Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

 

Finished reading “R & R” by Lucius Shepard. It was weird, having it intro’d by Dozois (the editor) as “probably his best story to date … and quite likely the single best story to appear in the genre this year”. And then before finishing it coming across an article from the past year by a different editor (Strahan) who also assembles year’s best collections, with him using example of this same story from the late 1980s as an example of that sort of “Wow, this is amazing” feel that he looks for in stories to anthologise.

That happens rarely, though, and it’s why I keep reading. To find the next “R&R”, and to experience that sort of moment again. It’s also what I hope the best of the year series delivers to readers.

So I finished reading it, and it did not knock my socks off. But it was interesting. All I’ve read of Lucius Shepard’s writing is the four stories collected in the second and third anthologies in this series. They tend to have a lot of themes and settings in common - not set in the US, despite protagonist often being from there, being set in Central America (and in one case, Spain), a mysterious, sexually alluring woman surrounded by ideas of magical escape, and the idea of escape from war or colonisation.

With this sense of repetition I had been feeling unexcited by the prospect of reading another. They had all been quite good, mind. But feeling I could anticipate the details of what was to come dampened my enthusiasm. Plus with all this high praise I reacted as if dared to dislike it.

This particular story held all of those themes also. But as it played out, it came across more as a repudiation of his previous work - all those elements, but ultimately a magical translation out of war or colonisation is not a viable escape.

I had heard many good things about Lucius Shepard prior to reading any of his stories, so I had been looking forward to reading his work. The first one I read, actually, felt so familiar I thought I had read it before, but this may have been a distant memory of Greg Egan doing what felt like a riff on his work (probably “Chaff” in the collection Luminous, not to be published for another 8 years after this).

This story reassures me I have been premature in writing off Lucius Shepard. Good news since he has been so well-regarded by people vastly better versed in the field than me.