From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:45:12 2004 Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:08:37 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Re: Summary: Anthologies, 2003 On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 18:54:26 -0600, Rich Horton wrote: >5. Outside the US > >I found five anthologies that either explicitly or implicitly selected >stories from non-US authors. One is Australian, one includes mostly >old-time British authors, one is an historical look at Latin American >and Spanish SF, one is Canadian, and one is restricted even further, >to Montrealers. > >The books: Agog! Terrific Tales, Fantasy Annual 5, Open Space, Island >Dreams, Cosmos Latinos > >Subtotals: 5 books, 90 stories (17 novelettes, 73 short stories), >about 480,000 words. I'll just treat each of these books separately. Agog! Terrific Tales is the second of what I presume is intended to be an annual series of original anthologies of Australian fiction. Cat Sparks is the editor. The publisher is Agog Press, perhaps formed mainly to publish these books, though they have done some other books, too. Last year's book was called Agog! Fantastic Fiction -- perhaps we could start guessing at future titles? Agog! Venturesome Visions? Agog! Stupendous Stories? ... I liked the book, didn't really love it. The best story is Scott Westerfeld's chiller "That Which Does Not Kill Us", about a man on a date with a beautiful woman who happens to be dead. (The story is science fiction, I should note.) (It was later reprinted (for an American audience?) in Say ... Aren't You Dead?) I also liked Tracey Rolfe's "Storm in a Chandelier", about a very realistic artist; and Chris Lawson's "Lacey's Fingerprints", though this was one of a couple of reprints in the book. Fantasy Annual 5 is the fifth (who'd have guessed?) in a series of anthologies. It's published in the UK by Cosmos Books, an imprint of John Gregory Betancourt's Wildside Press. The editors are Philip Harbottle and Sean Wallace. It seems to feature mainly writers who were regulars for E. John Carnell's magazines and anthologies: New Worlds, Science Fantasy, New Writings in SF, etc. This is a curious set of writers to draw from, as Carnell has been dead for decades. This means that the writers tend to be older, and also tend to be purveyors of a somewhat old-fashioned SF. (There are exceptions -- David Redd, for instance, seems to have begun to sell to New Worlds and Science Fantasy after Moorcock took over, and he's also had fairly recent stories in Asimov's and Spectrum SF. He also contributes two the best stories in the book.) Perhaps because of the limited pool of qualifying writers (though I have no idea if there were any FORMAL qualifications), some writers appear more than once. Redd has two stories, Eric C. Williams has two stories, and Philip E. High appears four times, under two different names.) There are two reprints, by John Russell Fearn (better known, perhaps, as "Vargo Statten") and E. C. Tubb. Names to conjure with, eh? Take it for what it is -- mostly distinctly old-fashioned stuff, but some of it, at least, is pretty entertaining. As I suggested, David Redd's two stories are among the best: "The Dinosaurs of London" (a novelette) is about a young artist who is part of a loose association of survivors after some cataclysm has returned dinosaurs to Earth, wrecking civilization; while "Moon-Pearls" is about a clone hero in a future full of altered humans and aliens. I also liked Barrington Bayley's "The Multiplex Fixative", about a camera that takes pictures of different time streams, and Dan Morgan's "Love in Limbo", a fierce story about people in some sort of Limbo, and one couple's hope for enduring love -- and subsequent descent into Hell. Also, Philip E. High has long been a distinctly guilty pleasure for me: his prose is not very good, his plots rambling, his ideas implausible: but besides being implausible his ideas are sometimes strange enough to fascinate, and at least one story here, "The Elementals", is pretty effective. The next two books are both edited by Claude Lalumière, and both feature only Canadian writers. Island Dreams, in fact, is restricted to writers from Montreal only, while Open Space features writers from all over Canada. One might think the more restricted anthology would be weaker, as having a smaller pool of writers to choose from, but in fact I preferred Island Dreams. From Island Dreams my favorite stories were a few novelettes. Glenn Grant's "Burning Day" is an SF mystery in which an android detective and his human partner investigate the murder of a number of androids, in which a radical anti-AI group is implicated. The mystery part is fine, but the best part of the story is the look at a combined human/android society, and the tensions within such a society. Yves Menard's "In Yerusalom" is about a mysterious alien city dropped on the North American plains, from whence the aliens distribute mysterious benefits. They also sponsor an artform, controlled dreaming, and the story concerns a team of people hoping to win a contest judged by the aliens. Linda Dydyk's "The Strange Afterlife of Henry Wigam" is about the treatment of a man revived from cryogenic sleep, a revival that didn't go very well. Of the short stories I liked Dora Knez's "The Dead Park", an oddly sweet story of a man living in a house next to a park where the risen dead congregate; and I respected but didn't exactly like Elise Moser's brutal "Human Rites", about a nearly feral band of homeless children. In Open Space I quite liked Derryl Murphy's novelette "More Painful Than the Dreams of Other Boys", which has a killer premise -- there is a region called Templetown (after Shirley) in which most children do not age, but older people who enter there age very rapidly (decades in a couple of hours). The story concerns a murder that has to be investigated by one of the former Templetown children who had to leave when he began to age. Vincent W. Sakowski's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok" is also a pretty good novelette, a satirical story about a vain and vicious couple as the end of the world approaches. Catherine MacLeod's "Postcard from Atlantis" is a very mordantly amusing set of very short pieces. Melissa Yuan-Innes in "Growing Up Sam" tells an affecting story of a genetically engineered human/bonobo mix. Cosmos Latinos is a scholarly anthology of Latin American and Spanish SF from the late 19th century to the present day. It is edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. It looks pretty impressive simply as a scholarly work, and it works pretty well also as simply an anthology. Naturally the stories are not new, but most of them are new to the English language, and even most those that apparently appeared previously in English (apparently there was an A. E. Van Vogt anthology of Latin American SF, for example) seem to have been retranslated for this book. (One exception is Braulio Tavares's "Stuntmind", which appears here in the author's own translation that originally appeared in On Spec in 1994.) The book is rather top-heavy with quite short stories, I suspect due to the editors' desire to include as wide a variety of authors as possible. Many of the older stories are more interesting than precisely good -- included, it seems to me, more for historical perspective than for quality. As we get closer to the present, the stories get both longer and (mostly) better. My favorite story is the longest in the book, a novelette of about 15,000 words by Angélica Gorodischer, the Argentine author of Kalpa Imperial, one of the better SF novels I've read from 2003. (In a translation by Ursula K. Le Guin published by Small Beer Press.) The story included here is "The Violet's Embryos", an unusual story of an expedition crashlanding on a desolate planet, where the five survivors manage to live only because of the very unusual properties of some violet shadows they find on the planet. A later expedition finds them living a life of ambiguous luxury. The story comments on the nature of happiness and on what people really desire. I thought it pretty effective. I also liked an amusing 1952 short-short, "Baby H. P." by Juan José Arreola, about harnessing the energy of infants. Magdalena Mouján Otaño's "Gu Ta Gutarrak (We and Our Own)" is an affectionate satire of Basque identity attitudes driven by a time travel plot. Daína Chaviano's "The Annunciation" is also somewhat light, an SFnal retelling of the Annunciation and for that matter the Immaculate Conception. Ricardo de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero's "The Day We Went Through the Transition" is another time travel story, combining a love story with a tale of Time Patrol types trying to prevent time terrorists from messing up Spain's transition from Franco's rule to democracy. The Tavares story is also pretty good, as are stories by Jerônimo Monteiro, Pepe Rojo, and Elia Barceló.