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The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction

Connie Willis (Editor),

Connie Willis

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Jul 29, 2010 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: short-stories, science-fiction

Note, July 14, 2021: I've just edited the review below to delete some extraneous material.

Carroll and Graf's Mammoth series offers anthologies of stories drawn from practically any genre or theme that can be suggested; so it was inevitable that science fiction would eventually be represented as well. Editor Ashley, as stated in his introduction, aimed for the best of both old and new stories. Of the 22 selections, the first and last were new stories written especially for this collection. The tw Note, July 14, 2021: I've just edited the review below to delete some extraneous material.

Carroll and Graf's Mammoth series offers anthologies of stories drawn from practically any genre or theme that can be suggested; so it was inevitable that science fiction would eventually be represented as well. Editor Ashley, as stated in his introduction, aimed for the best of both old and new stories. Of the 22 selections, the first and last were new stories written especially for this collection. The two in the exact middle date from the early 1900s, and are contrasting apocalyptic visions. Ashley drew the remaining 18 about equally from the 1950s and 1990s, "with a smattering in between." Several big names in the genre are represented (as the reader can see in the Goodreads entry for the book, which lists every contributor), but most of the stories are ones that have not been frequently anthologized; there were only two I'd read before, giving this collection at least the advantage of freshness.

Like all editors, he defined the "best" in terms of his own tastes and assumptions; and, of course, everybody's are individual and different. For instance, his taste runs somewhat more strongly to the darker side of the genre than mine does; and he's much more open to the strand of modern "hard" SF that draws on the "cutting-edge" theories of quantum physics to justify incoherent plotting and narrative --coherence, in this view, is an illusion and the structure of time and space is a confused jumble, so the writers are trying to reflect this "realistically." Though I'm admittedly not a scientist, I don't personally buy into the extreme aspects of quantum physics; I find them counterintuitive and the "evidence" that I've read unconvincing. More to the point, I don't find this kind of narrative (or "meta-narrative") pleasurable or satisfying to read; it doesn't provide anything that I'm seeking in fiction. Two stories here, Greg Egan's "The Infinite Assassin" and Geoffrey A. Landis' "Approaching Perimelasma," are drawn from this tradition. The Egan story had enough narrative coherence (even though the protagonist was constantly moving through an infinity of worlds, and was one among an infinity of alter egos) that I could read it, even though I didn't enjoy it. But (full disclosure :-)) even though I honestly tried hard, I could NOT read through the Landis story (which is essentially a fictionalized lecture on the quantum theory's postulates about black holes); prose of the "All of me are we are you" sort proved too much for me, and I finally decided that there are some exercises in time wasting and suffering that I don't need to put myself through. (Bludgeoning myself in the head with a hammer and finishing that story would both qualify. :-)) The other story I couldn't finish was Brian Aldiss' "Shards." That one has nothing to do with quantum theory; but it offers page after page of what might as well be gibberish, because it's written from a totally alien and incomprehensible perspective, with an vocabulary that's impossible to understand in key places, and a POV character who doesn't know what or where he/she/it is (and neither does the reader). This is all explained at the end (to which I skipped), and some critics and readers will think it brilliant; for me, it was another exercise with a bludgeoning hammer. :-)

As my star rating for the book suggests, however, there is a lot here that I related to more positively. (The uneven quality of the stories did make it hard to come up with an overall rating; individual ratings could run the gamut between five stars and one --or none, if that was possible. But in the main, I felt that the ratchet was toward the high end of the scale.) My favorite stories here were Connie Willis' "Firewatch," involving a time-traveling Oxford Univ. history student from the far future (as in her award-winning novel Doomsday Book, but a different student) in World War II London during the Blitz; one of the new stories, Eric Brown's brilliant homage to H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, "Ulla, Ulla;" and Clifford D. Simak's "A Death in the House," which illustrates the best features of the best strand, IMO, of his work.

Another story that actually could go in that group is Dick's "The Exit Door Leads In," one of the two I'd read previously. That one is included in the Dick collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, which I've read but never reviewed yet; I'd rather save a more detailed treatment of it for that review, to consider it in the context of the rest of his work. Suffice it to say that this story has a really good point --despite being one of the stories here that have, in places, the most objectionable language. (It can be noted that several, though not all, of the newer stories here have some gratuitous profanity and sometimes even obscenity, which mar the works without adding to them. This never, in these stories, becomes so off-putting as to in itself totally negate the literary value they may possess, though.) The other stories with the worst language problems are Keith Robert's "High Eight," which is nevertheless a very effective cautionary tale with the message that high technology is not necessarily a benevolent thing, and Michael Swanwick's "The Very Pulse of the Machine." There, you get the feeling that anger and frustration fuels a lot of the space-explorer protagonist's bad language --understandable emotions, since the tale opens with her trudging across the frigid, unforgiving surface of the Jovian moon Io on foot, dragging an improvised sledge bearing the body of her colleague (killed in the accident that wrecked their vehicle), with limited oxygen, keeping herself going on methamphetamines in the hope of reaching their spacecraft. But Swanwick's premise here is a genuinely original one; his character is on the cusp of a really major discovery --and of an enormous choice with profound spiritual and moral implications, the kind of choice that serious literature deals with.

Both of the early 1900s yarns are tied together by the theme of the extinction of life on earth, contrasting eschatological visions (fire or ice, to put it in terms of the Frost poem :-)) that are informed by the fears of atheism adrift in a hostile and doomed universe (rather than by New Testament eschatology). If they're approached with that understanding, though, and taken simply as fiction with no attempt to suspend disbelief (and indeed, suspension of disbelief in "Finis" would be difficult, since its astrophysical "science" is drastically off-beam even by 1906 standards!) they're actually affecting stories, "Finis" particularly so. The restrained way that Pollock handles the actions of his two characters here --a man and woman who know, not only that they're doomed to die within a few hours, but that their whole world is dead or similarly doomed as well-- is a model of the "less is more" principle. (This was the other story I'd read before.)

All of the remaining stories are well-written, readable and entertaining to one degree or another (or in one way or another) --even though they may or may not have very plausible premises, or ideas I personally agree with. Peter Hamilton's "Deathday" and Mark Clifton's "What Have I Done?" are the darkest-toned of the bunch. Robert Sheckley is perhaps best known for "The Tenth Victim," a tale with the message that human nature isn't consistent with Utopia. Unlike that one, the Sheckley story here, "A Ticket to Tranai," is cynically humorous in tone; but the message is the same. In "Vinland the Dream," Kim Stanley Robinson's premise is that an archaeological dig at L'Anse aux Meadows discovers that the original evidence for a Viking settlement on the site was actually a faked hoax. (In real life, it wasn't; but Robinson writes so realistically that some readers might think it was!) This is used a springboard for the postmodernist message that what really happened in the past doesn't matter --all that really matters is how stories about the past affect us individually. (I beg to differ! :-)) Other stories worth noting include Eric Frank Russell's "Into Your Tent I'll Creep" (which gives the reader a much different view of "man's best friend" than, say, a typical Lassie episode :-)) and John Morressy's "Except my Life3." ...more

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