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I recently finished the latest Year's Best Fantasy (number 3), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. I've really enjoyed their Year's Best SF series (now up to eight volumes), and I was thrilled when they began a similar Fantasy series.
This year's Fantasy collection has some solid stuff in it. Some. It's also got a lot of stuff I don't like, including some that I feel crosses the line into Horror (possibly my least favourite genre, but that's me) and shouldn't have been included. Magic realism, urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, whatever you want to call it, only bother with this year's volume if you like it. I mostly don't. In fact, I mostly hate it.
Now I'm not saying that it's all bad. I've read the occasional story in this sub-genre that I like and I've even written one or two. But I find most of it flat, dull, uninteresting, or seriously contrived. In most cases, things just don't mesh that well and, far too often, I'm left with "And the point of this was...?" running through my mind because there's no real resolution. Actually, the lack of resolution, or even plot for that matter, is far more widespread and is one of two the biggest annoyances I see in fiction (genre or otherwise) writing for a number of years now. There seems to be a large group of writers who have forgotten that it takes more than characters to make a story, that there needs to be a point, an objective, a goal, something to tie things together to the point where you have a story.
The other big annoyance, in case you're wondering, is the multi-volume blockbuster series in which only a couple of major plot points happen in every six or seven hundred pages of prose. I find this far more prevalent in Fantasy than SF (where the stand alone novel still has some respect). Robert Jordan springs to mind as being the most guilty of this, but there are plenty of others. Really, though ten volumes in thirteen years with no end in sight. The first several books were great - lots of things going on in an interesting setting. Things started to slow down about book four and by book six I was starting to get a bit bored. I didn't buy book ten and I haven't read nine yet. There are now about 900 characters wandering all over the world looking at things but not really accomplishing much. Maybe, if he ever gets around to finishing the series, I'll pick the rest up and read things through to see how things turn out (I'm betting that the good guys win after having a rough time of things), but that gets less likely with each passing year.
Back to the point, as this seems to have turned into a brief rant from the brief review I intended. If you like urban fantasy, or whatever you want to call it, The Year's Best Fantasy 3 has lots for you. If you don't, it has very little.
I'm also working my way through a stack of several dozen late 1980s Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Fantasy & Science Fiction that I picked up for the almost ridiculously low price of three for $1 a couple of weeks back. There's a lot of good stuff in here and some that falls into the "What's the point" category mentioned above, so it's not just a recent problem. There were also a few issues of Analog that completed some serial issues for me (one included a now classic Lois McMaster Bujold tale of Miles Vorkosigan). I read those first since Analog is my favourite of the major print magazines and has been for a long time.
You may get the impression that I'm reading mostly short fiction in the last few months. You'd be mostly right. While I have read about two dozen novels since the beginning of May, seven of these have been anthologies of short fiction. In the same time, I've read probably thirty old issues of Analog, Asimov's, and F&SF. I'm not sure how much non-genre stuff there's been. While I love novel length stories (and longer, sometimes), it's easy to underestimate the impact a well written shorter work can have. I'm fairly certain than most of the best work being done in any given genre at any given time is done in short fiction.
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Page last updated: 01 Aug 2003.