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Loading... Science Fiction: The Best of 2003by Jonathan Strahan (Editor), Karen Haber (Editor)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A war fought with the use of time travel, intelligences trapped in a computer program, a man whose synesthesia conjures up a kindred spirit, and a sentient house awaiting its master's return are just a few of the imaginative and fascinating concepts contained in this anthology. Some of the stories seemed more fantasy than science fiction, but I enjoyed almost all of them. A very satisfying collection. My reaction to reading this anthology in 2004. "Introduction", Karen Haber -- Short statement explaining what markets the editors scoured for stories to include and Strahan's role in this and future anthologies. "The Fluted Girl", Paolo Bacigalupi -- This story has a fairy tale air to it since it's set in a dwelling described as a castle and features a put upon young girl. The story has a couple of good points. The first is the satiric -- if economically implausible -- idea that entertainers have sort of become like the patricians of Republican Rome or Renaissance lords -- the providers of patronage and public goods in a world where taxation and political power have been removed from the masses. (It seems implausible because if they are that poor, have no source of income outside of patronage, how do the masses provide the money to pay their entertainer overlords?) The second point is the image at the center of the story: the protagonist and her twin sister have had their bodies modified, with hollow bones amongst other things, to literally be musical instruments which, in an erotic lesbian display of fingering, fondling, dancing, and caressing, are played by each other. Their owner hopes their novelty will get her the money to refuse the entertainment mogul who surgically created her beauty and his notion of recording her every sensation. "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman -- This story is from an anthology built around the bastard concept of crossing the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes mythos with H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos: Shadows Over Baker Street ed. by Michael Reaves and John Pelan. Gaiman pulls the stunt off. “Flowers from Alice”, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross -- Like a lot of Stross I’ve read, this story is concerned with the transition from human to post-human. Here a man about to be married is bothered by an old girlfriend. He regards her antics as so post-human, and the conversations and pre-marital disputes and cold feet between him and his fiancé are described. It turns out, in a bizarre -- but logical -- twist at the end that the narrator is sort of half-way through the transition to post-human because his fiancé is just a sex-changed clone of himself. Eventually both the narrator and his fiancé marry the ex-girlfriend and post-human Al -- who obligingly makes copies of herself. This story didn’t do much for me. It’s another example of Stross’ bizarre twists on family life due to nanotechnology, information science, and biotech. However, casual sex changes have been around since at least John Varley and the addition of cloning an alternate sex version of yourself, while conceptually novel (at least to my knowledge), and having sex with them didn’t do much for me dramatically. Another problem is that I just don’t buy the plausibility of recording minds and uploading and downloading them. If I’m expected to suspend my disbelief, I want something more exciting, more of a payoff, than a domestic drama -- say space opera. “The Tale of the Golden Eagle”, David D. Levine -- This story was pleasant enough and reminded me a bit of Ann McCafferey’s The Ship Who Sang in that it involved a mind being cybernetically implanted in a ship. There is a bit of the air of the fairy tale as we see the mind of a golden eagle implanted in a ship, the ship scrapped when made technologically obsolete, the horrible years of suffering as the mind lived in a sensory deprivation purgatory on a trickle of power, her resurrection as a wonderful automaton female who is won in a gambling match. The gambler at first wants to use her to power his ship, but she loves her new body so much that he puts his mind in the ship and the eagle/automaton is its captain. Its a nicely told story though nothing conceptually novel. “Confusions of Uñi”, Ursula K. Le Guin -- Most “best of” anthologies seem to have one or two stories where you wonder what the editors were thinking. This is one of those stories. I’ve read some other stories set in the same universe, a universe built around the punning conceit that, in airports, you can change astral type planes as well as airplanes. I liked the one or two others I read in this series, but this was a pointless exercise in describing a place of changing geographical juxtapositions. Its only redeeming feature was an occasionally witty sentence. “Jon”, George Saunders -- I approached this story with trepidation once I found out it was from The New Yorker, but it was actually fairly good, better than a lot of mainstream literary attempts at sf. To be sure, Saunders uses sf for social satire, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and it’s a time honored tradition. Here, the narrator is one of the elite teens, the “Tastemakers & Trendsetters” (they even have their own trading cards) who spends his day evaluating various products and commercials -- commercials directly loaded onto a hard drive surgically implanted in his skull. While this has saved him from a life of squalor and poverty, it has left him with poverty of another sort: the inability to express himself in anything but cliches and quotes and metaphors from the ads he's spent most of his life viewing. However, when he falls in love with a fellow Tastemaker and fathers his child, he must decide whether he wants to follow his love to the world outside where he’ll be a unhip, poorer nobody -- with residual brain damage from removing the hard drive (supposedly only temporary). This being a literary story, of course he opts for poor true love, natural stimulation, and reality. The best part was the witty snatches of commercials for products real and imagined “Legions of Time”, Michael Swanwick -- I don’t know if the title alludes to Jack Williamson’s Legion of Time stories or not since I’ve never read them, but this tale of how a widow of the Great Depression (I liked that choice for a character) becomes the leader and all the members of the Legion of Time, an organization dedicated to fighting the Aftermen. The story mixes the temporal solipism of Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstaps”, time wars a la Friz Leiber and Poul Anderson, and the human evolutionary stages a la Olaf Stapledon. If the story itself leaves you a little cold with the unexplained transcendence of Ellie Voigt to the Legion of Time, the other details are well done. I particularly liked the talking clipboard which, by the very questions it asks in trying to determine a time traveler’s when of origin, reveals something of the future. It’s a clever expository device. Like a fair amount of Swanwick’s short fiction, this is part of an ongoing genre dialogue only this time with several different sub-genre’s at once. I liked the two sides, the Aftermen and the Rationality, both commanding obedience by compulsion though its described, in the Rationality’s case, as irresistible rhetoric. “Calling Your Name”, Howard Waldrop -- As usual, this is a Howard Waldrop alternate history, and it is an alternate history that features a lot of alternatives to the pop culture of our history though here the emphasized point of departure is the history of Richard Nixon. The rationale of the story -- man propelled into an alternate history by being shocked by a table saw -- makes it sf by courtesy only though the rationale of travel via a burst of electricity also being the the basis for L. Sprague de Camp’s sf classic Lest Darkness Fall. Still, this story had a point to it. First the man must struggle to adopt to the new world he finds himself in. Second, he hatches a plan to return to his world. It almost works. In fact, it works splendidly because he returns to a world similar to his timeline but where his wife never died. For once, Waldrop squeezes some emotion out of his story. "Bumpship", Susan Mosser -- This was a skillful story on many levels. The narrative technique used is somewhat problematic. It's first person narration in the form of answers to a journalist's questions. Since this story is a character study, it works. Plotwise it also works because the narrator has been commanded by a superior in the Atmospherics Corporation to grant the executive's nephew an interview. The unspoken motive is that the narrator will provide good propaganda for resisting reform of Exclusion Rights by comparing the horrors of the status quo with the even worse ones of the past as suffered by the narrator. I suspect Mosser and Kelly Link, the editor of the anthology the story first appeared in, were also attracted to the narrative technique because they see it as a virtuoso one seldom employed in sf. I think it is hard to pull off but not as naturalistic as some think. After all, you're not hearing the questions so you're getting an artificial distortion of a dramatic situation. The journalism setup was a natural justification for that often contrived dramatic revelation of a dark secret from a person's past. The story belongs to the sub-genre of colonization horror stories. I was reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Logic of Empire", the economics of colonization often featured in Peter F. Hamilton's work, and the exploration of how the technological infrastructure of supporting life in a hostile environment leads to political repression as seen in John Shirley's Eclipse series. In a future where the colonization of the Boondocks outside the "Hub" worlds of Earth (which can be terraformed or naturally support human life) is expensive, the colonists must buy their expensive infrastructure from large corporations. They can't always make the payments though. They have two options. They can sell some of their fellow colonists into indentured servitude. Or they can wait for their "bubble" to be popped (basically their life support plant shutdown) by a bumpship which will then pick up a certain portion of the colony's assets (ie their children) for corporate service -- before they die. The narrator operates such a ship. She comes from a time where things were even bleaker. Her parents were one of the first colonists. When their settlement defaulted on their loans due to some fraudulent biotech shipped them, their bubble is popped. As the colonists faced slow asphyxiation, lots were drawn by the young narrator and she had the misfortune of leaving her parents to die. However, she eventually worked her way up the Atmospherics Corporation. She is a fierce defender of the status quo and her arguments for the justice of what is done sound very much like a vigorous defender of capitalism -- she mentions "market democracy" and the chance for all to better themselves through discipline, the need of companies to recoup and protect their investments. The scars of her past show when she speaks with contempt of her father, a "low market" linguist of Ancient Earth languages. I found the story most remarkable for the ambivalence of tone and argument. I felt like Mosser wanted to give me a satire of capitalism by analogy (think houses and food and talent for colonization infrastructure and market value), yet she kept giving me balanced, plausible arguments, didn't suggest how it could be otherwise. (I think another clue to satiric intent was that the story doesn't really work economically and technologically in that it postulates, for instance, an interstellar traffic in elements like boron or advanced technology rendering interstellar commerce in most things obsolete. That was the story's only flaw.) However, at story's end, the satiric element came to the front. We here preachments of democracy but a cabal of businesses goes about their legislation in secret, and once such peace of legislation proposes grabbing defaulting colonists for slave labor -- or, at least, till they or their descendants can pay off their debt. This debt slavery reminded me of the Heinlein story.) To protest the status quo, 13,000 colonists choose suicide when their bubble is popped rather than board the narrator's bumpship. They call themselves Ceuganters after the colony world the narrator is from. She is unimpressed. A fierce defender of a status quo in which she has, to a certain extent thrived, which is better than the horrors she knew as a child, she, as her superiors expect, concludes the story with the chilly line of a wounded woman who will not dwell on the horrors of the past: "I have no sympathy for those people." It is, of course, an ironical line because we do not feel what the corporation and narrator want us to feel. "Only Partly Here", Lucius Shepard -- A restrained story for Shepard. It forgoes his usual opening moral or philosophical statement though it characteristically concludes with one, and romance figures in the plot. The plot is a ghost story. A worker in the rubble of the World's Trade Center encounters an intriguing women in the bar he retires to after work. The worker and woman share a feeling of missing something -- including the passionate emotion that they think they should feel in the wake of the attack. I found that psychological observation realistic. Eventually, it is revealed that the woman is the ghostly owner of a half charred blue shoe the worker found in the buildings wreckage. The story ends with a nice rumination on all the unfinished, unlived lives ended, with no chance of course change or redemption, in the collapse of the Towers. Though I find it interesting there is not a bit of talk of vengeance against Al-Queda. http://nhw.livejournal.com/211123.html Not madly impressed; most of the stories I had read before as they were Hugo or Nebula finalists, or collected somewhere else, and the remaining ones were generally not up to much. (Honourable mentions though to "Flowers for Alice" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, and especially to "Only Partly Here", by Lucius Shepard, the first successful genre story I've read about 9/11). There is also a surprisingly unprofessional level of misprints. no reviews | add a review
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HTML: A collection of the best science fiction prose written in 2003, by some of the genre's greatest writers, and selected by two of science fiction's most respected editors. Continuing ibooks' series of popularly-priced "Best of the Year" books edited and designed to appeal to science fiction fans whose budgets may be taxed by more expensive "Best of the Year" collections. .No library descriptions found. |
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Anyway. This is a moderately chunky paperback at about 440 pages, although for that length there might be fewer stories than you'd expect, as many of them are fairly long, with I think at least a couple at or approaching novella length. As is common for this sort of thing, the editors are not particularly precious or pedantic about genre distinctions, with a number of stories here that could be perhaps more properly categorized as horror or fantasy than science fiction. (I find the inclusion of Neil Gaiman's Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft mashup, "A Study in Emerald," particularly amusing on this front, as I think you could argue that it ticks off almost every genre except science fiction. Not that that's a complaint! I'd read that one before, but it'd been a while and I'd honestly forgotten just how clever it was, so it was nice to encounter it again.)
As usual, of course, notions of what constitutes the "best" of anything can vary enormously, and for me the contents here ranged from very good indeed to stuff that just left me cold. (Unfortunately, one of the latter, Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster," which had a decent idea but an execution I found dull and unconvincing, was by far the longest one in the collection.)
It is, by the way, always kind of interesting to look for themes in these sorts of anthologies, and this one absolutely does have one, as the vast majority of these stories deal with the idea of exploitation in some way, from Paolo Bacigalupi's impressively disturbing story of young girls whose bodies are altered in horrific ways to amuse the rich to Susan Mosser's very pointed piece of social commentary about corporations who force people into indentured servitude for not being able to afford air. All of which, rather depressingly, makes the volume feel not at all dated and still very, very relevant.
It's probably also worth noting that some of the stories here have typos or weird formatting issues that make me wonder if they were poorly scanned in or possibly printed directly from emails. Then again, maybe that's about what one should expect from a book whose back cover blurb touts its main selling point as being "affordable"? ( )