THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR
Okay, a few caveats. There's no way I'm going to be reading everything released in 2009. That should be pretty much obvious in the poetry category, too, except that with poetry you don't have to wait around a year for the paperback to come out. Hardcover science fiction in anathema to me, so I haven't read the big hitters like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which I've heard is great. That said, here's my myopic look at the year just past.
YELLOW BLUE TIBIA
Adam Roberts
Orbit Books
Probably the best novel released last year, Adam Robert's book is less about a vast conspiracy unthawing in perstroika-era Soviet Russia involving aliens, Cherynobl, Stalin, Scientology and the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, and more a manifesto of why one writes science fiction in the first place, as well as a well-hidden excoriation of those that do so thoughtlessly. "A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying...How can this not produce callouses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?" (He also took the Hugo Awards down a peg this year with a great essay on his blog, Punkadiddle.)
THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kressel
Tachyon
I was wary at first, looking at the contributors. Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle and Margaret Atwood and so on. The introductory essay, which echoes and references Jonathan Lethem's 10-year-old essay from the Village Voice, asking what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon had won the Nebula for Gravity's Rainbow back in 1974, is equally obnoxious. A word to the wise, SF writers, comic book artists, graffiti artists, video game developers, et al.--"hi quality" is a racket real artists have been trying to wriggle out from under for 40 years. There is no "hi quality." From our America-has-won, 21st Century position, it may never have existed. Philip Roth is a "great artist" only in the sense that Micheal Jackson was a "great artist." That is, it wouldn't matter either way. However, in spite of the editor's worst intentions, this collection is redeemed by its actual, present, right-there vitality. The work inside is not good literature. It's good science fiction, which at least has the potential to be worthwhile.
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD
FSG
Of course.
ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE
Electic Velocipede finally hot a Hugo nod this year. They deserve it. If you're interested in seeing which kids are publishing Karen Joy Fowler these days (just kidding! They publish a lot of stuff, honestly) this is the magazine to go to. Well-rooted and risk-taking at the same time.
GARBAGE TREND OF THE YEAR
If you want a weird-science/Jane Austen pastiche, read Susanah Clarke's terrific Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from a few years back, or else read the Oulipo Compendiuum for fun, genre-trashing experiments in language. Whatever you do, skip this whole gutless "I'm going to read something trashy but really I'm not" white-girl phenomenon of splicing Jane Austen novels with Zombie-related nouns. It's strictly Shirley Temple.
THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR Monday, December 28, 2009
BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR Wednesday, December 9, 2009
BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR
In no particular order
Ish Klein, Union!
Canarium Books
Ish Klein's first book of poems caught me totally unprepared when I first heard them last February at AWP. If listening to most poetry is like listening to a radio tuned between the classical and NPR stations, Ish Klein represents a station all the way down the dial, playing Amon Düül and The Beach Boys. I don't think that accurately represents her freewheeling, rhapsodic and honest approach, but that's how I felt. She's a refreshing presence in poetry. Likewise, Canarium is a great publisher--they have really terrific work on the slate for next year, too.
Noelle Kocot, Sunny Wednesday
Wave Books
Noelle Kocot's "Poem for the End of Time," touched on the political disaster of the 00's and the personal disaster of losing a loved one: not only is it great, it's probably the poem--the collection of poems--most likely to last beyond this sorry decade. Sunny Wednesday finds her on the other side of that maelstrom, willing to put her heroic, playfulness to post-traumatic use. It's often funny. "Persephone would lie awake nights," she writes,"Beating off, thinking about Olive."
Matvei Yankelovich, Boris By The Sea
Octopus Books
There has been a lot of great translation within the last year: Cavafy, Char, Rilke, Vallejo, among others. I try not to review or comment on translation--I possess a little French and nothing else. Also, I don't trust it. Translation--or rather, the small industry of translation-- sponsors the notion that poetry is something else: an intellectual job, something inherently decent, to be spread like television PSA's, something one works at rather than experiences, something one can safely say has been predigested in advance. It runs counter to my way or reading poetry. Okay, I'm probably wrong. We might agree on one thing, however: this has been a great year for Matvei Yankelevich, a great editor of works in translation and a great translator himself, notably of Daniel Kharms. Boris By The Sea fuses his interest in his translated subjects in a way that puts him in the shoes of the more personal and intrusive, and therefore more interesting, translators like Pound. His witty, absurd prose is unlike anything else this side of Kharms himself.
Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three, The U of C Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
University of California Press
Finally, a book that actually delivers on the categorical irresponsibility only hinted at by the revealing yet squishy inclusiveness of the first two volumes. I suspect there are very few scholars of 19th Century literature who wouldn't find this anthology grasping and bizarre: what fun! What a disappointment that it was largely ignored on its release earlier this year. Volume Three plays Twister in its attempt to isolate only those works which support its thesis-- namely that the avant-garde as codified in the mid-1970's actually started sometime in the mid-1770's! The odd thing is, it all starts to make sense--for instance, finally someone has managed to get Goethe, Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman all together in a single, focused anthology. One of the more fascinating reads this year.
WORST POETRY DEVELOPMENT OF THE YEAR
It's got to be this whole deal about the Dickman brothers. An article appears in the New Yorker praising these kids for their magical telepathic twin powers and suddenly they're our generation's great white hope. Is there no one else who finds these poems linked only by a flabby, self-satisfied malaise?
