Book Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2015

The Year's Best Science Fiction,Thirty-Second Annual Collectionedited by Gardner DozoisSt. Martin's Griffin, 2015The mighty “Year's Best Science Fiction” series of doorstop anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois has reached thirty-two volumes, which will seem well nigh incredible to who remember eagerly buying the latest editions back when they were in single digits. An entire generation of science fiction writers and readers has by now grown up reading the roughly three dozen stories Dozois assembles every year from his customarily broad spectrum of sources and finding in those stories enough stimulation and sheer wonder to get them through the dry patches of arid steampunk and wan Game of Thrones homages.As is his custom, Dozois enumerates that broad spectrum of sources in his magisterial opening “Summation” of the year that was. I've had occasion in the past to gripe a bit at some aspects of these summings-up, even while noting that they're unique in the whole breadth of the genre. The problem is the very tone of complete comprehensiveness Dozois tries to sound: he knows everything there is to know about the state of sci-fi and fantasy publishing from year to year – who's leaving which jobs, which obscure Australian web-zine with twenty subscribers is putting out some good work, which notable figures in the field (virtually all of whom he knows) have recently died, etc. And if these introductory essays stuck to that already-large ambit, they'd be invulnerable – but Dozois always feels compelled to comment on elements of the larger sci-fi universe about which he might not be quite so well-informed. It can make him sound fusty (as when he refers to Guardians of the Galaxy as “a good-natured update of the classic space opera movie”) or slightly clueless (as when he mentions the J. J. Abrams-directed Disney Star Wars movie and mystifyingly adds, “many hard-core fans are already outraged by [it] even though it hasn't come out yet. Preemptive outrage, I guess” - when hard-core Star Wars fans have reacted to the Abrams film with the closest approximation their cramped, virginal souls can manage to ecstasy).But it hardly matters, since such comments tend to come at the end of every “Summation,” by which point any reader will already be skipping pages, eager to get to the main banquet itself. And those readers won't be disappointed – or at least, not often disappointed. True, this volume gives the honor of double entries to only two authors, Ken Liu and Elizabeth Bear, even though they're two of the weakest authors in the collection, each prone to flat prose and easy cliches. And true, fan favorite Cory Doctorow is here represented by a lackluster 60-page story called “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (not to be confused – not that it's likely – with the great story of the exact same name by Robert Heinlein, although I noticed no explanation whatsoever for the duplication – will Doctorow's story in next year's collection be called “Stranger in a Strange Land” or “Dune”?) in which a man named Greg worries that he has “the big C”:

Bone cancer can take a week to diagnose. A week! I spent a lot of time trying to visualize the slow-moving medical processes: acid dissolving the trace of bone, the slow catalysis of some obscure reagent, some process by which a stain darkened to yellow and then orange and then, days later, to red. Or not. That was the thing. Maybe it wasn't cancer. That's why I was getting the test, instead of treatment. Because no one knew. Not until some stubborn molecules in some lab did their thing, not until some medical robot removed a test tube from a stainless steel rack and drew out its contents and took their picture or identified their chemical composition and alerted some lab tech that Dr. robot had reached his conclusion and would the stupid human please sanity-check the results and call the other stupid human and tell him whether he's won the cancer lottery (grand prize: cancer)?

Prose like that serves as yet another reminder that authors who touch the pitch of Young Adult fiction scarcely ever come away lily white, but such sour notes are, as usual, rare in these hundreds of pages. Most of these stories exhibit just the combination of nerve and imagination that's been attracting Dozois' scanning eye for three decades, and it's more noticeable than ever this year how many of those voices are from writers born outside the US and UK, such as Israeli writer Lavie Tidhar (author of The Violent Century, among many other things), whose “Vladimir Chong Chooses to Die” is set in Tidhar's interconnected “Central Station” continuity and concerns, as its title indicates, a man who opts to die in a future society where simply dying, with no artificial means of survival, is a rare and exotic act of individuality. Vladimir is suffused with memories while he's discussing his options with a mortality specialist:

Vlad regarded the doctor for a moment. Silence had become a part of him I recent years. Slowly the memory boundaries tore and recall, like shards of hard glass, fragmented and shattered in his mind. More and more he found himself sitting, for hours or days, in his flat, rocking in the ancient chair Weiwei once brought home from the Jaff flea market, in triumph, raising it above his head, this short, wiry Chinese man in this land of Arabs and Jews. Vlad once loved Weiwei. Now he hated him almost as much as he loved him. The ghost of Weiwei, his memory, still lived on in his ruined mind.

The main character in India-born Vandana Singh's story “Entanglement” (bizarrely called a novella by Dozois, even though it's 33 pages long) is likewise haunted by “old world”-style family:

Her grandfather died during her freshman year of high school. He was the one who had given her her Inuk name, Enuusiq, after his long-dead older brother, so that he would live again in her name. The name held her soul, her atiq. “Enuusiq,” she whispered now, trying it on.

Perhaps predictably (although there have been years where it very conspicuously didn't happen), the best stories in this anthology are by some of the oldest, most experienced hands – in this case, Michael Swanwick and Nancy Kress, and in this case both writing “First Encounter” tales with decidedly dark humor edges, Swanwick in “Passage of Earth” about creatures that look like monsters:

“The body is bluntly tapered at each end, and somewhat depressed posteriorly. The ventral side is flattened and paler than the dorsal surface. There's a tripartite beak-like structure at one end, I'm guessing this is the mouth, and what must be an anus at the other. Near the beak are five swellings from which extend stiff, bone-like structures – mandibles, maybe? I'll tell you, though, they look more like tools. This one might almost be a wrench, and over here a pair of grippers. They seem awfully specialized for an intelligent creature ...”

… and Kress, in “Yesterday's Kin” (which does more in 70 pages than most science fiction novels can do in 570), about seemingly benign aliens who of course turn out to be much more problematic:

Contact was immediate, in robotic voices that were clearly mechanical, and in halting English that improved almost immediately. The aliens, dubbed by the press “Denebs” because their ship cam from the general direction of that bright, blue-white star, were friendly. The xenophiles looked smugly triumphant. The xenophobes disbelieved the friendliness and bided their time. The aliens spent two months talking to the United Nations. They were reassuring; this was a peace mission. They were also reticent. Voice communication only, and through machines. They would not show themselves: “Not now. We wait.” They would not visit the International Space Station, nor permit humans to visit their ship. They identified their planet, and astronomers found it once they knew where to look, by the faintly eclipsed light from its orange-dwarf star. The planet was in the star's habitable zone, slightly larger than Earth but less dense, water present. It was nowhere near Deneb, but the name stuck.

This volume has three dozen visions to explore, and thanks to Dozois' practice of offering hundreds of URLs and contact details for all of the various publishing venues he haunts for good stuff, the potentials for discovery are multiplied and multiplied. These are volume to treasure and re-consult as each new one appears and subtly alters the landscape Dozois has been tending for so many years.