ardner Dozois's anthology The Good Old Stuff, reviewed here a few months ago, was only the half of it. Here's part two. Like the first volume, it's a stuffed stocking of a book, and carries Dozois's extremely amiable survey of adventure SF from 1977 on down to 1998.
We have, in other words, entered Dozois's home era, and it shows. He is visibly more comfortable with the material presented in The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition than he was the Cauldron of Story of early SF he sipped from through a long spoon to make up the first volume, whose contents dated from 1948 through 1971--a period that, so far as adventure SF is concerned, might be described as the Years of Plague of John W. Campbell (see previous review for intemperate assault). By 1948, as editor of Astounding, Campbell's magic touch was already turning radioactive (Dianetics was just around the corner), and by the end of 1971 he was dead. Long dead, as his critics might have put it.
By halting the first anthology in 1971 (even though its last story was a clangorously deranged, center-does-not-hold, prophetic little shocker from James Tiptree Jr.), and by leapfrogging most of the remaining decade before starting the new book off with John Varley's "Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe" (1977 Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), Dozois makes his intention absolutely clear: to distinguish between the before and the after.
The universe does not change drastically
Though it tends to be described in very much more sophisticated terms, the physical nature of the adventure SF universe deployed in The Good New Stuff does not change drastically: it is the home galaxy, pixilated by the availability of faster-than-light travel. Stories still tend to be set on a wide range of planets other than Earth. Large issues--often the survival or death of entire worlds--are "addressed."
And, as before, this galaxy remains full of niche species--alien races, that is, described in terms of specific problems their evolution has shaped them to solve. Humans still tend to be the only multi-task species around, as in George Turner's otherwise exemplary and refreshingly cynical "Flowering Mandrake," (Alien Shores anthology, 1994), whose vegetal alien protagonist acts out an exceedingly intricate ancient evolutionary diktat on his first encounter with red-blooded meat sentients, like some deranged Freemason doing Poohbah Handshakes, to a mirage, in the middle of the Sahara. This does not really wash.
There are, of course, physical differences in the new good stuff. Black holes, wormholes, and various other geek kits have been normalized. And--following the pioneering gesture of John Varley--our own home solar system has been recolonized, though the prohibition against setting adventure SF on Earth remains unaltered. Varley's solution--to exile humanity from Earth for sins against ecology--remains the neatest dodge around this prohibition; as The Golden Globe (recently reviewed here) demonstrates, this dodge has fertilized his career for more than two decades.
The personages who pinball their way through this adventure playground galaxy retain something of the polished idiot-savant glitter of their forebears--protagonists who have to do stuff all the time tend to be conceived by their creators with the speedlines already built in. And there is a lot more nudity, and a lot more sex, but carefully apportioned. Nipples are very numerous (and are usually multiplied by two), but penises are relatively infrequent, and if there was a single mention of a clitoris in the book I must have been skimming. Missed it.
A sense of fractal intensity
In any case, none of this is important, except to the wrong kind of human. What does count in the stories Dozois has assembled is a sense of what one might call fractal intensity. The closer you get to the universe, in other words, the bigger the universe gets. Very few writers whose prime came before 1971 (Jack Vance is one, but most of the sense-of-wonder boys of old are dodos when it comes to the depiction of complexity) could convey as much of a sense of the Great Tapestry of Scale as the most routine writers of recent decades.
The stories assembled here are not, for the most part, routine: they are tales dyed deep in that Tapestry. They are about immensity. Oddly, it is perhaps the most routine of them all--Vernor Vinge's "The Blabber" (New Destinies anthology, 1988), an uneasy marriage of Heinlein's The Star Beast (1954) and Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976)--that most vividly demonstrates the gap between the threadbare old and the new. The story itself, with its wiseacre Heinlein uncle figure and its Great Gildersleeve sociology, shows how much trash Vinge had to divest himself of before writing A Fire Upon the Deep (1992); but the model of the universe that so marvelously sustains that story also exists, in a somewhat more primitive form, in "The Blabber."
In this universe, Earth lies deep within the "Slow Zone," the central part of any galaxy where the speed of light cannot be exceeded, and artificial intelligences cannot exist. Beyond is the "Beyond," where light speed is not a barrier, and adventure SF can occur. Vinge's new universe is profoundly story-shaped, a creation of high imagination; nobody who loves adventure SF and who runs across his universe in action can feel anything but aesthetic joy.
And the pang of knowing it's nonsense.
But nonsense is what good adventure SF makes silk purses out of. Other neat stories in The Good New Stuff, almost always featuring protagonists unimaginable in the real world, include George R.R. Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979 Omni), Bruce Sterling's "Swarm" (1982 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), Walter Jon Williams' "Prayers in the Wind" (When the Music's Over anthology, 1991), Maureen F. McHugh's "The Missionary's Child" (1992 Asimov's), Stephen Baxter's "Cilia-of-Gold" (1994 Asimov's), and Mary Rosenblum's "The Eye of God" (1998 Asimov's).
The protagonists of these stories seem jeweled--indeed it is one of the marks of recent adventure SF that their authors are kind of obsessed by gear--and they seem bound in to the vast worlds they traverse. Unlike the jocks of the Years of Plague, they have gone native.
One day, some of the folk of Earth may follow them home.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
