"Gardner Dozois - The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

century was THE FUTURE, that unimaginably distant territory in which most
science fiction stories took place; now I find myself living there, in the remote,
glittering FUTURE...(which somehow feels different than you thought it would, more
mundane and less goshwow fantastical, once you're actually rubbing up against it, in
spite of technological innovations all around us that would have dropped the jaw of
anybody in 1950тАФa lesson many SF writers and futurologists could usefully learn).
To paraphrase Mark Twain, I wish the new century well, although I doubt I'll get to
see all that much of itтАФbut it's not my century. My century was the previous one.

But the twentieth century is gone, taking its freight of unprecedented and
unanticipated horrors and wonders with it, and even dinosaurian refugees from that
century, like me, must learn to look ahead, not back. We can go ahead, if we're
lucky, for a while anywayтАФbut back there's no returning.

The temptation to try to predict what the new century ahead is going to be like is
almost irresistible, and I'll succumb to that temptation here and there in the pages that
follow, but what makes me hesitant to really give in to it is realizing how poor a job
prognosticators at the beginning of the twentieth century did peering ahead at what
lay in store for them. In almost every case, even those who thought that they were
being wildly daring and outrageous in their predictions fell far short of what actually
happened, missing both the marvels and the miseries, the triumphs and the tragedies,
the unimaginable progress and the equally unimaginable atrocities that waited ahead.
For someone standing in 1901 and peering ahead, these things were literally
unimaginable; it was beyond the power of the human imagination to predict or fully
appre-ciate how radical the changes that lay ahead really would be, changes that
would come to alter almost out of recognition every aspect of the nineteenth-century
world, sweeping it aside and replacing it with a new world instead. And I suspect
that people at the beginning of the twenty-second centuryтАФif there are any people,
as we understand the term, still around by thenтАФwill look back at today's
predictions of what the twenty-first century is going to be like with similar
amusement (if not outright scorn) at how naive and limited our imaginations turned
out to be. So then, let's mostly content ourselves with taking a look at 2000, which is
safely past, and thus can be confidently examined with 20/20 hindsight.

It was a pretty quiet year, for the most part. Once again, the science fiction genre
didn't die, much to the disappointment of some commentators. In fact, the genre
seems to be fairly stable at the moment commercially (knock wood!); artistically,
even taking into account all of the tie-ins and media and gaming-associated books
that crowd the shelves, there are still considerably more science fiction novels of
quality being published now than were being published in, say, 1975 (including a few
that would probably not have been allowed to be published at all back then), in a
very wide range of styles and moods, by a spectrum of writers ranging from Golden
Age giants to Young Turks with one book under their beltsтАФquite probably more
quality material (including a wide range of short work) than any one reader is going
to be able to read in the course of one year, unless they make a full-time job of it.
The last couple of years have been dominated by Merger Mania, but this year the
corporations were mainly quiescent, like huge snakes digesting the goats they'd
swallowed. There were no major changes in publishing, at the genre level, anyway,
except in the troubled magazine marketтАФno print SF lines lost or gained. (Most of
the major action, both positive and negative, was in the online market, about which