New York: Tor Books, 2013; $34.99 hc/$21.99 tpb; 572 pages

We are confronted by the title of this big book. We do not know what to think. It is not likely that for David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden the title they have attached to their anthology of reprinted stories simply designates work published this century. 21st Century Science Fiction means way more than that to them, we reckon, on guard; a title like this, graven in stone, tells us that the 34 tales assembled here must be intended in some sense to represent like commandments the state of science fiction in this century; in which case, if sf is properly to be understood as a form uniquely shaped both to describe and instruct the world, 21st Century Science Fiction should be a lesson to us.
Maybe no book of this size—it’s big but hardly half as long as an earlier Hartwell anthology like The Science Fiction Century (1997)—should be asked to fulfill a remit so daunting, and indeed Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden have been careful to warn us that their anthology does not in fact aspire to provide an aliquot sample of sf in this era, an aspiration which would require a deeper chronological pool of authors to select from than they have been inclined to offer. As can be anticipated from their introduction—“You are holding in your hands an anthology of stories by what we believe are some of the best science fiction writers that [sic] came to prominence since the twentieth century changed into the twenty-first”—we need to anticipate recentness. If Greg Bear or William Gibson or Nancy Kress or Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling has written significant short works during this century about this century, we will not expect to see them here, nor do we. Indeed, of the 34 contributors to this volume, about half of them—more women than men—began their careers in 2000 or later, and 15 more—six of them women—started in the 1990s (five of these in 1999). Only Charles Stross opened his mouth upon the world significantly earlier than that (in 1985), but he published no books of fiction (beyond a wee pamphlet) before 2000, and something like 30 since. So certainly, for a reviewer who began to read sf long before 2000, most of the contributions in this anthology are from authors who may be saying something new; no story in the book was in fact first published earlier than 2003.
This is not to suggest that 21st Century Science Fiction was exactly designed to shock us with abysses of novelty. Not only were the stories here assembled all first published elsewhere (23 from magazines, the rest from original anthologies and collections), but a very high proportion of them also appeared in one or another Best of the Year anthology before 2013, and several of them won awards. For teachers of sf courses, whose assignments of reading texts are important if the book is to reach its presumed main market, this provenance is a demonstration that safe hands have been at the tiller; for the rest of us, even before we plunge into its offerings, there may seem to be something senatorial about the sound of the book in the ear of the mind, something verging—if one dare suggest such a thing about two editors for one firm who inhabit together barnacled niches in the Flatiron Building itself, an edifice Washington Irving could have dreamt up as the capital of Gotham—on the clubbable. It is of course satisfying to maybe know what the stories we tell ourselves here have in store for our century so soon. The danger is to seem to know too much already.
The danger, which we can perorate ad libidum upon after a brief run-through of the actual contents, is of failing to awaken from the unflagged quantum-entanglement dream of classic sf into regions less congenial, for the allure of Homo sapiens–compliant sf is great. But more of that in a minute.
The order of presentation of 21st Century Science Fiction follows no visible scheme, but it is possible to sense the invisible hand of professional editors doing their jobs through the exceedingly smooth way story segues into story, almost as though a consensus were being unpacked. Almost as though 21st Century Science Fiction were a concert. We will be less careful.
First some examples from the album amicorum world of magazines. The two contributions originally from Analog—Brenda Cooper’s “Savant Songs” (2004) and Marissa Lingen’s “The Calculus Plague” (2009)—are examples of the extrovert story in which an invert transforms the world through thought applications, both at the top of the Analog modular for such endeavors, though it did seem a bit odd in the Cooper tale to find an autistic genius attempting to attach the universe through mathematical/oulipo transfigurations of music without a mention of similar dances in our own world like Peter Maxwell Davies’s magic-square architectures. The seven stories from Asimov’s are thematically and stylistically more various. David D. Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk” (2005) is an apparent homage to the anthropology-tinted sf of half a century ago where a naive Terran learns a painful but ultimately wholesome lesson from the natives of a planet he’s attempting to sell inappropriate goods to and is taught a lesson in capitalism; it won a Hugo. Neal Asher’s “Strood” (2004) is a joyously compact tale in which a dying human is put in contact—under duress—with aliens exogamously entranced by the chance to eat human diseases and make us well. Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline” (2007) jumps half a century upwards from Keith Laumer Bolo country, describing (in terms it is impossible not to be moved by) the slow death of a sentient weapon who befriends a human and passes hope on. Liz Williams’s “Ikiryoh” (2005) cleverly applies a mutated japonisme to a small, deep, alien tragedy that stares at us not with human eyes. Daryl Gregory seems unexceptionably to render in “Second Person, Present Tense” (2005) the effects of imposing an artifactual replacement self into the somatic cauldron of a young girl whose brain has been blotted out, but just as the tale seems about to terminate in something close to psychobabble, he shockingly turns everything inside out with a human sentence; in that sentence alone, out of all the sentences in all the tales in this large volume contributed to by sharp and feeling authors, I felt myself face to face with something mysterious about Homo sapiens. Ian Creasey’s “Erosion” (2009) almost captures a similar mystery but is cloaked in nostalgia, even if resolutely controlled by mise en scène and an onward thrust—because sf stories need to go, a blessing here.
The three tales originally from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction befit that journal in whose pages can often be found lurches into the nakedness of “literal” sf, stories like M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” (2003), which peels the rind off memories of the past and leaves the world unannealed: Rickert—along with Kelly Link and a very few others (sadly, there is no Kelly Link story in the anthology nor any by China Miéville or Lavie Tidhar)—only seems tranquil till the ribs tear open; family is central here as it is in Link, but for neither author is there any return to values. David Moles’s “Finisterra” (2008) exports events and exploitations to Jupiter in what sounds very much like a continuation of what we should be very afraid we are doing right here. And James L. Cambias’s preposterous “Balancing Accounts” (2008), narrated by a mobile AI trying to make a profit in the Outer Planets, is another hugely entertaining counterfactual: for the future it depicts, a techno-occultist continuation of progress here on Earth, is patently laid down to comfort us: and does. Nine further stories first appeared in magazines. Of them, Tony Ballantyne’s quite astonishing “The Waters of Meribah” (2003 Interzone) is set in an imprisoning alternate cosmos where there is no hope for us; Genevieve Valentine’s “The Nearest Thing” (2011 Lightspeed), set in a near future, corporation-speak world, seems to be the only genuine satire in the book; Catherynne M. Valente’s “How to Become a Mars Overlord” (2010 Lightspeed), which seems to have been fecundated, Vance by Calvino, is perhaps the most startling piece assembled here for the writing of it; and not a single word, unlike some of her novels, too many. Hannu Rajaniemi’s “His Master’s Voice” (2008 Interzone) is almost as much fun as Cambias’s nonsense and as poignant.
It may reflect the editors’ taste—which conspicuously honors the carefully fashioned, the generically obedient, the sophont reiteration of the Twice-Told—that only eleven of the stories in 21st Century Science Fiction did not first appear in magazines and that there is consequently an element of generic prechoice underpinning their choices; that none are translations (which is to say there is nothing here from the astonishing Leena Krohn, one example only, but then she might be too old); that there is nothing here from writers who do not work and publish within a modestly generous definition of the sf Pale, which is to say they don’t normally publish in the genre-identifiable magazines (which is to say no Rhys Hughes, no Jonathan Lethem, no Karen Russell, no George Saunders, no William T. Vollmann); and that sf so demarcated will tend to perpheralize fantastika as a whole, a demarcation which peripheralizes in turn the editors’ pull-the-other-one claim that “Neither of us is especially interested in being genre policemen....”
Stories from anthologies or single-author collections in 21st Century Science Fiction include two or three—like Vandana Singh’s rather profound “Infinities” (2008), Paolo Bacigalupi’s prescient if dangerously neat “The Gambler” (2008), and Peter Watts’s harsh dry-ice “The Island” (2009)—that clearly demonstrate how deeply the kind of sf this anthology is friendly to can in fact penetrate. But others, like Charles Stross’s “Rogue Farm” (2003) or John Scalzi’s “The Tale of the Wicked” (2009) or Kage Baker’s “Plotters and Shooters” (2007), are more adherent to a central genre-governing pleasure principle, which may be defined as Stir Do Not Shake. Which makes them huge fun to read. In general, though we may take it as a warning note that we are being told tales whose grammars we learned in childhood, like knowing where the apse of a church is without ever having to know what an apse exactly was, a sense of familiarity only intensified by the fact that not only was each one of these selections first printed elsewhere, but that all of them have been reprinted more than once before appearing here; some of them have been reprinted several times. They welcome us into the club. We welcome them.
Really, we do. There are two anthologies here, and the first of them is entirely easy to welcome. It is a well-organized assembly of prerecognized professional work containing a large number of really pretty fine sf titles published between 2003 and 2011. The second anthology can only be inferred, but it remains hard to resist a sense—despite the editors’ possibly sagacious determination not to define what they mean by their title—that we are being told something. I think we are in fact being told something increasingly difficult to swallow as the quicksand nanoseconds of the next century mound into Saharas of the indecipherable, prelusive viral whiffs of the Singularity of Things to come. I think this anthology is trying to tell us that the marriage between First SF and the latter days of the last century was not morganatic and that the hardworking heirs of this marriage will inherit the new earth. Some of us think they won’t.
In a recent London Review of Books (19 November 2015), Michael Wood creatively repurposes the phrase “unflagged dream” to describe films (in particular) where you cannot tell you are in a dream until you wake up, instancing directors like Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, whose films both demonstrate a deep and knowing love of cinema and a knowledge that the film of story always splits. What I’m suggesting here by analogue is that twentieth-century sf was an unflagged dream out of which it has proven singularly difficult to awaken. Certainly we have seemed to lack a Buñuel to convince us that our discreet charm consisted in the ability to starve slowly as we ate the World while thinking we were being fed. But it is more than just a willful refusal to see the flag that has brought us here. I think the problem with sf may be that its modulars and its belief system are fatally isomorphic with the Western World it has so successfully advocated since 1950 or so: that it is quite astonishingly hard for classic sf writers to stop dreaming and to try to catch some glimpse of reality beyond our monkeybrain niche because being Homo sapiens is an inside job. It is very hard not to cater to ourselves. It may be impossible not to.
To speak of something like Homo sapiens–compliant sf is, in a sense, therefore, simply to make a bad joke: because there’s nothing we can do that we can’t do, nothing we can see which we are not designed to see. As a species, we do not do well with strangeness; especially in the West we are compelled to see how strangeness works, to slap a slave face on the unknown. At a more homely level, though, it may be possible to think of the amalgam of sf tales presented in 21st Century Science Fiction as being Homo sapiens–compliant through their failure to convey an awareness that the stories that make us feel most human are no longer the stories that tell us the truth (I quote myself from a review for Strange Horizons where I instanced this review; the tail is now bit).
Two examples out of many. Whenever an AI begins to talk in an sf story (there are several instances reprinted here), we are making use of a compliance code in order to impersonate a future which in the light of day is in fact no longer stageable by us: for whatever the Singularity is and whenever it comes, we will almost certainly recognize it by its silence. Whenever a scarcity-driven dilemma is encountered and solved by a monkeybrain protagonist in an sf story, we expose our Western inclination to think we have earned whatever we get (and get what we earned), and we continue to confess our deep inability to abandon stories in which our agency is necessary to shape the future—hence sf writers’ disdain for the terrible simplicities of the 3D printer at a time when NASA is beginning to work out how to print the next or next-but-one Mars base. Two swift examples, which point to the same conclusion: that if we continue to tell ourselves stories where Homo sapiens (or the surrogates we recognize in the mirror) continue unilaterally to make the future in our own image, we will continue to sleep the Sleep of Reason. Snore the unflagged dream.
John Clute lives in London and in Maine.
This would have been a better review if you'd replaced the first-person plural with the first-person singular throughout.
Posted by: Sumana Harihareswara | 01/12/2016 at 08:39 AM
(There are some places where that would have made the sentence not make sense -- because the "we" in different bits of the review is different and could use specifying!)
Posted by: Sumana Harihareswara | 01/12/2016 at 08:41 AM