A review by cattytrona
The Best of World SF: Volume 1 by Lavie Tidhar, R.S.A. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
3.0
Some really fun stories in this. My favourites were, in some particular order, The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir, Immersion, Fandom for Robots, The Sun from Both Sides, The Green, Xingzhou, The Cryptid, and If At First…. Most of the rest are fun and interesting, and there’s a lot of variation to keep you on your toes.
I do have a couple of hesitations about the collection itself though. Firstly, what the SF in the title refers to. I picked up the book assuming it stood for scifi, and that’s the implication of the introduction too, but the actual stories frequently aren’t — rather, I think they’d be classed as speculative fiction. Which is a very legit genre in itself, but it’s not (exclusively) scifi. It seems mad to me to depend on an ambiguous abbreviation in your title, first up, but then to not actually define it is an issue. My preference, or at least the thing I’m in the mood for rn, is scifi, and so there was inevitably going to be some undeserved coolness on some of these stories.
My second issue is the editor’s notes. I found the introduction frustrating — Tidhar, the editor, escorts you through his personal history/grievances with SF (whatever that is) publishing, and makes little attempt to actually introduce the writers in this collection, the process of putting it together, or any of the things which would be interesting to hear about with such a deliberately diverse and eclectic collection. His tone really irked me, but I thought it was fine, that I wouldn’t have to hear from him again. I was wrong. Tidhar introduces every story too, in basically the exact same way every time: his opinions on the author, how many times he’s met them, where he first encountered their story, which of his other collections he’s published them in. If he knows the author well, they get a chunky introduction. If he doesn’t, he’ll be like ‘I want to meet this author, this story blew me away, bye’. And it’s like, okay, I’m about to read it so I’ve literally never been so primed to make an opinion on this story: I don’t need yours.
I think that introductions, both to collections and individual stories can be such powerful tools in short story collections. How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula Le Guin (both, interestingly, also working in the speculative space) have really great ones, that properly transformed my thoughts on what this kind of information can do. And whilst those introductions are personal, they are also from the author, giving a sense of the craft and context behind each story, as well as how it ties into their own larger bibliography. For a book of WORLD fiction, where the explicit point is to highlight perspectives previously overlooked because of the focus on white, anglophone voices (also, the lack of works in translation really surprised me — there’s a few, but the majority are originally written in English so it’s still reinforcing that as lingua franca, if not like, lingua prime, to an extent) in the scifi sphere, meaning the use of cultural traditions I’ve literally never got a chance to read before, it seems wild to not use these various introductory options to provide contextual information. Each story has the country its author is from stated at the very beginning, so the collection clearly sees that as important, yet makes no attempts to provide that info, instead wasting space with glib and self-congratulatory anecdote or empty comment. Why someone couldn’t have done a little research — or even better, allowed the authors to introduce their own works — is beyond me. I know I’ve wasted a lot of words on this especially relative to the stories, but it really put me off. It made starting each story a chore, and made the whole collection feel worse. The stories are good, I recommend giving the collection a look, and if you skim the extra bits then you’re not missing out, you’re probably getting the better experience.
I do have a couple of hesitations about the collection itself though. Firstly, what the SF in the title refers to. I picked up the book assuming it stood for scifi, and that’s the implication of the introduction too, but the actual stories frequently aren’t — rather, I think they’d be classed as speculative fiction. Which is a very legit genre in itself, but it’s not (exclusively) scifi. It seems mad to me to depend on an ambiguous abbreviation in your title, first up, but then to not actually define it is an issue. My preference, or at least the thing I’m in the mood for rn, is scifi, and so there was inevitably going to be some undeserved coolness on some of these stories.
My second issue is the editor’s notes. I found the introduction frustrating — Tidhar, the editor, escorts you through his personal history/grievances with SF (whatever that is) publishing, and makes little attempt to actually introduce the writers in this collection, the process of putting it together, or any of the things which would be interesting to hear about with such a deliberately diverse and eclectic collection. His tone really irked me, but I thought it was fine, that I wouldn’t have to hear from him again. I was wrong. Tidhar introduces every story too, in basically the exact same way every time: his opinions on the author, how many times he’s met them, where he first encountered their story, which of his other collections he’s published them in. If he knows the author well, they get a chunky introduction. If he doesn’t, he’ll be like ‘I want to meet this author, this story blew me away, bye’. And it’s like, okay, I’m about to read it so I’ve literally never been so primed to make an opinion on this story: I don’t need yours.
I think that introductions, both to collections and individual stories can be such powerful tools in short story collections. How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula Le Guin (both, interestingly, also working in the speculative space) have really great ones, that properly transformed my thoughts on what this kind of information can do. And whilst those introductions are personal, they are also from the author, giving a sense of the craft and context behind each story, as well as how it ties into their own larger bibliography. For a book of WORLD fiction, where the explicit point is to highlight perspectives previously overlooked because of the focus on white, anglophone voices (also, the lack of works in translation really surprised me — there’s a few, but the majority are originally written in English so it’s still reinforcing that as lingua franca, if not like, lingua prime, to an extent) in the scifi sphere, meaning the use of cultural traditions I’ve literally never got a chance to read before, it seems wild to not use these various introductory options to provide contextual information. Each story has the country its author is from stated at the very beginning, so the collection clearly sees that as important, yet makes no attempts to provide that info, instead wasting space with glib and self-congratulatory anecdote or empty comment. Why someone couldn’t have done a little research — or even better, allowed the authors to introduce their own works — is beyond me. I know I’ve wasted a lot of words on this especially relative to the stories, but it really put me off. It made starting each story a chore, and made the whole collection feel worse. The stories are good, I recommend giving the collection a look, and if you skim the extra bits then you’re not missing out, you’re probably getting the better experience.