PUBLIC SHUDDERS AT "BEST OF THE YEAR"

It can't be the editors' fault. Can it? Terry Carr has as much taste as any editor in the field has ever had. Donald Wollheim may be a tough old shark, a snuff-snorting roue' of the ancien regime, but he Knows What People Like.

How to explain, then, the painful dullness of these two collections? (THE 1983 WORLD'S BEST SF, Donald A. Wollheim, Ed., DAW, $2.95; THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR #12, Terry Carr, ed., Timescape, $3.95.) Is SF suffering from intellectual exhaustion? Perhaps it takes itself too seriously and has lost the careless vigor it had when it was mere pop crap. One might easily conclude this after perusing the vapid "Letter From the Clearys," the pompous and bloodless "Sur," or the Abbess-phone-home fakery of "Souls." But even these clumps of parasitic literary mistletoe have more to recommend them than the clunky obsolescence of James White's "The Scourge" or Timothy Zahn's laughable "Pawn's Gambit."

Consider how good Frederik Pohl's "Farmer On the Dole" looks in this company. This story is predicated on the waggish Pohl-Kornbluth satires of thirty years ago. In those days "Farmer On the Dole" would have ranked as a shoulder-shrugging mild amusement. Nowadays, however, surrounded by stories that lie gasping and wall-eyed with anemia, a story that has enough strength left to execute a rickety buck-and-wing and toss a pie or two DESERVES ACCLAIM.

Wollheim's collection is the dopier of the two, burdened by aberrations like Timothy Robert Sullivan's negligible "The Comedians," and "Written in Water," one of Tanith Lee's most opaque efforts. The collection closes well with Rudy Rucker's lively Pac-Man parody, but the mind boggles at this choice, since it's probably the worst thing Rucker ever wrote. One winces to think of the impression this must make on Rucker's potential fans, who will almost certainly conclude that his work consists of juvenile KA-CHOW KA-CHOW incoherency.

Carr's collection has more on the ball, including Disch's claustrophobically brilliant "Understanding Human Behavior" and Silverberg's competent "Pope of the Chimps." The silly plot of Connie Willis' "Firewatch" does not prevent her from making her point with force and grace. And Gregory Benford's strange parable of modern industrial society, "Relativistic Effects," demands respect and earns it. It is, however, rather dull.

Hope for the future lies with newer writers. Bill Johnson's first story, "Meet Me At Apogee," shows unusual stylistic grace for a hard-SF devotee, and he seems to have grasped the fact that the Future Will Be Different. Bruce McAllister does not know how to plot, but this can be forgiven him, since his is clearly a visionary chomping at the bit. McAllister needs to forget his pretensions and cut loose.

Bruce Sterling contributes a slick piece of entomological SF. The odd popularity of this work, with its intense Stapledonian pessimism, probably shows that readers have missed his point.

But the best comes last: William Gibson's incredible "Burning Chrome." THIS is the shape for science fiction in the 1980's: fast-moving, sharply extrapolated, technologically literate, and as brilliant and coherent as a laser. Gibson's focussed and powerful attack is our best chance yet to awaken a genre that has been half-asleep since the early 1970's.

And until SF does reform itself, re-think itself, and re-establish itself as a moving cultural force instead of a backwater anachronism, even the cleverest editors will find their efforts useless. They cannot produce meritorious fiction after the fact; nor can they stitch silk purses from the ears of sows, no matter how fat the sows are or how long they have been munching the same acorns under the same tree. SF must stop recycling the same half-baked traditions about the nature of the human future. And its most formally gifted authors must escape their servant's mentality and learn to stop aping their former masters in the literary mainstream. Until that happens, SF will continue sliding through obsolescence toward outright necrophilia.