#gardner-dozois — Public Fediverse posts

#GardnerDozois 's best short SF of the year collections are always good, but the 1998 one might be the best I've read. My favourite story was a re-read of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life (later adapted as Arrival) and there are also extremely memorable stories by Geoffrey A. Landis, Greg Egan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian R. Macleod, and Michael Swanwick (whose story The Very Pulse of the Machine was adapted for the Love Death + Robots series). The cover, however, is extremely ugly. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

#GardnerDozois 's yearly #SciFi collections are slowly taking over my bookshelf. This one from 1991 starts extremely strongly with Nancy Kress's 'Beggars in Spain', which I believe she later reworked into her most well known novel. She really is the best writer in SF at handling themes of class and wealth inequality I think. Other highlights are by Alexander Jablokov, Geoffrey A. Landis, Rick Shelley, and two Greg Egan stories I already own in his Axiomatic collection. I was a little surprised that there were so many stories that were more fantasy, horror, or alt history than SF, but the quality was high so I didn't really mind. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

Finished another of my growing collection of gigantic #GardnerDozois anthologies of best short sci fi from a year - this one, 2014. These collections are always so good, and diverse in themes and moods. #NancyKress ends this one on a particularly high note with her terrific novella 'Yesterday's Kin'. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

#FinishedReading another brick of best-of-the-year picks of #SF #SciFi short stories selected by #GardnerDozois . These are always good, but the two stories from this 2013 collection that really floored me were both by #NancyKress . I need to seek out more of her work - any fans of her here who can recommend where to start with her longer fiction? #Bookstodon @bookstodon

Best of SF annuals are a venerable tradition. The first such collection was, according to my research, Bleiler and T. E. Dikty’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949. That being said, a slightly later Best SF series left a lineage that spans decades.

I refer to Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest SF. Between 1956 and 1968, Judith Merril edited twelve [Note 1] annual anthologies of works that Merril considered to be the best speculative fiction stories of the previous year. Merril’s tastes were unusually wide-ranging [Note 2].

When I revisited the series in 2023 and 2024, it was the structure of her anthologies that caught my attention. I’d seen that arrangement before. Or rather, I had seen it before in anthologies that were published later than Merril’s were.

A Merril Year’s Best included, in addition to the stories, ancillary material in form of a discussion of the state of science fiction in the previous year and a list of noteworthy works that hadn’t quite made the cut for inclusions. Lester del Rey’s less noteworthy Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, which he helmed from 1972 to 1976, used a similar approach although minus the long list of recommended works. Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which ran from 1984 to 2018, resembles Merril’s structure far more closely, albeit at greater length. Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy also adopted a similar arrangement.

It’s no surprise that Dozois’ Best of would resemble del Rey’s. Dozois’ 1984-to-2018 series was the second time he’d helmed a Best SF series. The first time, he replaced del Rey as editor of The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. A consistent format under those circumstances is no surprise, but if you check Dozois’ first volume, its structure resembles Merril’s more than it does del Rey’s.

The similarity between Merril, del Rey, and Dozois could just be three editors independently arriving at a similar arrangement. Far stranger coincidences have happened in science fiction. On the other hand, Aldiss, Harrison, Carr, Strahan, Hartwell, Cramer, and other editors used different approaches, so alternatives did exist. Still, Merril’s series was hardly obscure, and her way to contextualize the best SF stories makes a lot of sense.

Were del Rey and Dozois drawing on Merril [Note 3]? Or is there an earlier source from which all three were drawing? I’d love to know one way or another.

Ah, but what about Rich Horton, you ask? Why no laborious dot-connecting and strained reasoning to connect Horton and Merril? Horton is still alive, so I asked him if Merril’s Best SF influenced him [Note 4]. His answer: “Yes, definitely.”

As you can see, the past is never gone in the present and future, particularly in SF and its annual anthologies of best SF, where each successive generation is influenced and inspired by and builds on what has come before, not just in content and context of the stories themselves but also in how those anthologies are presented to us.

Notes

1. Unless you count her three Best of the Best selections from earlier volumes as anthologies in their own right, in which case one could argue for as many as fifteen.

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2. As was her definition of “year.” It wasn’t uncommon for her anthologies to span more than one calendar year. In at least one case, it spanned more than one calendar decade. Well, Merril never said which planet’s year she was using.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 2

3. I did check the debut volumes of both the del Rey and Dozois series to see if they mentioned Merril. If they did, I overlooked it.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 3

4. Horton is also influenced by Merril’s wide-ranging, eclectic tastes.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 4

James Davis Nicoll is a book reviewer and five-time Hugo finalist, four-time Aurora finalist, and CSFFA Hall of Fame nominee. His work can be found at James Nicoll Reviews.

https://seattlein2025.org/2024/12/13/fantastic-fiction-judith-merrils-approach/

#GardnerDozois #JudithMerril #LesterDelRey #RichHorton

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

#FinishedReading another massive best #SF short stories of the year compilation from #GardnerDozois, this time from 1996. Unusually for this very reliable series this starts with a quite poorly written novelette ("she said, with wifely nonchalance") but there's great work here from John Kessel, Maureen F. McHugh, Gregory Feeley, Steven Utley, Cherry Wilder, etc. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

These #GardnerDozois best of the year compilations of #SciFi short stories - this one from 2009 - are such good value, near 700 pages of consistent high quality. Lots of stories concerned with poverty and/or set in the global South this year, but I've included an image of the most distinctively 00s sentence! #Bookstodon @bookstodon #FinishedReading

I've #finishedReading a few of these #GardnerDozois best-of anthologies, and they've all been ridiculously good value. This one collects #SciFi short stories from 2001, with my favourites being 'On K2 with Kanakaredes' by #DanSimmons , 'The Chief Designer' by #AndyDuncan and, best of all, 'May Be Some Time' by #BrendaWClough , a time travel story that tells which 'some time' Captain Oates headed into the Antarctic blizzard for. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

#FinishedReading on my beach holiday #GardnerDozois 's selection of short #SciFi from 1997. His collections seem to be always great although this is not his most diverse by authors or themes; a lot of uploading oneself into virtual reality in the air in 1997! My favourites were by @gregeganSF , Brian Stableford, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Walter Jon Williams, Ian McDonald, and Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malartre. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

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#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

The New York Review of Science Fiction #349 is a special free issue, dedicated to the memory of Gardner Dozois, a well-known SF editor, writer and all-round fun fellow.

It can be downloaded from Weightless Books [ https://weightlessbooks.com/format/new-york-review-of-science-fiction-349/ ]

#WeightlessBooks #Editors #Writers #Personalities #ScienceFiction #GardnerDozois

@kevinbeynon