Edited By Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s Press/642 pages/$40.00)

Reviewed by Dorman T Shindler

More astute reviewers than this one have pointed out that novellas are the perfect form for science fiction writers: just enough time to develop believable premises and worlds, as well as characters, without going on for too long.

After putting out The Best of the Best Volume 1, a culling of what Dozois believed are the best short stories from twenty years worth of “Year’s Best” collections, the former editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction has done the same for novellas.

Happily for this reviewer and long-time reader, many favorites are included. Foremost among them is “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, one of the most perfect novellas I’ve ever read. Haldeman manages to mix bits of crime fiction and mainstream fiction flavor into his outlandish tale of time travel and literary forgery, making it that much more delectable. His protagonist, John Baird, a college professor and Hemingway buff, bears a not-so coincidental resemblance to Haldeman. Both were wounded in the Vietnam War, and both are married. Of course, things diverge from there, since Baird’s wife is willing to play her husband for a patsy when Sylvester Castlemaine enters the picture, trying to convince both of them to commit forgery. Castlemaine’s idea begins slouching toward reality when Baird mentions that Hemingway’s first wife managed to lose a brief case full of his early stories while traveling by train from France to Switzerland. After some persuading from his wife (who was encouraged by Castlemaine), Baird decides to look into the possibility of forging one of those lost stories: properly aged paper has to be obtained, as well as the correct sort of typewriter.

Baird travels to New England doing research and his wife stays in Florida, twisting bed sheets with Castlemaine.

That’s when a mysterious, time-traveling entity that looks like Hemingway (sometimes the old Hemingway, sometimes the young) throws a monkey wrench in everyone’s plans by appearing to Baird and warning him that his petty criminal act threatens the fabric of time, and that the entity will have to kill Baird if he doesn’t desist. Baird, of course, ends up not listening; but the entity’s efforts to kill Baird only send him into a parallel universe, where the strange ballet of death and deconstruction begin all over again.

With its chapter headings taken from Hemingway’s own tales, it’s Roman-a-clef flavor and it’s moebius strip structure (not to mention a section that runs backwards and reads almost like poetry), “The Hemingway Hoax” is a tour-de-force of storytelling, and much-deserving of the Nebula and Hugo Awards bestowed upon it.

Haldeman’s story is just one of the treasures readers will find in this trove of literary wonders. There’s Robert Sliverberg’s moving, elegiac, “Sailing to Byzantium” (another Nebula and Hugo winner), in which a 20th century man finds himself in a future that seems magical–and soulless; “Griffin’s Egg” by Michael Swanwick, in which human settlements on the moon and controlled mental evolution play a part; telepathic marine animals and a god-like alien in “Surfacing” by Walter Jon Williams; and a return to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish interstellar community in “Forgiveness Day.”

From hard SF to the sort that treads a line between fantasy and science fiction, the novellas herein–many of them award-winners–as well as the authors truly represent some of the best that the genre has to offer.