The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF - By Gardner Dozois Page 0,3

Power, 1976, Another World, 1977, and many others); and for five years beginning in 1977 had taken over the editorship of Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year anthology. But no one, I think, was quite prepared for the magnitude and comprehensiveness of the inaugural volume of the new Dozois anthology, nor could anyone have anticipated that the series would, in time, come to be the defining summation of a glorious era in science fiction.

I have the first volume of the Dozois series before me now. It looks surprisingly like the most recent one: a thick book that announces its name in bold letters emphasizing the words SCIENCE FICTION, and lists on its cover the names of thirteen of its contributors. Those contributors were a stellar group, of course. Taken all together, the stories represent a shrewd cross-section of what was already a potent period in the history of the s-f short story.

But that first volume was not distinguished merely by the excellence of its fiction. What gave it special importance and, eventually, immense historical value, was the thirteen-page essay “Summation,” in which Dozois provided a penetrating, closely analytical account of the year’s activities in the world of science-fiction publishing: comings and goings among editors and publishers, sales figures for bestselling books, circulation figures for magazines, thematic trends in current science fiction, news of awards and conventions, comments on recent s-f movies, obituaries. No previous best-of-the-year anthology had provided anything comparable. Each of the nineteen subsequent volumes has had a similar summation section, each at least as lengthy as the first and some much longer indeed; in and of themselves they form a continuing chronicle of the evolution of science fiction in the late twentieth century that will be of value to critics, historians, and readers for decades to come.

The stories chosen by Dozois in these first twenty volumes also constitute a statement about the nature of the s-f short story in that two-decade period – a statement filtered through the sensibility of just one reader, of course, but a highly informed one, steeped in the history of the field, imbued with a sense of science fiction’s value both as entertainment and intellectual stimulation, and further augmented by the editor’s own innate knowledge, as a skilled practitioner himself, of the art of the short story. Over the years Dozois’s story-picking expertize has been confirmed by reader approval, demonstrated through the great number of Hugo awards conferred on Dozois-chosen stories and by the many awards given to the anthology itself.

Dozois’s task as anthologist was complicated, in an odd way, by being editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Asimov’s had already established itself as the outstanding magazine of the field, but under Dozois’s guidance from 1985 onwards it attained an even more powerful position of dominance, as is shown by the unparalleled fourteen Hugo awards for Best Editor that he received during the nineteen years of his stewardship of the magazine. John Campbell’s Astounding was similarly dominant in its day, more than half a century ago – but Campbell was not also the editor of a Best of the Year anthology. When Healy and McComas, in 1946, chose twenty-five of their thirty-three stories from the Campbell Astounding, no one was particularly surprised or upset: everyone knew that most of the superior stories of the era had been published there. And, since science-fiction writers tend naturally to gravitate towards their era’s top magazine, a similar concentration of the best work began appearing in the Dozois-edited Asimov’s. But Dozois as anthology editor could not allow himself to draw as extensively on his own magazine as Healy and McComas had drawn on Campbell’s, lest his book seem merely self-promoting; and so he was faced with the perplexing necessity of finding worthy stories for his anthology that had originally appeared in magazines competitive with his own.

Examining a few randomly chosen volumes of the Dozois series, we can see how well he managed this tricky task. The fourth volume of Best New SF, published in 1990, contains twenty-five stories, of which just nine originated in Asimov’s: an admirable show of objectivity. The eighth volume, from 1994, includes only seven Asimov’s items out of twenty-three. The sixteenth volume, released in 2003, shows an eight-for-twenty-six ratio. Surely the practice of this sort of discipline required Dozois to eliminate from his anthology a great many stories from his magazine that must have seemed as worthy of reprinting as the ones he did choose for the book;