With "Jurassic Park" eating box office records like a tyrannosaur starved since the Cretaceous period, it is hard to escape the feeling that the cinema is the best place for science fiction (SF). The book of the same name is a successful but humdrum addition to the long line of dinosaur stories that stretches from Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" – itself filmed twice – to R Garcia y Robertson's "The Virgin and the Dinosaur", published last year. The film, on the other hand, achieves through visual wizardry what the book and much of the rest of today's published SF never manage. It evokes a sense of wonder.
To many critics and most fans, it is in the evoking of a sense of wonder that the essence of SF is to be found. As Peter Nicholls puts it in an entry in the revised and much expanded "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" *, the sense of wonder is
"created by the writer putting the readers in a position from which they can glimpse for themselves, with no further auctorial aid, a scheme of things where mankind is seen in a new perspective."
Put that way, it is easy to see why the genre's greatest popular successes in recent years have been not the many fine books produced in the field but rather films with remarkable special effects. The sheer vastness of the mother-ship in Steven Spielberg's earlier epic, "Close Encounters", provides new perspective in a way that the finest prose is hard-put to match. That cinema has special abilities in the evocation of wonder does not mean written science fiction is a dead genre. But the evidence from the pick of the current crop is that the writers are not aspiring to compete with the directors.
The market for short SF is buoyant. For the past ten years Gardner Dozois of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has put together an anthology of the year's most impressive short science fiction. It is a pretty fair summing up of what the more literate end of the genre thinks – two-thirds of Mr Dozois's two dozen selections are also in the year's best list compiled by the critics who work for Locus, the field's news magazine. However, although well told, the stories have a tendency towards the dreary.
There is no reason for science fiction to be cheerful; warning against excess is one of the genre's strengths, and is often done better than in "Jurassic Park". Futures a little nastier than the present in one particular way can provide great fiction – a case in point is "The Last of the Winnebagoes" by Connie Willis, which graced Mr Dozois's selection of 1988's fiction. But that story did more than moan; and that collection had more variety than this year's. In 1992, with all the possible universes theirs for the picking, the authors in Mr Dozois's stable chose to stick with the near future of the earth.
They also showed a tendency towards fantasy in stories lacking the remotest scientific rationale for their high jinks. There is nothing wrong with fantasy; but it is not the same as science fiction. The difference does not rest on the ideas in SF being possible – many are not. But SF is not concerned merely with the sorts of things science might do. Rather, at its best, it is concerned with showing how the world can be viewed through science. That is the basis of its best warnings, and its best wonders.
The "new perspective" on mankind Mr Nicholls talks about is normally one based on the scientific world-view the author has set up in his tale. John Clute, the inventive critic who edited the expanded encyclopedia with Mr Nicholls, argues that, by understanding that the sense of wonder is created through the tension between what the characters in the book think is the case and what the author is able to reveal as the case, you can see the literary achievement of the sense of wonder for what it is – a peculiar form of dramatic irony.
Thoughts like this make Mr Clute's many portraits of SF's practitioners one of the charms of the encyclopedia. It has many others, such as excellent bibliographies, and mini-essays on the field's many concerns, from Big Dumb Objects (engineering mega-projects) to Apes and Cavemen (but, funnily, not dinosaurs), and from the planet Mars to the nature of McGuffins. Unfortunately, the book's fine detail, broad scope and startling intelligence are marred by mistakes. The little critters in Greg Bear's "Blood Music" are based on RNA, not DNA; Larry Niven's "The Integral Trees" is not set in the same universe as his delightful Big-Dumb-Object novel "Ringworld". There are also curious omissions, such as that of Geoffrey Landis, a young author who has won both the field's must sought-after prizes, the Hugo and the Nebula awards.
So although this is a book to be loved, it is not one to be trusted unreservedly – which makes it a good representative of the field it describes. For those who already know the field a bit, it will provide easily as much wonder, if not as much dramatic irony, as any collection of stories. Mr Dozois's collection, on the other hand, distinguished by a high standard of writing, might make a good gift for someone who thinks all science fiction to be for juveniles. But though the book might clear up misconceptions about the nature of the beast, few of its stories show the newcomer what its potential is. One of the few that might is Michael Swanwick's "Griffin's Egg", a good novella about the transformations of mind and landscape that take place on the earth's newly industrialised moon. And if that story does not, then at least its epigram, from Vachel Lindsay, catches the aspirations of the field, and its capacity for wonder and warning, in a succinct, if sexist, way:
The moon? It is a griffin's egg
Hatching to-morrow night,
And now the little boys will watch
With shouting and delight
To see him break the shell and stretch
And creep across the sky,
The boys will laugh. The little girls,
I fear, may hide and cry...