THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR Monday, December 28, 2009

THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR

Okay, a few caveats. There's no way I'm going to be reading everything released in 2009. That should be pretty much obvious in the poetry category, too, except that with poetry you don't have to wait around a year for the paperback to come out. Hardcover science fiction in anathema to me, so I haven't read the big hitters like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which I've heard is great. That said, here's my myopic look at the year just past.


YELLOW BLUE TIBIA
Adam Roberts
Orbit Books

Probably the best novel released last year, Adam Robert's book is less about a vast conspiracy unthawing in perstroika-era Soviet Russia involving aliens, Cherynobl, Stalin, Scientology and the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, and more a manifesto of why one writes science fiction in the first place, as well as a well-hidden excoriation of those that do so thoughtlessly. "A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying...How can this not produce callouses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?" (He also took the Hugo Awards down a peg this year with a great essay on his blog, Punkadiddle.)



THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kressel
Tachyon

I was wary at first, looking at the contributors. Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle and Margaret Atwood and so on. The introductory essay, which echoes and references Jonathan Lethem's 10-year-old essay from the Village Voice, asking what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon had won the Nebula for Gravity's Rainbow back in 1974, is equally obnoxious. A word to the wise, SF writers, comic book artists, graffiti artists, video game developers, et al.--"hi quality" is a racket real artists have been trying to wriggle out from under for 40 years. There is no "hi quality." From our America-has-won, 21st Century position, it may never have existed. Philip Roth is a "great artist" only in the sense that Micheal Jackson was a "great artist." That is, it wouldn't matter either way. However, in spite of the editor's worst intentions, this collection is redeemed by its actual, present, right-there vitality. The work inside is not good literature. It's good science fiction, which at least has the potential to be worthwhile.


THE COLLECTED STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD
FSG

Of course.

ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE
Electic Velocipede finally hot a Hugo nod this year. They deserve it. If you're interested in seeing which kids are publishing Karen Joy Fowler these days (just kidding! They publish a lot of stuff, honestly) this is the magazine to go to. Well-rooted and risk-taking at the same time.


GARBAGE TREND OF THE YEAR
If you want a weird-science/Jane Austen pastiche, read Susanah Clarke's terrific Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from a few years back, or else read the Oulipo Compendiuum for fun, genre-trashing experiments in language. Whatever you do, skip this whole gutless "I'm going to read something trashy but really I'm not" white-girl phenomenon of splicing Jane Austen novels with Zombie-related nouns. It's strictly Shirley Temple.