The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

This most recent installment of Dozois' long-running Year's Best Science Fiction series offers, as always, a fine assembly of thirty-two well-crafted short stories.  Dozois' penchant for apocalyptic fiction continues its gentle decline, but the anthology nevertheless hosts a number of stories inspired by contemporary events: terrorism is a persistent theme, as is environmental disaster (manmade and otherwise).  That being said, Dozois' authors are far more interested in exploiting the imaginative possibilities of life under frightening--or frighteningly different--conditions than they are in making easy political points. 

The least satisfying story in the collection is a trifle by Gregory Benford, "Bow Shock," which delves into the world of a UCI astronomer on the tenure track.  At the end, he presumably gets both tenure and the girl; unfortunately, while academics and/or UCI alumni will be amused by Benford's account of professional rivalry, he doesn't present the astronomer's work in an especially compelling fashion.  Elizabeth Bear's and Sarah Monette's "The Ile of Dogges," one of the shortest stories in the collection, has a charming conceit--visitors from the future rescue one of Ben Jonson's satires from oblivion--but the idea perhaps needed a bit more fleshing out for it to be wholly successful.  Readers of David D. Levine's "I Hold My Father's Paws" will either roll their eyes at the protagonist's plight (how does one deal with a father undergoing species reassignment, anyway?) or find the outcome oddly touching; I admit to falling in the latter category.  And Daryl Gregory's "Damascus," in which "conversion" really is a symptom of illness, works reasonably well until the very abrupt ending.

Other stories revisit the classics or conventions of SF and other genres.  The first story in the collection, appropriately enough, is Cory Doctorow's "I, Row-Boat," which transforms Isaac Asimov's "Robbie" (anthologized in I, Robot) by emphasizing not how human beings interpret and react to the silent robot, but instead how the very vocal (and very sentient) Robbie the Row-Boat analyzes his relationship to posthumankind.  In a world where everyone is a potentially disembodied consciousness, does it really make sense to think of humans and robots as fundamentally different in kind? By the same token, does disembodiment alleviate any of the usual traumas of human existence? At a less ambitious level, Michael Swanwick reworks Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924) by setting it on Venus and infusing it with sexual tension; unfortunately, the story abruptly deflates at the end.  Two of the most successful stories in the volume cross SF topoi with the Gothic.  John Barnes' "Every Hole is Outlined" is a ghost story, set on a ship manned by crew members who range from emotionally damaged to autistic.  The story unfolds in cool, deliberately languid prose that echoes the characters' cautious relations with each other.  Ships' captains, we are told, are "notorious for spending much time explaining unnecessarily," but that is simply a part of a larger rite of speech: "Even ship people say so, and for them to say that is saying something, for ship people are all that way.  They like to let the talk be slow and affectionate and thorough.  They acquire a habit of listening to things they have heard many times before, and already know by heart, just to indulge the person who needs to speak; and, so that the ears of the others stay friendly, most of them learn not to talk very much except at formal occasions" (568-69).  In this context, death and the ghost-world offer hope for spontaneous, novel connections that are endlessly deferred in life.  There is more Gothic in the collection's final story, Alastair Reynolds' "Nightingale," which also features the endlessly popular topos of the insane computer (e.g., Arthur C. Clarke's HAL 9000 or the electronic sadist of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream").  While Reynolds' story seems to start out innocently enough, genre-wise, as a straightforward adventure tale, it develops its theme of the madness of war by incrementally ratcheting up the horror; the conclusion is genuinely terrifying, all the more so for being largely left to our imaginations.  For sheer effect, it's the most satisfying story in the collection. 

A number of stories share "I, Row-Boat"'s and " I Hold My Father's Paws"' interest in alternative ways of thinking about human consciousness, especially in a world where "human" might no longer bear its original meaning.  Walter Jon Williams' "Incarnation Day" puts a new twist on the coming-of-age story: the child narrator is, in fact, software, who will have no civil rights as such until she is "incarnated" in a material body of some sort.  Both adolescent rage and mental disability have potentially deadly outcomes when the child is literally (not figuratively) property.  Greg Egan's "Riding the Crocodile" offers something of a riposte to Jonathan Swift, in that its virtually immortal characters nevertheless manage to find an antidote to boredom; nevertheless, the story also suggests that a utopia of intergalactic peace might also be effectively stagnant.  And Mary Reynolds' "Home Movies," which offers a different spin on the idea of "virtual reality," explores the personal consequences of selling off one's own memory banks.

Of the apocalyptic and dystopian stories, three in particular stand out.    Robert Charles Wilson's "Julian: A Christmas Story," written in faintly antiquarian style, is another coming-of-age tale, set after the oil reserves have entirely collapsed and technology has regressed to the nineteenth century.  The ex-United States is now a theocracy, supervised by the Dominion--not itself a Church, but in charge of approving various church sects.  The situation is not so much neo-Victorian as it is post-Victorian.  Underneath the placidly conformist surface lies the ongoing threat of raging warfare and deep antagonism to anything different (including Judaism, as we briefly discover).  Wilson's story tracks the growing discontent of both the aristocratic Julian, who is explicitly a new Julian the Apostate, and the narrator, who slowly discovers his own vocation as a writer.  In this world, books themselves might prove dangerous.  Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the most consistently interesting authors in Dozois' collections, sets his "Yellow Card Man" in a deeply dystopian Bangkok filled with demoralized Chinese emigrees.  The title really refers to two different characters: the displaced protagonist, a formerly wealthy businessman reduced to unskilled labor and suffering from PTSD, brought on by the horrible deaths of his entire family; and the clerk he once fired, now apparently managing to survive and even thrive.  As we soon discover, the survival instinct trumps any sort of communal identification, let alone altruism.  Finally, Robert Reed's eerie "Good Mountain," set on a distant planet where the continents and islands are entirely wood, ponders the nature of hope in an entirely hopeless situation.  As the world quite literally burns, the characters flee inside a giant worm, but most fall prey to one woman's fantasies of perfect safety.   Reed turns the situation into a meditation on language itself and the ways in which we vivify dead words, even at our own peril: "But words...what they are...they're just sounds and scribbles.  It's people who give them meaning. Without us, the poor things wouldn't have any life at all" (349).  Instead of the Biblical apocalypse, which promises to unlock all meaning, Reed's apocalypse barrels towards the disappearance of meaning itself.

Comments

[TheSnarkWasABoojum]

An anecdote to boredom?

Like so: a paean to ennui?

[Miriam]

Oops! Fixed. A reasonably amusing typo, as typos go...