Customer Reviews

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology

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Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through the kind offices of the Publicist of the publisher, Tachyon Publications.

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, is an anthology of stories across the eponymous magazine's 60 year history.

Although I am not a heavy reader of SF magazines (when I read SF stories, its usually in anthologies or collections), it is clear to me, immediately, that F&SF has had a wonderful history of publishing some of the best stories in SF history.

And a swath of those stories are ably collected by Mr. Van Gelder in this collection. The stories range in publication date from 1951 (Alfred Bester's Time and Third Avenue) to 2007 (Ted Chiang's story The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate).

Arranged in chronological order, the stories show the changes and evolution of the SF story with a high quality of selected stories throughout. Its not just a "most famous" story group either. While there are genre-famous stories like Flowers for Algernon, the Deathbird, and Harrison Bergeron, there are stories that are in that class, but much well less known. (Zelazny's This Moment of the Storm, for instance, or Peter Beagle's story sequel to the Last Unicorn, Two Hearts come to mind)

With that in mind, I devoured this book quickly and gleefully. I enjoyed the touchstones to the classics and old favorites, and discovering new (to me) stories as well. Gelder has done an top notch job.

Genres that forget their history are condemned to fail by that forgetting. Collections like this help the genre of SF keep in mind its roots and history. Any serious fan of science fiction would do well to dip their oars into this volume.

The lineup:

Of Time and Third Avenue, Alfred Bester
All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury
One Ordinary Day with Peanuts, Shirley Jackson
A touch of Strange, Theodore Sturgeon
Eastward, Ho!, William Tenn
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut
This Moment of the Storm, Roger Zelazny
The Electric Ant, Philip K Dick
The Deathbird, Harlan Ellison
The Women Men Don't See, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon)
I see You, Damon Knight
The Gunslinger, Stephen King
The Dark, Karen Joy Fowler
Buffalo, John Kessel
Solitude, Ursula K Le Guin
Mother Grasshopper, Michael Swanwick
macs, Terry Bisson
Creation, Jeffrey Ford
Other People, Neil Gaiman
Two Hearts, Peter S Beagle
Journey into the Kingdom, M Rickert
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, Ted Chiang

Were one young enough not to have read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as I have from the late 1950s onward (and published once in it myself) one would gather by the earlier review posted here that this is a good, perhaps even great anthology. It's not. It doesn't even come close. Van Gelder has put together a book that's excellent, but excellent up to a point, and that's about half way through the book when, around 1990 all of science fiction and fantasy being published began to show a marked decline in both quality and writing style. Various critics and writers have written extensively on this topic already, so I won't dwell on it here, but the stories in the latter half of this anthology (with the exception of "macs" by Terry Bisson--an acknowledged, and terrifying, classic) visibly pale in comparison to the previous stories. Stephen King's "Gunslinger" is here, but I'd rather Van Gelder reprinted J.G. Ballard's "Cloud Sculptors of Coral D" or any of the Vermillion Sands stories published in F&SF. And Ballard is only one of 40 writers I'd much have preferred to see here. I suspect that "Gunslinger" is in this book to help sell the anthology, and, I suspect, so is Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts". Both stories, while containing tropes of the fantastical, they are nonetheless written in a very realistic, almost Hemingway-esque prose--serviceable, journalistic--that considerably diminishes any fantasy element that someone such as Clark Aston Smith or Fritz Leiber would have easily conjured. (And I am talking about magic here: the magic of new worlds created, a sense of wonder.) The problem is that Van Gelder is playing his favorites (which is allowed--it's his magazine, after all). He tips his hand when he chooses the very weak (and atypical) story by Zelazny, "Moment of the Storm" from 1966. Van Gelder admits in the introduction that he could have chosen "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" or "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", much more mature stories by Zelazny, but he didn't. "Moment of the Storm" would never in a thousand years be considered among Zelazny's "very best". (The fact that it's rarely been anthologized is no excuse to include it here.) In fairness, Van Gelder undoubtedly was trying to put together an anthology that would offer some stories commonly anthologized and others not. Fair enough. But the fantasy stories here really fall flat. The Peter S. Beagle story is the one that amazed me (and disappointed me) the most. The flatness of the prose style comes across as mere reportage; it's about a village besieged by a griffin. Okay. Cool. But where's the lyrical prose that can be found in the best fantasy written? No mood is conjured, so real sense of wonder created. I remember feeling sucked into the world Orson Scott Card created in his novel, "Hart's Hope" (and that even isn't one of Card's best novels!). You read that and you're most definitely in his creation--because of the prose style. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does the same thing in "One-Hundred Years of Solitude". Is there a Jack Vance novel or story that doesn't work the same way? Cordwainer Smith. C.M. Kornbluth. Where are those guys? Yet the Beagle story is here because Beagle has written one great book that nearly everybody worships. I just wish this was a better anthology than it is. However, to think of it another way, you could look at this book as something like a canary in a coal mine: it shows what many of us older readers have known for a while: that starting about 25, perhaps 30 years ago, both sci-fi and fantasy fell into a creative decline (even though sales have soared). Stories after that time seem less innovative and choose to fall back on familiar tropes and conceits. Nothing seems magical, no one seems to be bringing anything new to the table. Just the familiar. Just what sells. (Isn't that, in the end, the name of the game anymore?)

(Caveat: And, yes, the one story I published in F&SF falls into the period of decline I mentioned. It was a time travel story. Fun to write. Glad it was taken by Ed Ferman. The rule still applies.)

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology is an excellent collection of 23 stories picked from the treasure trove of short fiction that's been published in the eponymous magazine over the past 60 years. Editor Gordon Van Gelder -- also the editor of the magazine since 1997 -- has done an admirable job, picking stories that illustrate the diversity of both the genre and the magazine. As such, this is a great anthology for SF&F fans as well as newcomers looking for a taste.

The line-up of authors in this collection looks like a veritable Who's Who of speculative fiction: Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman -- just to name a few of the most famous ones. What's even more impressive is the fact that all the stories collected here saw their first publication in the magazine. It really gave me pause when I realized that a towering classic such as "Flowers From Algernon" by Daniel Keyes first appeared in this digest-sized magazine (and if you haven't read that story yet, you have at least one perfect reason to get this anthology right now!). Every story is preceded by a brief and thoughtful editorial note, often highlighting its author's involvement with the magazine.

The quality of these stories is, as could be expected, almost uniformly excellent. Stand-outs for me were: the previously mentioned "Flowers For Algernon" which is about a mentally retarded man who gains a brief period of brilliance via a scientific experiment; "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin, an exquisite and touching story set in her Hainish Cycle; "Creation" by Jeffrey Ford, about a young boy's attempt to create life; and "Mother Grasshopper" by Michael Swanwick, about how a far-future civilization becomes reintroduced to death. If I could give these stories individual ratings, they'd all have five stars by their names, with the majority of the others getting a solid four stars. The only disappointment for me was "Buffalo" by John Kessel, a reverie about a fictional meeting between the author's father and H.G. Wells.

By the numbers: out of the 23 stories collected here, I'd call 12 solidly science fiction, 6 definitely fantasy, 1 horror, and the rest hard to place but trending towards the fantastical. Included in that last category is Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird", which is more or less a genre of its own and one of the oddest things I've read in years. The stories are spread out across the six decades of the magazine's existence, although strangely enough not a single story from the eighties was included. The earlier part of the anthology is predominantly science fiction, and as fantasy became more popular over the years, more stories of that genre appear towards the end of the collection. The only real "high fantasy" story included here is Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts," in which the author revisits his classic The Last Unicorn. In terms of length, the stories vary from barely 3 pages (Neil Gaiman's "The Others," a terrifying vision of hell) to Stephen King's 44 page story "The Gunslinger," one of the 5 stories that make up the novel of the same name, originally serialized in the magazine.

Another number, and one that might raise an eyebrow, is 5: the number of female authors represented here, compared to 18 male authors. Also, some readers may look for one or more legendary stories from the magazine that unfortunately aren't represented here. My personal pick would be to add Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met in Lankhmar" novella, originally published in F&SF Magazine and certainly one of its classic -- and now sadly underappreciated -- stories.

Still, it's easy to second-guess almost any anthology, let alone one that attempts to span the life of one of the most revered magazines in speculative fiction. When all's said and done, this is undeniably an excellent collection of stories -- one that will give readers a great look at the history of F&SF Magazine and, in doing so, the history of the entire genre. It's possible that some reader will already be familiar with many of these stories, but if you aren't, The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology is practically a must-read. Highly recommended.

This collection contains truly the cream of the crop, including a number of top-level stories that have not been anthologized to death. The reader can thus both revisit old favorites and encounter "new" works by well-known authors. Highly recommended.

As an aspiring short story writer, I constantly read story collections/anthologies and magazines, and all forms of speculative fiction give me great reading pleasure. I must say that "Fantasy & Science Fiction" is up in my top three favorites for short fiction sources, and I wish to be published in this publications. And any writer will tell you that if you wish to be published by a particular magazine, sample read what they publish. This is one of the major reasons why I picked this anthology, and I must say that I was more than impressed with the book. Here's the reasons why:

As an anthology covering sixty years' worth of publication history, this offers the reader the unique opportunity where one can see the evolution of speculative fiction as a literary form from the post-pulp days on to the present. Unlike other genres, science fiction (and to a lesser extent, fantasy) as a rule covers all lengths of fiction, with each length of story being equally respected. And one can see this here, with short-shorts put in with novellas and short novels. With this cross-section put between covers, I became more savvy to the types, lengths and styles of stories that are generally accepted by the magazine while allowing for the author's ability to experiment with his/her work. This has encouraged me in my work, as this gives me an education into the type of stuff I should work with when I go to submit my work to this and other publications.

Also, I was met with stories not only from some of my favorites--King, Ellison, Vonnegut, and Keyes come to mind--but also from writers that I have not heard of before. That I have been exposed to some of these great writers, many of whom are household names, has encouraged me to broaden my reading material.And with this broadening, I can learn more about my chosen profession and craft that I would not have learned about otherwise.

Lastly, the stories themselves were tremendous in my young opinion (I am barely twenty years old as I write this). Ellison's "The Deathbird" is a personal favorite from a favorite writer of mine, and I know not of one person who has not been affected by Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" or Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon." For my fellow King fans, you will be delighted to find out that the first book in his "Dark Tower" series, "The Gunslinger," was published as a series of stories in this publication. And the first in that group is published in this book. There are of course several other stories here, many of which escape my memory at present, but I recommend them nonetheless.

All in all, I was rather impress with this collection. It has surely opened my eyes, as a reader and a writer. I recommend it time and again.

Several classics, and several excellent stories I hadn't seen before.
(Several I could have happily done without, but the ratio was highly favorable --
the editors had a great deal of good material to choose from, and it showed.)