rom the get-go, Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction is in your face, and it's two-faced, and it weighs a lot. One of its faces—think Janus—glares into the past at the Harlan Ellison of long ago, who is the dedicatee of the volume, and whose example—"My initial inspiration," says editor Al Sarrantonio, "was Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, the publication which in 1967 changed the science fiction field forever"—we are formally instructed to keep in mind as we read the 30 brand-new stories collected here, which is why Redshift is so heavy. The second face of the book peers futureward at the terra incognita of the new century that Al Sarrantonio think the stories collected here are going to shine the light of SF upon, he hopes.
And before any more is said about Redshift as a project, it should be made clear that about half the stories here assembled are very good indeed (a very high percentage of hits in an original anthology) and that none of them is actually rotten. Sarrantonio has clearly edited with his hands on, and he seems to have thought a lot about the order in which he presents the material he bought: themes and iconography from one story tend to surface, transformed, in the next; the bad stories have been sorted so as somehow not to corrupt the barrel.
There are, moreover, almost no bottom-drawer tales here from "famous" vanity-plate authors whose veteran status allows them the occasional bummer, the kind of story that should be signed "Vet." Those
authors who are new or newish are included on merit mostly, not promise. There are no stories which go on too long, and several—Neal Barrett's long, stunning "Rhido Wars," which depicts hominid life in a context savagely pre or post our own, maybe a few terrible centuries into life on a generation starship, but who knows?—seem to stop way too soon, as though a novel had been pounded into pemmican. Redshift is big, bustling, bristly, buy it. It is the buy of the year.
The dangers of dangerous visions
As a project, on the other hand, if we are going to take its editor seriously about its goals, Redshift is a load of old codswallop. There is no genre prison left for Redshift to escape from. Its claimed model in the field, Dangerous Visions, broke taboos by the dozen because (as Sarrantonio does admit) they were there to be broken. In 2001, the walls are shattered, the world lies before us, what we see is what we get, and few forbidden topics remain, except, as Sarrantonio once again is the first to make clear, political correctness.
There is, for instance, a lot of sex in Redshift, some of it really pretty interesting, and most of it sufficiently explicit to have burned pulp to ash a few decades ago; but not now. Only one story—Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone," worthily the longest tale in the book—is both sexually explicit and deeply incorrect. (I'll say no more about Hand, whom I've not reviewed since we got to know each other too well, about half a decade ago, for me to continue pretending to be objective; but can suggest this: that "Cleopatra Brimstone" builds fruitfully on what I thought was so interesting up to 1995, round about when I stopped being able to say so.)
Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint" is also un-PC, a deliciously surly take on the modern mega-state, and media, and people who rob people and don't respond well to kindness; and the constraints of focus which govern its protagonist's perceptions make it a fitting side-saddle to The Book of the Short Sun. Joe Haldeman's "Road Kill" is not so much un-PC as nearly intolerable: told at an icy remove—the story is couched as a kind of movie synopsis—it has some of the effect of those fictions which attempt through estrangement to convey some sense of Final Solutions.
Joyce Carol Oates's "Commencement" is richly and intensely couched, but ultimately damned silly. Michael Moorcock's "A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club," which is an explicit homage to Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht (coll 1950), sprawls comfortably within the club-story model it's based on, clutches its lapels and comes out with some absolutely hilarious blasphemies about our brave species. Thomas M. Disch's "In Xanadu," which he dedicates to the memory of the great John Sladek, places a protagonist who could be Sladek in a Coleridgean VR paradise for the dead who can pay for the privilege; but the resort is on the skids, and a fate worse than death awaits the damsel with a dulcimer: "In Xanadu" is the finest memorial Sladek has yet received. Ursula K. Le Guin deposes in a tone of godly calm another parable about Balance, couched as an anthropological note. Dan Simmons, in "On K2 with Kanakaredes," does high mountains (with aliens) (with gusto). And half a dozen other stories could be mentioned. There is a lot here.
Too soon to predict SF's future
What there is not—and it may have been a bad instinct on Sarrantonio's part to allow us to think there might be—is any sense of consensus about the nature of the fantastic in the new century. A huge amount could be said here about why the year 2001 may not be a really very good year in which to announce the project of SF for the new millennium, in which to tell us how SF will shape our perceptions of the macerating badlands we (it seems) may have already trespassed into. What Redshift says—either through the introducing mouth or story choices of its editor, or through the stories themselves—is very nearly nothing.
What can be said about SF and the next world is this: that the SF we have known all our lives, and the SF and fantasy and horror assembled in Redshift, have one home and one overarching venue. That home and venue is the great anxious 20th century of ago. The genres of the fantastic—SF, horror, fantasy, supernatural fiction—fit the 20th century hand in glove. They are the literature of that century.
They are the literature of anxiety.
In 2001, however, we are beginning to guess that the beast may have already slouched to Bethlehem. The secret of the 21st century may be terribly simple: that there is nothing left to be anxious about, because it is already happening. To embrace a world like that, a world which acts like SF without our having to push the start button, the genres of the fantastic will need to face some pretty radical surgery.
Redshift may be the best anthology published in several years. But it comes too soon to tell us what we face. It is not a manual for the surgeon.
