The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Read online

  Not a lot of change for the publishing world, where, some years, editors moving from house to house to house can seem like a game of Editorial Musical Chairs. The really big changes were under the surface, and little discussed. One thing likely to have major and far-reaching consequences is the recent legal decision that the Print-On-Demand process used by such POD publishers as Lightning Source is in violation of a pre-existent patent, something that could have a chilling effect on the burgeoning world of POD publishing. And the “Internet piracy” case against AOL, spearheaded by Harlan Elllison, continues to churn its way through the court system, although recently some progress seemed to be being made in Ellison’s favor; the ultimate ruling here could also have far-reaching long-term consequences. The behind-the-scenes thing that’s likely to have the most wide-ranging effect, though, is that genre publishing seems to be finally hitting the glass ceiling, as far as how long books can be allowed to get; the reluctance of the chain bookstore to order books priced over $24.95 (the bigger the book, the more it costs to produce, the higher the cover price that has to be put on it – and the fewer customers who will be willing to shell out that much to buy it) is putting the brakes on the trend toward ever-longer novels that kept snowballing throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and it may be that the days of really Big Fat Novels are behind us. Of course, really heavy hitters like Stephen King or Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist will continue to be allowed to publish books at any length they like – this will have the most effect on most new or middle-level writers, who will have the choice of writing shorter books or seeing their novel split up into three separate volumes in order to be published at all, as happened to John C. Wright’s novel The Golden Transcendence, originally intended to be one volume. (I actually don’t mind the switch to smaller novels; some of the best SF novels ever produced were written back when publishing realities wouldn’t allow you to publish a novel longer than 70,000 words, and most SF and fantasy novels of the last twenty years have been bloated and grossly padded anyway. Maybe, in some cases, less is more.)

  2003 was another bad year in the magazine market, throughout the entire magazine industry, nationwide and even worldwide, not just in the genre market – although some commentators continue to use this as ammunition in the “SF Is Dying” argument, and usually go on to comment that magazine circulations must be going down because the magazine editors are buying the wrong kinds of stories, or that the readers have lost interest in core science fiction (a particularly popular argument with the slipstream crowd). In fact, falling circulations – for many technical reasons, including broken or vanishing infrastructure channels (see the Summations in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Nineteenth and Twentieth Annual Collections for more detail) – are a problem throughout the entire magazine industry, far outside genre boundaries. An article in dmnews.com selects 2003 as “the worst year in recent memory for news-stand sales,” with news-stand sales sliding 10 to 15% across the board; according to Oxbridge Communications’ National Directory of Magazines, the overall number of print and online titles published dropped 9.1% in the United States and Canada in 2003, to 17,670 from 19,436 in 2000. Even magazines such as Playboy and TV Guide, formerly among the best-selling titles in the world, are feeling the pinch, and beginning to emit distressed wobbling noises. Seen from this perspective, the situation in the genre market is relatively stable, with small circulation losses, yes, but so far no repeat of the catastrophic drops that we saw in the mid-1990s.

  Still, there were changes necessitated by hard economic times. Asimov’s and Analog, as a cost-saving measure, went from an eleven-issue-a-year schedule to a ten-issue-per-year schedule, with a new double issue replacing one issue a year; and Interzone, after missing several issues during the course of 2003, officially announced that they were converting to a bi-monthly schedule from a monthly schedule in 2004. This makes the upcoming year the first time since the launch of Weird Tales in 1923 that the field has officially been without a monthly fiction magazine. In other bad news, 3SF, a new large-format SF magazine launched last year, lasted for only three issues before dying, and the excellent Scottish magazine Spectrum SF seems to have gone quiescent, with nothing heard from it in 2003.

  In spite of the troubled water in the magazine industry, many new magazines are still being launched, both inside and outside of the genre. In the genre, in addition to a slew of semi-prozines and new e-magazines (which are discussed below), the end of the year saw the launch of a handsome multigenre revival of the old men’s magazine Argosy, with some serious advertising bucks behind it (more about this next year), a new horror magazine called H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, and a new mixed-genre magazine from PS Publishing, Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther, one of the best editors in the business, is on the horizon.

  To get down to hard figures, Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 3.9% loss in overall circulation in 2003, losing 1,298 in subscriptions, but gaining 68 in news-stand sales; sell-through was up to a record 60%. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 3.6% loss in overall circulation in 2003, losing 1,592 in subscriptions, but 75 in news-stand sales, with sell-through rising to a record 61%. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 10% loss in overall circulation, losing 2,716 in subscriptions, but gaining 339 on the news-stand, with their sell-through rising to 44%. Interzone reported circulation to be down “maybe 10%” from its former level of about 4,000 copies. Realms of Fantasy claims a paid circulation of 27,331, up 1,318 from 2002, the last year for which figures were available; no breakdown as to how many of those are subscription sales versus news-stand sales are available either, but probably the bulk are subscription sales.

  The SF magazines are by no means down for the count yet – as Charles N. Brown said in his year-end summary in Locus, commenting on the fact that Asimov’s and Analog more or less held their ground, with no precipitous drops in circulation, “In magazine publishing, even is the new up” – especially as they are so cheap to produce that you don’t need to sell a lot of them to earn a profit, but it’s clear that the next few years are going to be critical ones in determining whether these magazines survive or not. One problem is that as news-stands and specialty SF bookstores themselves continue to dwindle in numbers, and the ones that are still around become ever more reluctant to display fiction magazines – especially digest-sized magazines, which don’t really fit into the physical format of most newsstands very well – it becomes more and more difficult to get your product out where it might be seen and purchased by people who might eventually become new subscribers; and without new subscribers, eventually your subscription base will be whittled away by natural attrition until you don’t have a large enough one to support the magazine anymore.

  Therefore, I’m going to urge everyone reading these words to subscribe to your favorite SF or fantasy magazine, and to do it today, right now, before your good intentions get buried under the press of daily events and you forget about it. It’s the one practical thing you can do to ensure the survival of a strong SF/fantasy market, with lots of diversity. And it’s easier to subscribe to genre magazines today than ever before, as most of them have the capability to issue subscriptions online on their Web sites, with all that’s called for is a credit card and a few clicks of a button, with no stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post office required. Additionally, you can subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible. Internet sites such as Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com) and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), sell electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or PC, something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvy set. Therefore, I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com; Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; and 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/. Or, if you want to go the traditional
ink, paper, and stamp route instead, subscription addresses are listed below. Whichever you do, though, if you like having a lot of science fiction to read every year in anthologies like this one, put the book down and go subscribe now.

  Subscription addresses for the professional magazines follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, annual subscription – $44.89 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $43.90 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $43.90 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton, BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $65.00 for an airmail one-year (twelve issues) subscription; Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703, $16.95 for an annual subscription in the US.

  Let’s turn now to the Internet scene, although I should add the caveat that things there evolve with such lightning speed, with new e-magazines and Internet sites of general interest seeming almost to be born one day and die the next, that it remains possible that everything I say about it here will be obsolete by the time this book makes it into print. The only way you can be sure about what’s available and what’s not is to go online yourself and check. Not a lot has changed since last year, with most of the major sites still in place and still the major genre-related sites, although new sites of interest continue to be born almost faster than it’s possible to keep up with them.

  As usual, the best place on the Internet to find fantasy, horror, and science fiction of high-literary quality, and one of the major players in the whole genre market, is Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction page on the internet (www.scifi.com/scifiction/), which this year featured a lot of the year’s best fiction, on or off of the Internet, including stories by John Kessel, Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop, Geoffrey A. Landis, Paul Di Filippo, Octavia Butler, J. R. Dunn, Jeffery Ford, Maureen F. McHugh, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and others. Eileen Gunn’s The Infinite Matrix page (www.infinitematrix.net) continued to publish literate and quirky fiction by people such as Michael Swanwick, Richard Kadrey, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and others, although a funding crisis has forced them to resort to PBS-like appeals for donations; let’s hope this works, as the site deserves to survive. Good professional-level SF and fantasy (as well as the usual slipstream and soft horror) could also be found on the Strange Horizons site (www.strangehorizons.com), which published an excellent story by David Moles, as well as good stuff by Bill Kte’pi, Nisi Shawl, Greg Van Eekhout, Daniel Kayson, Jeff Carlson, and others, as well as by electronic subscription to Oceans of the Mind (www. trantorpublications.com/oceans.htm), which published one of the year’s best stories, by Terry Dowling, as well as good stuff by Stephen Dedman, Marissa K. Lingen, Ian Creasey, Mary Turzillo, and others. (Oceans of the Mind deserves special commendation, in my eyes, anyway, for concentrating almost exclusively on core science fiction; almost all the other Internet fiction sites, including Sci Fiction, publish at least as much fantasy, horror, and slipstream as SF, if not more.)

  Below this point, most of the sites and e-magazines from which original fiction is available are less reliable; the stuff you find there won’t always – or even mostly – be of professional quality, although sometimes there are above-average stories to be found. The best of the remaining sites is probably Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com); the bulk of its space is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, essays, and interviews, but some good stories from Steven Utley, Jay Lake, Lou Antonelli, and others did appear there this year, and they seem to be increasing their emphasis on fiction. Short science fiction stories of high-professional quality have even been turning up recently on Salon (www.salon.com) of all places, which this year published good SF stories by Cory Doctorow and William Shunn. Other promising new sites include: The Fortean Bureau – A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.forteanbureau.com/index.html), Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (http://klio.net/abyssandapex), Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), and Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).

  Good original SF and fantasy becomes somewhat hard to find after this point, but there’s quite a lot of good short reprint SF and fantasy out there to be found. For example, most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aurealis, and others, will have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and some of them regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues; SCI FICTION also has a substantial archive of “classic reprints,” as do The Infinite Matrix and Strange Horizons. You can also check out the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which has, in addition to biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays, and a good selection of good-quality reprint stories. All of this stuff is available to be read for free (as long as you’re willing to read it on a computer screen).

  For a small fee, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. One of the best such sites is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), a place where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or PC. In addition to individual stories, you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, as well as a selection of novels in several different genres; more importantly to me, you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines – including Asimov’s Science Fiction – here, in a number of different formats (as you can at the Peanut Press site, www.peanutpress.com). ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com) is a similar site, but here, in addition to the downloadable stuff (both stories and novels) you can buy, you can also access for free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material. Access for a small fee to both original and reprint SF stories is also offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/genres.htm), and Alexandria Digital Literature (http://alexlit.com) as well.

  There’s also a large cluster of general-interest sites that don’t publish fiction but do publish lots of interviews, critical articles, reviews, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. One of the most valuable genre-oriented sites on the entire Internet is Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus; not only do you get fast-breaking news here (in fact, this is often the first place in the entire genre where important stories break), but you can also access an incredible amount of information here, including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive and invaluable database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. Other essential sites include: Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/), more media-and-gaming oriented than Locus Online, but still featuring news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassut, and Wil McCarthy; Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent/), which underwent a fallow period last winter and a change of editorship, but which now seems back on track in providing extensive short-fiction reviews that cover magazines, anthologies, and e-zines, something that’s difficult to find anywhere else in both the print and online worlds; Best SF (www.bestsf.net/), another great review site, and one of the few places, along with Tangent Online, that makes any attempt to regularly review online fiction as well as print fiction; The Internet Review of Science Fiction (http://www.irosf.com) and Lost Pages (http://lostpagesindex.html) are new reviews sites which cover similar territory to Best SF and Tangent Online, while adding articles, interviews, and, in the case of Lost Pages, some fiction as well; SFRevu (http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), is a review site which specializes in media and novel reviews; the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com), which provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION and for Science Fiction Weekly, and to the bi-monthly SF-oriented chats hos
ted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; the SF Site (www.sfsite.com/), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews; but also serves as host-site for the web pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Interzone; SFF NET (http://www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and newsgroups for SF writers, plus sites for genre-oriented live chats; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (http://www.sfwa.org/); where news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), where SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed; multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his fanzine Ansible (www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/), which provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news; and Speculations (www.speculations.com) a long-running site which dispenses writing advice, and writing-oriented news and gossip (although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site).

  Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (http://www.scifi.com/chat/) every other Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST (SCI FICTION chats conducted by Ellen Datlow are also featured on the Sci-Fi Channel at irregular intervals, usually on Thursdays, check the site for details); regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (http://www.cybling.com/); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (http://www.talkcity.com/). Many Bulletin Board Services, such as Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time chats or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate, the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on SFF.Net, and probably on other BBSs as well.