Review: The Norton Book of Science Fiction edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery

Trade paperback, 869 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1960-90)
Acquired November 2008
Read September 2018

The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990
edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
Karen Joy Fowler, consultant

This is an odd book; one can tell that as soon as you look at the table of contents. There are not many familiar names or familiar stories here. I think this would be okay if it were marketed as Science Fiction Stories Liked by Le Guin and Attebery, however, it's supposedly The Norton Book of Science Fiction, an overview of an entire genre. The back cover trumpets it as suitable for use in schools, but I think you'd be better off with, say, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One if you want a chunky anthology that gives an overview of the genre. I don't think an overview has to be historically comprehensive, it just has to cover the range of subforms the genre can take, so the subtitle of "North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990" isn't necessarily limiting even if it is arbitrary. But this feels to me like a limited slice of what science fiction can do.

I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that Le Guin's taste in sf is literary. That's perfectly fine by me, as I like literary sf, and Le Guin is my joint favorite sf writer. What does surprise me from the author of the Hainish cycle is that it's very Earthbound. Very few stories here take place in space. I think that's what makes it feel limited: sf's ability to imagine other worlds and future times is very underrepresented here. There are times this book feels very insular. It's hard to imagine handing this to a literary sf neophyte and having them come away wowed at the possibilities the genre offers.

Random thoughts on random stories:

• "The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960): This felt very old-school to me, a short story constructed around a sort of Twilight Zone-y concept of a man who operates a human suit. But it's more than just a twist, it tells us something about ourselves in that best sfnal way, so I ended up liking it a lot despite the fact there's not a whole lot to it. (Kind of an odd choice to begin the collection, though, but I guess that's chronological order for you.)
• "High Weir" by Samuel R. Delany (1968): I really enjoyed this, a tale of explorers on Mars where an encounter with an ancient, dead civilizations ends up unsettling the minds of one of the explorers. I am always meaning to read some Delany.
• "Day Million" by Frederick Pohl (1969): This is one of the few stories (I think just four?) in the book that I'd read before (in this case, in Ascent of Wonder, a collection it definitely did not belong in). I enjoyed it there and enjoyed it here, a very weird story of romance.
• "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1973): Justly a classic. My second time reading it, and I still quite enjoyed it. Cleverly written from the perspective of a male protagonist where you have to read against what he says to sympathize with the female characters.
• "Schrödinger's Plague" by Greg Bear (1982): A sort of goofy sf thought experiment about a disease that may or may not exist, but clever enough and well told enough (it's a found documents story) to get away with it.
• "Snow" by John Crowley (1985): A man accesses the life experiences of his dead wife, which had been recorded completely. There's a lot of stories here about people flitting into the lives of the dead, I think, actually, but this is one of the better ones. They didn't exactly love each other, which makes it more poignant.
• "The Brains of Rats" by Michael Blumlein (1986): This was a dark, disturbing story, of a self-hating male feminist scientist. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I did think it was executed with great skill.
• "We See Things Differently" by Bruce Sterling (1989): In a future where America is no longer a dominant world power, a Muslim Egyptian journalist interviews a popular rock star. This did absolutely nothing for me, and I'm not sure what the point was, even with the twist at the end.
• "Half-Life" by Paul Preuss (1989): This is perhaps a typical weak story in some ways, one I wanted to like but couldn't never quite unlock. Something something Marie Curie, but I'd be damned if I could tell you what, and I think how the story is told gets in the way of whatever effect the writer was trying to achieve.
• "And the Angels Sing" by Kate Wilhelm (1990): Perhaps unfairly, you could say this was like a lot of stories in the volume: something fantastic enters into the lives of humdrum people. That said, I did quite enjoy it, as Wilhelm draws character sharply and has a knack for the uncanny and the weird. A reporter who pushes everyone away suddenly finds an alien and has to figure out what to do, along with a photographer who doesn't like him very much.

There were plenty others I liked, too: "When I Was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman Hess, "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" by Eileen Gunn, "(Learning About) Machine Sex" by Candas Jane Dorsey, "Tauf Alef" by Phyllis Gotlieb, "Invaders" by John Kessel, and "Schwarzschild Radius" by Connie Willis. This all gives a disproportionately positive impression, though, because there are a lot of stories I just didn't even mention here, because I just couldn't latch onto them, not even enough to tell you what I don't like about them. Skipping back through the book to pick out the ones I listed above, I found there were so many I just didn't remember. There are some sixty-seven stories in the book, so even thirty standouts wouldn't be a very good rate. (The book took me seven months to read; I read a story over lunch at work one to five times most weeks.)

So, it's definitely got some interesting stuff going on, and there are stories I would revisit, but on the whole, there are definitely better entries into the genre of Honking Big SF Anthologies than this one.