The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Read online

  CONTENTS

  Summation: 2006

  I, ROW-BOAT Cory Doctorow

  JULIAN: A CHRISTMAS STORY Robert Charles Wilson

  TIN MARSH Michael Swanwick

  THE DJINN’S WIFE Ian McDonald

  THE HOUSE BEYOND YOUR SKY Benjamin Rosenbaum

  WHERE THE GOLDEN APPLES GROW Kage Baker

  KIN Bruce McAllister

  SIGNAL TO NOISE Alastair Reynolds

  THE BIG ICE Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

  BOW SHOCK Gregory Benford

  IN THE RIVER Justin Stanchfield

  INCARNATION DAY Walter Jon Williams

  FAR AS YOU CAN GO Greg Van Eekhout

  GOOD MOUNTAIN Robert Reed

  I HOLD MY FATHER’S PAWS David D. Levine

  DEAD MEN WALKING Paul J. McAuley

  HOME MOVIES Mary Rosenblum

  DAMASCUS Daryl Gregory

  LIFE ON THE PRESERVATION Jack Skillingstead

  YELLOW CARD MAN Paolo Bacigalupi

  RIDING THE CROCODILE Greg Egan

  THE ILE OF DOGGES Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

  THE HIGHWAY MEN Ken MacLeod

  THE PACIFIC MYSTERY Stephen Baxter

  OKANOGGAN FALLS Carolyn Ives Gilman

  EVERY HOLE IS OUTLINED John Barnes

  THE TOWN ON BLIGHTED SEA A. M. Dellamonica

  NIGHTINGALE Alastair Reynolds

  Honorable Mentions: 2006

  * * * *

  SUMMATION: 2006

  The old Chinese curse says “May you live in interesting times,” and in that sense, we were lucky with 2006, since it was overall a relatively uneventful year (although there were a few things that might qualify as “interesting” in the way the curse intends).

  The Time Warner Book Group was sold to Lagardère, parent company of Hachette Livre, which also owns Gollancz and Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom, and will now be known as Grand Central Publishing. There was good news and bad news about this for the SF field—the bad news was that Warner Aspect was phased out and folded into the general Warner line; the good news is that Hachette Book Group USA will launch a major new imprint called Orbit USA in 2007, overseen by Tim Holman, who is also publishing director of Orbit UK. Orbit USA intends to produce forty titles per year in hardcover and paperback, which could make the line a major player in the American SF scene. So this “interesting” event might turn out to be more positive than negative.

  More solidly qualifying as “interesting,” two major bankruptcies shook the publishing world in 2006. American Marketing Services, the largest book distributor in the United States, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of the year, leaving behind more than $200 million in debt, something that could have disastrous consequences for many publishers, especially the financially vulnerable small presses. Following the sudden death of publisher Byron Preiss in 2005, Byron Preiss Visual Publications and iBooks also declared bankruptcy and stopped publishing in early 2006, leaving a large number of already-published and yet-to-be-published SF titles in a legal limbo; the whole situation was complicated by the bankruptcy of American Marketing Services, referred to above, which was the parent company to Publishers Group West, the last distributor of iBooks. It may take years for any of this to be resolved, and ill effects may be rippling through the publishing world (not just the genre) for longer than that.

  Much less “interesting,” pretty encouraging, in fact, was the founding of Solaris Books, a new SF imprint from BL Publishing (parent company of the Black Library, British publisher of gaming-related books), due to start up with an ambitious program in 2007. Wildside Press added fantasy romance imprint Juno Press in 2006 and announced plans to develop another new line under the Cosmos Books imprint in 2007 in partnership with Dorchester/Leisure. Gollancz will launch a new supernatural romance line in 2007.

  * * * *

  Things were, alas, all too “interesting” in the troubled short fiction market, which suffered another bad year, with the circulation of many magazines continuing to fall—although there were also a few encouraging signs here and there, especially in the wider short fiction market that includes electronic online publications as well as print magazines.

  The most recent incarnation of Amazing Stories, which had gone “on hiatus” fifteen months ago (almost always a bad sign) finally officially died in 2006. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 13 percent loss in overall circulation in 2006, with subscriptions dropping from 18,050 to 15,117, and newsstand sales dropping as well; sell-through remained steady at 29 percent. Asimov’s published good stories this year by Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mary Rosenblum, Paul McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Jack Skillingstead, Bruce McAllister, Robert Reed, and others. Sheila Williams completed her second year as Asimov’s editor. Analog Science Fiction and Fact registered a 7.3 percent loss in overall circulation in 2006, with subscriptions dropping from 25,933 to 23,732, while newsstand sales dropped from 4,614 to 4,587; sell-through, however, rose from 30 percent to 32 percent. Analog published good work this year by John Barnes, Stephen Baxter, Rob Chilson, Carl Frederick, Brian Plante, and others. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there for twenty-seven years. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, although it didn’t go up in circulation, managed to hold at almost the same level as last year, dropping less than 1 percent since 2005, with subscriptions dropping from 14,918 to 14,575, and newsstand sales declining from 3,822 to 3,691. This may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but to put it in perspective, since 2004, circulation at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has dropped 13.7 percent (only 1.9 percent of that taking place during the last two years), while circulation at Asimov’s Science Fiction dropped 45 percent during the same period (36.6 of that in the last two years) and at Analog Science Fiction and Fact, circulation dropped during the same period by 33.5 percent (15.5 percent of that in the last two years)—so that F&SF has at least been able to put the brakes on swiftly dropping circulation rates in a way that Asimov’s and Analog have so far not been able to; in today’s magazine market, that’ll count as good news! F&SF published good work this year by Peter S. Beagle, Daryl Gregory, Robert Reed, Matthew Hughes, Ysabeau S. Wilce, Geoff Ryman, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and others. The editor and publisher is Gordon Van Gelder. Circulation figures for Realms of Fantasy lag a year behind the other magazines, but their 2005 figures show them registering a 13 percent loss in overall circulation from 2004, with subscriptions dropping from 17,191 to 16,547, and newsstand sales dropping from 9,398 to 6,584 after two previous years in a row of newsstand gains, sell-through increased, from 20 percent to 29 percent. They published good stuff this year by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold, James Van Pelt, Richard Parks, Greg Van Eekhout, and others. Shawna McCarthy is the longtime editor.

  Interzone, which had seemed on the brink of death just a couple of years ago, continued a strong recovery in 2006, publishing its scheduled six issues, and featuring strong fiction by Justin Stanchfield, Jamie Barras, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, David Mace, Chris Beckett, Suzanne Palmer, and others. In its slick, large-size format, Interzone has also transformed itself into just about the best-looking SF magazine in the business, and, in fact, one of the most handsome SF magazines ever published. The editorial staff, supervised by publisher Andy Cox, includes Jetse de Vries, Andrew Hedgecock, David Mathew, Sandy Auden, and, most recently, Liz Williams. Circulation is in the 2,000-to-3,000 range.

  These five magazines are usually thought of as the “professional” magazine market, although Interzone doesn’t qualify by SFWA’s definition because of its low rates and circulation—nobody can seriously atte
st that the magazine isn’t thoroughly professional, and even top-level professional, by any other standard, though, certainly by the quality of the fiction it produces.

  None of these magazines should be counted out, but it’s clear that several of them—especially the so-called digest-sized magazines, although they have the compensating advantage of being cheap to produce—must be skating on the edge of profitability; fortunately, if you like to have a lot of professional-quality short SF and fantasy stories available to read every year, there is something you can do to help: subscribe.

  It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines since you can now do it online with the click of a few buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. In the Internet age, you can also subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible. Furthermore, Internet sites such as Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), Magazines.com(www.magazines.com), and even Amazon.com sell subscriptions online, as well as electronic downloadable versions of many of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savy set. And, of course, you can still subscribe the old-fashioned way, by mail.

  So I’m not only going to urge you to subscribe to one or more of these magazines now, while your money can still help to ensure their survival, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$43.90 for an annual subscription in the U.S. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$43.90 for an annual subscription in the U.S. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030—$50.99 for an annual subscription in the U.S. Interzone can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestorel.html; its subscription address is Interzone, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, $42 for a six-issue subscription, make checks payable to “TTA Press.” Realms of Fantasy’s site is at www.rofmagazine.com; its subscription address is Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703, $16.95 for an annual subscription in the U.S.

  There are lots of print fiction magazines worth supporting other than just the “professional” magazines, though, including some that are totally professional when judged by the literary standards of the product they offer. 2004 saw two promising new publications, the British Postscripts and Argosy Magazine; after going through several distribution problems and changes in editorial staff, no issue of Argosy has been seen since early in 2005, and I begin to fear that this magazine is dead (subscribe at your own risk), but Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, had another strong year in 2006, featuring good work by Jack Dann, Michael Swanwick, Matthew Hughes, John Grant, Stephen Baxter, and others. Two new publications debuted in 2005, the e-magazine Mon, which will be discussed below in the online section, and Subterranean, edited by William K. Schafer, which had a strong novella by Caitlin R. Kiernan and nice work by Jack McDevitt, Chris Roberson, Allen M. Steel, and others. [Subterranean will be phasing its print edition out in 2007, after an issue guest-edited by Ellen Datlow, and reinventing itself as an electronic magazine on the Subterranean Web site instead; issue 8 will be the last print edition, issue 7 will be the Datlow-edited issue.)

  All these publications are capable of presenting work of professional quality, and frequently do, some of it by some of the top writers in the business.

  Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications empire continues to unravel; last year, Weird Tales and the speculative poetry magazine Mythic Delirium were sold to other publishers; this year, editor Edward J. McFadden publicly and bitterly resigned as editor of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, a decision based, in his words, “on the fact that DNA Publications, Inc. has not maintained a reasonable publishing schedule in some time”—all of which would seem to leave the future existence of that magazine in doubt. Neither Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, nor Dreams of Decadence have been seen in awhile, either, except as inclusions of stories from those magazine’s inventory in DNA’s newszine Chronicle, which itself was published only sporadically this year, and parted ways with news editor Ian Randall Strock. As reports are widespread from contributors, subscribers, and even some contributing editors (such as McFadden, above) that publisher Warren Lapine has become incommunicado, not returning messages or even phone calls, I don’t think I can in good faith continue to recommend DNA magazines to the readership; I’ll continue to list the subscription addresses, but be warned that if you subscribe, you do so at your own risk.

  Weird Tales had seemed on the brink of death in 2005 as a DNA magazine, but has made a strong comeback since being sold to Wildside Press, publishing five of its scheduled six issues in 2006 and running good stuff by Tanith Lee, Brian Stableford, Greg Frost, Stephen Dedman, Richard A. Lupoff, and others. Toward the end of the year, Weird Tales announced a reorganization of its editorial staff, with John Betancourt returning to his duties as publisher, George Scithers becoming editor emeritus and continuing in an advisory position, and Darrell Schweitzer contributing a new movie-review column; the new fiction editor is Ann VanderMeer, former editor of The Silver Web. The magazine will also be getting a new logo and interior layout. Also from Wildside Press is the very promising new publication called Fantasy Magazine, edited by Sean Wallace, which managed three issues in their second year as (ostensibly) a “quarterly,” and published some nice stuff by Theodora Goss, Bruce McAllister, Aaron Schutz, Sandra McDonald, and others. The Wildside stable also contains H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, which managed one issue this year (and which seems a bit redundant with Weird Tales also in the group; they need to somehow establish sharply different identities for these titles), and the non-genre Adventure Tales, which published one issue.

  Paradox, edited by Christopher M. Cevasco, an “Alternate History” magazine that also publishes some straight historicals as well as AH stories with additional fantasy or SF elements, managed both scheduled issues this year, and featured good work by Sarah Monette, Richard Mueller, and others.

  There’s also a raft of aesthetically similar “slipstream/fabulist” fiction magazines (very small-circulation magazines referred to as the “minuscule press,” by Locus editor Charles N. Brown), where the fiction is usually of professional-level quality—often by top professionals, in fact—but where you will rarely if ever find anything even remotely resembling core science fiction (or, most of the time, even genre fantasy). The flagship of the slipstream movement, and the inspiration/model for most of the others, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, published two issues this year; Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, also published two issues, as did Flytrap, edited by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw; Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, edited by Mark Rudolph, managed one issue. If there was an issue of Say… this year, I didn’t see it. The long-running The Third Alternative, perhaps the most respected of British semiprozines, edited by Interzone editor Andy Cox, probably belongs in this grouping somewhere (although it has a somewhat different flavor from the others, skewing more toward stylish bleak horror), but since they announced that they were going to change their name to Black Static, not an issue has been seen, under either title. Still, no doubt Andy Cox has had his hands full getting Interzone firmly up on its feet again, so let’s hope that we’ll be seeing the magazine again somewhere down the line.

  Talebones, edited by Patrick and Honna Sweson (which also doesn’t quite fit in with the “minuscule press” group in flavor, being somewhat more oriented toward horror, genre fantasy, and S
F and less toward slipstream than the others), survived a brush with death this year, published three issues (one arriving late enough to be held over for next year), and continued to feature interesting work by people such as James Van Pelt, Steven Mohan, Jr., and Don D’Amassa.

  Below this level, a reliable professional level of quality becomes a bit harder to count on, but there’s still frequently good stuff to be found.

  Turning to the longer-established fiction semiprozines, the Canadian On Spec, run by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, one of the longest-running of them all, published its four scheduled quarterly issues. Another Canadian magazine, Neo-opsis, edited by Karl Johanson, managed three out of four scheduled issues in 2006. Newcomer Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, edited by Jason Sizemore, published its four scheduled issues. Long-running semiprozine Space and Time almost died, but was reprieved by a last-minute sale to a new publisher. All five issues of the Australian Andromeda Spaceways In-flight Magazine, also run by a collective with a rotating staff of editors, appeared as scheduled. The long-running Australian zine Eidolon seems to have died (although the title was kept alive by an original anthology this year, see below). The other long-running Australian magazine, Aurealis, has seemed to be tottering on the brink of oblivion for some time now, with no issue seen in awhile, but I’m glad to say that it’s been revived, with a new issue under new editor Stuart Mayne reaching me just as I was typing up the final version of this summation; I’ll hold it over for consideration for next year, and the fact that Aurealis seems to be alive and viable again is good news for the field. I saw one issue of the Irish fiction semiprozine Albedo One this year, one of Tales of the Unanticipated, one of New Genre, two of Tales of the Talisman, and two of newcomer Fictitious Force (although they arrived late enough that I’ll consider them for next year). If there were copies of Black Gate, I didn’t see them, although reportedly a new issue will be along in March 2007.