The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth 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

  Introduction: Summation: 1988

  Walter Jon Williams

  SURFACING

  James Patrick Kelly

  HOME FRONT

  Brian Stableford

  THE MAN WHO LOVED THE VAMPIRE LADY

  Steven Gould

  PEACHES FOR MAD MOLLY

  Harry Turtledove

  THE LAST ARTICLE

  Eileen Gunn

  STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

  Nancy Kress

  IN MEMORIAM

  Mike Resnick

  KIRINYAGA

  Bruce McAllister

  THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS

  Connie Willis

  THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOES

  Lewis Shiner

  LOVE IN VAIN

  Judith Moffett

  THE HOB

  Bruce Sterling

  OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL

  Robert Silverberg

  HOUSE OF BONES

  George Alec Effinger

  SCHRÖDINGER’S KITTEN

  Howard Waldrop

  DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?

  Brian Stableford

  THE GROWTH OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  GLACIER

  James Lawson

  SANCTUARY

  Michael Swanwick

  THE DRAGON LINE

  John Kessel

  MRS. SHUMMEL EXITS A WINNER

  Stephen Kraus

  EMISSARY

  Pat Cadigan

  IT WAS THE HEAT

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  SKIN DEEP

  D. Alexander Smith

  DYING IN HULL

  Kathe Koja

  DISTANCES

  Kim Newman

  FAMOUS MONSTERS

  Lucius Shepard

  THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER

  Honorable Mentions

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  TO MY IN-LAWS

  Norton and Sylvia Casper

  Anne Berger

  Judith Kohn

  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; Virginia Kidd, Ellen Datlow, Sheila Williams, Tina Lee, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Arnie Fenner, Janet and Ricky Kagan, Shawna McCarthy, Lou Aronica, Edward Ferman, Anne Jordan, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Pat LoBrutto, Patrick Delahunt, Patrick L. Price, Charles C. Ryan, John Betancourt, Tim Sullivan, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael G. Adkisson, Diane Mapes, Nicholas Robinson, David S. Garnett, Mike Resnick, David G. Hartwell, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Lucius Shepard, David Pringle, Mark Van Name, and special thanks to my own editors, Gordon Van Gelder and Stuart Moore.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $28.00 for a one-year subscription, twelve issues) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Algol Press, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 10202–0056, $27.00 for one year, twelve issues) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  INTRODUCTION

  Summation: 1988

  This was a year of contradictory signals and ambiguous omens for science fiction. On one hand, it was yet another record year, commercially, for the field. The familiar litany of Big Name SF writers—Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Stephen R. Donaldson, and so forth—dominated nationwide bestseller lists again. Some 177 different publishers produced SF or fantasy in 1988, according to the newsmagazine Locus, turning out a record total of 1,936 books (1,186 of them new titles!), up 16 percent from last year. New book lines continued to appear, including a line of Tor Doubles (short novels published back-to-back, in the style of the old Ace Doubles line); a line of softcover reprints of the Isaac Asimov Presents hardcover novels from Worldwide Books; a line packaged by Byron Preiss Productions for Lynx Books, to be called Omeiga Books, edited by Dave Harris; and a new line of up to a dozen titles per year, coming up later in 1989 from Bantam Spectra.

  On the other hand, an uneasy awareness that a recession of some size—whether major or minor—is almost inevitably on the way seems to have spread over the American publishing industry, and many insiders seem to be emotionally battening down the hatches and waiting to ride out the coming storm, if they can. This uneasiness may be responsible for the buying slowdowns that are rumored to have affected several major publishers. There were plenty of ill omens to be found, if you looked for them. Postal rate increases, for instance, drove up mail-order book prices and magazine subscription rates throughout the field last year. Pageant Books—the mass-market line produced by Crown Books in partnership with the giant bookstore chain Waldenbooks—died, as did several genre magazines. Tor announced cuts of 25 percent of its mass-market lists, and St. Martin’s Press announced that it will drop its entire mass-market SF program. Waldenbooks announced that it will reduce the number of titles it buys, and increase the nonbook display space in its stores at the expense of book space. Sharecropping, the practice of hiring lesser-known authors to create new novels set “in the world of” some famous SF novel (for instance, a novel set in the world of Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle) continues to increase; the newest twist on sharecropping is “franchising,” hiring a well-known SF writer to write a sequel to some work by another well-known SF writer, or even to expand some shorter work of a well-known writer out to novel size. For instance, Gregory Benford has been asked to write a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s short novel Against the Fall of Night, and Robert Silverberg has been hired to expand three short pieces by Isaac Asimov—“Nightfall,” “The Martian Way,” “The Ugly Little Boy”—into full-length novels. “Sharecropper” and “Franchise” novels join a flood of similar items in recent years—Star Trek novels, choose-your-own-adventure books, shared-world anthologies, TV and movie novelizations, “Robotech” books, “Dungeons and Dragons” scenarios and books based on other games, “Thieves’ World” novels, and so on—that are filling an ever-increasing number of slots in publisher’s schedules and eating up rack display space in bookstores, making it more and more difficult for unknown young writers to place individual novels of merit. Taken to an extreme, which is just where many publishers (who would love to be able to publish only surefire “brand name” bestsellers) would like to take it, this could mean that it would become extremely difficult for a young writer to get into print at all, unless he hires out to write books in some more famous writer’s universe … which could spell the creative death of the field.

  Quite probably—I hope—this scenario is far too bleak. There are still publishing houses concentrating on producing individual novels of merit, new writers are still finding it possible to get into print without resorting to sharecropping … and there are some tentative early indications that the public may not be responding to sharecropper books anywhere near as enthusiastically as p
ublishers had hoped that they would. As for recession and retrenchment—the “bust” phase of the periodic boom-and-bust cycle that has repeated ever since there was such a thing as SF as a distinct publishing category—undoubtedly it will come. But as it has been pointed out before, every boom-and-bust cycle has left the habitual SF-reading audience larger than it was before the boom began. Some of the gains are always held. Retrenchment may come, but even so, the “retrenched” genre will probably still be larger than the genre as a whole was prior to the start of the most recent boom. It’s hard to realistically predict any “bust” cycle, for example, that would reduce SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or advances or sales, unless most of the publishing industry collapses with it. History also shows us that even in the midst of the blackest recessions, some writers will survive … and may even prosper. And finally, we should remember that a cycle implies that things will eventually turn up again as well. At the beginning of the’80s, for instance, the British SF publishing world was a dreary ruin—and now SF publishing in Britain is booming, so much so that British publishers are now frequently able to pay considerably more for the British rights to American books than the American publishers were able to pay in the first place!

  So keep your fingers crossed. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

  * * *

  It was a year of changes in the SF magazine market, with old magazines dying, and new magazines struggling to establish themselves. Just as I was preparing a clean copy of this summation, I received the worst news of the year in the magazine market: that The Twilight Zone Magazine had died. This is saddening news—the magazine had improved greatly in quality under the creative editorship of Tappan King during the last couple of years, and I had real hopes for its survival. The death of TZ, coupled with the demise last year of the digest-sized horror magazine Night Cry, leaves a real hole in the market for horror fiction at shorter lengths—in fact, there are no longer any professional horror magazines left on the market, so that a horror writer with a short story to sell has no recourse but to sell it to one of the slew of horror semiprozines, or to the occasional original horror anthology. With horror booming in the novel market, it’s hard to believe that this vacuum will remain unfilled—the question is, who will fill it? My own money would be on the new semiprozine Weird Tales, simply because it is edited by canny magazine veteran George Scithers, but other possible candidates include American Fantasy and Midnight Graffiti, two slick, large-format semiprozines, and Fear, a new slick British semiprozine. It’ll be interesting to see which, if any, of these magazines manage to take over this particular ecological niche. At Amazing, editor Patrick L. Price resigned as a full-time TSR employee, but will continue to edit the magazine “on a free-lance basis”; at year’s end there were some rumors that Price had left the magazine entirely, but we were unable to confirm or deny those by presstime. Amazing’s overall circulation remains dangerously low, and many insiders have speculated that it may be next major magazine to die—which would be a shame, since the quality of the magazine has increased dramatically under Patrick Price, and Amazing is now publishing better stuff than it has in years. Elsewhere, the British magazine Interzone and Aboriginal SF both went bi-monthly, and both raised their circulations above the 10,000-copy per issue mark, which, according to the Hugo eligibility rules, raises them into the professional magazine category. Interzone is partially supported by a British Arts Council grant, but Aboriginal SF has already defied the experts by surviving as long as it has—founding a new magazine (particularly a large-format slick magazine, which costs far more to produce than a digest-sized magazine) is an extremely chancy enterprise, and the field is littered with the bleaching bones of magazines that failed after a few issues or died stillborn, most of them killed by undercapitalization. Aboriginal SF is making many of the right moves—an aggressive advertising policy, direct mail solicitation, getting chain distribution to major bookstores like Dalton’s and Waldenbooks—but they are also dangerously undercapitalized, and have yet to get through their first major cash-flow crunch; a similar crunch helped to kill off Charles C. Ryan’s last SF magazine Galileo, in the ’70s. So we’ll see. I wish both of them luck—the field can use all the short-fiction markets it can get.

  As most of you probably know, I, Gardner Dozois, am also editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And that, as I’ve mentioned before, does pose a problem for me in compiling this summation, particularly the magazine-by-magazine review that follows. As IAsfm editor, I could be said to have a vested interest in the magazine’s success, so that anything negative I said about another SF magazine (particularly another digest-sized magazine, my direct competition), could be perceived as an attempt to make my own magazine look good by tearing down the competition. Aware of this constraint, I’ve decided that nobody can complain if I only say positive things about the competition … and so, once again, I’ve limited myself to a listing of some of the worthwhile authors published by each.

  Omni published first-rate fiction this year by George Alec Effinger, Bruce McAllister, Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Robert Silverberg, Tom Maddox, Sharon N. Farber, and others. Omni’s fiction editor is Ellen Datlow.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction featured excellent fiction by Brian Stableford, Harry Turtledove, Pat Cadigan, Lucius Shepard, Mike Resnick, Bruce Sterling, and others. F & SF’s long-time editor is Edward Ferman.

  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine featured critically acclaimed work by Walter Jon Williams, James Patrick Kelly, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, Judith Moffett, John Kessel, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Howard Waldrop, Neal Barrett, Jr., and others. IAsfm’s editor is Gardner Dozois.

  Analog featured good work by Michael Flynn, Charles Sheffield, James White, Steven Gould, Elizabeth Moon, W. T. Quick, Stephen Kraus, Ben Bova, and others. Analog’s long-time editor is Stanley Schmidt.

  Amazing featured good work by James Lawson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, David E. Cortesi, John Barnes, Phillip C. Jennings, Susan Palwick, and others. Amazing’s editor is Patrick L. Price.

  The Twilight Zone Magazine featured good work by Susan Casper, Jane Yolen, Chet Williamson, B. W. Clough, Stanley Schmidt, James Killus, Elizabeth Mitchell, Robert Frazier, and others. TZ’s editor was Tappan King.

  Interzone featured good work by Brian Stableford, Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Phillip Mann, David Langford, Christopher Burns, and others. Interzone’s editors are Simon Ounsley and David Pringle.

  Aboriginal Science Fiction featured interesting work by Jamil Nasir, Howard V. Hendrix, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Elaine Radford, Phillip C. Jennings, and others. The editor of Aboriginal Science Fiction is Charles C. Ryan.

  Short SF continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries. Playboy in particular continues to run a good deal of SF, under fiction editor Alice K. Turner.

  (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, CT, 06753, annual subscription—twelve issues—$21.00 in U.S.; Amazing, TSR, Inc., P.O. Box 72089, Chicago, IL, 60678, annual subscription $9.00 for six issues; Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Davis Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 1933, Marion, OH 43305, $25.97 for thirteen issues; Interzone, 124 Osborne Road, Brighton, BN1 6LU, England, $26.00 for an airmail one-year—six issues—subscription; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888–0849, $14.00 for six issues, $22.00 for twelve.)

  Among the fiction semiprozines, with Interzone and Aboriginal SF having escaped up into the professional category, the most prominent survivor is probably Weird Tales, edited by George H. Scithers. Weird Tales is a thoroughly professional magazine, lacking only in circulation to qualify it for the professional category; maybe it’ll make it next year, if it survives. There was no issue of Whispers this year, although it has been your most reliable value among the horror semiprozines for many years. There is a
lso a slew of new horror semiprozines, too many to list here, although the most visible of them were probably Midnight Graffiti, American Fantasy, The Horror Show, and Grue. New Pathways, edited by Michael G. Adkisson, seems to still be healthy; it’s a quirky, intriguing, and frequently deliberately outrageous magazine, well worth a look. The promising new fiction semiprozine Argos, edited by Diane Mapes, died this year, unfortunately, another victim of undercapitalization. The British Fantasy Tales died as a semiprozine, but was reborn as a hardcover anthology series. As ever, Locus and SF Chronicle remain your best bet among the semiprozines if you are looking for news and/or overview of the genre. Thrust is the longest-running of those semiprozines that concentrate primarily on literary criticism. Two other more recent criticalzines, Steve Brown and Dan Steffan’s Science Fiction Eye and Orson Scott Card’s Short Form, are interesting, but both magazines had trouble sticking to their announced publishing schedules this year—Short Form was particularly unreliable, and some people have wondered if the next issue ever is going to appear at all. A new contender in this category is The New York Review Of Science Fiction, an interesting and pleasantly eccentric journal that, so far at least, has been fairly good at keeping to schedule.

  (Subscription addresses: Locus, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O.Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $28.00 for a one-year subscription, twelve issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, Algol Press, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 10202–0056, $27.00 for one year, twelve issues; Thrust, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, $8.00 for four issues; Science Fiction Eye, Box 43244, Washington, DC 20010–9244, $10.00 for one year; Short Form, 546 Lindley Road, Greensboro, NC 27410; Weird Tales, Terminus Publishing Company, Box 13418, Philadelphia, PA 19101–3418, $18.00 for six issues; New Pathways, MGA Services, P.O. Box 863994, Plano, TX 75086–3994, $10.00 for one year—four issues—subscription, $18.00 for a two-year subscription; Whispers, 70 Highland Ave., Binghamton, NY 13905, two double issues $13.95; Fantasy Tales, Stephen Jones, 130 Parkview, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 6JU, England, Great Britain, $11.00 for three issues; The Horror Show, Phantasm Press, 1488 Misty Springs Lane, Oak Run, CA 96069, $14.00 per year; Grue Magazine, Hells Kitchen Productions, Box 370, Times Square Sta., New York, NY 10108, $11.00 for three issues; American Fantasy, P.O. Box 41714, Chicago, IL 60641, $16.00 a year; The New York Review Of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $24.00 per year; Midnight Graffiti, 13101 Sudan Rd., Poway, CA 92604, one year for $24.00.)