Jim Baen's Universe

Notes From the Buffer Zone

Columns

An Amazing Amount of Stuff

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My to-read pile balances precariously on the shelves beside my bed. The print magazines alone go back to 2007, with more piled on top daily. In 2008, I managed to read every word of every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I delved into the others.

2008 was my best year in almost a decade. I immediately got behind in 2009, and I’m not even sure where the early 2010 copies of the magazines are.

When I was a pup (she writes, resisting the urge to talk about trudging through the snow uphill both ways [which, considering I lived just off Hill Avenue in Superior, a town in northern Wisconsin, isn’t as far off as you might think]), you could read every word of every major magazine published in sf. I never saw the mystery magazines or I would have gobbled them up in a moment. At that point, I read four books per day when school was out (two when it was in session), watched as much television as I could, and saw the movies the day they opened—if they ventured that far north, of course.

I went to the dime store with the book racks larger than one of our local bookstores and bought every single gothic novel I could find. The Ace Doubles and the Daw science fiction books with their yellow spines had covers too garish to bring home—my parents would have reduced my allowance if I bought them—so I had to content myself with Andre Nortons from the library, and reading the anthologies (from Orbit to Universe) in the university library while waiting for my father to drive me home.

When Terry Carr’s best of the year volumes came out, I had already read half the stories in it. Donald Wolheim’s best of the year always had some revelations and was my very favorite anthology of the year, no matter what. (When I got asked to be in a volume just before Wolheim’s death, I was so flattered, I could hardly speak.)

I can still count the science fiction television shows that aired back then on one hand. The science fiction movies were either too dark for young me (A Clockwork Orange) or too obtuse (2001: A Space Odyssey), so I mostly avoided them. But I could have named them as well.

The amount of sf in them thar days was finite. Truly finite. A diligent sf fan could read everything that came out and still have time to make a dent in the mysteries, gothics, and general fiction. (With time to spare for all that assigned reading from school.)

So whenever I get these invites to pick the best of the year or to opine about “my” top choices for the year in question, I have a moment of panic. I haven’t read everything. I didn’t even try to read everything. I’m not even aware of everything.

In 2008, when I read all of Asimov’s and Queen’s, I still failed. I wanted to read all of the stories in all of the digest magazines, as well as everything in the sf/f field online. Whoops. Never got to any online pubs, except those of my friends or favorite authors, and while I dipped into F&SF, Hitchcock’s, and Analog, I never got through all of the year’s issues either.

Now it comes time to put in my orders for the 2010 year’s best volumes for the best work of 2009. The last volume that will appear will be The Best American Mysteries in October of 2010. But I hesitate to put in my orders. At the moment I write this column, the only year’s best of 2008 (pubbed in 2009) that I’ve finished is Gardner Dozois’s and that only because I had assigned it for a class I was teaching.

I’m halfway through Ed Gorman’s year’s best (crime stories), with The Best American Mysteries 2009 sitting underneath it. There are so many volumes of sf/f year’s bests that I’m not even sure where to start. Now that the big year’s best fantasy and horror volume that Ellen Datlow co-edited (first with Terri Windling, then with Gavin Grant and Kelly Link) is gone, the field has divided into fantasy and horror, and I feel lost. I’m so far behind in my reading of the best of the year volumes that I fear I will never catch up.

And those volumes point me to magazines I’ve missed, new authors I haven’t heard of before, novelists I really should try.

I am overwhelmed by stuff. Stuff to read, stuff to watch, stuff to listen to. (Let’s not even get started on the wonderful choices in music these days.)

My problem is my upbringing. I know that the amount of work published/released in 2009 is finite. It’s just no longer at a small enough number that I can consume it all and still have time to 1)write; 2) socialize; 3) sleep. (Thank heavens you can read while eating.)

So whenever someone asks me for my opinion on the best whatever of the year, I usually say no. What else can I do? I haven’t culled from all the possible sources, haven’t watched all the available movies. I know I’ve missed some really really good stuff, so I can’t make the judgment call of “best.” I’m not willing to say “And the winner is. . . .” Some variation on the switch that the Oscars made several years ago to “And the Oscar goes to. . . .” doesn’t work either.

“And Kris’s uninformed opinion is. . . ?” Naw.

“And the Kris Best of the Year designation goes to. . . ?” Nope.

“And the thing Kris points to as good is. . . ?” Okay, maybe.

In late 2009, I got asked to choose “my” best of the year. The person who asked specified the best books, movies, television, games that I consumed in 2009, whether or not it came out in 2009.

But because I’m an obstinate completist, I still restricted myself to 2009—and I found myself e-mailing the poor guy days later with even more suggestions, things that hadn’t been at the forefront of my brain when I wrote the first e-mail because I’d read/watched them in early 2009, which seemed like a century ago.

I vowed I would clean up my magazines in the first part of the year and only have the current ones in my to-be-read pile. But the huge stacks remain. I really don’t want to cull. I’m still under the illusion that I’ll catch up someday—even though my editions of The Best American Short Stories (yes, the mainstream ones) goes back unread (except for the Stephen King edited issue) to the previous century.

When I moved my library last year, I found the best essay of the year volumes, some as old as the 1930s. Of course, they’re in my to-be-read pile too. Maybe at the end of this year, when someone asks me to compile a best-of list, I’ll quote from essays nearly 100 years old.

I’ll bet somewhere in this gigantic house library we have sf best of the years that I missed as well. I’ll go completely retro. I do know we have every issue of every sf digest magazine. Maybe I’ll compile my 2010 list from those.

Time Travel, the Rusch Method.

Or maybe not. Because at some point I really am going to have to admit to myself that the bumper sticker defines my life: There is too much to read and too little time.

Too much to read.

That’s a good thing.

Right?

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