Black Gate

Year’s Finest Fantasy (Berkley Books, 1978). Cover by Carl Lundgren

The first Year Best volume I ever read was Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6, published in paperback by Del Rey in 1977 and filled with stories that blew my 13-year old mind, including the fascinating gadget tale “I See You” by Damon Knight,  John Varley’s futuristic murder mystery “The Phantom of Kansas,” the raunchy and bizarre “Meathouse Man” by George R. R. Martin, and Isaac Asimov’s classic “The Bicentennial Man.”

I kept an eye out for Terry Carr’s anthologies after that. The next one I spotted was Year’s Finest Fantasy, published by Berkley in July 1987. It was a fine demonstration of Carr’s far-ranging and discerning eye, for it included names both expected — Avram Davidson, Stephen King, a Dying Earth tale by Jack Vance, and Harlan Ellison with one of his finest stories, “Jeffty Is Five” — and unexpected, including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Woody Allen, and a horror novella by Robert Aickmanm. It also contained Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop’s Frankenstein story, “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” and an long novella from a virtual unknown, Julian Reid, his only known fantasy work, originally published in Universe 7.

Year’s Finest Fantasy was successful enough to kick off a series that lasted for five volumes, changing name to Fantasy Annual with #3. Terry Carr, a fine writer in his own right, provided a thoughtful introduction to the first volume, arguing convincingly that “contemporary fantasy tells us more truly of the nature of humanity than any collection of “realistic” stories could.” 43 years after I first read them, I find Carr’s words still resonate strongly.

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There are prolific anthologists, and there are very prolific anthologists, and there’s Isaac Asimov. The Internet Science Fiction database lists nearly 200 anthologies with his name on them, averaging around seven per year between 1963 and his death in 1992. (If you’re thinking, Geez that seems like a lot, let me clarify for you. Yes. It’s a lot.)

Of course, the vast majority of those were produced later in his career and in partnership with a team of editors, especially Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. In the early days Asimov compiled anthologies the old-fashioned way: by himself. It was the enduring, decades-long success of those books that paved the way for the massive literary-industrial complex to spring up around Asimov in the 80s and 90s. And he may have had no original anthology more successful or popular than Where Do We Go From Here?

Where Do We Go From Here? was published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1971, reprinted by Fawcett Crest in 1972, and kept in print in paperback for nearly ten years. It was one of the most popular and discussed SF anthologies of the decade, by a wide margin, and cemented Asimov’s reputation for curating — and selling — top-notch short fiction collections. It gathers stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum, John W. Campbell, Jr., Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Hal Clement, James Blish, Jerome Bixby, Arthur C. Clarke, James E. Gunn, H. Beam Piper, Walter Tevis, Larry Niven, and others. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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