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Evans, Arthur B., Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk, eds. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2010. 776 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-08195-6955-4. $39.95.
The sf anthology, for anyone who cares to notice, has become a genre unto itself. So many such collections are available online, at used-book sales, and on remainder shelves that interested readers can easily locate collections devoted to every possible sf subgenre, mode, theme, and historical era. Publishers, no matter how many times the death of print is announced, remain willing to bundle twenty, fifty, seventy, or even one hundred sf short stories, novellas, and novel excerpts together. The resulting books, between two and five inches thick, are doorstops as much as anthologies.
The question facing twenty-first-century sf anthology editors is how to distinguish their collection from the dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands already on the market. Answering this query is no easy task. When done poorly, it results in forgettable collections that repurpose sf texts that scholars and aficionados have seen many times before. When done competently, it results in serviceable collections that may be read once, perhaps twice, before meeting undignified destinies in recycling bins. When done well, it results in important collections that remain on bookshelves long after their editors and initial audiences shuffle off this mortal coil.
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction falls into the third category, as we might expect from a collection assembled by six editors of Science Fiction Studies, perhaps sf s premiere scholarly journal. Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr., Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk have assembled fifty-two pieces, a probing (and concise) introduction, a serviceable further-reading list, and an excellent online teaching guide into an anthology as good as my personal favorites from the previous twenty years. The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery; Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (2002), edited...