The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Summation: 1992
GRIFFIN’S EGG Michael Swanwick
EVEN THE QUEEN Connie Willis
THE ROUND-EYED BARBARIANS L. Sprague de Camp
DUST Greg Egan
TWO GUYS FROM THE FUTURE Terry Bisson
THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED Nancy Kress
THE COMING OF VERTUMNUS Ian Watson
A LONG NIGHT’S VIGIL AT THE TEMPLE Robert Silverberg
THE HAMMER OF GOD Arthur C. Clarke
GROWNUPS Ian R. MacLeod
GRAVES Joe Haldeman
THE GLOWING CLOUD Steven Utley
GRAVITY’S ANGEL Tom Maddox
PROTECTION Maureen F. McHugh
THE LAST CARDINAL BIRD IN TENNESSEE Neal Barrett, Jr.
BIRTH DAY Robert Reed
NAMING NAMES Pat Cadigan
THE ELVIS NATIONAL THEATER OF OKINAWA Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger
THE TERRITORY Bradley Denton
THE BEST AND THE REST OF JAMES JOYCE Ian McDonald
NAMING THE FLOWERS Kate Wilhelm
SNODGRASS Ian R. MacLeod
BY THE MIRROR OF MY YOUTH Kathe Koja
OUTNUMBERING THE DEAD Frederik Pohl
Honorable Mentions: 1992
Also by Gardner Dozois
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
For my Clarion West Classes,
the Class of 1988
and the Class of 1992.
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, Janet Kagan, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Scott L. Towner, Tina Lee, David Pringle, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Pat Cadigan, David S. Garnett, Charles C. Ryan, Chuq von Rospach, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Lou Aronica, Betsy Mitchell, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, David G. Hartwell, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Jim Frenkel, Greg Egan, Steve Pasechnick, Susan Ann Protter, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Chris Reed, Dirk Strasser, Michael Sumbera, Glen Cox, Darrell Schweitzer, Don Keller, Robert Killheffer, Greg Cox, 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, $50.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via first class mail, $38.00 second class) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $30.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $36.00 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout.
SUMMATION:
1992
This was a low-key, low-energy year, for the most part, a recession year with a siege mentality firmly in place, gray, grim, unsmiling—and yet, it seems to me that many people were a little more gloomy and pessimistic than was actually justified by the year’s events.
Yes, things of ill omen happened in 1992—there were major corporate shakeups and cutbacks at Bantam and at Pulphouse Publishing, for instance, with unadmitted buying slowdowns or freezes clearly in place at other publishing houses, and there may be worse to come. Some book editors were fired, or participated in the usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs, with former Roc editor John Silbersack moving to Warner, for instance, former Warner editor Brian Thomsen moving to TSR, former Bantam editor Amy Stout going to Roc, and former Ace editor Peter Heck going from Ace back to editing the Waldenbooks SF newsletter. For the first time in several years, the overall number of books in the related SF/fantasy/horror genres did not increase, and even began to creep back a little. Money was generally tight this year, and many mid-list writers were forced to take part-time or full-time jobs—if they could find them—in order to make ends meet. Fewer writers and editors went to conventions and professional gatherings, and when they did go, they were more likely to spend their time glumly sitting around discussing how depressing everything was.
And yet, certainly things could have been a lot worse. The American SF publishing industry has yet to be hit with the kind of really major and crippling collapse that afflicted British SF publishing in 1991 (although, of course, it could always be still to come), and even the British SF publishing industry is showing a few tentative signs of at least partial recovery. It certainly wouldn’t be true to say that the SF publishing world in general had gone bust this year—the decline in the number of titles published overall is really quite minor so far, in the United States, at least, and although most of the major publishers did cut their lines back in 1992, many of the small-press publishers and smaller publishing houses were expanding at the same time, so that the overall decline in titles is almost negligible. Some genre books continued to sell quite well, and there were many genre titles on nationwide bestseller lists throughout 1992 (although, increasingly, many of these are TV/movie–related books, or gaming books, which is worrisome). The magazine market suffered (the imminent death and vanishing of the science fiction magazine was predicted again, as it has been predicted nearly every year since I first entered the SF world professionally, in the late sixties), the year’s anthologies were rather weak, and overall it wasn’t a terribly good year for short fiction in general (although so many stories now appear in the field annually, hundreds and hundreds of them, that even in a weak year there’s still more than enough good stories among the chaff to fill a volume of this size easily), or for genre movies either (although it was a fairly strong year for novels).
Still, as someone who’s been assembling Best of the Year anthologies, and Summations, since 1976, I can assure you that science fiction has seen a number of considerably worse years. Nevertheless, industry people did seem to be gloomier than usual this year, perhaps gloomier than they ought to have been realistically. Perhaps it was the fact that several of the most beloved figures in the field died this year, including Isaac Asimov and Fritz Leiber; perhaps it was the deepening of the nationwide recession generally, throughout 1992, or the Los Angeles riots, or the Presidential elections, about which many people were depressed right up until they heated up at last, almost to November. Whatever it was, several commentators were predicting the imminent death of the science fiction genre this year, in articles in semiprozines and fanzines, in letters and in postings on the electronic computer networks, and in private conversations. Even David G. Hartwell, usually a fairly optimistic sort, wrote a gloomy cautionary editorial for The New York Review of Science Fiction, warning that because of the increasing dilution of the form, “Science fiction could end this decade. Maybe it will. Maybe it (already) has.” The coming death of science fiction was also predicted here and there by Charles Platt, Barry Malzberg, and others.
A bit of historical perspective may be in order here, since, as with so much else that happens in the SF publishing world, we have been through all this before.
By the beginning of the 1960s, for instance, after the furor and excitement of the Galaxy-era aesthetic revolution of the mid-1950s had begun to die away, after the inflationary postwar SF boom had g
one bust and a recession had settled in over the SF publishing industry, wiping out dozens of SF magazines, many fans and professionals began to perceive the SF world of the late fifties as a dismal place, in Robert Silverberg’s words, “a kind of fallen empire that had collapsed into eerie provincial decay.” For the first time since the middle of the thirties (just prior to John W. Campbell’s takeover of Astounding), it became possible to entertain seriously the thought that SF might have reached the end of its string and be on its way to extinction. Many critics and commentators were worried and increasingly glum over what they perceived as the sudden dearth of worthwhile SF, and the proliferation of “watered-down” nonkosher SF (including fantasy “masquerading” as SF), and it is probably significant that the winner of the fanzine Hugo for 1961 was a symposium with the title Who Killed Science Fiction?
Was science fiction dead, or dying?
With hindsight, it is easy to see that it was not. A great deal of good work, and even much evolutionarily significant work, was published throughout the early sixties, right through this supposedly dry and sterile period—the bulk of Cordwainer Smith’s work, for instance, the best of Jack Vance’s short work, incandescently strange work by Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, as well as important work by Poul Anderson, Algis Budrys, Edgar Pangborn, Avram Davidson, Richard McKenna, Theodore Sturgeon, and dozens of others. Most of the new writers who would soon be the stars of the New Wave revolution—Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Keith Roberts, Joanna Russ, Norman Spinrad, Kate Wilhelm, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, and many others—had already started their careers by the early sixties, and were busily toiling away in obscurity, attracting as yet little or no attention. And many older writers who were considered at the time to be “burnt out” can be seen in retrospect to have instead been within a few years of a revitalizing surge of new creative energy.
And yet, one of the most common perceptions of this period at the time was that SF was in decline, a long, slow dwindling-away into gray mediocrity, the ferocious fires of the early years of the fifties cooling into ash—and the evidence to the contrary seemed to register on few.
We went through this whole thing again some years later, in the middle and late seventies, in a low-energy recessionary period following the creative excitement of the New Wave revolution of the mid-sixties, when once again commentators were shaking their heads solemnly over the imminent demise of science fiction, scholarly articles were being written explaining why it was All Over, and some writers (among many others who were also plunged into gloom and despair in those days … for some very real reasons, it should be emphasized) were making a big public show of “getting out” of science fiction, renouncing a failing genre for greener and more lucrative pastures elswhere. (Nearly all of them were working in the field again by the beginning of the new decade, if not before.) This was theoretically another dry and sterile period in SF—and yet, as David G. Hartwell notes in an article about the seventies in the December 1991 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction (and as other commentators have pointed out), a tremendous amount of good work was produced during this “sterile” period, by writers as various as James Tiptree, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Michael Bishop, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, John Varley, Joanna Russ, Robert Silverberg, Brian W. Aldiss, and dozens of others. As is usually the case in these episodes of postcoital triste that inevitably seem to follow periods of compacted “revolutionary” aesthetic furor, the evidence for SF’s state of health would again be viewed with a very selective eye. As I pointed out at the time, in several of the “Best” anthologies from the late seventies, if you looked around carefully, you could see, even then, the seeds being planted that would soon bloom into a new period of energy and expansion and creative excitement.
And now, in the wake of the “Cyberpunk” revolution, and in a recessionary period following a boom, we’re going through it all again. More or less.
No, history does not repeat itself in tidy one-to-one analogues; there are important differences between each of those historical situations, especially as far as the mechanics of the SF publishing world are concerned, differences that are too complicated to get into in detail in the space permitted here—and yet, I really feel that, in general, the pattern holds.
Of course, this can be dismissed as merely a belief on my part, something that I take on faith alone—and yet, I can look around me, right here, right now, and clearly see the seeds being planted that are going to blossom in the years ahead. There are new writers out there right now who are going to be the Big Names of the nineties—hell, the Big Names of the first part of the 21st century, for that matter. Some of them may be in this book. Some of them have yet to be noticed. Some of them have probably not even made their first sale yet. But they’re out there.
Right now, even as you read these words, there’s some sixteen-year-old kid out there somewhere reading something that is blowing him or her away, sitting somewhere with a book or a story grasped tightly in sweaty fingers, eyes bulging out of his or her head, going “Wow! Wow! Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!”, and that kid, whoever he or she may be, is going to be the key figure, or one of them, in the next high-energy creative “revolution” to hit science fiction. What that revolution will consist of, I don’t know, although I’d be willing to bet that Cyberpunk will be one of the elements that is swept into the meld, just as the New Wave was one of the elements that went into the meld for the creation of Cyberpunk. I may not like it, or even recognize it—few old fart editors maintain their receptivity or credibility through more than one such revolutionary upheaval, and I’ve already been through at least two of them. But it’s out there. And so is that kid in the grubby T-shirt, reading until the room grows too dark to see the page, because he or she can’t bear to break away long enough to get up and turn on the light.
* * *
It was a gray and somewhat glum year in the magazine market, although there were some encouraging signs, and even a couple of potential success stories. Unlike 1991, it was a relatively quiet year—most of the major changes in the magazine market were already in place by the end of 1991 or the beginning of 1992, and what we’ve seen this year is the beginning of the working out of their effects … although, in some cases, the jury is still out on whether the overall effect of the changes is positive or negative, and we may have to wait until next year (or later) to know for sure.
Magazine sales were down almost across the board in all of the established magazines, including Omni, as the magazine field in general (not just SF/fantasy titles, or even fiction magazines) continued to struggle with the effects of the recession, which deepened throughout most of 1992. Amazing probably had the worst year, as its first full year as a large-sized slick-format monthly saw its circulation plummet disastrously, down 61.6 percent since last year, according to the newsmagazine Locus; this must particularly hurt Amazing, since a large-sized magazine is so much more costly to produce than a digest-sized magazine, so that expenses are probably rising as sales decline. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1993, parent company TSR was still committed to supporting them, according to editor Kim Mohan, who remains confident that sales will increase dramatically this year. Amazing is probably the best-looking SF magazine in the business, and you’d think that it would do well on the newsstands in its new format, but the problem may be that very few people see it there; its distribution is awful—it’s almost impossible to find on newsstands in Philadelphia or New York, for instance; or at least I haven’t been able to find it in those places, and I’ve been looking. It was recently announced that Amazing has signed on with a new national distributor, which will distribute the magazine starting with its April 1993 issue, and maybe that will help; let’s keep our fingers crossed for them.
Aboriginal SF also continued to struggle throughout 1992, as did Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine. Aboriginal SF skipped their Spring 1992 issue, and only published three issues this year, although they were large “double” issues—they are now schedu
led to produce four quarterly “double” issues a year; financial considerations also forced them to drop the use of color for their interior illustrations, and their circulation continued to decline. As I reported last year, Aboriginal SF had laid off their paid staff (all work is now being done by volunteer labor) and applied to the IRS for nonprofit status in order to enable the magazine to continue to publish, but that status still has not yet been approved, and it may well be that the magazine’s survival depends on what the IRS ultimately decides to do. Money problems also hit Pulphouse Publishing hard this year, causing the cancellation of many of their projects, and affecting Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine as well. Last year, editor Dean Wesley Smith had been forced to give up on his ambitious but unrealistic original plan to publish Pulphouse as a weekly magazine, and had changed the publication schedule to a more feasible one of publication every four weeks, closer to the monthly schedule that is the industry standard—unfortunately, probably because of the upheavals at Pulphouse Publishing, Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine was published extremely erratically this year, managing to produce only six of their scheduled thirteen issues, at irregular intervals; if they can’t steady down to a reliable publication schedule this year, they may be in trouble, but the Pulphouse people are planning to devote more of their energies to the magazine now that many of their other projects are defunct or scaled down, so we’ll see.
Money troubles also caused Weird Tales to publish only two issues this year, and to change format with the second issue to a full-size staplebound format from a somewhat smaller perfectbound format. This change may end up helping Weird Tales considerably, since issues in this format are much less expensive to produce (thereby increasing the magazine’s profitability) and bookstore chains will carry it in its new size, where they would not carry it at its former size … which, of course, may help its chances of being displayed, and, therefore, of being bought. Omni, which went through a massive internal reorganization last year and moved its production facilities to North Carolina, also changed its format slightly, going from perfectbound to staplebound—the good news is that this makes the magazine considerably cheaper to produce (especially as its production has been consolidated with that of another general media magazine, Compute), which increases its profitability; the bad news is that much of the graphic style and flair that typified the old Omni has been lost in the process (the magazine now looks almost exactly like Compute, perhaps not surprisingly), and since much of the upscale appeal of Omni depended on the sophistication of its graphics and the slickness of its whole visual “look” (it was the chic thing to be seen reading on the Metroliner, in the old days), it remains to be seen what the overall effect of all this will be on sales. Omni also started a new original anthology series this year, which we discuss below in the original anthology section.