Product Description
Collecting more than two dozen stories that originally appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—the premiere speculative fiction magazine—this extraordinary anthology celebrates 60 years of top-notch genre fiction. Including “All Summer in a Day,” Ray Bradbury’s lasting tale of what happened on one special day; “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, describing what happened to Charlie Gordon when he was made into a genius; “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist cautionary tale of mandatory equality; and “The Electric Ant” by Philip K. Dick, concerning what Garson Poole learned after the accident that hospitalized him. This remarkable collection also features some of… More >>
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology
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Were one young enough not to have read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as I have from the late 1950s onward (and published once in it myself) one would gather by the earlier review posted here that this is a good, perhaps even great anthology. It’s not. It doesn’t even come close. Van Gelder has put together a book that’s excellent, but excellent up to a point, and that’s about half way through the book when, around 1990 all of science fiction and fantasy being published began to show a marked decline in both quality and writing style. Various critics and writers have written extensively on this topic already, so I won’t dwell on it here, but the stories in the latter half of this anthology (with the exception of “macs” by Terry Bisson–an acknowledged, and terrifying, classic) visibly pale in comparison to the previous stories. Stephen King’s “Gunslinger” is here, but I’d rather Van Gelder reprinted J.G. Ballard’s “Cloud Sculptors of Coral D” or any of the Vermillion Sands stories published in F&SF. And Ballard is only one of 40 writers I’d much have preferred to see here. I suspect that “Gunslinger” is in this book to help sell the anthology, and, I suspect, so is Peter S. Beagle’s “Two Hearts”. Both stories, while containing tropes of the fantastical, they are nonetheless written in a very realistic, almost Hemingway-esque prose–serviceable, journalistic–that considerably diminishes any fantasy element that someone such as Clark Aston Smith or Fritz Leiber would have easily conjured. (And I am talking about magic here: the magic of new worlds created, a sense of wonder.) The problem is that Van Gelder is playing his favorites (which is allowed–it’s his magazine, after all). He tips his hand when he chooses the very weak (and atypical) story by Zelazny, “Moment of the Storm” from 1966. Van Gelder admits in the introduction that he could have chosen “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” or “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, much more mature stories by Zelazny, but he didn’t. “Moment of the Storm” would never in a thousand years be considered among Zelazny’s “very best”. (The fact that it’s rarely been anthologized is no excuse to include it here.) In fairness, Van Gelder undoubtedly was trying to put together an anthology that would offer some stories commonly anthologized and others not. Fair enough. But the fantasy stories here really fall flat. The Peter S. Beagle story is the one that amazed me (and disappointed me) the most. The flatness of the prose style comes across as mere reportage; it’s about a village besieged by a griffin. Okay. Cool. But where’s the lyrical prose that can be found in the best fantasy written? No mood is conjured, so real sense of wonder created. I remember feeling sucked into the world Orson Scott Card created in his novel, “Hart’s Hope” (and that even isn’t one of Card’s best novels!). You read that and you’re most definitely in his creation–because of the prose style. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does the same thing in “One-Hundred Years of Solitude”. Is there a Jack Vance novel or story that doesn’t work the same way? Cordwainer Smith. C.M. Kornbluth. Where are those guys? Yet the Beagle story is here because Beagle has written one great book that nearly everybody worships. I just wish this was a better anthology than it is. However, to think of it another way, you could look at this book as something like a canary in a coal mine: it shows what many of us older readers have known for a while: that starting about 25, perhaps 30 years ago, both sci-fi and fantasy fell into a creative decline (even though sales have soared). Stories after that time seem less innovative and choose to fall back on familiar tropes and conceits. Nothing seems magical, no one seems to be bringing anything new to the table. Just the familiar. Just what sells. (Isn’t that, in the end, the name of the game anymore?)
(Caveat: And, yes, the one story I published in F&SF falls into the period of decline I mentioned. It was a time travel story. Fun to write. Glad it was taken by Ed Ferman. The rule still applies.)
Rating: 3 / 5
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through the kind offices of the Publicist of the publisher, Tachyon Publications.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, is an anthology of stories across the eponymous magazine’s 60 year history.
Although I am not a heavy reader of SF magazines (when I read SF stories, its usually in anthologies or collections), it is clear to me, immediately, that F&SF has had a wonderful history of publishing some of the best stories in SF history.
And a swath of those stories are ably collected by Mr. Van Gelder in this collection. The stories range in publication date from 1951 (Alfred Bester’s Time and Third Avenue) to 2007 (Ted Chiang’s story The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate).
Arranged in chronological order, the stories show the changes and evolution of the SF story with a high quality of selected stories throughout. Its not just a “most famous” story group either. While there are genre-famous stories like Flowers for Algernon, the Deathbird, and Harrison Bergeron, there are stories that are in that class, but much well less known. (Zelazny’s This Moment of the Storm, for instance, or Peter Beagle’s story sequel to the Last Unicorn, Two Hearts come to mind)
With that in mind, I devoured this book quickly and gleefully. I enjoyed the touchstones to the classics and old favorites, and discovering new (to me) stories as well. Gelder has done an top notch job.
Genres that forget their history are condemned to fail by that forgetting. Collections like this help the genre of SF keep in mind its roots and history. Any serious fan of science fiction would do well to dip their oars into this volume.
The lineup:
Of Time and Third Avenue, Alfred Bester
All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury
One Ordinary Day with Peanuts, Shirley Jackson
A touch of Strange, Theodore Sturgeon
Eastward, Ho!, William Tenn
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut
This Moment of the Storm, Roger Zelazny
The Electric Ant, Philip K Dick
The Deathbird, Harlan Ellison
The Women Men Don’t See, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon)
I see You, Damon Knight
The Gunslinger, Stephen King
The Dark, Karen Joy Fowler
Buffalo, John Kessel
Solitude, Ursula K Le Guin
Mother Grasshopper, Michael Swanwick
macs, Terry Bisson
Creation, Jeffrey Ford
Other People, Neil Gaiman
Two Hearts, Peter S Beagle
Journey into the Kingdom, M Rickert
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Ted Chiang
Rating: 5 / 5