8. From Other Countries

Another traditional category, with three entries this year, one Canadian and two Australian. So:

Tesseracts Twelve, edited by Claude Lalumière [Canada];
Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann [Australia];
2012, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne [Australia].

Subtotals: 3 books, 53 stories (2 novellas, 11 novelettes, 40 short stories (3 short-shorts)), some 330,000 words of fiction.

Stats: 21.5 stories by women (41%), 27 SF stories (51%).

Somehow this category tends to show that SF in other countries is pretty vital! (I should note perhaps that another coming category, the books from NewCon Press, could possibly have fit here, as most if not all of the writers editor Ian Whates uses are from the UK.) Anyway, these three books are all good in their way.

2012 is the slightest of them, partly because it is by far the thinnest. It's also a bit weakened because it is explicitly polemical, and the polemics weaken some of the stories. But there is good work here, particularly "Apocalypse Rules, OK?" by Lucy Sussex, very amusing stuff about the real movers behind the various idiocies humans get up to; and "The Last Word" by Dirk Flinthart, in which a scientist and her ex-lover who is now a wheeler-dealer negotiate the development of a genetic treatment with effects that could be wonderful -- like a cure for melanoma; trivial, like an easy suntan; or scarier yet.

The other Australian book, Dreaming Again, is a very big showcase of the best in current Australian short SF/Fantasy. (With one curious exception -- an unpublished story by the late doyen of Aussie SF, A. Bertram Chandler.) Dreaming Again's best story is Margo Lanagan's searing "The Fifth Star of the Southern Cross", in which due to environmental damage people are mostly infertile. The protagonist is shown first with an alien prostitute, then encountering a human woman with whom he has improbably sired a child. Powerful stuff about damaged but not evil people. The other real standout is Isabelle Carmody's "Perchance to Dream", a story about a woman, an artist, who realizes that she is living in a dream. Other first rate work in the book comes from Rowena Cory Daniells, A. G. Slatter, Kim Westwood, Lee Battersby, Trent Jamieson, and Rjurik Davidson, among others.

Tesseracts Twelve is, as with all the Tesseracts books, devoted to Canadian writers. The editor of this volume, Claude Lalumière, decided to devote it to novellas (here defined, sensibly enough, as stories of 10,000 words and up). Two stories shone for me: E. L. Chen’s "The Story of the Woman and Her Dog", which actually encompasses a few stories, that turn out to have something to do with Natasha and her dog and gender roles; and Gord Sellar’s "Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang", yet another modern day superhero story, here about a South Korean superhero and conflict with an evil North Korean supervillain.

Tags: 2008, anthologies, yearly summaries