“IS THERE ANY BRANCH of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?”
“Historians confidently place its origins in 1516 (Utopia by Thomas More), or 1634 (Somnium by Johannes Kepler), or 1818 (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley), or 1926 (Amazing Stories edited by Hugo Gernsback).”
“lack of unity is the one consistent feature in all approaches to science fiction”
“There are innumerable definitions, all of which flatly contradict each other, and the most widely accepted, by Darko Suvin, allows for a story to be science fiction one day but not the very next day owing to some advance in science or technology. Clearly we are on shifting and unstable ground.”
“awards and anthologies, which function as histories and taxonomies, instantiate ongoing attempts to tackle science fiction’s identity crisis — one that has consumed the field ever since people first tried to apply a name and a form to the literature”
“However, what we call science fiction is not and never has been uniform. If there is any consistency in science fiction, it is an engagement with the new, and so science fiction is constantly engaged in reinventing itself.”
“Science fiction, throughout most of the 20th century, has presented itself as an overwhelmingly masculine literature.”
“As a literature of the 20th century, science fiction has often been perceived as characteristically Anglo-American.”
“Science fiction, this collection makes clear, is a far more heterogeneous thing than we usually allow for.”
“The latest monumental historical anthology, which has the appropriate title of The Big Book of Science Fiction, reflects that fluid approach.”
“A number of the stories gathered here have appeared in earlier anthologies edited by the VanderMeers: for instance, “The Hall of Machines” by Langdon Jones (an example of the British New Wave that is otherwise not widely anthologised) and “Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer previously edited collections including The New Weird and (almost on the same scale as this monster) The Weird. A similar taste for the mysterious, the unexplained, and the surreal exists in The Big Book of Science Fiction. This penchant comes through in the Dalíesque Mars we encounter in “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki, for example, and the people who are slowly being transformed into trees in “Standing Woman,” a hauntingly tender story by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Even when the stories superficially conform to the scientific rigor more usually associated with science fiction, there is an air of the weird about them: the dying reverie of a crashed astronaut in Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea”; the body horror of a scientist eaten up and transformed by his own discovery in “Blood Music” by Greg Bear; the cardinal found frozen on an uncharted world in Michael Moorcock’s “The Frozen Cardinal”; the aliens who assume the form of women to satisfy their human invaders, only to find themselves unable to abandon this new role, in “Wives” by Lisa Tuttle. It’s a heady brew and these are excellent stories, but there are times when the collection feels only tangentially science fiction, or rather, like it is plowing a deep furrow but only in one section of the larger whole that is science fiction.”
“In Britain, the New Wave of the mid-’60s rejected the technocratic optimism of hard SF in favor of psychological depth and modernist literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness prose and unreliable narrators. That tradition is illustrated here by such stories as “The Voices of Time” by J. G. Ballard, “Sporting with the Child” by Barrington J. Bayley, and “The Snake that Read Chomsky” by Josephine Saxton.”
“This radicalism seems to resonate with the editors’ tastes even more than the British New Wave. Examples range from Kurt Vonnegut’s precursor tale of state imposed euthanasia, “2BR02B,” to Harlan Ellison’s playful account of chaos in an overly ordered society, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Samuel R. Delany’s tale of sexual desire for genderless spacemen, “Aye, and Gomorrah,” forms a neat pair with James Tiptree Jr.’s story of sexual desire for the alien, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.” And there’s the contrast of David R. Bunch’s chilly mechanistic fable “Three from Moderan” with Michael Bishop’s warm tale of sexual healing “The House of Compassionate Sharers.””
“The New Wave wasn’t exclusively the playground of a new generation of writers, as proven by the inclusion of “Day Million” by Frederik Pohl, one of the finest of all science fiction short stories. Set on one day about a thousand years in the future, this story neatly and dispassionately overturns every traditional notion of what it means to be human and in love. The New Wave was also the springboard for other developments in science fiction, exemplified by the inclusion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed”: stories that presaged the emergence of feminist science fiction over the coming decade.”
“Novelty becomes old and familiar very quickly, and the New Wave had pretty much run its course by the early 1970s. The next major movement, cyberpunk, which emerged in the 1980s, is reasonably well represented here by the usual suspects, including William Gibson (“New Rose Hotel”), Pat Cadigan (“Variation on a Man”), and Bruce Sterling (“Swarm”), though the chosen stories are not always typical of the movement.”
“That said, some classics repay every rereading: alongside some of those already mentioned we might include “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” by R. A. Lafferty, “Schwarzschild Radius” by Connie Willis, and “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang.”
“Will this book resolve science fiction’s identity crisis? Does it give us an account of science fiction that we can feel confident about? By shining a light into aspects of science fiction obscured or ignored by conventional histories are we at last getting close to the full story?
No. But it will tell you a part of the story that is well worth knowing. And it will provide an awful lot of pleasure along the way.”
“Paul Kincaid is a recipient of both the Thomas D. Clareson Award from the Science Fiction Research Association and the British Science Fiction Association Award for nonfiction.”