While one could argue that such and such a seminal story is omitted, or the absence of novel-length work misrepresents the...
Two decades’ worth of The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
The title is no idle boast. Anyone who follows SF and fantasy knows the names here, from ’60s veterans (Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin) to today’s hottest names (Charles Stross, Ted Chiang). Among the Hugo and Nebula winners are Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” Terry Bisson's “Bears Discover Fire,” Chiang's “Story of Your Life,” Joe Haldeman’s “None So Blind,” Connie Willis’s “Even the Queen,” Mike Resnick’s “Kirinyaga.” Even more of the stories were finalists for one or more of the genre’s awards. The volume is also a mini-history of short SF from the cyberpunk/humanist wars of the mid-’80s to the alternate history boom of the ’90s and the eclectic approaches of the youngest generation. Not surprisingly, Dozois was the original editor for nearly half the selections: his tenure at Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine shaped an era as clearly as John W. Campbell shaped the 1940s from the helm of Astounding magazine. But this is no self-promotional anthology; there are exciting tales from Omni, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and from original compendiums such as Starlight and Legends—a few were even originally published electronically. The tone ranges from ominous (Bear) to playful (Bisson), and the subjects are an epitome of the hot scientific topics of recent years, from genetic engineering to nanotechnology to fractal geometry and theories of dinosaur evolution. Dozois’s knowledgeable introductions put the pieces in perspective for readers new to the genre.
While one could argue that such and such a seminal story is omitted, or the absence of novel-length work misrepresents the character of the era, any attempt to assess recent short SF and fantasy will have to begin with this well-edited and essential anthology.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33655-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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