Science Fiction and Horror Anthologies
The Penguin Book of Horror Stories has some gems and a certain
breadth but it suffers from a weak almost nerdy academic introduction
filled with fact but weak on interpretation. It is a Wikipedia article before
its time. The definition of horror is very wide. The brutal
realism of Prosper Merimee's primitive and vengeful Mateo Falcone (a story that disturbed me as a child and disturbs me today) sits
alongside a pulp tale of derring-do (the oft-anthologised Leiningen
Versus The Ants) and a sardonic and satirical horror tale like Robert
Graves' Earth to Earth. But yet there is little true cosmic horror -
no H P Lovecraft or Arthur Machen.
What are the best stories
in an average collection? Apart from
decent works by Hogg, Merimee (see above), Poe, Henry James, Maupassant, R
L Stevenson, Zola, Kafka ...
- William Hope Hodgson's decidedly creepy The Derelict: the nearest the collection gets to Lovecraftian uneasiness;
- Lord Dunsany's dark little masterpiece of criminal psychopathy, The Two Bottles of Relish;
- Evelyn Waugh's desperate tale of entrapment and obsession, The Man Who Liked Dickens;
- Geoffrey Household's disturbing tale of mental unbalance, Taboo - a twist on the werewolf legend;
- Muriel Spark's magnificently cold and English ghost story, The Portobello Road
- Roald Dahl's typically sick Man from the South.
A decent enough collection but not one that will keep one awake at night. And that is what horror should do ...
Sadly, despite the inclusion of some very big names in science fiction, Redshift is a somewhat unimpressive anthology without much
sense of coherence - certainly not 'extreme' in any meaningful way.
The Mammoth anthologies tend to do this sort of thing so much better. Mammoth is a cultural phenomenon - relatively
cheap paperback compendia of genre material that would otherwise be lost
in periodicals or never otherwise be published, alongside entertaining
encyclopedic tomes covering themes that underpin our popular culture
(from true crime to myths and legends). Gardner Dozois' niche
within its ecology is Science Fiction and his Best Short SF Novels brings together thirteen 'novella' from the last two decades in an
overview of what may not be the top thirteen by any absolute standards
but which is (mostly) representative of Sci Fi at its contemporary best.
The
novella is an odd form. It works well compared to a short story when it uses its greater length to work up an idea to its natural conclusion or to
add an incident to an existing universe (as Alastair Reynolds does with
his otherwise fairly middle-of-the-road tale of Ultras and Jugglers, Turquoise Days). It works worst when it is clear that the
author is angling for a book contract and leaves his or her tale hanging
in the air in the expectation that it can be 'worked up' later. This
seems to be driven by the genre literature market but it is artistically
frustrating to say the least. Three tales irritate on these grounds but
for entirely different reasons.
The very presence of Surfacing
(Walter John Williams) puzzles - it seems to have neither particular
literary merit nor a clear message and it ends on a mystery that is
rather uninteresting rather than stimulating. There is a sneaking
suspicion that it has been included to make some ecological point about
whales but I am damned if I can find it. And was it designed to be a
solus story or as the basis of a novel? We are not sure and we can't be
bothered to check on the internet.
Namcy Kress' Beggars in
Spain is already a much-anthologised classic whose story line of
genetically manipulated superiority and prejudice will be familiar to a
younger generation of X-Men fans. She makes the story end on a
reasonably satisfactory note but the writing is not remarkable and the
story is so well-known, with a novel easily available and widely read,
that its inclusion puzzles.
Joe Haldeman's The Hemingway
Hoax is another, frustrating, kettle of fish altogether. There is no
doubt about it - this is a work of flawed genius, brilliantly crafted.
No-one else has captured as he has done what the experience of shifting
through multiple universes and time travel might be like. He confirms an
opinion that Michael Moorcock has been much overrated in literary terms when
he deals with these same concerns. But, Haldeman's ending is
peremptory and confusing, a burst of confused hysteria after such
intensely careful plotting. While I am eternally grateful to have been
introduced to the story, I really think something else should be put in
its place in a second edition.
So, taking out the 'universe'
story and the three with peremptory endings or endings designed for
later novel publication leaves us with nine stories that can
properly be called novella with some integrity. There are some
real gems in here once you have got past the problem with all
imaginative science fiction - those first few pages where a new world is
introduced in a confusion of sometimes overwrought language and ideas which certainly serves to alienate a reader too soon in the game.
This method works if the alienation
is intended to cause some cognitive shift that allows us to see the
world in a different way but it does not when the jargon and the ideas
take over and all we have is a hard science fantasy. Fortunately, the
balance in this collection is towards the former. Sometimes with a
truly great writer, you understand that all the deliberately alienating
imagery and lore is being used to get our imaginations working on who
we are as persons in the world and, indeed, how the world works,
shifting our perceptions radically. Four stories stand out in this
respect.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Forgiveness Day (1994) is a story
in which love between cultural opposites blossoms from respect earned
in crisis. In Frederick Pohl's Outnumbering the Dead (1991) an
accidental mortal in a world of immortals finds love in a person and a
community in his last moments in a story of remarkable tenderness. Both
stories are by modern SciFi masters. Both require a little patience and
some education to get to the point where they can capture your full
attention. By the end you have been moved deeply. The two other stand out stories have resonances of the 'other' on our own
planet that are almost political. The turn to the sociological and the
anthropological in science fiction from the mid-1980s is not accidental.
It presages (as science fiction often does) changes in the real world -
we have now turned our eyes from the stars to planetary management and
that means management of the people who live on our planet.
Stories of
psychological manipulation, long embedded in the American science
fiction tradition, were joined by stories of genetic
manipulation (as in Nancy Kress' tale) and, increasingly, by stories
based on the social sciences. Maureen McHugh's The Cost To Be Wise (1996) is a tragic little tale of a community
manipulated and ultimately abandoned by the social scientists who
observe it. It is a subtle humanist indictment of the clinical Western
mind, a story that never preaches but allows us to draw our own
conclusions from the observations of the 'natives' themselves. It is
ultimately about the consequences of the lack of a duty of care involved
in intervention.
A fourth masterpiece is Ian Mcdonald's Tendeleo's Story (2000) which owes a great deal to the incomparable JG
Ballard and the British dystopian tradition but it stands on its own in
its depictions successively of Africa, a grey Britain and an alien
environment. This is one story where spoilers must not be
permitted but it could stand a detailed critique on its own - suffice it
to say that it is, like McHugh's story, subtle, beautifully written and
even more directly political than hers. It has an end that may surprise
(especially for those with certain expectations of British science
fiction) but which already captures the potential for shifts in power
globally - ahead of its time.
The remaining stories include
another classic, Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg, the
strange, absurdist and vaguely sick but well crafted Freudian fantasy Mr Boy by James Patrick Kelly, the solid Cold War-linked sociological
moon base fantasy Griffin's Egg by Michael Swanwick, Greg Egan's wise
and thoughtful exploration of the religious mentality and its evolution
in Oceanic and a frankly disappointing and rather silly future fantasy
written with some rather leaden prose and some scientifically absurd
detritus from the generally much better Iain R. Macleod: New Light on
the Drake Equation.
Macleod's story was particularly
disappointing because I really like his novels but this one was like
ploughing through treacle, made worse by the fact that its depiction of a
relationship contrasted so sharply with the wisdom and tenderness of Le
Guin and Pohl's contributions. All in all, this is a recommended
although not a perfect collection. I would skip Williams and Macleod
(without prejudice to their other work) and read Le Guin and Pohl and certainly the much more
accessible McHugh and McDonald, maybe Silverberg, Haldeman (though be
prepared to be frustrated), Kress (if you want to tick off a minor
classic), Egan and (just) Reynolds (but only if you are into his
universe).