Lavie Tidhar (ed) "The Best of World SF: Part 1" (2021)

The question is: how to review collections of short fiction? That may not be your question. You, let’s say, may prefer to know—with respect to the volume here under consideration, Lavie Tidhar’s The Best of World SF Volume 1 (Head of Zeus 2021)—is it any good? If that is your question then I can tell you: yes, it’s very good. It's a superbly varied collection of SF, Fantasy and slipstream short stories, absorbing and stimulating and readable. This is where SF is nowadays: a global discourse, a splendid diversity, no longer in the hands of a small group of straight, white US and UK men. Tidhar's collection works both as a primer, for those interested in exploring a more diverse range of SFnal voices, and as a collection on its own terms, just as a gathering of really good SFnal shorts.

OK, very good. What else should a review provide? There are twenty-six stories here, some quite lengthy, which makes the book (I read it in processed-tree, real-world form) hard on the wrists, and awkward to schlep about in your manbag or other carryall; though presumably it is as weightless on kindle as any other e-book, which may be your preferred mode. If you’d like your review to carry a little more detail, information-wise, here’s isfdb’s list of the constituents: 

Click to embiggen. These stories are from, respectively, France, China, Singapore, Botswana, Nigeria, India, China, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Cuba, United Kingdom/Nigeria, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Spain, Mexico, Finland, Israel, Iceland, Russia, India, Ghana, South Africa, Sweden, Mexico and Malaysia, which is a pretty good spread, although there are some omissions (nothing by a German author, nothing Australian, although SFF is huge in both territories/languages). 14 women, 12 men is a healthy balance too. I have in my time had some small involvements in edited collections of things, on both sides of the process, and I am nothing short of boggled at what Tidhar has accomplished here: all the regular problems of corralling a varied selection of interesting material with the added problems of navigating translations, international rights and so on. 

Is that a review of this book? It doesn’t tell you very much: some factual description, some praise. Is that enough to be a review, do you think? I could go through the list of stories judging each, perhaps giving each a star rating out of five, but to what extent would that really add value? It seems to me it would instead drive the review to that place where fine-grainedness intrudes into sheer tedium ... notating my personal quirks of taste so that, what? You could read the collection, come up with your own list of preferences and judgments, and check them against mine? Why on earth would you want to do something so fruitless? I liked some of the stories more than others, which, since the alternative would be ‘I liked each story exactly as much as every other story’, isn’t saying anything substantive, now, is it?

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Short stories used to be a huge part of literary culture: many magazines (Argosy, Strand Magazine, New Yorker) existed to deliver them to eager readers. Short story magazines still exist of course, but now they muster a tiny fraction of circulation of those giants in their heyday. We have gone off short story writing. This happened, I think, in different phases: the bloom departed from ‘straight’ short stories in the early 20th-century, where science fiction Pulp magazines continued healthily through to the 1930s and into the 1940s. Indeed there are those, I daresay, those who think of the short story as the ideal science-fictional mode: enough space to present a novum, to frame a thought-experiment, to stage it, dramatize it with a small cast of strongly-drawn characters, but not so as to outstay its welcome or hang heavy on the reader, just enough to put the core conceit under the lens for the reader. But the fact is SF, like general fiction, is a book-length business now (although, if it comes to that, SF is really a film-and-TV-and-video-game business now, but that’s a separate issue). H G Wells wrote a lot of brilliant SF shorts in the 1890s, and then more or less abandoned the mode in the 20th-century. One late example of him in this mode is the peerless short ‘The Country of the Blind’. When he oversaw the publication of a greatest-hits collection of his shorts in 1911 he included this as the title piece: The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. In that volume's preface Wells notes that ‘the task of selection and revision’ entailed by editing it brought home to him ‘with something of the effect of discovery’ that

I was once an industrious writer of short stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

He goes on to speculate as to why he has, in effect, stopped writing short stories. Such writing used to come to him as easily as leaves to the tree:

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production. ... I found that, taking almost anything as a starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

Here he inserts a potted recent history of the form: the 1890s were ‘a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer’ with great work being produced almost continually by a whole tribe of short-story writers (‘Barrie, Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm; Henry James; George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs and Joseph Conrad’), all led by Kipling: ‘Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East’. Wells thinks that's all passed away now:

I do not think the present decade can produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time, with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they did before 1900.

There's an interesting discussion to be had, I think, as to whether Wells is right in his larger literary-historical diagnosis; but it can't be denied that it describes his own career as a short story writer. Despite being one of the true masters of the form, the inspiration of Borges and generations of SF authors, and despite the fact that some of his most enduring literary achievements are to be found amongst his shorts, he wrote no more of them. Why not?

It's not a question that admits of straightforward answer, I fear. He himself blames the figure he calls ‘the à priori critic’:

Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful, but “it isn't a Play,” so we' had a great deal of talk about the short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable. It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted no defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, “A mere anecdote,” just as anyone can say “Incoherent!” of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning.

In comes the fog, it seems.

Still: fog, though Wells deplores it, may be part of the unique strength of the short story as a distinct form. In saying so I'm drawing on Timothy Clark's rather brilliant essay ‘Not Seeing the Short Story: A Blind Phenomenology of Reading’, which appeared as part of the Oxford Literary Review's special issue on ‘The Blind Short Story’ in 2004. Clark makes the case for the short story as a specifically blind mode of art, arguing that ‘what I propose to call, non-pejoratively, the “blindness” of the short-story revisits the issue of the form's relation to realism’. A long quotation from Middlemarch demonstrates George Eliot's commitment to as whole a sight as possible. The short story, by contrast, is necessarily determined by its pseudo-poetic brevity:

[Eliot's] passage of character analysis lasts several pages. However, were such a series of paragraphs as that about Lydgate to appear in a short story, might the mechanics of its realism not be more likely to echo back on itself, revealing its tautological basis? This element of the literary, that it actually conjures up what it seems merely to re-present as already there, is something this forms mere brevity—its lack of concretizing context—makes less ignorable. The short story, as they say, is more ‘poetic’. Eliot's effect of subtlety seems to escape this merely self-validating quality through its integration into earlier and later passages of the text. Without that, the kinship between the general ‘human truths’ of such a realist text and the kind of effects of ‘truth’ at work in a horoscope would be clearer. This lack of the trompe-l'oeil effects of a lengthy context constitutes what may be called the relative blindness of the short story. [Clark, ‘Not Seeing the Short Story’ Oxford Literary Review 26 (2004), 8]

Clark goes on to develop a larger phenomenology of blindness and reading, and whilst there's not space to get into all that here, it is, I think, worth drawing out one other point he makes. Metaphors of seeing, according to Clark, pervade short story theory. He finds a remarkable ‘predominance of countervailing metaphors of sight, of the striving to “see” a text whole, the flash of revelation etc’ in the way critics write about the short story form, and quotes one such critic:

‘Visual metaphors’, writes Dominic Head, ‘abound in short story theory, a fact which underlies the “spatial” aspect of the genre, but which also obscures the illusory nature of this aspect.’ The illusion lies in the fact that the visual pattern is constructed from out of the necessarily temporal movement of reading, its working through both memory and anticipation to achieve a seeming ‘overview’ of the text as a whole. Visual metaphors, he argues, often focusing the whole text through some crucial epiphanic moment of ‘insight’—itself usually described as if it were an instance of the miracle of the restoration of sight—repress the heterogeneity and ‘openness’ of a story. [Clark, 9; he is quoting Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10]

This all seems to me interesting in several ways, and although Clark doesn't might have some bearing on Wells's own praxis. Blindness either as a total state, as in ‘The Country of the Blind’ (or cast by the individual out upon the community in the short novel The Invisible Man), or else as a partial restriction or limitation of vision is a recurring theme in Wells's short stories: ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes’, ‘The Plattner Story’, ‘The Crystal Egg’ and many others. Conceivably Wells's increasing dissatisfaction with the short story mode correlated to that belief, which increasingly gripped him as the 1920s and 1920s went on, that he ought to be aiming at a kind of whole sight. His next novel, Marriage (1912), is a positively Eliotian exercise in comprehensive vision, in concretizing context and sheer length—getting on for 600 pages in the first edition (Joan and Peter from 1918 is nearly 800).

No question but it's a shame. Wells blindness was prodigiously more eloquent and resonant than his attempts as clear-sightedness. But he didn't think so, and drew a line under his short story writing. The short story form is the enclosed valley of ‘The Country of the Blind’; it is the sightless but blessed inhabitants of that valley. And the truth of Wells's later career is that he could not rest content in that place, but had to engineer a gigantic rock-fall and the opening of a new breach in the surrounding mountains to be able to scramble back to Realism.

I'd say there's something of that brilliant, creative blindness about the best of the Best of World SF stories Tidhar has gathered: Aliette de Bodard’s ‘Immersion’, an finely written exploration of masks, identity and hiddenness set on a multi-ethnic station, or Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘His Master’s Voice’, a characteristic piece of posthuman-nanotech worldbuilding that centres an uplifted dog and feeds us the world through this creature’s estranging, limited sensorium. I also liked the creative opacity of Vandana Singh’s time-ghost-haunted ‘Delhi’ and Malena Salazar Maciá’s post-singularity, post-apocalypse, nanobots-are-gods ‘Eyes of the Crocodile’. The blindness of insight, the insight of the blind. Excellent stuff.

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Related: here's a short piece I wrote on the SF fix-up.