Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14 Read online

  THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW SCIENCE FICTION

  14th Annual Collection

  by

  Gardner Dozois

  CONTENTS

  Summation: 2000

  The Juniper Tree John Kessel

  Antibodies Charles Stross

  The Birthday of the World Ursula K. Le Guin

  Saviour Nancy Kress

  Reef Paul J. McAuley

  Going After Bobo Susan Palwick

  Crux Albert E. Cowdrey

  The Cure For Everything Severna Park

  The Suspect Genome Peter F. Hamilton

  The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-o Michael Swanwick

  Radiant Green Star Lucius Shepard

  Great Wall of Mars Alastair Reynolds

  Milo and Sylvie Eliot Fintushel

  Snowball in Hell Brian Stableford

  On the Orion Line Stephen Baxter

  Oracle Greg Egan

  Obsidian Harvest Rick Cook & Ernest Hogan

  Patient Zero Tananarive Due

  A Colder War Charles Stross

  The Real World Steven Utley

  The Thing About Benny M. Shayne Bell

  The Great Goodbye Robert Charles Wilson

  Tendeleo’s Story Ian McDonald

  Honourable Mentions: 2000

  SUMMATION: 2000

  Well, the millennium is definitely at hand (cue the swell of ominous, Apocalyptic music in the background), and even calendar purists can no longer deny that we’re living in the twenty-first century.

  It’ll probably be hard to convey to younger readers a sense of how downright strange that seems to old fogies like me. For most of my life, the twenty-first century was THE FUTURE, that unimaginably distant territory in which most science fiction stories took place; now I find myself living there, in the remote, glittering FUTURE… (which somehow feels different than you thought it would, more mundane and less goshwow fantastical, once you’re actually rubbing up against it, in spite of technological innovations all around us that would have dropped the jaw of anybody in 1950—a lesson many SF writers and futurologists could usefully learn). To paraphrase Mark Twain, I wish the new century well, although I doubt I’ll get to see all that much of it—but it’s not my century. My century was the previous one.

  But the twentieth century is gone, taking its freight of unprecedented and unanticipated horrors and wonders with it, and even dinosaurian refugees from that century, like me, must learn to look ahead, not back. We can go ahead, if we’re lucky, for a while anyway—but back there’s no returning.

  The temptation to try to predict what the new century ahead is going to be like is almost irresistible, and I’ll succumb to that temptation here and there in the pages that follow, but what makes me hesitant to really give in to it is realizing how poor a job prognosticators at the beginning of the twentieth century did peering ahead at what lay in store for them. In almost every case, even those who thought that they were being wildly daring and outrageous in their predictions fell far short of what actually happened, missing both the marvels and the miseries, the triumphs and the tragedies, the unimaginable progress and the equally unimaginable atrocities that waited ahead. For someone standing in 1901 and peering ahead, these things were literally unimaginable; it was beyond the power of the human imagination to predict or fully appreciate how radical the changes that lay ahead really would be, changes that would come to alter almost out of recognition every aspect of the nineteenth-century world, sweeping it aside and replacing it with a new world instead. And I suspect that people at the beginning of the twenty-second century—if there are any people, as we understand the term, still around by then—will look back at today’s predictions of what the twenty-first century is going to be like with similar amusement (if not outright scorn) at how naive and limited our imaginations turned out to be. So then, let’s mostly content ourselves with taking a look at 2000, which is safely past, and thus can be confidently examined with 20/20 hindsight.

  It was a pretty quiet year, for the most part. Once again, the science fiction genre didn’t die, much to the disappointment of some commentators. In fact, the genre seems to be fairly stable at the moment commercially (knock wood!); artistically, even taking into account all of the tie-ins and media and gaming-associated books that crowd the shelves, there are still considerably more science fiction novels of quality being published now than were being published in, say, 1975 (including a few that would probably not have been allowed to be published at all back then), in a very wide range of styles and moods, by a spectrum of writers ranging from Golden Age giants to Young Turks with one book under their belts—quite probably more quality material (including a wide range of short work) than any one reader is going to be able to read in the course of one year, unless they make a full-time job of it. The last couple of years have been dominated by Merger Mania, but this year the corporations were mainly quiescent, like huge snakes digesting the goats they’d swallowed. There were no major changes in publishing, at the genre level, anyway, except in the troubled magazine market—no print SF lines lost or gained. (Most of the major action, both positive and negative, was in the online market, about which see more below.) There were no major changes in editorial personnel this year either, although last year saw a vigorous round of the traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs, with several Big-Time players leaving the scene (most of whom have yet to return in any significant way).

  Most of the serious action this year was going on behind the scenes, like the legal battle over Napster—at first glance, something far removed from the SF world… but not really, eh?, as I strongly suspect that if you want a good model for the problems that the book-publishing business is going to encounter tomorrow, you take a look at the problems that the music industry is dealing with today. (Already, the Science Fiction Writers of America is embroiled in a legal battle with pirate Web sites, with Harlan Ellison—good for you, Harlan!—being one of those leading the rush to the battlements although I suspect that as yet we’ve only seen some very early skirmishes in what’s going to be a long and bloody war.) The turmoil in the stock market over the faltering dot.com market—with many big Internet players failing to meet expectations by huge margins and being forced to close up shop, and possible major trouble ahead forecast for others, like the online bookselling (and everything else-selling) superservice Amazon.com also cast a long shadow into the SF world.

  Major changes are looming over the publishing world like thunder-heads coming up over the horizon, fundamental changes in the way that books reach the general reading public. This year you could hear those storms of change growling and rumbling off in the distance, mostly as yet producing only occasional gusts of wind and fitful bursts of rain, but not too many commentators would deny that those storms are going to break sooner or later—although you’ll hear a wide range of predictions of how severe the weather is going to get, from soak-your-clothes-to-your-skin downpours to barely-wet-your-lawn passing showers. Print-on-demand publishers are appearing like mayflies—as are online sites that sell downloads to PCs, portable handheld computers and other electronic text-readers—and they may turn out to have the life span of mayflies, too… but it’s a good bet that there will be others coming along behind them to replace those that falter and fall by the wayside. And just behind these are marching other waves of change: new generations of better and more sophisticated handheld computers and electronic text-readers of all sorts (some of which may already be in stores by the time you read these words); print-on-demand systems in most major bookstores that can print most books in their extensive catalogues for you right on the spot, while you wait, “electronic paper”; genuinely reprogrammable “e-books” that will look and f
eel as much like print books as possible, and be as easy to carry around (even today, you can call into the Internet with a wireless modem and get new novels or stories downloaded into your handheld, as easily as making a phone call). And, no doubt, behind these changes there’ll be coming other innovations and technologies that will end up having a major effect on the publishing world, stuff we haven’t even heard of yet.

  None but the most wild-eyed prognosticators believe that all this is going to make print books, or regular trade publishers, or bookstores that exist in the physical world, disappear (that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and likely will never happen at all). But it is going to mean big readjustments in market share, something that’s already happening, and which isn’t going to stop any time soon.

  Although cyber-optimists of the “Print books will be extinct by 2004! With Internet shopping, nobody will ever bother leaving their homes again!” sort may have been a bit too giddy, those semi-Luddites who have spent the last few months smugly anticipating the forecast demise of Amazon.com (proving that all this Internet stuff was “just a fad&8221;) are probably going to be disappointed as well. Amazon.com may (or may not) die, but there will still be online booksellers. That’s not going to change, not now; too many people have become accustomed to the ease of ordering books online, one of the most rapidly growing areas in the whole bookselling industry, and somebody will appear to take up the slack and provide that service for them, even if Amazon.com and all the other present online booksellers went down. Books will continue to be produced and sold online, in one form or another, in one way or another, no matter how the fortunes of an individual publisher rise or fall; the technology is just too easy and too seductive not to use, and sooner or later somebody will figure out a reliable way to make money doing so. Although it may not be the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of starry-eyed would-be dot.com millionaires, the High Road to Effortless Business Success, the Internet is not going away. It—or its successor technologies — will be a part of our lives (probably an evermore-integral, indispensable, and yet taken-for-granted-and-largely-ignored part) for the foreseeable future, and for our children’s future as well. Barring all-out war, an asteroid strike, a universally potent pestilence, environmental collapse, or some other disaster that sends civilization reeling back to the Dark Ages or worse, things are not going to go back to The Way They Were. The clock cannot be turned back, once you set it ticking—your only option is to smash the clock altogether.

  So fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy decade. But it just might—with luck — end up taking us to some places worth going to.

  It was another bad year in the magazine market, with sales down again almost across the board (in areas far outside the genre, as well), and with only a few hopeful notes to be found here and there.

  There were two major losses in the magazine market in 2000, the demise of Science Fiction Age (which happened early enough in 2000 that we covered it in last year’s anthology) and then, towards the end of the year, the death of Amazing Stories—which was axed in its recent incarnation as a glossy mixed SF/media magazine soon after parent company Wizards of the Coast was sold to Hasbro (Hasbro also axed its card-gaming magazine, Top Deck; apparently a severe slump in the card-gaming market was responsible for both decisions). This was perhaps not quite as much of a hammer blow to the market as the cancellation of Science Fiction Age, since Amazing Stories in its current version was less central and important to the genre than Science Fiction Age had become, but it still sent shock waves through the field. There was a flicker of hope late in the year, as the online site Galaxy OnLine announced that they were going to buy Amazing Stories and reinvent it as an online site selling versions of the magazine in CD format, but this deal fell through when Galaxy OnLine itself died (see below). Amazing Stories has died and then come miraculously back to life several times in the twenty-five years I’ve been editing Best of the Year anthologies, but this may finally be the end of the line for the grand old magazine, which has existed in one form or another (with occasional breaks in continuity) since 1926. (On the other hand, I’ve said that before, only to watch the magazine rise from the ashes again, so we’ll just have to wait and see, and hope that Amazing Stories can somehow pull off the Lazarus trick one more time. That probably wouldn’t be the way to bet it, though.)

  The other big change in the magazine market this year is potentially positive: late in the year, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was bought by its current editor, Gordon Van Gelder, from its longtime owner and publisher, Edward L. Ferman. If Gordon can cope with the extra work and problems that will come with assuming the role of publisher as well, and if he has deep enough pockets to weather any financial setbacks that might be caused by the transition, then this might well give F&SF a new lease on life—the Fermans were getting near retirement age, and there has been speculation as to what would happen to the magazine when they did retire. Without someone like Gordon willing to assume the stewardship of the magazine, a big job, it might well have died. Now it has a decent chance of surviving, for as long as Gordon can keep it going, anyway.

  The news in the rest of the magazine market was no more cheerful than it has been for the last several years. Overall sales were down almost everywhere, with Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy reaching all-time lows (sales were down across the entire range of the magazine market, in fact, far beyond genre boundaries—it shows up more noticeably with the genre magazines because their initial audience bases were lower to begin with). Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 12.3 per cent loss in overall circulation in 2000, 3,348 in subscriptions, and 1,062 in newsstand sales. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 7.5 per cent loss in overall circulation in 2000, 1461 in subscriptions, and 2,435 in newsstand sales. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered an 8.1 per cent loss in overall circulation, 1,294 in subscriptions, and 1,360 in newsstand sales. Realms of Fantasy registered a 12.1 per cent loss in overall circulation, rising 2,313 in subscriptions, but dropping by 7,157 in newsstand sales. As it has for several years, now, Interzone held steady at a circulation of about 4,000 copies, more or less evenly split between subscriptions and newsstand sales.

  I’ve mentioned before that these figures probably look worse than they actually are. Most of the subscriptions that have been lost, to date, are not of the core subscribers who regularly renew their subscriptions at full rate, the most profitable subscribers for a magazine, but rather Publishers Clearing House-style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, which can actually cost more to fulfil than they actually bring in in revenue. The good news, then, is that the core subscribers who do remain seem loyal, dedicated and, according to surveys, enthusiastic about the product that they’re receiving. Helping also to keep the digest-size or near-digest-size magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF) profitable in spite of declining circulation is the fact 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, the advantage that has kept digest-size magazines alive for decades when more expensive-to-produce magazines, which need to sell a far greater number of copies in order to be profitable, have faltered and died. Nevertheless, this continued decline in circulation is distressing and, if the slide continues long enough, must ultimately threaten the existence of these magazines; without at least a trickle of new subscribers coming in, you can’t counterbalance the inevitable attrition of your subscriber base due to death and circumstance, and sooner or later you’re left with no subscribers at all, or at least not enough to keep the magazine in the black.

  One mildly hopeful note is that in the last couple of years most of the SF magazines are pulling in at least a trickle of new subscribers over the Internet from audiences that probably haven’t been tapped much by them before, including people who had probably never heard of the magazines before coming across them online (most people, even many
habitual science fiction readers, have no idea that the SF magazines—which receive no advertising or promotion at all, in most cases—even exist), and people from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems. Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF have also all made deals with Peanut Press (http://www.peanutpress.com) that enable readers to download electronic versions of the magazines into Palm Pilot handheld computers, with the choice of either buying an electronic “subscription”, or of buying them individually on an issue-by-issue basis, and a small but steady flow of new subscribers drawn from new audiences is coming in from this source as well.

  With today’s chaotic newsstand situation, which keeps most SF magazines off most newsstands, I have a feeling that if anything is going to save the magazines, it’ll be the use of the Internet as a promotional tool, using Web sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions, and so I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites: Asimov’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com. Analog’s site is at http://www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/. Interzone’s site is at http://www.sfsite.com/interzone/. (Realms of Fantasy doesn’t have a Web site per se, although content from it can be found on scifi.now.com… although you could surf the whole site and be hard-pressed to find even a mention of the magazine’s name; if you persist, though, you can eventually find a place to subscribe to it online.) The amount of activity varies on these sites, with the Asimov’s and Analog sites perhaps the busiest and the Interzone site perhaps the least active, but the important thing about all of the sites is that you can subscribe to the magazines there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post office required. It would be hard for us to make it any easier for you.