never falls into a predictable groove from one entry to the next.
With the major writers herein represented, the editors have generally chosen items that are typical and representative and conducive to their thesis, although there can always be a difference of opinion on what might be best from a writer’s catalogue. Should Asimov have been represented by a robot story perhaps? Maybe Silverberg would have shone better with one of his more intense pieces rather than the humorous “Good News from the Vatican . . . “? But this is a game (beloved of my literary tribe) that has no actual winning conditions, and the selections made by the VanderMeers certainly do not mislead or fail.
Another fine aspect of their curation is in bringing forth forgotten gems or treasures. Among others, “Student Body” by F. L. Wallace, “The Hall of Machines” by Langdon Jones, “Plenitude” by Will Worthington, and “Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” by S. N. Dyer can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the more illustrious items here, and serve as exemplars of what SF can do in ways that complement the stuff from more famous writers.
In their individual story prefaces, the VanderMeers draw profound and entertaining connections among the various pieces and chart the larger forces at work in the genre while they vividly limn the authors and their careers. They exhibit an almost judicial impartiality and objectivity in their observations, although one amusing quirk does obtrude. So enamored of the work of Stepan Chapman are they that his name surfaces in a dozen or more prefaces as a baseline of magnificence. By the time the reader reaches Chapman’s own selection — “How Alex Became a Machine” — he or she will probably be expecting to encounter the best story in the universe. It proves merely marvelous.
In a project like this — which, however ginormous, boils down to selecting one meager story to represent every individual year of the century’s vast production — there is always the matter of who was excluded. No Heinlein, no Bester, no van Vogt, Varley, or Vance. No Atwood, no Brunner, no Stapledon, no Rucker, no Malzberg, no Zelazny, Morrow, or Herbert. A mirror-image volume — probably not quite as awesome but not negligible, either — could be compiled out of the excluded writers. One author — William Tenn — inexplicably gets two entries. Both fine, but someone thus had to be dropped who might have otherwise fit in. The final story, “Baby Doll” by Johanna Sinisalo, appears to derive from 2002, and is thus technically outside the timeframe of the book and might have given way for an older peer.
But ultimately, we have to cease playing “what if” and take The Big Book of Science Fiction as it is given to us, on its own terms. Doing this, we discover a treasury of magnificence and excellence along those trademark vectors that science fiction has claimed as the parameters of its own particular storyspace.
If I could alter one small thing, it would be to have closed the book with Cory Doctorow’s “Craphound,” which is third from last as the table of contents currently stands. Then you’d have SF’s twentieth-century history bookended symbolically by Wells and Doctorow. Victorian patriarch and his mutant offspring, antithetical along so many surface dimensions, yet united at the foundational level by their adherence to and love for the powerful, rebellious, visionary toolkit and territory represented by modern science fiction.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2aqxOEh
Sig Nordal 