The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

I first saw a copy of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction at Readercon and, on a quick look at the table of contents, was impressed, because here was as solid a collection of basic SF as I'd seen in a while -- indeed, for one volume covering the years it does in a general way, I don't know of a better one (The Road to Science Fiction is great, but it's 6 volumes!  Others I can think of are either more focused on a particular era or are more thesis-driven).

One thing that's important to keep in mind about the book is that it is intended as a teaching anthology -- its primary audience is any sort of "intro to SF" class (it even has a companion website with sample syllabi).  As such, it seems to me really strong.

Jeff VanderMeer raised a good point about the anthology's odd inclusion of very few stories from the last 20 years.  It's bizarre, and one of those things that tends to happen with books edited by a bunch of people.  It would be nice if the introduction addressed this weakness, because there are always compromises that have to be made in an anthology, and I imagine the editors probably thought that more recent work is more readily accessible to readers through various other anthologies and websites, so their focus should be on the older stuff.  Indeed, in a class, it would be easy to supplement this anthology by also using something like Dozois's Best of the Best and maybe some online stories.  Problem solved.

A more efficient solution would have been to end the anthology with Jim Kelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur" from 1995, and use the extra space and money on enriching some of the other decades, but I expect Wesleyan would have frowned on a book in which the most recent story is fifteen years old.

So the lack of representation for the last 20 years is weird, but I can understand it, and I would happily have such stories as "The Liberation of Earth" and "Desertion" and "When It Changed" and so many others easily accessible.  The only giant and inexplicable omission I've noticed in the book so far is its failure to reprint Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", which is the story "Think Like a Dinosaur" is in direct response to.  (Eric Schaller notes this in the comments to Jeff's entry.  I emailed one of the editors to see if anyone's willing to talk about this omission, but haven't heard back yet. See update in next paragraph.)  One of the nice things about the book is that it is explicitly concerned with the idea of an SF megatext, and for that purpose, including "The Cold Equations" would have made a lot of sense.  There could be a problem with rights or something that prevents the story being reprinted in the book, but, again, it would have been nice to see it addressed in the introduction.  Godwin's story is mentioned in the headnote to "Think Like a Dinosaur", which only compounds the oddness.

Update: Just heard back from the editors of the book -- "Cold Equations" was on the original long list, but length considerations came into play, as well as a desire from at least a few of the editors to allow "Think Like a Dinosaur" to be something other than just a response to "Cold Equations".

(Eric also mentions that it would have been better perhaps to reprint "Mr. Boy", which is, I agree, among Jim's most impressive works.  But it's much longer than "Think Like a Dinosaur", and for an anthology like this, long stories take up so much space that they need to be absolutely essential to be included.  "TLD" fits the book's purposes well and is short enough that it doesn't hog precious space. Also, any of us would choose different stories by some of the authors, but that's the nature of anthologies.  Some of the selections that on a first glance I thought were odd -- especially Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Aldiss's "Supertoys..." -- make sense within the context of the book; in this case, it encourages connections to familiar media: both stories partly inspired films [indeed, films either directed by Stanley Kubrick (2001) or intitiated by him (A.I.)].  So while they're not by any means the best or most representative works by those authors, that's not the purpose of their inclusion in the anthology.)

Larry Nolen speaks truthfully when he calls it a "safe" anthology.  I expect the editors would agree, because that's part of the point -- this is an intro anthology.  To fill it with lots of esoteric authors or less-familiar stories would be counter-productive to the stated purpose.  I'm not the audience for it (except that I might assign it to classes one day), because I already have copies of 95% of those stories.  This is not a book you give to somebody who has a shelf full of SF anthologies covering a bunch of different eras.  This is a book you give to somebody who's seen a few sci-fi movies and maybe read a couple books or a short story here or there, or  to somebody who has only read current work and wants a one-volume crash course in some of the classics of the field.  For such a person, this is a marvelous book.  Just stick a note in the end with a list of some of your favorite recent anthologies, so they can see the wonderful diversity of what's been published since 1995...

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more