Best of SF annuals are a venerable tradition. The first such collection was, according to my research, Bleiler and T. E. Dikty’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949. That being said, a slightly later Best SF series left a lineage that spans decades.
I refer to Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest SF. Between 1956 and 1968, Judith Merril edited twelve [Note 1] annual anthologies of works that Merril considered to be the best speculative fiction stories of the previous year. Merril’s tastes were unusually wide-ranging [Note 2].
When I revisited the series in 2023 and 2024, it was the structure of her anthologies that caught my attention. I’d seen that arrangement before. Or rather, I had seen it before in anthologies that were published later than Merril’s were.
A Merril Year’s Best included, in addition to the stories, ancillary material in form of a discussion of the state of science fiction in the previous year and a list of noteworthy works that hadn’t quite made the cut for inclusions. Lester del Rey’s less noteworthy Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, which he helmed from 1972 to 1976, used a similar approach although minus the long list of recommended works. Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which ran from 1984 to 2018, resembles Merril’s structure far more closely, albeit at greater length. Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy also adopted a similar arrangement.
It’s no surprise that Dozois’ Best of would resemble del Rey’s. Dozois’ 1984-to-2018 series was the second time he’d helmed a Best SF series. The first time, he replaced del Rey as editor of The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. A consistent format under those circumstances is no surprise, but if you check Dozois’ first volume, its structure resembles Merril’s more than it does del Rey’s.
The similarity between Merril, del Rey, and Dozois could just be three editors independently arriving at a similar arrangement. Far stranger coincidences have happened in science fiction. On the other hand, Aldiss, Harrison, Carr, Strahan, Hartwell, Cramer, and other editors used different approaches, so alternatives did exist. Still, Merril’s series was hardly obscure, and her way to contextualize the best SF stories makes a lot of sense.
Were del Rey and Dozois drawing on Merril [Note 3]? Or is there an earlier source from which all three were drawing? I’d love to know one way or another.
Ah, but what about Rich Horton, you ask? Why no laborious dot-connecting and strained reasoning to connect Horton and Merril? Horton is still alive, so I asked him if Merril’s Best SF influenced him [Note 4]. His answer: “Yes, definitely.”
As you can see, the past is never gone in the present and future, particularly in SF and its annual anthologies of best SF, where each successive generation is influenced and inspired by and builds on what has come before, not just in content and context of the stories themselves but also in how those anthologies are presented to us.
Notes
- Unless you count her three Best of the Best selections from earlier volumes as anthologies in their own right, in which case one could argue for as many as fifteen.
- As was her definition of “year.” It wasn’t uncommon for her anthologies to span more than one calendar year. In at least one case, it spanned more than one calendar decade. Well, Merril never said which planet’s year she was using.
- I did check the debut volumes of both the del Rey and Dozois series to see if they mentioned Merril. If they did, I overlooked it.
- Horton is also influenced by Merril’s wide-ranging, eclectic tastes.
James Davis Nicoll is a book reviewer and five-time Hugo finalist, four-time Aurora finalist, and CSFFA Hall of Fame nominee. His work can be found at James Nicoll Reviews.
@seattlein2025 Ted Dikty and his wife, fellow SF writer Julian May, lived in the Seattle area (Mercer Island) at the time of his death.