The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Read online

  THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION:

  FIFTEENTH ANNUAL COLLECTION

  EDITED BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  In memory of

  my mother

  Dorothy G. Dozois

  and my father

  Raymond G. Dozois

  Rest in Peace

  THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: FIFTEENTH ANNUAL

  COLLECTION. Copyright 0 1998 by Gardner Dozois. All

  rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

  matter whatsoever without written permission except in

  the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or

  reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175

  Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  ISBN 0-312-18779-3

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Summation: 1997

  Beauty in the Night … Robert Silverberg

  Second Skin … Paul J. McAuley

  Steamship Soldier on the Information Front … Nancy Kress

  Reasons to be Cheerful … Greg Egan

  Moon Six … Stephen Baxter

  We Will Drink a Fish Together. . . … Bill Johnson

  Escape Route … Peter F. Hamilton

  Itsy Bitsy Spider … James Patrick Kelly

  A Spy in Europa … Alastair Reynolds

  The Undiscovered … William Sanders

  Echoes … Alan Brennert

  Getting To Know You … David Marusek

  Balinese Dancer … Gwyneth Jones

  Marrow … Robert Reed

  Heart of Whitenesse … Howard Waldrop

  The Wisdom of Old Earth … Michael Swanwick

  The Pipes of Pan … Brian Stableford

  Crossing Chao Meng Fu … G. David Nordley

  Yeyuka … Greg Egan

  Frost Painting … Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Lethe … Walter Jon Williams

  Winter Fire … Geoffrey A. Landis

  Nevermore … Ian R. MacLeod

  Open Veins … Simon Ings

  After Kerry … Ian McDonald

  The Masque of Agamemnon … Sean Williams & Simon Brown

  Gulliver at Home … John Kessel

  A Cold, Dry Cradle … Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malartrez

  Acknowledgements

  The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: first and foremost, Susan Casper, for doing much of the thankless scut work involved in producing this anthology; Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Sheila Williams, Jared Goldman, David Pringle, Jonathan Strahan, Charles C. Ryan, Nancy Kress, David G. Hartwell, Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, Warren Lapine, Ed McFadden, Tom Piccirilli, Dave Truesdale, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Liz Holliday, Darrell Schweitzer, Corin See, and special thanks to my own editor, Gordon Van Gelder.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $43.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders [510] 339-9198) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $35.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $42.00 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  Summation: 1997

  Doomsayers continued to predict the imminent demise of science fiction throughout 1997, some of them even seeming to look forward to it with gloomy, headshaking, I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn't-listen-to-me relish; but, although there were cutbacks-some of them serious ones-it seems to me that the actual numbers and the actual real-world situation do not justify these sorts of gloomy predications. To modify the words of Mark Twain, the Death of Science Fiction has been greatly exaggerated.

  The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for more than a decade now in fact did not happen in 1997. In spite of cutbacks and even some failing or faltering imprints (and new imprints, some of them quite major, were being added even as old ones disappeared), science fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror remain large and various genres, with almost a thousand "books of interest" to the three fields published in 1997, according to the newsmagazine Locus, and science fiction and fantasy books were still making a lot of money for a lot of different publishers (although the market is changing and evolving, with mass-market titles declining and trade paperback titles on the rise). Artistically and creatively, the field has never been in better shape, with an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors producing an amazing spectrum of first-rate work, ranging all the way from the hardest of hard science fiction through wild baroque Space Opera and sociological near-future speculation to fantasy of a dozen different sorts, with uncountable hybrids of all those sorts of stories (and with other genres as well, including the historical novel, the mystery, and even the Western novel!) filling in the interstices. In terms of there being first-class work of many different sorts available to be read, this is the Golden Age, nor are we out of it!

  As usual, there were many contradictory omens out there to be read, and it is entirely possible to read the very same signs and make either pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the future, depending on what evidence you look at and what weight you arbitrarily decide to give it.

  There were certainly plenty of Bad Omens around to look at. Original books declined by nearly 100 titles in 1997 compared to 1996, which, in turn, had had 130 fewer original books than 1995, a drop of over 17 percent in two years; the magazine market was still precarious; and mass-market continued to shrink. Harper Collins cancelled 106 books, about 7 percent of the 1,600 trade books they published last year; TSR Inc. fell deeply in debt and was sold to Wizards of the Coast Inc.; Wired Books, the publishing arm of Wired magazine, was reported to have lost $35 million dollars, scuttling their plans to launch an imprint of SF titles (or at least putting it on hold); and there were cutbacks elsewhere as well. You could read these omens and draw quite a gloomy picture of the future, and many commentators did just that.

  On the other hand, while mass-market continued to shrink, trade paperbacks and hardcovers were growing more frequent, and while some companies were struggling financially and/or contracting, Avon, under the direction of Lou Aronica, is launching an ambitious new genre line called Eos (replacing the old Avonova imprint), Harperprism is increasing the number of titles it produces, and Simon & Schuster UK is launching another ambitious new SF line, Earthlight, under the editorship of John Jerrold. Jim Turner was dismissed from his long-held job at Arkham House last year, but bounced back by launching a new small-press imprint of his own, Golden Gryphon Press, and Stephe Pagel also launched a new small-press imprint, Meisha Merlin Publishing. You can draw a different set of conclusions from these facts, and forecast a quite different sort of future.

  Then there are things that can be viewed as either positive or negative, depending on which spin you put on it. Random House UK sold its SF/fantasy imprint, Legend, to Little, Brown UK, publisher of the Orbit SF line; Legend will be absorbed into Orbit, under the editorial direction of Tim Holman, with Cohn Murray staying on as editorial consultant and Lisa Rogers joining the editorial team. The downbeat take on this is that there's now one genre line where there once were two, but since the Legend backlist will be reissued as Orbit books, it's quite possible that the end result of
this will be that more genre titles will eventually see print than they did before. Similarly, although TSR Inc. died as an independent entity, the absorption of its output into Wizards of the Coast Inc. may eventually result in more overall titles being published in that area as well. And you'll notice that even really severe cutbacks, on an almost unprecedented level, still leaves Harper Collins a very large company even after the cuts (and most of those cuts weren't SF titles anyway).

  Then there were other developments whose ultimate ramifications are impossible as yet to predict at all, one way or the other.

  We got a break from the usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs in 1997, a year in which there were few if any significant changes, as far as which editor was working where. Once again, however, there were some major changes at the very top levels of publishing houses, the consequences of which-which could prove to be either positive or negative-may take years to work themselves out. Elaine Koster left Penguin Putnam, where she was president and publisher of Dutton, Plume, and Signet, to become a literary agent. Clare Ferraro, former senior VP and publisher of Ballantine, took over as president of Dutton and Plume, but not Signet. David Shanks, the president of Putnam and Berkley, took on the additional job of president of Signet. Judith M. Curr, former senior VP and editor-in chief, will become publisher at Signet. Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House, resigned to become editorial director and vice-chairman of Mort Zuckerman's Publication Group. He was replaced by Ann Godoff, former executive VP, who also retained her former title of editor-in chief of Randon House. Random House executive VP Jane Friedman became president and CEO of Harper collins, replacing Anthea Disney, who became chairman of Rupert Murdoch's News America. And Harper collins (UK) deputy managing director Malcolm Edwards moved to Orion to become managing director and publisher.

  So I'm not willing to read memorial services over the grave of the genre just yet. Science fiction has plenty of problems, sure, from the decline of the midlist (which has driven many authors into writing media novels in order to survive) to the general unavailability of backlist titles as opposed to the way it was in the Old Days, from the way new authors can find their careers deadlocked by the refusal of chain-store buyers to order books from anyone whose first few titles didn't do geometrically increasing business (a system that, if it had been in place back then, would have insured that you'd never have heard of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, all of whom built a following slowly over a number of years) to the alarming tendency of some publishers to think that they can assure "sure sales" by publishing nothing but media tie-in novels (apparently realizing that just publishing media novels is not a sure enough sure-thing, some publishers have now progressed to publishing media tie-in novels by media celebrities.) What's next? How about media tie-in novels by famous serial killers? I can see it now: Star Trek Bloodbath, by Charles Manson-but science fiction also has a lot of vitality and staying power, and, for all its problems, it's far from down for the count yet.

  As I've said here before, even if a deeper recession is ahead (and I'm not at all sure that it is), I find it unlikely that any recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or sales, unless it's a recession so big that most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. And as Gordon Van Gelder recently said, in an editorial in The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, commenting on a critic's lament that there's nothing but crap to be found on the shelves in the SF sections of bookstores: "Back in 1960, he wouldn't have been so distressed by the SF section of the story because it didn't exist back then. Remember please that SF specialty shops like A Change of Hobbit in L.A. and The SF Shop in New York were founded in the 1970s because SF could be so hard to find ... Personally, I think there's more good SF getting published nowadays than most people have time to read, there are plenty of interesting new writers coming into the field, and lots of the field's veterans are producing top-flight work. So what's this talk about SF dying?" I also wholeheartedly agree with Warren Lapine, who, in an editorial in the Spring 1998 issue of Absolute Magnitude, said: "It's time that everyone in Science Fiction got off their collective asses and stopped whining about the future. Are you worried about magazines? Then subscribe to a couple of them. Are you worried about books? Then buy a few of them." I was in an on-line real-time conference a couple of weeks ago, talking-typing?-to a woman who said that she was extremely worried that all of the science fiction magazines were going to die, and who then went on to add that she goes down to Borders bookstore every month, faithfully reads all the science fiction magazines while having coffee and croissants, and then puts them all back on the shelf and leaves the store! And I thought to myself in amazement, Lady, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. Next time, skip the croissants, take out your wallet, and actually buy the goddamned magazines before you read them! Similarly, don't wait for that novel you've been wanting to read to hit the used-book store, buy it now, while the royalties will not only do the author some good, but will actually help to keep the entire mechanism of the science fiction publishing industry in operation.

  Of course, none of this may be enough. Gordon and Warren and I may all be whistling past the graveyard. Only time will tell.

  But my own prediction is that science fiction as a viable genre will survive at least well into the next century-and perhaps for considerably longer than that.

  It was another bad year in the magazine market, although some of the turbulence caused by the recent chaos in the domestic distribution network-when bigger distributors abruptly swallowed up the small independent distributors-has quieted a bit, with things settling down (for the moment, at least) to somewhere closer to a rest state. The print magazines that survived the storm are working on adopting various bailing strategies to deal with the water they shipped (adjusting their "draw," for instance-sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine's efficiency, and thereby lowering costs, and so increasing profitability), and nervously eyeing the new storm clouds-in the form of new hikes in paper costs coming up next year.

  To move from the world of overheated metaphor to the world of cold figures, all the science fiction magazines suffered further drops in their circulation figures in 1997. About the only cheerful thing that can be said about this fact is that it was not as precipitous a drop as had been registered the year before, when the distribution network problems really began to bite deep, and that a few of the magazines are actually beginning to creep up again, although minusculely, in newsstand sales. Still, Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction 6 Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy 6, Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age all registered the lowest circulation figures in their respective histories. Even the fantasy magazine Realms of Fantasy, the only magazine to show a gain in circulation in 1996, was down some, although only by a measly 0.5 percent. Asimov's lost about 3,700 in subscriptions but gained about 360 in newsstand sales, for a 7.4-percent loss in overall circulation. Analog lost about 6,230 in subscriptions and another 38 in newsstand sales, for a 10.5-percent loss in overall circulation. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 6,730 in subscriptions but gained about 800 newsstand sales, for a 13.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,590 in subscriptions and about another 2,220 in newsstand sales, for a 14.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy lost about 151 in subscriptions and about another 100 in newsstand sales, for a barely perceptible 0.5-percent loss in overall circulation-basically, they're holding steady.

  This is probably not as dire as it looks. For instance, one of the traditional advantages that has always helped the digest magazines to survive is that they're so cheap to produce in the first place that you don't have to sell very many of them to make a profit. I'm willing to bet that most of these magazines are still profitable, in spite of declining circulation.

/>   Still, it's hard to deny that things are dicier these days than they were ten years ago, especially in the area of newsstand sales. There are so few distributors left now that it's a buyer's market, and the distributors know that very well. The few surviving distributors often charge much-higher fees for carrying titles or ask for greatly increased "discounts," both higher than many SF magazines can easily afford to pay; some distributors also set "subscription caps," refusing to even handle magazines with a circulation below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. Many newsstand managers have also become pickier, sometimes refusing to display magazines that fall below a certain circulation figure-again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines. The result of all this is that it's harder to find genre magazines on newsstands, with some carrying a lot fewer copies of each title than before, and many newsstands not carrying them at all.

  This is not as serious as it looks either, in the short-term, anyway. Most SF magazines are subscription-driven, and always have been, with newsstand sales a considerably lower percentage of overall sales than subscription sales, so they could get by without newsstand sales if they had to-for a while. Declining newsstand sales hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers, casual newsstand browsers who might pick up the magazine and read it on a whim, but who, with luck, might like what they see enough to eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new subscribers, a magazine's circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a percentage of the old subscribers, until eventually the magazine becomes inviable. So one of the biggest problems facing magazines these days is to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the newsstand. One way to do this may be with a greatly increased presence on the Internet, which, if things go well, might enable the magazines to get around the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. I expect that this will become an increasingly important outlet in days to come and may be what saves the magazines in the long term-if anything can.