2009 books
2) Mike Ashley, ed., The Best of British SF 1, 1977
3) Mike Ashley, ed., The Best of British SF 2, 1977
A two-part anthology of nearly 800 pages is ample space to cover eighty-odd years of British science fiction, and while Mike Ashley's specific aim may not have been to provide something for everyone that's inevitably what he ended up with. At the time of publication this was the biggest anthology of British SF ever published (and I wonder if there has been anything comparable published since), and Ashley's idea was to go way back to the birth of 'identifiable' British SF, ie. writers who went beyond their mere flights of fantasy and who instead began to present their ideas more scientifically, and chart the long development of British science fiction up to the then-present in his introductions to the stories. These introductions are all particularly well crafted, meandering informatively into areas not directly connected with the authors or their stories, and providing a widescreen picture of the development of British SF often made in comparison to its more widespread and illustrious offshoot, American SF.
A chosen few - Wells, Wyndham, Clarke, Aldiss - are represented with a couple of stories each, which only seems right given their influence, plus there are some useful inclusions, Christopher Isherwood and J.B. Priestley among them, though one small but glaring omission for me was any mention being made anywhere of E.M. Forster's classic, 'The Machine Stops'; it may have been too long for inclusion but it did deserve at least a nod in its direction. Something that somehow works in the editor's favour, yet also unfortunately works against his intent, is the disparity in quality between Ashley's sometimes perfect choices for inclusion from authors no longer with us - and you can tell these because they often feel like the right stories - and those that some living authors themselves specifically chose as their best. The latter may have provided diversity but it also proves that authors often have a rather skewed view of the quality of their own work: for instance John Brunner's 'The Totally Rich', which Brunner says is his best ever short story but which in my opinion hardly holds the reader's attention at all (and he had written far better), and Brian Aldiss's 'Manuscript Found in a Police State', which had only appeared five years previously in an almost-forgotten anthology (though Aldiss's other choice, 'Old Hundredth', fares far better).
Absolutely the best story of all for me in either volume - in fact I'd say it was one of the most enjoyable short stories I've read anywhere recently - is George Griffith's 'From Pole to Pole', written in 1904: it is imaginatively stunning, particularly with the perspective of a century hence from which to now read it, and the word 'audacious' hardly begins to describe it. At the more recent extreme the New Wave is largely represented by the strangeness of Michael Moorcock's novelette 'Pale Roses' from his 'Dancers at the End of Time' series, and something that confirmed to me once again that I just don't grok Moorcock, though finishing the second volume is thankfully something far better, Keith Roberts's 'The Signaller', the first episode of his novel Pavane. Altogether I'd say this was a very good anthology indeed, although perhaps inevitably given the vast range of styles and themes over so many decades it occasionally became something of an academic exercise when ploughing through the less enjoyable or even less notable stuff.