The Shape of A Year

Posted by Colin Harvey May 15, 2009

Lately, prompted by the nostalgia-fest that marks F&SF's 60th year, I've been thinking a lot about the history of SF.

Pundits like to talk about decades and years as if they are discrete entities, as if 'The Golden Age,' or 'New Wave' or Cyberpunk were physical entities. That got me thinking, what gives a year a specific quality? Is it possible to define it?

Much of our view of a year comes from the various Year's Best anthologies, the latest being edited by Jonathan Strahan and Rich Horton, who have been editing for the last four or five years. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer are releasing their fourteenth volume, while Gardner Dozois celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of a series that started with the now long-defunct Bluejay Books. Before that Terry Carr, Don Wollheim, Harrison and Aldiss, Judith Merrill, and Dikty and Bleiler all published their choices.

But novels are equally important; with its burgeoning awareness of ecology and politics, Dune is archetypally a 1960s novel, while it's hard to think of brand-named driven Neuromancer with its cyberspace battles being written in any decade but the 1980s. More difficult to think of the novel that defines the 2000s - perhaps Gaiman's American Gods?

Theny there are the awards, major and minor. Whether the reader looks at the BSFA or the American-dominated Hugo and Nebulas, the stories that win the awards and those who write them are those that are remembered.

Much of the definition of Campbell's Golden Age comes from the SFWA's selection for their Science Fiction Hall of Fame, when almost every 1940s story came from Astounding. 1967 will forever be defined for some older readers by the publication of Harlan Ellison's colossal Dangerous Visions anthology. By the 1970s, anthologies dominated the field, yet a decade later the magazines that many written off had fought back.

All of these things, writers and stories, novels and awards, anthologies and magazines, are what give any particular year its shape.

And just as they give a year its shape, so conversely some writers are particularly associated with a decade or epoch.