Fantasy: The Best of 2002
edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen
Haber
(ibooks, $7.99, 358 pages, mass-market paperback; published in May
2003.)
Last year, Robert Silverberg and Karen  Haber
entered the "year's best" anthology arena by launching two new series,
one dedicated to science fiction and the other to fantasy. Their science-fiction
volume was excessively redolent of misplaced nostalgia, but Fantasy:
The Best of 2001 presented an interesting and entertaining mix of
imaginative fiction. They return this year with a new volume in each
series.
Again, Science Fiction: The Best of 2002 fails to capture the
excitement of the genre, but Fantasy: The Best of 2002 is a diverse
and thrilling read that spans the broad range of fantasy fiction's subgenres.
The fantasy book's biggest lacuna -- especially compared to the rival
anthology series edited by David Hartwell and by the duo of Ellen Datlow
and Terri Windling -- is that Silverberg and Haber limit their choices
to selections from a handful of the most easily available genre magazines
and anthologies. The one exception to this rule is Brian Stableford's
"The Face of an Angel", taken from the small-press anthology Leviathan
3, and it's the most daring and captivating story in Fantasy:
The Best of 2002.
It tells of a vain plastic surgeon who meets a man claiming to know
the secret to recreating the face of Adam. The tale shimmers with inventive
wonders, deftly juggling history, mythology, and literary allusions.
In the introduction, the editors argue that they consider science fiction
a branch of fantasy. So, despite their other anthology dedicated to
that genre, they include a few science-fiction stories here, of which
Robert Reed's "The Majesty of Angels", describing a cataclysm of cosmic
proportions from a grippingly intimate point of view, is the most impressive.
Other gems include David Prill's gruesomely bizarre romance "Dating
Secrets of the Dead" and John Langan's peculiar modern gothic, "Mr.
Gaunt."
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 28 June 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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