The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 1996

  IMMERSION Gregory Benford

  THE DEAD Michael Swanwick

  THE FLOWERS OF AULIT PRISON Nancy Kress

  A DRY, QUIET WAR Tony Daniel

  THIRTEEN PHANTASMS James P. Blaylock

  PRIMROSE AND THORN Bud Sparhawk

  THE MIRACLE OF IVAR AVENUE John Kessel

  THE LAST HOMOSEXUAL Paul Park

  RECORDING ANGEL Ian McDonald

  DEATH DO US PART Robert Silverberg

  THE SPADE OF REASON Jim Cowan

  THE COST TO BE WISE Maureen F. McHugh

  BICYCLE REPAIRMAN Bruce Sterling

  THE WEIGHING OF AYRE Gregory Feeley

  THE LONGER VOYAGE Michael Cassutt

  THE LAND OF NOD Mike Resnick

  RED SONJA AND LESSINGHAM IN DREAMLAND Gwyneth Jones

  THE LADY VANISHES Charles Sheffield

  CHRYSALIS Robert Reed

  THE WIND OVER THE WORLD Steven Utley

  CHANGES William Barton

  COUNTING CATS IN ZANZIBAR Gene Wolfe

  HOW WE GOT IN TOWN AND OUT AGAIN Jonathan Lethem

  DR. TILMANN’S CONSULTANT: A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE Cherry Wilder

  SCHRÖDINGER’S DOG Damien Broderick

  FOREIGN DEVILS Walter Jon Williams

  IN THE MSOB Stephen Baxter

  THE ROBOT’S TWILIGHT COMPANION Tony Daniel

  HONORABLE MENTIONS: 1996

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  For Gordon Van Gelder

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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, Sheila Williams, Tina Lee, David Pringle, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Pat Cadigan, Charles C. Ryan, Harlan Ellison, David G. Hartwell, Craig Engler, Leslie What, Torsten Scheihagen, Warren Lapine, Ed McFadden, Tom Piccirilli, Dave Truesdale, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Darrell Schweitzer, Robert Killheffer, 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] 3399198) 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: 1996

  Nineteen ninety-six was a year when some of the birds that have been hovering ominously over the genre for a number of years came home to roost. It would be premature to say that the recession/bust/slump that some pessimistic genre pundits have been predicting for more than a decade has finally arrived—science fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror are still large and varied genres, with over 1,100 “books of interest” to the three fields published in 1996, according to the newsmagazine Locus, some of which sold very well indeed. There are still many contradictory omens out there to be read (the number of science fiction books published this year actually increased for instance, from 239 to 253, although there were declines in fantasy and horror, working out to a 6 percent drop overall), with new publishing lines being launched even as some of the old ones dwindle, and it is still possible to read the 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.

  Nevertheless, SF has had better years than 1996, which saw an extremely bad year in the magazine market, and saw the sale of mass market paperbacks plummet dramatically (although some hardcovers and trade paperbacks continued to sell well), with record returns, to the point where many industry insiders were saying that mass market was no longer a viable publishing category. Domestic distribution networks, responsible for getting books and magazines to newsstands and bookstores, underwent major upheavals this year and last, with some disappearing and others merging or swallowing up smaller independent distributors, all with very significant consequences, particularly in the precarious magazine market. There were some major changes at the very top levels of publishing houses, and some big mergers, the consequences of which may take years to work themselves out. And the dream of electronic publishing remained still largely a promise for the future, although its prophets are still vocal (and there were interesting developments here and there—this anthology, for instance, features three stories that have never been published in print form before, existing before then only as phosphor dots on a screen, an indication that the electronic market is becoming a more viable and more important place to search for quality SF).

  So, the long-predicted Big Bust has not come yet (the comics and gaming industries were hit much harder last year than SF has been to date), and SF remains a big genre, but of course all of the above omens make publishers nervous. The poor sales of mass-market originals that aren’t media tie-ins are particularly worrisome, and there’s likely to be some belt-tightening and line-trimming going on next year, as publishers either react to poor sales or try to dodge the bullet. Some publishers seem to think that they can boost the reliability of performance by shifting their emphasis away from adult SF to media tie-in books of various sorts, which are considered a “safe sale,” and this may work for a while—until they glut and oversell the market with such items, and readers abruptly get tired of media tie-ins … and then the shit will really hit the fan. (Something similar seems to be happening in early 1997 with the once-booming Goosebumps Young Adult Horror empire, where sales seem to have suddenly and dramatically fallen off, probably because the ever-increasing flood of Goosebumps titles and related tie-in products oversaturated the audience.) These publishers are certainly not going to listen to me, though, so you’re likely to see media tie-in books continue to proliferate at the expense of adult SF books—swallowing monthly slots and rack space that might once have gone to core SF instead—for at least the next few years. Some publishers also seem to be flirting with the idea that fantasy sells much better than science fiction (and so you should publish nothing but fantasy); this idea has infected the British publishing world to the extent that it is now almost impossible to sell an SF book to a British publisher, even for Big Name Writers. At this year’s Worldcon, many top agents and editors were buzzing excitedly about the sales potential of fantasy, and the talk of the convention was the fact that a fantasy anthology featuring new stories set in various famous fantasy series had just sold for an enormous six-figure advance, the highest ever paid for an anthology—while the corresponding science fiction anthology, new stories set in various famous science fiction series, could not be sold at all; the publishers weren’t interested. So what’s happened to the British publishing world could happen here as well—in which case, non-media-oriented science fiction would effectively vanish, driven off the shelves by a self-fulfilling prophecy imposed on th
e publishing world by itself.

  I don’t really think that this is going to happen; this scenario is probably much too bleak. Regular adult non-media-oriented SF still makes too much money for too many different publishers—the inclination, in fact (in some places at least), seems to be to publish more science fiction. Avon, for instance, is planning an ambitious new and expanded line for 1998. And even if the worse came to the absolute worst, with the bleak scenario above coming true in every particular, that still wouldn’t mean that science fiction was dead—small presses and smaller non-corporate imprints would take up the slack and continue to publish core SF, and eventually some of those small presses would start to grow, and other publishers would notice their success and imitate it—and the cycle would start all over again. A very similar sort of thing happened with Western novels, which for about a decade were almost driven out of the trade publishing industry, but which are now making something of a comeback, with bookstores putting in shelves of Westerns once again. Historical novels went through a similar dry spell, and are now flourishing again as well.

  So would it be with science fiction, I think—but we are still a long, long way away from that scenario, and, with luck, the cycle of bust-and-eventual-resurgence will never start in the first place.

  Meanwhile, whether there are storms ahead or not, there was a fair amount of activity in the SF publishing world this year. Putnam Berkley were sold to the Penguin Publishing Group, which plans to merge the operations of the two giant companies, although management is claiming that editorial structures will remain essentially the same, with imprints and smaller publishing units (such as the Ace and Putnam SF lines) left intact. Avon, with a new editorial team under the direction of Lou Aronica now in place, announced a five-month hiatus in publishing, from September 1997 to January 1998 (although books bought under the old regime will continue to be published during this period); in 1998, they plan to launch a new SF line and imprint, dropping the old AvoNova name. Several CEOs of major publishing houses departed this year, which could have big impact down the line: Peter Mayer, longtime CEO of the Penguin Group, stepped down to run his own small publishing house, Overlook Press; Thomas McCormack, longtime CEO and editorial director of St Martin’s Press, retired; and Charlie Haywood, president and CEO of Little, Brown, resigned. Other changes at the top included Nancy Neiman-Legette being named senior vice-president of the Putnam Berkley group; Ken Fun, CEO and president of Harper San Francisco, being named senior vice-president and deputy publisher of the entire HarperCollins adult trade group, replacing Geoff Hannell; and Judith Curr joining the Ballantine Publishing Group as senior vice-president and editor-in-chief of the Group’s mass-market and hardcover publishing. John Silbersack was promoted from vice-president, editor-in-chief of HarperPrism to Publishing Director, in charge of marketing and merchandising as well as editorial. White Wolf underwent a number of upheavals, with Publisher Stewart Wieck becoming Senior Editor of their Borealis Science Fiction imprint (although he will still oversee the White Wolf publishing program as a whole) and the rest of the editorial staff still not settled enough for me to report anything accurately. And Zebra Books announced that they were dropping their horror imprint, one of the last existing genre horror lines.

  The usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs continued in full vigor this year. Laura Anne Gilman moved from Ace to Penguin/NAL, where she became executive editor of Roc Books, replacing Amy Stout, who, later in the year, became a consulting acquisitions editor at Del Rey. James Turner, longtime editor of Arkham House, was discharged, and later became an editor for Golden Gryphon Press. Pamela Weintraub replaced Keith Ferrell as editor of Omni Internet. And early in 1997, Tom Dupree left Bantam, following other former Bantam colleagues to Avon; he was replaced at Bantam by Pat Lo Brutto, who had at one time been the editor of the Doubleday SF line.

  So, what’s ahead for the science fiction field, as we hurtle toward the last few years of the century?

  Well, I’ve said this before, but, since several gloomy notes have been sounded in this summation so far (with several more yet to come), perhaps it’s worth saying again: A recession or bust in the SF publishing industry is by no means a sure thing, but, even if one does come along … well, SF has gone through boom-and-bust cycles before, ever since there was such a thing as SF as a distinct publishing category, and every such boom-and-bust cycle has left the habitual SF-reading audience larger than it was before the boom began. SF is so large a genre at this point that I find it unlikely that any recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or sales, unless most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. Even with a lot of the fat trimmed away—and there’s a lot of fat out there to be trimmed—there will still be a good deal of solid red meat left behind.

  To switch metaphors with a sickening swoop, there may be storm clouds on the horizon—but storms have been weathered before. And will be again this time, I think.

  * * *

  It was a terrible year in the magazine market, even worse than last year—one of the worst years, in fact, since the collapse of the post-war SF boom wiped out magazines by the dozen in the fifties.

  The circulations of all the professional SF magazines were down this year, with the digest-sized magazines particularly hard-hit, several of them registering the lowest circulation figures in their histories. Last year saw skyrocketing paper and production costs, and a dramatic industry-wide drop-off in “stamp” subscription sales from places like Publisher’s Clearing House, which, responding to an overall slump in sales, “tightened their belts” by dropping many SF magazines and other small “marginal” magazines from their stamp subscription mailings altogether; this, plus 1994’s massive postal rate hike, killed some magazines outright in 1995, or forced them to give up print publication for “online electronic magazine” formats (another print SF magazine, Tomorrow, made that decision this year, see below), and also caused big cuts in the number of pages and the frequency of publication for many of the digests. In 1996, the chaos in the domestic distribution networks, with bigger distributors swallowing up many of the small independent distributors, further hurt the ailing SF magazine scene—the few distributors left often charging fees for carrying titles or asking for greatly increased “discounts” higher than many SF magazines can easily afford to pay, and with some distributors setting “subscription caps,” refusing to even handle magazines with a circulation below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than most genre magazines can boast. Logistical problems generated by the takeover of smaller firms by larger ones also resulted in lots of inefficiency—a distributor who had previously serviced outlets in a hundred-mile area might now be expected to cover a territory two or three times as large—so that sometimes, even when a distributor was theoretically willing to handle them, magazines just didn’t physically even get to those newsstands that wanted to display them, because of breakdowns in the delivery systems. And many newsstands themselves became pickier, sometimes refusing to display magazines that fell below a certain circulation figure—again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines.

  The net result of all this was that it was harder to find genre magazines, particularly the digest-sized titles, on the newsstands in 1996. Some outlets that had carried such magazines for years dropped them altogether, either by choice or because the distributor had refused to carry them, or because the genre magazines just got lost in the welter of confusion over which distributor was responsible for serving which newsstand with what.

  There were a few bright spots this year—the latest postal hike was not as bad as had been anticipated, and the price of paper even went down; Aboriginal SF, which had been reported to be dead in 1995, returned from the grave; and there was increased activity in the area of online electronic publication—but you had to look long and hard to find them.

  It was a bad year for the three major digest magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fanta
sy & Science Fiction, which all continued to lose circulation to one degree or another.

  Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction both dropped to their lowest circulation figures ever. Analog lost about 9,000 in subscriptions and another 1,900 in newsstand sales, for a 14.8 percent loss in overall circulation. Asimov’s Science Fiction lost over 10,000 in subscriptions and about another 2,300 in newsstand sales, for a 22.2 percent loss in overall circulation. Both magazines lost a signature (sixteen pages) per issue and dropped one of their double issues this year, going to an eleven-issue-per-year schedule, one of those issues being a double issue on sale for two months—the same schedule that F&SF has been on for a few years now. Analog and Asimov’s also changed owners in 1996, being bought—along with the rest of the Dell Magazines chain, including mystery magazines, crossword-puzzle magazines, and horoscope magazines—from Bantam Doubleday Dell by Penny Press, a family-owned Connecticut-based publisher. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 5,300 in subscriptions and about another 600 in newsstand sales, for an 11.6 percent loss in overall circulation. F&SF also lost its longtime distributor in 1996, and by year’s end several readers were reporting that it seemed to be missing from a number of newsstands that had previously carried it for years, a worrisome development. Longtime editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch stepped down to pursue a full-time writing career, and was replaced at the beginning of 1997 by Gordon Van Gelder.

  It’s hard to put too hopeful a spin on these declining circulation figures, although it should probably also be said that things are perhaps a little less bleak than they would at first appear. Most of the digest magazines have always been subscription-driven anyway; where declining newsstand sales hurt the digests the most is by cutting them off from attracting new readers who will eventually, with luck, become subscribers. Eventually, if cut off from newsstand distribution altogether, the subscription list would dwindle through natural attrition to the point where the magazine was no longer viable, although this might take years. So, with decreasing availability on the newsstands, one of the biggest problems facing the digests is to find ways to attract new subscribers—perhaps an increased presence on the Internet will be a way around the newsstand crunch, and most of the digests are looking into this. In spite of declining circulation, most of the digests are probably still profitable, because digest magazines are so cheap to produce in the first place, one of the traditional advantages that has always helped the digest magazines to survive. The publishers of Analog and Asimov’s were also busy adjusting their “draw” this year—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, so that the “efficiency” of both magazines actually increased, increasing their profitability—and probably similar efforts are underway at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well.