Colin Harvey notes in a review at Strange Horizons of the stories in Jonathan Strahan's the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year #1 that
"perhaps the overarching theme is that we in the West, with most of the basic steps of Mazlow's Hierarchy of needs – food, shelter, family --- met, have become preoccupied with our own mortality."
Serendipitously, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer wrote in the introduction to their Year’s Best SF#12 of chronotopicality, “How the myriad voices of a moment participate to represent that moment in space-time when the works in question were written and published.” The stories themselves are reviewed here.
Cramer defines chronotopicality as:
A cultural studies notion for examining trends in popular culture, in which large scale events prior to and during the processor composition of a work, leave their imprint.
It has become almost a cliché that we live in what to our grandparents would be a science-fictional world. In the last twenty years personal computers, mobile phones that take pictures, the world-wide web, all have transformed our lives – in some instances, almost beyond recognition.
External change -- forced on individuals by circumstance or outside influences rather than choice – is almost invariably threatening, due to the lack of personal control involved. So as the pace of change increases, anxiety increases. While most technological developments have been at least neutral, and in many cases positively beneficial, the individual anxieties are still present.
When the developments lead to actual or perceived threats, such as terrorism and climate change (often sensationalized in the media for the individual commentator’s benefit) the anxiety increases to the level of actual fear.
There is nothing new in such anxiety; late 1940s and 1950s science-fiction was full of apocalyptic after-the-bomb parables, including outright cannibalism in New York in Robert Silverberg’s early novelette ‘The Road To Nightfall,’ while the 1960s and early 1970s often ran stories prophesizing calamity such as social and ecological collapse.
What is unusual about the current situation is that whole representations of the best of the year are dominated by stories so clearly showing the personal uncertainty of their authors, whether through their obvious themes, such as disaster and (sometimes) the recovery from that catastrophe, or through more subtle signals, such as a preoccupation with the afterlife or immortality achieved through technological means.
Given that most of the stories selected would have been written in the eighteen months after the following events listed in chronological order;
- The Indonesian earthquake and subsequent tsunami
- Severe January weather killed forty-five people in the USA.
- The London bombings that killed fifty-two people.
- On-going news of killing and civil war in Iraq.
These are only selected items from a daily diet of news that highlights what at times seems to be a steady stream of catastrophes, both natural and man-made. (This post is not to debate the morality of news coverage, only to observe its effect)
Is it any wonder that the defining emotion in SF in 2006 was anxiety?
Scrutiny of the magazines themselves, however, indicates that all is not as clear-cut as Hartwell & Cramer would have their readers believe; examination of magazines such as F&SF, Interzone and Strange Horizons indicate that the mood of doom and gloom is not as prevalent as the Hartwell and Cramer selections indicate.
Apocalypse stories make for great imagery, and Hartwell and Cramer probably made their selection, then tailored their editorial to fit it; there is a noticeable skew to the Hartwell and Cramer volume, which is echoed, albeit much less clearly, in the Strahan selection, but is not truly representative of the wider SF field.
There is anxiety, but it’s more subtle than Hartwell and Cramer’s selection would seem to indicate.
