I generally don’t like anthologies: there will be two or even three stories I like, and then along comes one that doesn’t work at all and it just kills my enjoyment of the whole project. So many different authors, dang it! How can any editor hope to pull them all together? And because of that, I can’t claim to be nearly as well-read in that subgenre as I really should be to be composing a “top 5” list. And yet.
And yet here we are, because twice in the last two months I’ve been reminded just how good SF anthologies can be, and I feel the need to share a few of my long-standing favorites, as well as a couple of new ones.
5. 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories. Some of the O. Henry-style twists are obvious to me now, but when I discovered this volume in grade school, it blew my head open. It was my first exposure to high-quality authored fantasy, and after a steady diet of He-Man/She-Ra cartoons my brain just about went into shock– not least because some of the fantasy stories weren’t afraid to slide into horror.
4. Dangerous Visions. Ah, Harlan. Harlan Ellison is worth a list all by himself, but his anthology has a historical significance and a vibrant force even forty-plus years later. This was a focal point for the “New Wave” of science fiction, a more passionate, involving approach than what had gone before and a style that’s inspired many of my best stories.
3. Flight. These days, it’s almost trite to say something “challenged the notion of what comics could be,” but Flight really deserves that label. Its stories embodied a kind of comics storytelling that had been seen before but never really celebrated, at least not in the U.S…. a style where the narrative served beauty rather than the other way around, full of bright colors, non-traditional subjects and infectious youthful optimism.
2. Machine of Death. I had the opportunity to submit to this exciting anthology and got a rare case of writer’s block, up against such short-form wunderkinds as Ryan North and David Malki, what could I possibly offer? And they were just the editors! The books “#1 on Amazon for a day” status is remarkable, but what’s truly amazing is how many different creative voices it’s gotten to contribute to a single concept– it’s like a Superman or Archie franchise, only much more imaginative.
1. The Nebula Awards Showcase. There are countless “Best Of…” anthologies out there somewhere, and the rival SF lovers’ Hugo Awards is coming out with an anthology again after a long absence from the market. But they’re going to have to go a long way to beat the Nebulas, which has been impressing hell out of me for the last several years. If you want your finger on the pulse of the best new ideas in science fiction and fantasy now, this is an excellent place to start.
There are so many more, though. What did I miss?
“Future on Fire” and “Future on Ice,” two anthologies of science fiction edited by Orson Scott Card. He gathered what he considered the more meaningful, significant, disturbing, engaging, and otherwise over-looked stories of the 80s. Absolutely wonderful books, that are very unknown.
“The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF,” edited by David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It’s an anthology of some of the greatest SF stories ever told.
It’s sort of guilding the lily, but ‘Again, Dangerous Visions’, is also excellent, and has the official *last ever* short story written by Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote plenty of novels afterward, but his short story in A,DV ‘The Big Space F*ck* (yes, that’s really the title) was the last short-form thing he ever did. All the short-story ideas he had after that were given to Kilgore Trout.
You can’t leave out “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_One,_1929%E2%80%931964
I’m a sucker for Ursula K. LeGuin – and thus have mad love for all her anthologies -but there are two that really stand out. First is Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences – gathering all her (as of 1987) ainmal and plant themed short stories interspered with her usual thought-provoking, enlightening and funny introductions, grouped in thematic categories, capped by the new (at the time) Novella Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight an eternal favourie of mine. The second is Changing Planes – the collected observations of a narrator using “The Sita Dulip method” which chanels “a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom” found in (pre-9/11) airports to change planes – no, not airplanes, Dimentions. The result has been justifiably very favorably compared to Gulliver’s Travels.
I’m very tempted to put Always Coming Home on here too -which is silly, because although it says it’s a novel and reads a bit like an anthology, it is in fact an Ethnography, and nobody will ever tell me different.
My favorite of Judith Merrill’s Best SF of the Year series was number seven, but it’s really the series as a whole* which is so remarkable. Number seven has, oh, at least a dozen stories, essays, cartoons, and poems, each of which bent my mind in their ways ranging from beautifully to badly. They really should be reissued.
There’s a volume of the Hugo Winners, edited by Isaac Asimov, maybe volume two. It had stories by Poul Anderson, Harlan Ellison, Anne McCaffery, Robert Silverberg and Philip Jose Farmer, each excellent in its own way, and especially Samuel R. Delany’s “TIme Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”.
Again, all those stories affected me deeply–I remember buying the book in some sort of general store/drug store in Canton, Oklahoma, and reading it in the motel room while my dad and I waited for a campsite to open up–and hitting the Delany story, in that context, there, in my early teens helped make me who I am today.
*Anyone with cheap reading copies of the first two volumes, let me know.
Isaac Asimov’s “The Complete Robot”. I’ve had it for a whi9le now, and I’m still working my way through it ;^^ It’s got a lot of great stories, though. Some will make you laugh (“Victory Unintentional” and “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”) and some will make you cry (“A boy’s best friend” and “The Bicentennial Man”). Either way, it’s a great read and I recommend it to any sci-fi fan who loves robots.