Jonathan Strahan

Lafferty, R. A. The Best of R. A. Lafferty. Edited by Jonathan Strahan. Tor, 2019.
R. A. Lafferty, 1914-2002, wrote most of his science fiction between 1960 and 1980. During the 1960s, he worked fulltime as an electrical engineer, but his career literary output was prodigious: 32 novels and 200 short stories. He won Hugo nominations for his first novel and for three of his short stories. The agent who manages his literary estate still holds a cache of unpublished manuscripts.
Each of the show more stories in this collection is introduced by a major writer who has been influenced by him. The list includes Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, and Samuel R. Delany, and other well-established writers in the field. They are unanimous in saying that he is a “writer’s writer.” Most are grateful for his influence, but Delany, who began writing about the same time Lafferty did, seems miffed to be so often compared with him. Faulkner had a similar reaction to being compared to James Joyce. As much as other writers admired his work, I bet Lafferty had a lot of rejection slips from editors who did not know what to make of him. His prose style displays a wry, understated sense of humor. It combines a colloquial working-class slang with occasional words that can send readers to the dictionary to check the etymology. His narrative structures are tightly compressed but often have double or triple twists that spin the reader’s head around. There are echoes of fables and folktales from several cultures. The combination often reminds me of such diverse writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Zelazny, Cordwainer Smith, Flannery O’Connor, and John Barth. Lafferty’s bio makes his education seem spotty, but he knew history, languages, science, philosophy, and plains Indian culture. His symbolism is never straightforward and his humor is often undercut by pessimism as characters find that wrestling with the gods is dangerous and that the universe is a much stranger place than they imagined.
Let me discuss just one of the stories—and, warning, I cannot do it without spoilers, and I cannot do it justice. “Sky” begins with a man coming up out of a mine to sell some skydivers some sky. It should bother us a little that one of the skydivers is named Icarus, and one of them seems to be herself almost lighter than air. Their pilot takes them up to a high altitude and they begin to inject, smoke, and snort the sky they bought from the man in the mine. They go higher, talking like hippies on an acid trip that gives them the sense that they are immortal and exist outside time. And maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Some of the skydivers have chutes. Some don’t. Maybe that matters. Maybe not. And there are more twists to come.
I have not read Lafferty for years, and that is a failing I intend to remedy. This collection of excellent short stories Is a good route back into his work. Lafferty was a unique talent. 5 stars. show less

I keep picking up various old "best of" SF anthologies at library sales and such, so this is me trying to actually read at least one of them, rather than letting them all sit aging forever on my shelves. Although part of my mind instinctively balks at referring to a book from 2003 as "old," anyway. I mean, that was only a few years ago, right? Right?

Anyway. This is a moderately chunky paperback at about 440 pages, although for that length there might be fewer stories than you'd expect, as show more many of them are fairly long, with I think at least a couple at or approaching novella length. As is common for this sort of thing, the editors are not particularly precious or pedantic about genre distinctions, with a number of stories here that could be perhaps more properly categorized as horror or fantasy than science fiction. (I find the inclusion of Neil Gaiman's Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft mashup, "A Study in Emerald," particularly amusing on this front, as I think you could argue that it ticks off almost every genre except science fiction. Not that that's a complaint! I'd read that one before, but it'd been a while and I'd honestly forgotten just how clever it was, so it was nice to encounter it again.)

As usual, of course, notions of what constitutes the "best" of anything can vary enormously, and for me the contents here ranged from very good indeed to stuff that just left me cold. (Unfortunately, one of the latter, Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster," which had a decent idea but an execution I found dull and unconvincing, was by far the longest one in the collection.)

It is, by the way, always kind of interesting to look for themes in these sorts of anthologies, and this one absolutely does have one, as the vast majority of these stories deal with the idea of exploitation in some way, from Paolo Bacigalupi's impressively disturbing story of young girls whose bodies are altered in horrific ways to amuse the rich to Susan Mosser's very pointed piece of social commentary about corporations who force people into indentured servitude for not being able to afford air. All of which, rather depressingly, makes the volume feel not at all dated and still very, very relevant.

It's probably also worth noting that some of the stories here have typos or weird formatting issues that make me wonder if they were poorly scanned in or possibly printed directly from emails. Then again, maybe that's about what one should expect from a book whose back cover blurb touts its main selling point as being "affordable"? show less

Since 1968, Locus has been the trade magazine of SFF publishing. It's the place to go for news of publishing deals, reviews of new fiction, and comprehensive lists of what's been published each month. In 1971, they began the Locus Awards, honoring the best fiction of each year. This anthology was published in 2004, and includes selected winners from the first 30 (ish) years of the award.

With so vague a theme, this collection does feel a little shapeless. There's no unifying authorial voice, show more no thematic similarities, not even a "here's what the genre looks like at this specific moment" snapshot. The only thing these stories share is excellence, and on that level, Brown and Strahan have assembled a terrific collection.

There are four stories here good enough to make my personal list of all-time classics: Harlan Ellison's "Jeffty Is Five," which starts as Bradbury-esqe nostalgia, then rips your heart out in the final paragrahps; John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision," about a man who stumbles into happiness at an unusual desert commune; Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild," about an alien race who establish a violently symbiotic relationship with humanity; and Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God," in which despite angelic visitations and other visible signs of God's existence, one man simply cannot bring himself to accept or love God.

Chiang's is the best of the three stories on religious themes, but the others are also quite good. In "The Way of Cross and Dragon," George R. R. Martin sends a cleric, representing a future Inquisition, to a distant planet to wipe out a dangerous new heresy; Joanna Russ's "Souls" gives us a medieval abbey run by an extraordinary abbess.

And the rest of the authors here are like an all-star team of these three decades: Ursula K. Le Guin, Connie Willis, John Varley, James Tiptree Jr., Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan. There are a couple of stories that didn't do much for me, but both are by authers to whom I've never quite connected; Gene Wolfe and Lucius Shepard both write prose that's too ornate for my taste, though I certainly understand why so many do like them.

A strong, solid collection of late-20th century SF. If you enjoy the genre at all, there will be something here, and probably several somethings, that will delight you. show less

Jonathan Strahan has become the editor of science fiction anthologies like we used to get from the late Gardner Dozois.
New Adventures in Space Opera rounds up stories from 2014-2023 by writers who are on all the recent awards shortlists. Don’t expect pulpy “phasers-on-stun” stories from this crowd. Nor do they have much to say about technology or physics. For the most part, they are polished and poignant explorations of character that just happen to be set in a spacefaring far show more future.
Because I am old fashioned, my favorite was “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” by Tobias S. Buckell, which featured a well-meaning Asimovian robot with a knotty ethical problem.
Alastair Reynolds’ “Belladonna Nights” about a deep-future reunion was as heart-wrenching as anything I have read since Cordwainer Smith.
Seth Dickinson’s “Morrigan in the Sunglare” provides a space war in which pilots must face the cold equations and the erosion of their humanity that such a war entails.
There are other good stories here as well. If you are thinking about getting back into space opera, these new adventures are a good place to start. show less