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S stands for speculative
Nov. 14th, 2005 09:06 pmThere are a good number of "year's best" anthologies around at the moment. They went out of fashion for a while but they are back in force again. The thing is, that the best is not an absolute quantity. Unless taken from an award of some sort, the quality of work to the reader is dependent on the taste and skill of the editors.
So we come to Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt. What I see here from the editors is a preference and a commitment to works that push the boundaries. There isn't a lot of safe conservative work here - well unless you subscribe to the view that "experimental is the new conservative". Perhaps that is the motivation behind the selections for this collection as a "best of". Quality of wordcraft and emotional impact seem to be in the mix as well.
The thing is, when reading stories that push the boundaries is that tastes on the edge have greater variation than in the old elves and rocketship derived core of the genre. For me, in this collection there were stories which worked and stories which don't. By my count it was a majority in favour of "worked". But somebody else might come to the same conclusion and yet choose a very different set of stories in each pile. The stories are personal and introspective in nature which means that the resonance between the reader and writer becomes a complex and personal thing. The probability of my interaction being the same as the editors' feelings towards a work becomes fairly low. As a corrollary, it also makes for stronger polarisation of opinion and strength of opinion. Well that was what I found in this collection.
One last thing about "best of" anthologies which counts a little against what I just wrote. If you read short fiction from a variety of sources, you are bound to run into stories you have read before when you get to the "year's best". The impact of those stories is usually softened by the previous reading - this was certainly the case with a couple of the tales in this book. It always pays to read the table of contents.
So we come to Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt. What I see here from the editors is a preference and a commitment to works that push the boundaries. There isn't a lot of safe conservative work here - well unless you subscribe to the view that "experimental is the new conservative". Perhaps that is the motivation behind the selections for this collection as a "best of". Quality of wordcraft and emotional impact seem to be in the mix as well.
The thing is, when reading stories that push the boundaries is that tastes on the edge have greater variation than in the old elves and rocketship derived core of the genre. For me, in this collection there were stories which worked and stories which don't. By my count it was a majority in favour of "worked". But somebody else might come to the same conclusion and yet choose a very different set of stories in each pile. The stories are personal and introspective in nature which means that the resonance between the reader and writer becomes a complex and personal thing. The probability of my interaction being the same as the editors' feelings towards a work becomes fairly low. As a corrollary, it also makes for stronger polarisation of opinion and strength of opinion. Well that was what I found in this collection.
One last thing about "best of" anthologies which counts a little against what I just wrote. If you read short fiction from a variety of sources, you are bound to run into stories you have read before when you get to the "year's best". The impact of those stories is usually softened by the previous reading - this was certainly the case with a couple of the tales in this book. It always pays to read the table of contents.