Fantasy: Best of 2002
★★★☆☆ Fantasy: Best of 2002 edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber with Ursula Le Guin, Robert Sheckley, and Brian Stableford on the title too (Published in 2003, wooooo)
This “book” took me an unusually long time to finish. Not because it was boring, but because I made myself take out library books and I suppose library books should always take precedence.
The issue with anthologies is that either they’re boring, or they’re not boring and you have a little reading hangover at the end of each story. And with eleven stories, that’s eleven potential hangovers. Not that they were all good. They ranged from two to five stars. The last ones were my favorites, but I shall not fall victim to recency bias this time.
Also. The cover had zero relevance to any of the stories. There were no dragons.
I’m just gonna briefly summarize/review each of the stories, because I haven’t tried that format yet and idk what else to do here.
Our Friend Electricity by Ron Wolfe: A guy falls in love with a girl. She keeps taking him to Coney Island. One day she transports him back in time to when Topsy the elephant was electrocuted. Then the girl ghosts him. He realizes she’s totally a mermaid. The end.
King Rainjoy’s Tears by Chris Willrich: A couple hunt down three tears-made-human once shed by a king to save a kingdom. Very classic fantasy. It’s the type of story that could easily be rewritten as a (good) full-length novel while covering the same plot points. Action action action, to the point where “she killed him” could be a whole sentence and then they move on.
Social Dreaming of the Frin by Ursula K. Le Guin: When the Frin sleep in somewhat close proximity, their dreams blend together. A presumably human outsider studies this and its implications. It’s worldbuilding but zero plot, not really my thing. However I do want to read her utopia works sometime.
Agamemnon’s Run by Robert Sheckley: Some dude has been drafted into a magical Trojan War LARP to play Agamemnon. He tries to escape his fate (getting stabbed to death by his wife and/or her lover) and he’s successful, but dies anyway. I liked this, especially the repeated mention of Schrodinger’s Iphigenia. Did she get sacrificed by her father or whisked off by Athena? Nobody knows, least of all Agamemnon himself.
Creation by Jeffery Ford: A boy builds a figure and accidentally brings it to life. It wanders the woods until the boy, guilty, releases it from life.
The Face of an Angel by Brian Stableford: A genius surgeon gets a compelling offer to carve the face of biblical Adam into a baby. Surgery goes fine, the baby dies anyway, but he becomes obsessed with the concept. Later the baby-bringer is back for attempt two, but this time the surgeon demands to see the face of Adam. He runs a simulation and the face changes his entire worldview. He loses his ability to distinguish between beautiful/ugly, because what is the entire human race compared to Adam? The end.
Dating Secrets of the Dead by David Prill: A wholesome story about a teen guy romancing a teen girl wholesomely. Except he’s dead and decomposing, and so is she, and so is the entire cast. It’s sweet but pointless.
Luck by James Patrick Kelly: A caveman dreams of killing a mammoth. He does. He lives happily ever after. The end!
The Majesty of Angels by Robert Reed: An “angel” helps usher the entire human race to their paradisiacal afterlife via fantasy train, after their kind accidentally wiped them out (oops!). She kinda gets obsessed with one Man of Science. Also men are horndogs, that is relevant.
Ailoura by Paul di Filippo: My favorite story here. An antihero in a dystopian, interstellar future is dispossessed of his inheritance by his scheming stepfamily. He gets to bring along one “bestient” servant, and he picks the cat-woman Ailoura. They hatch a plan to impersonate a long-dead House and sell worthless mining rights to his stepfamily. Plot twist: Ailoura is his surrogate mother. They live happily ever after, moving to a different planet. The worldbuilding was great and the protagonist was actually grey; he’s cruel to an innocent servant, he blackmails an innocent businessman, and he’s hung up over an ex-girlfriend with no redeeming qualities beyond looking beautiful.
Mr. Gaunt by John Langan: A guy’s father dies, and he leaves a tape warning him about his uncle & the uncle’s unholy butler. The uncle is cold and evil; his son gets dragged and crushed to death inside a magical sarcophagus and his only regret is not managing his butler better. Our protagonist doesn’t believe it and is going to meet the uncle + butler at the end.
There’s a story by a Ford followed by one by a Stable-Ford. There’s two with Angel in the title. Ailoura and Mr. Gaunt both begin with the death of the protagonist’s father and have evil relatives.
Conspiracy? Certainly.