The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Sixteen Original Works by Speculative Fiction’s Finest Voices edited by Ellen Datlow
Del Rey, $16.00, 402pp, tp, 97803435496324. Science fiction/fantasy anthology. On-sale date: 29 April 2008.
In a field where anthologies may carry names like Dangerous Visions, Giants Unleashed, Otherwhere, or Dark Matter, a title like The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy seems, at first glance, unimaginative… a fatal flaw in a field steeped in the imaginative and the speculative. But then we remember that the first great SF anthology was called simply The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, and that other classics include The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, The Science Fiction Omnibus, and A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. So call the title instead classic or perhaps retro. And, more importantly, while its title may lack sparkle, its contents shine with brilliance.
Edited by Hugo-, World Fantasy-, and Bram Stoker Award-honored editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy is a collection of 16 original speculative fiction stories spanning the genre. Datlow has spoken about her love for short stories, which she has called “the heart and soul of fantastical fiction” and SF. The short form, she notes in her introduction to this volume, particularly lends itself to the imaginative and allows writers to experiment in voice, style, and structure, and the stories collected are indeed innovative. (Note: A launch party for the book was held as a special, “extracurricular” event at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, as reported in SFScope on 15 May 2008.)
Despite its title (we always come back to that, it seems), The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, while far-ranging, does not include every type or subgenre of SF, fantasy or horror. There are no off-planet stories, hard SF puzzles, sword-and-sorcery yarns, or Tolkienesque high fantasies. Earth is room enough (to borrow shamelessly the title of an Asimov anthology) for these authors’ imaginations to soar over, and (still in quoting mode), to paraphrase Spencer Tracy, what there is is choice. (Individual tastes vary, of course, and no collection is free of “clunkers”.)
In “Daltharee”, Jeffrey Ford offers homage to the mad scientist, in a Lewis Padgettesque tale of a bottled city (and, yes, there’s a shrinking ray, but no, no evil, green computer-androids). Aliens do come to Earth in Nathan Ballingrud’s “North American Lake Monsters”, where an uncanny gargantuan carcass stinks up more than the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains; in Pat Cadigan’s “Jimmy”, a fable of misfit childhood set on the day of the JFK Assassination; and, in “Prisoners of the Action”, the anthology’s sole novella, a topical political satire by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman that veers (as great political satires do) between the chilling and the comic as it takes us into the madness of a Gitmo-like prison for captured extraterrestrial attackers.
Alternate history is represented by “The Elephant Ironclads”, Jeffrey Stoddard’s counterfactual tale of an independent Dinétah homeland, in which Navajo legend meets the Atomic Age present; by Christopher Rowe’s “Gather”, set in a weirdly “reconfigured”, theocratic Kentucky; and, most provocatively, by “Shira”, a wishfully speculative future parable (the word is Hebrew for “song”) by Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli emigrant (or yored) now living in remote Micronesia, in which the mysterious (and unspecified) destruction of Jerusalem leads (implausibly, some would say) to Jews and Muslims being united in grief, in peace, and in deep friendship. Maureen F. McHugh envisions a future China of capitalist corruption (and one in which workers figuratively owe their souls to companies as they inextricably bury themselves in debt) in “Special Economics”.
Laird Barron’s “The Lagerstätte” (“resting place” in German) is a ghost story of sorts, a darkly haunting tale of a woman overwhelmed by grief for her husband and son, while in “Gladiolus Exposed” (as in the bone, not the flower), Anna Tambour presents a doctor’s different object of obsession. The East Village is very nearly a character in Richard Bowes’ urban fantasy “Aka St. Mark’s Place”, where the fates of a runaway-turned-rock star with a touch of ESP and an undercover “spotter” are intertwined. Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle”, a grisly and depraved twist on the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”, offers a very different look at youth and lost innocence, while Barry N. Malzberg’s “The Passion of Azazel” mines Judaic themes from the scapegoat (literally, a beast sacrificed in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem) to the golem and the Freudian.
Finally, also represented are stories that don’t categorize neatly. Carol Emshwiller’s “All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World” is a wry and quirky yarn about a librarian in a midlife crisis who is washed up on a desert island whose odd, not quite human natives aren’t what she had hoped for in her quest for a change. In “Ardent Clouds”, New Zealand author Lucy Sussex convincingly presents a woman who has embraced the job of filming volcanoes, and, rounding out the book, Elizabeth Bear’s “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” gives us an imaginary reminiscence by the heavyweight boxer on his epic fights with Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy is not indispensable to every SF/fantasy library, but, with its mix of fresh short fiction from both established writers and new talents, it is a superb slice of contemporary speculative fiction that’s well worth a look.
[Note: SFScope Editor Ian Randal Strock reviewed this book in March. That review is available here.]