From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:47:29 2004 Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 21:54:32 -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: >8. "Traditional" Science Fiction > >These four books I've grouped as being fairly "traditional" science >fiction-oriented anthologies -- not that there aren't a couple of >fantasy stories mixed in, but mostly these seem SF -- at least for the >purposes of my "chunks"! > >The books: Witpunk, The Silver Gryphon, Hitting the Skids in >Pixeltown, Live Without a Net > >Subtotals: 4 books, 62 stories (1 novella, 17 novelettes, 44 short >stories), about 388,000 words. And finally (pant, pant), these last four anthologies. Again, I'll treat them separately. Witpunk, edited by Claude Lalumière and Marty Halpern, tried to show that "funny" (or "witty" or "sardonic") SF still has a place. For the most part it was pretty successful. It's about half-and-half original/reprint. Of the original stories my favorite was the shortest, Ray Vukcevich's "Jumping", a lovely short-short about the hold a young woman can have on a man. I also liked Paul DiFilippo's "Science Fiction", a metafictional novelette about an SF writer losing his grip on reality; and Leslie What's "Is That Hard Science, or Are You Just Happy to See Me", about a high-tech chastity belt. The Silver Gryphon, edited by Halpern again, this time with Gary Turner, collects stories by all but one of the authors of the first 24 Golden Gryphon books. This is a pretty strong set of writers, and the collection is pretty solid -- but rarely much more than that. Certainly worth your time, but I basically wasn't knocked off my socks anywhere. My favorite story was a short story, Ian Watson's "Separate Lives", in which people are required to suppress their libido after a certain age (the protagonists, of course, don't comply). I also liked several novelettes: Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Cowboy Grace", non-SF (a mystery) about a 40ish woman accountant who chucks it all and heads to Reno; Richard A. Lupoff's "The American Monarchy", an alternate history in which Bush and Gore become co-presidents, with eventual unusual results; R. Garcia y Robertson's "Far Barbary", another of his very fun (but rather lightweight) fantastical/historical romps, this time about a Scottish mercenary who ends up rescuing a pregnant wife of a Shah from the sack of their palace; and Paul DiFilippo's "What's Up, Tiger Lily", about a nerdy inventor and the revenge schemes of his beautiful one-time classmate. One more short story deserves mention: "Night of Time", by Robert Reed, a decent Marrow story about searching the memories of one of the oldest species on the world-size Ship. Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown is a collection of stories by winners of the Phobos contest for short fiction, which seems to focus on newer writers. Generally decent work, more promising than polished in many cases (as one might expect). Best was a story by the fine new writer David D. Levine, "Ukaliq and the Great Hunt", American Indian legends transposed to a new world. Also worth noting were stories by Eugie Foster, Carl Frederick, and Paul Pence. Live Without A Net, edited by Lou Anders, was a very fine collection of stories on the theme of "worlds without an internet" -- for various reasons: alternate worlds, alternate histories, far futures where computers have been abandoned, different worlds entirely ... I thought it one of the stronger original anthologies of the year. The best of the stories seem concentrated among those involving some sort of biological tech or post-tech in a posthuman, or at least post-computer, world. In Paul Melko's "Singletons in Love", )a novelette) a group of people have been brought up from birth as a telepathic cluster, in a world abandoned by those humans who had become linked with the cybernetic organism called the Ring. They encounter a refugee from those people, a singleton, who seduces one of them -- but to what end? Rudy Rucker's "Frek in the Grulloo Woods" is set in a complex world of many different bioengineered beings, some intelligent. Frek himself seems basically human, though perhaps not quite. He runs away from his "counselors", encountering a strange person called a Grulloo and other dangerous beasts. This leads him eventually to learn a bit more about his own nature -- and it led me to hope that this story was just the first of several, or the opening of a novel (which is apparently the case). Charles Stross's "Rogue Farm" seems to be set on an old-fashioned English farm, with a cranky farmer and farmer's wife. But what is this threatening "rogue farm", which seems part-human, and bent on heading to Jupiter? Perhaps best of all is Paul Di Filippo's "Clouds and Cold Fires" (another novelette), in which the departed humans have left a revitalized Earth in the charge of long-lived, intelligent, genetically engineered chimeras of some sort. Pertinax and his friends must deal with a threat from one of the still technologically oriented "Overclockers", humans who have stayed behind on reservations, and who refuse to abandon the old ways. Another quite engaging story is the last one, John Grant's "No Solace for the Soul in Digitopia", an erotic fantasia of multiple universes, in which a visit to what seems to be our universe reveals the limitations of a computing-based life. The novella, "The Swastika Bomb", by John Meaney, is also decent, about a strange alternate World War II, with otherworldly weapons.