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

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 1989

  Judith Moffett

  TINY TANGO

  Charles Sheffield

  OUT OF COPYRIGHT

  Mike Resnick

  FOR I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY

  Gregory Benford

  ALPHAS

  Connie Willis

  AT THE RIALTO

  Kathe Koja

  SKIN DEEP

  Steven Popkes

  THE EGG

  Robert Silverberg

  TALES FROM THE VENIA WOODS

  William King

  VISITING THE DEAD

  Bruce Sterling

  DORI BANGS

  Lucius Shepard

  THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  Nancy Kress

  THE PRICE OF ORANGES

  S.P. Somtow

  LOTTERY NIGHT

  Alexander Jablokov

  A DEEPER SEA

  Michael Swanwick

  THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  Megan Lindholm

  SILVER LADY AND THE FORTYISH MAN

  Alan Brennert

  THE THIRD SEX

  Neal Barrett, Jr.

  WINTER ON THE BELLE FOURCHE

  Robert Silverberg

  ENTER A SOLDIER. LATER: ENTER ANOTHER

  Robert Sampson

  RELATIONSHIPS

  John Varley

  JUST ANOTHER PERFECT DAY

  Janet Kagan

  THE LOCH MOOSE MONSTER

  Brian Stableford

  THE MAGIC BULLET

  Avram Davidson

  THE ODD OLD BIRD

  John Crowley

  GREAT WORK OF TIME

  Honorable Mentions: 1989

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  for

  EILEEN GUNN

  and

  JOHN D. BERRY

  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; Ellen Datlow, Michael Swanwick, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Charles Ardai, Tina Lee, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Pat Cadigan, Arnie Fenner, Janet and Ricky Kagan, Pat LoBrutto, Susan Protter, Patrick Delahunt, Virginia Kidd, David S. Garnett, Charles C. Ryan, Chuq von Rospach, David Pringle, George Alec Effinger, James Turner, Lucius Shepard, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, James Patrick Kelly, Edward Bryant, David G. Hartwell, Tim Sullivan, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Michael G. Adkisson, Steve Pasechnick, Nicholas Robinson, Andy Watson, Michael Sumbera, Glen Cox, Eileen Gunn, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Mark Van Name, Martha Soukup, Robert Killheffer, Greg Cox, Byron Preiss, Dave Harris, David Memmott, 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, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $28.00 for a one-year subscription—twelve issues; $40.00 for a one-year subscription—twelve issues via first-class mail) 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, N.Y. 11202-0056, $27.00 for a one-year subscription—twelve issues) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  SUMMATION

  1989

  Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of changes and ominous omens, as perhaps is befitting for the penultimate year of a turbulent decade. Pat LoBrutto resigned his position as senior editor at Doubleday Foundation to pursue a career as a free-lance writer and anthologist. Beth Meacham relinquished her duties as Tor editor-in-chief and moved to Tucson, Arizona, with husband (and former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine) Tappan King—she will, however, continue to work as executive editor of Tor, and as an acquisitions editor for them, commuting in to New York City ten times a year. Patrick Delahunt, one of SF’s foremost literary agents, has abruptly retired from the agency business, causing a feeding frenzy among other agents, who have at once swooped in on his client list. Lynx Books died, following on the heels of Pageant, and the Isaac Asimov Presents line has fallen into a state of limbo, although there are still rumors from time to time that it will be started up again. Two long-running magazines died, the majority of SF lines have made cutbacks of one degree of severity or another, and rumors of buying slowdowns at some houses are rife.

  And the Salman Rushdie affair—the details of which I certainly don’t have to rehash here—raises the ugly possibility of censorship by terroristic threat. During the last year, more than one SF writer said to me, with a nervous laugh, “Thank goodness the Ayatollah doesn’t read SF!” But someone else with a political/religious/polemical ax to grind might, and how long would it take for the SF publishing industry to cave in under the kind of pressure that was brought to bear on the publisher of The Satanic Verses? Censorship is a thousand-headed snake that must be fought every time it raises one of those heads, at whatever level, no matter what the cost.

  As the last item makes clear, this was a year of ominous omens for the whole publishing industry, not just for science fiction publishing (which, in fact, was actually affected less severely than some other areas). The summer of 1989 was widely reported to be a very bad one for sales in general, and this caused shakeups throughout the publishing industry at the very top of the corporate ladder, with corporate presidents and board chairmen being fired or being forced into retirement at several giant conglomerates; some lines, like E.P. Dutton, suddenly undergoing dramatic changes; and with other publishing houses put up for sale altogether by their parent corporations, many of whom admitted to massive operating losses.

  It becomes clear that SF publishing—and probably the publishing industry in general—is headed into the heavy weather of another recession. The key questions are: how bad will things get? And for how long?

  For there were also contradictory omens. Even as some SF lines were dying, new ones were being born. The British publisher Pan, for instance, will start a new three-part science fiction/fantasy/horror list under editor Kathy Gale, and NAL will create a new three-part science fiction/fantasy/horror list called Roc Books, under editor John Silbersack. Deborah Beale at London Century is starting a new line of prestige novellas, to be published as individual books, and Malcolm Edwards will be working on starting a new science fiction and fantasy line for Grafton Books. Bantam Doubleday Dell’s two new lines, Spectra Special Editions and Doubleday Foundation, seem to be doing well, as is the new Tor Double line. The small press market has never been livelier, or more important to the field. SF writers continued to figure prominently on nationwide bestseller lists. And though the total number of books published in the related SF/fantasy/horror fields was down slightly in 1989, “down” is a relative term: 1,784 books were published this year, according to the newsmagazine Locus—an 8 percent drop from last year’s total of 1,936, admittedly, but still an enormous number of books.

  I’ve said this before, but I think that it’s worth repeating: There is a periodic boom-and-bust cycle that has repeated ever since there
was such a thing as SF as a distinct publishing category. But it should be pointed out that 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, and I don’t really believe that any “bust” or recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or advances or sales, unless most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. Even with most of the fat trimmed away—and there’s a lot of fat out there to be trimmed—the “retrenched” genre as a whole will still be larger and more prosperous than it was in 1973.

  Even more important than the question of sales is the question: is there still anything out there worth reading? In a 1977 essay, I decried the advent in science fiction publishing of what I referred to as “the junk-food mentality: cut quality, cut costs, hype your product relentlessly, and sell in bulk,” and warned that “the creative end of the genre is in many places in danger of being taken over by corporate marketing specialists who have no intention of taking any risks, by people who care nothing about SF as an art form, by people who think of writers as sausage factories and regard the SF audience as just another cowlike group of consumers to be manipulated.” This mentality, and the short-sighted, bottom-line, immediate-gratification corporate accounting practices that promulgate it, is responsible for a great deal that is wrong with today’s publishing industry, and not just in SF, by any means. And those junk-food specialists are just the people who, when belt-tightening time comes, will try to eliminate the few novels of quality that remain in their lists, rather than cut back on the hordes of “surefire” commercial crap that they’ve cluttered the bookshelves with—let’s hope that they can be prevented from doing this in the tough times ahead, for that way leads to the stagnation of the genre and the ultimate falling away of much of the genre audience, however commercially sensible and “hardheaded” the strategy looks in the short term.

  In fact, in an odd way, the most encouraging thing about today’s SF market is that adult work of quality does still manage to get into print, in spite of the increasing flood of choose-your-own-adventure books, “sharecropper” books, Star Trek novels, “Robotech” books, shared-world anthologies, “Thieves World” novels, wet-dream mercenary fantasies, “Dungeons and Dragons” scenarios, and movie novelizations that it must fight against for rack display space.

  That quality work does still manage to get into print is almost solely because there are still editors working in the field who are courageous or naive enough to treat their audience as if it were composed of intelligent adults of all ages … and as long as that remains true, science fiction as a genre worth reading will survive.

  * * *

  It was a somewhat gloomy year in the SF magazine market, which suffered several heavy losses. Toward the beginning of 1989, we lost The Twilight Zone Magazine, which folded after producing only three 1989-dated issues, and toward the end of the year, we began hearing dire rumors about Amazing as well. Alas, those rumors were confirmed in the beginning of 1990, while I was typing a clean copy of this Summation. Amazing has died, at least as a digest-sized science fiction magazine. There are several contradictory rumors currently floating about as to the future of the magazine—one has it that it will become a large-format gaming magazine, similar to TSR’s Dragon magazine; another has it becoming a “graphic comix” magazine—but, whatever its future, it is clearly not intended to continue as anything we would consider a science fiction magazine. This is a shame, since, under editor Patrick L. Price, Amazing was livelier than it had been for years, and was publishing some very good material—but its continuing low circulation and its inability to attract advertising revenue have finally done it in. (I’ve had occasion to read memorial services over Amazing’s grave two or three times before during the last fourteen years of editing Best of the Year anthologies, and each time it has fooled me by rising again reborn in a new avatar, but I have the uneasy feeling that this time the Grand Old Lady, SF’s oldest and longest-running magazine, may well be gone for good.) With the demise of Amazing as a fiction magazine, the digest-sized SF magazine market is reduced to three titles: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, the lowest number of digest-sized titles in years.

  On the upbeat side, Aboriginal SF and the British magazine Interzone both made it up from the semiprozine ranks into the professional magazine category this year, and there seems to be reason to be cautiously optimistic about the future of both. Interzone seems to be publishing better material than ever, and gained national newsstand distribution in the United Kingdom this year. Aboriginal SF continued to dramatically increase its circulation for yet another year, and is widely available in major chain bookstores like Dalton’s and Waldenbooks that sometimes carry no other SF magazines at all. (A cautionary note was struck, however, by its admission, in an early 1990-dated issue, that it is beginning to feel the pinch of money problems, caused mainly by the high cost of producing a large-format magazine and by the difficulty in attracting enough advertising revenue. Let’s hope that Aboriginal can survive the cash-flow crunches that may be on the way, since SF can use all the short-fiction markets it can get.) Analog celebrated its sixtieth birthday early in 1990, and is still going strong.

  A new large-format magazine, Starshore, was announced, but little else was known about it by press time. There were also rumors about an upcoming new horror magazine, called Shadows Magazine, to be edited by veteran horror editor Charles L. Grant, but there was little concrete information to be had about that by press time, either. Maybe we’ll have more information on those projects next year.

  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 Connie Willis, James Blaylock, Michael Swanwick, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Silverberg, J.R. Dunn, Bruce McAllister, Marc Laidlaw, and others. OMNI’s fiction editor is Ellen Datlow.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction featured excellent fiction by Lucius Shepard, Mike Resnick, Charles Sheffield, Robert Silverberg, Judith Dubois, Bradley Denton, and others. F & SF’s longtime editor is Edward Ferman.

  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine featured critically acclaimed work by Judith Moffett, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Eileen Gunn, Kathe Koja, Alexander Jablokov, Bruce Sterling, Megan Lindholm, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others. IAsfm’s editor is Gardner Dozois.

  Analog featured good work by Charles Sheffield, Lois McMaster Bujold, Michael Flynn, Elizabeth Moon, W.T. Quick, Rick Shelley, Harry Turtledove, and others. Analog’s longtime editor is Stanley Schmidt.

  Amazing featured good work by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Sheila Finch, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gregory Benford, Phillip C. Jennings, Harry Turtledove, R. Garcia y Robertson, and others. Amazing’s editor was Patrick L. Price.

  Interzone featured good work by Brian Stableford, Lisa Goldstein, Karen Joy Fowler, Ian MacDonald, William King, Richard Calder, J.G. Ballard, Greg Egan, Kim Newman, Phillip Mann, and others. Interzone’s editor is David Pringle.

  Aboriginal Science Fiction featured interesting work by Patricia Anthony, R.P. Bird, Walter Jon Williams, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Resa Nelson, Jonathan Lethem, and others. The editor of Aboriginal Science Fiction is Charles C. Ryan.

  S
hort 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 US; Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Davis Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 7058, Red Oak, IA 51566, $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 issue, $22.00 for twelve.)

  * * *

  Among the fiction semiprozines, the most commercially viable title, and the one most likely to be the next to escape up into the professional category, is probably Weird Tales, edited by George H. Scithers, John Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer. It’s a thoroughly professional magazine, lacking only in circulation to qualify it for the professional category. Things were livelier in the fiction semiprozine market this year than they have been since the high days of the Pat Cadigan-edited Shayol, and there are now several strange and eclectic magazines out there that are well worth a look. Perhaps the most prominent of them is New Pathways, edited by Michael G. Adkisson, a glossy, good-looking magazine full of interestingly quirky stuff of all sorts; New Pathways perhaps tries a little too self-consciously to be weird, but there’s always something of interest to read here, and I recommend it. Nova Express, edited by Michael Sumbera, with help by Glen Cox and Dwight Brown, is another enjoyably eclectic magazine, an interesting mix of fiction, highly opinionated reviews, and gonzo journalism. They have also published some worthwhile interviews with Howard Waldrop, John Kessel, and others, and the only genuinely entertaining convention reports I’ve seen in some while; Nova Express also spends a fair amount of time demonstrating how hip it is, but the tone of the magazine is more robust and gonzo than the somewhat cooler and more intellectual/abstract tone of New Pathways, and so far there has been something in every issue that made me laugh out loud (in a good way, guys, in a good way), no mean recommendation. An all-fiction semiprozine called Strange Plasma made an impressive debut this year; edited by Steve Pasechnick, the stories in Strange Plasma strike me as being of considerably higher overall quality than the stories in the vast majority of semiprozines—one of them, in fact, a story by Robert Sampson, made it into this anthology, and two more, stories by Paul Park and R.A. Lafferty, were on my short list; clearly this is a magazine to watch. Another weirdly eclectic magazine that made its debut this year was Journal Wired, edited by Andy Watson and Mark V. Ziesing; another mixed-content magazine, it seems to consist mostly of a kind of critical ranting, some of it—notably the rants by Lucius Shepard and John Shirley—entertaining, some of it not—although they did publish an intriguing story by A.A. Attanasio, and an even more intriguing story by Rudy Rucker that accomplished the difficult literary feat of making the watching of a live sex show in a sleazy porno theater on 42nd Street an upbeat, morally positive, life-affirming, damn near pastoral experience; only Rucker could—excuse the expression—pull this off. Mention should probably also be made here of Ice River, edited by David Memmott; although it published mostly poetry, there were many names featured here which would be familiar to genre audiences, and much that would be of interest to them. They have reportedly ceased publication.