SCIENCE FICTION
THE BEST OF 2001
AN INTRODUCTION

by Robert Silverberg

and Karen Haber


The first of all the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies appeared in the summer of 1949. It was edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, a pair of scholarly science-fiction readers with long experience in the field, and it was called, not entirely appropriately (since it drew on material published in 1948), The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949.

Science fiction then was a very small entity indeed—a handful of garish-looking magazines with names likePlanetStories andThrillingWonderStories , a dozen or so books a year produced by semi-professional publishing houses run by old-time s-f fans, and the very occasional short story by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein inTheSaturdayEveningPost or some other well-known slick magazine. So esoteric a species of reading-matter was it that Bleiler and Dikty found it necessary to provide their book, which was issued by the relatively minor mainstream publishing house of Frederick Fell, Inc., with two separate introductory essays explaining the nature and history of science fiction to uninitiated readers.

In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors ofTheBestScienceFic­tion:1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both later incorporated inTheMartianChronicles , and Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story “In Hiding,” and an excellent early Poul Anderson story, and one by Isaac Asimov, and half a dozen others, all of which would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by the modest sales standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for another decade or so.

Toward the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the Year anthology edited by Judith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines founded, shows likeStarTrek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.

In modern times the definitive Year’s Best Anthology has been the series of encyclopedic collections edited by Gardner Dozois since 1984. Its eighteen mammoth volumes so far provide a definitive account of the genre in the past two decades. More recently a second annual compilation has arrived, edited by an equally keen observer of the science-fiction scene, David A. Hartwell; and that there is so little overlap between the Hartwell and Dozois anthologies is a tribute not only to the ability of experts to disagree but also to the wealth of fine shorter material being produced today in the science-fiction world.

If there is room in the field for two sets of opinions about the year’s outstanding work, perhaps there is room for a third. And so, herewith, the newest of the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, in which a long-time writer/editor and his writer/editor wife have gathered a group of the science-fiction stories of 2001 that gave them the greatest reading pleasure.


—Robert Silverberg
Karen Haber