Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century
Edited by Orson Scott Card
Ace Books, New York 2001
422 pages, $24.95 in hardcover
I usually don’t review books that have been in print for more than two years, and this volume appeared in November of 2001.
However, the availability of good English-language science fiction is limited and shrinking in Panama, notwithstanding that shelf of Trekkie books I recently encountered at Excedra. The only magazine with science fiction that you can find on the racks here is “Fantasy & Science Fiction.” Retired US Navy computer whiz and science fiction writer Tom Cool, who’s married to a Panamanian and who had planned to retire near a beach down here, has altered those plans for the time being due to the worldwide state of low-intensity war in which the United States finds itself. The renewed interest in English coming from business and political circles includes a tremendous eagerness on the part of Panamanian working people to be able to talk to tourists from the Anglo-Saxon world in their own tongue; mixed feelings on the part of the nation’s English teachers, who will in most cases need to improve their skills and revise their methods; and a shallow incomprehension on the part of many politicians who championed English in our schools but don’t understand much about the cultures of the English-speaking peoples. Thus it’s easy for the nation’s bookstore buyers, librarians, teachers and other cultural filters to dismiss science fiction, a literary genre that mostly if not exclusively has developed in the English language, as kids’ stuff, junk reading for bored adults or a tacky spinoff from television just like all those toys based on children’s TV programs.
But meanwhile, science fiction has blossomed into one of the most popular, prolific and profound expressions of English literary culture. This development, which has taken place over about about 75 years, is so important that Panama’s revived interest in the English language will inevitably be distorted, impoverished and blunted if science fiction continues to be ignored here.
What to do?
Fortunately, I received as a Christmas present “Masterpieces,” an ambitious anthology edited by Orson Scott Card, who is one of the leading lights --- duly certified by Hugo and Nebula awards --- in the science fiction field. This book is important as much for its introductions --- both of the field’s general progression at the beginning of the book and of the individual authors’ great works before each story --- as for the great works collected within. It explains and illustrates the various phases of science fiction’s development so well that it should be the preferred textbook of any good science fiction appreciation course, a type of class without which any Panamanian university’s English literature program would be incomplete.
Card confesses to the work’s principal shortcomings. By its very nature it excludes novels and screenwriting, which encompass a major part of the genre’s great works. No writer has more than one piece in Masterpieces, which inevitably means that the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. LeGuin are slighted by the omissions of several of their respective great short works in favor of one whose designation as “best” would be very debatable. (For examples, Card picked Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” where I would have chosen “The Star,” Ellison’s “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” where I prefer “The Deathbird” or one of several other works, and LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” where I put the original version of “The Word for World is Forest” atop the list of her shorter works.)
The editor does not note a major American slant to his selections, but it’s there all the same. It should be, given that the great bulk of science fiction is written in the United States, and in “Masterpieces” it’s not so gross that Arthur C. Clarke, a British subject who has lived for many years in Sri Lanka, is denied his due. But the late Douglas Adams (“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” etc.) leads the list of unfortunately omitted Brits, and is joined by many worthy Canadians and Aussies, and that’s not to mention the Russians and others writing works of science fiction in other languages that have then been translated into English.
But let me not complain too much. Science fiction is a huge and wonderful literary field, much more subtle and brilliant than those who don’t know it tend to presume, and it can’t be done complete justice in 400-odd pages.
Orson Scott Card does science fiction substantial justice in this anthology, which is all that anybody could ask him to do. “Masterpieces” is a treasure for a committed science fiction fan, a most useful guide for a reader relatively new to the genre, and a very good textbook for somebody who is at an advanced state of learning English as a second language. It’s the sort of thing that you should be able to pick up at bookstores on and around the University of Panama and USMA campuses, but will instead have to special order through the bookseller of your choice.
Also in this section:
Cool Internet sites
A century of Panamanian music
Books: Science fiction
Morning TV gets more intelligent debate
