Many Angles on the Future

By MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER

Readers of so-called literary fiction may lament that it is no longer a staple of mass-circulation magazines—that the short story is now a hothouse form produced mostly for fellow creative-writing students—but lovers of science-fiction stories are in the enviable position of having too much to read. The three major American science-fiction magazines—Analog, Asimov's, and Fantasy and Science Fiction—publish nearly 4,000 pages of fiction a year. Then there is the British magazine Interzone and websites such as Subterranean, Clarkesworld and Tor.com. Occasional science-fiction stories appear even in The New Yorker.

Most science-fiction fans give up on the effort to keep pace and turn to anthologies instead. Gardner Dozois's long-running "best of" series is rightly a favorite. This year's version includes more than 300,000 words and draws from a variety of sources, including a recent collection of stories that rework H.P. Lovecraft's masterly tropes and themes. But "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection," for all its bulk, is charmingly eclectic more than portentously comprehensive. Consider two stories that Mr. Dozois has placed next to each other in his anthology: "Paradiso Lost" by Albert E. Cowdrey and "It Takes Two" by Nicola Griffith.

Mr. Cowdrey's novella is a traditional military science-fiction story: hard men on rough planets. Ms. Griffith's novelette "It Takes Two" is, for its first half, the tale of a female vice president of a software company falling in love with a female lap dancer. Mr. Cowdrey's readers and Ms. Griffith's are probably two distinct groups, but the stories are more similar than one might expect.

Mr. Cowdrey delivers all the battle action one would want, but he is far more concerned with the struggle his hero faces when he receives orders from his superior officers that seem aimed at genocide. As for Ms. Griffith's storyline, it turns out that her heroine's erotic urge is not what it seems: She has been drugged and set up by her company's higher-ups, who engineer her affair as an illicit experiment. Both Mr. Cowdrey and Ms. Griffith ultimately ask the same question: How much control should our bosses have over us?

It helps that both stories are neatly constructed, intellectually challenging and smoothly written. Indeed, many of the stories in Mr. Dozois's anthology—notably "Blood Dauber" by Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore (about the horrific effects of a research experiment at a zoo) and "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" by Ian McDonald (about a fractured India in 2050)—are remarkable for their literary qualities.

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Not all of the entries in "The Year's Best Science Fiction" are so appealing, however. Increasingly, it seems, the genre is turning inward or making a show of imitating earlier work. John C. Wright's "Twilight of the Gods," for example, adapts Richard Wagner's operatic Ring Cycle by making the ring of Wagner's saga into a lost key: It turns on a long-dormant computer that can reactivate a dying starship. Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" performs a similar imitative task for "The Prisoner of Zenda," Anthony Hope's classic tale of intrigue and mistaken identity in a middle-European kingdom. But why read Mr. Wright or Mr. Cornell when the original works are available and arguably more entertaining?

Still other stories in the anthology refer self-consciously to the genre's history. Jo Walton, in "Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction," provides an alternate-universe story in which the Depression never ended and World War II never happened. It is filled with breadlines and brutally crushed strikes, but a newspaper snippet essential to the plot (the headline is the story's title) alludes to pseudonymous science-fiction writers who became famous, but it uses only their real names or other pseudonyms that they discarded. In other words: an annoying inside joke. Chris Roberson's "Edison's Frankenstein," an adaptation of 19th-century novels about heroic inventors such as Tom Swift, will please mostly the few readers who think that the Victorians were naïve for daring to presume that the future would be better than the present.

More often than not, though, Mr. Dozois picks fiction that deserves to be better known to a wide audience. Take one of science fiction's traditional themes: the "what if" story. What if, John Barnes asks in "Things Undone," we lived in a world where the past is changed as easily as a Wikipedia page? What would it be like if the "I" in I-70 routinely changed its reference from "interstate" to "imperial"? Or if we woke up each morning not sure if we lived in America or Armorica? The names of things—as philosophers have long noted—entail a conception of what they are, their qualities or properties. Mr. Barnes uses these examples to ponder how easily "reality" can be remade by seemingly trivial changes.

Another traditional science-fiction story explores the effects of "new" science. Nancy Kress, for instance, specializes in stories about genetic manipulation and in "Act One" describes what happens when gene researchers ensure that several thousand children have "Arlen's Syndrome," which endows them with far more empathy for other people than children usually possess. Are these genetically modified children to be admired, Ms. Kress wonders, or pitied?

Only in an alternative reality would an anthology please every one of its readers, and surely "The Year's Best Science Fiction" will inspire disapproval as well as assent. But it is as good as the real world allows for now—a wide-ranging sampler for enthusiasts eager to catch up on their favorite genre and a good introduction for fiction lovers who are tired of reading precious short stories about paint drying in Connecticut.

Mr. Wooster is a former editor of the Wilson Quarterly and The American Enterprise.