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In the decades since Michael Moorcock's magazine New Worlds and Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions shattered taboos and transformed science fiction, editors have yearned to do likewise. But science fiction and Western society have changed greatly since the 1960s, and though new taboos have been born, there aren't many left. They can still be shattered, but any taboo-challenging fiction that appears in the same year as the movie Freddy Got Fingered has a tough job, and Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction is hardly as extreme as promised. For example, nonwhite and homosexual characters are rare; the status quo goes largely unchallenged; and a few of the 30 stories are young-adult in tone and subject, with the others having little that would disturb new-millennium youth, a generation accustomed to wearing bondage/fetish gear to the dance clubs. The rare examples of taboo breaking include a black character with a disturbingly thick accent and a posthuman race that commits mass murder for policy; but the anthology's potentially most challenging story gets there as a result of publication after September 11, 2001: Harry Turtledove's well-written but traditional modern fantasy "Black Tulip" is sympathetic to Afghanis.
Ignore the subtitle. Redshift is a very good anthology of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with some stories, like Gregory Benford's "Anomalies" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Commencement," that will become classics of speculative fiction. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly
For this big, glitzy original anthology, Sarrantonio asked his contributors to write short stories that could "influence the course of sf for the next twenty-five years." That's a fairly pretentious goal. Sarrantonio's working subtitle was "Dangerous Visions for the New Millennium," a nod to Harlan Ellison's revolutionary 1967 story anthology with subjects and/or styles too hot for publishers at the time. Nowadays, there aren't many taboos in SF, so this anthology mostly shows how accessible formerly "extreme" stories have become. Looked at simply as stories, the contents are occasionally disappointing. Some pieces are included because of the writers' reputations, some have a message that overpowers everything else, some are too brief to be much more than displays of style, and some suffer from multiple weaknesses. But there are excellent stories, too, showing the range of contemporary SF, such as Dan Simmons's tale of a human-alien team of mountain climbers, "On K2 with Kanakaredes," and Stephen Baxter's picture of human nature reasserting itself after extreme distortion, "In the Un-Black." In addition, Gene Wolfe ("Viewpoint") and Rudy Rucker and John Shirley ("Pockets") present message stories with real plots. Greg Benford ("Anomalies") offers a short tale as compact and deadly as a coral snake, while Catherine Wells ("'Bassador") and Neal Barrett Jr. ("Rhido Wars") use mind-stretching prose styles effectively. That's a pretty good average, actually, and the rest are worth reading to see how the writers responded to the editor's challenge. Agent, Ralph Vicinanza. (Dec. 4)horror fiction.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
