The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24 Read online

  The whole either/or thing is a false dichotomy anyway. The truth is, only a very few purists will insist on buying exclusively in one format. Most readers will buy both print books and e-books, choosing one or the other depending on the circumstances.

  Nevertheless, as I’ve been predicting for several years now, there are big changes on the horizon (mostly changes for the better, I think, with any luck), and the whole publishing world may look very different a decade from now.

  Although I suspect that the boardrooms at many a publishing house were filled with executives panicking over the “sudden surprise” explosion in popularity of e-books that many commentators have seen coming for almost a decade now, the genre publishing world was relatively quiet on the surface in 2010, although the possible collapse of the bookstore chain Borders, which tottered on the brink of bankruptcy throughout the year and filed for chapter 11 on February 16, 2011, could have serious repercussions for the publishing industry as a whole. Random House Publishing Group continued the major structural reorganizations that started in 2008 by merging the Ballantine and Bantam Dell divisions into a single group called Ballantine Bantam Dell, combining the two independent editorial departments into one. Ballantine senior vice president and publisher Libby McGuire will run the new division, overseeing hardcover and mass-market paperback publications from DelRey/Spectra, Ballantine, Bantam, Delacorte, Dell, Villard, and other imprints. Trade paperback publications will continue to be overseen by Jane von Mehren, senior vice-president of trade paperbacks. Nina Taublib, former executive vice-president, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Bantam Dell, has stepped down. Jennifer Hershey has become editor-in-chief of the new Ballantine Bantam Dell group. Eos, the SF imprint of HarperCollins, will be renamed Harper Voyager in January 2011, bringing it into line with the Voyager programs in Australia and the United Kingdom; Diana Gill of Eos will remain executive editor of Harper Voyager in the United States.

  Prominent British editor Jo Fletcher, longtime associate publisher of Gollancz, left the company to join Quercus, where she will run her own SF/fantasy/horror imprint, Jo Fletcher Books. Angry Robot Books, the imprint of HarperCollins UK, started in 2009, parted ways with its parent company and became an independent imprint of Osprey Publishing, a nonfiction press that currently specializes in military history and wants to expand into the science fiction and fantasy market; founder and publisher Marc Gascoigne will remain in charge. Ian Randal Strock purchased SF/fantasy imprint Fantastic Books from Wilder Publications; Fantastic Books will now be an imprint of Strock’s Gray Rabbit Publications, and Douglas Cohen, Darrell Schweitzer, and David Truesdale will remain as acquiring editors. Dorchester decided to give up print publishing entirely and become a digital-only publisher, then reversed the decision early in 2011 under a new CEO, and will add a full trade paperback line, Dorchester Trade Publishing, in addition to its e-publishing program.

  It was, thankfully, a quiet year in the long-troubled print magazine market, with even a few minor bits of encouraging news here and there, mostly an increase in subscriptions sold for electronic reading devices like the Kindle, the iPad, and the NOOK. All of the major print magazines survived the year, with the exception of Realms of Fantasy, which had died and been reborn under a different publisher the previous year, and which died again in 2010 – only to be reborn again under yet another new publisher, with the editorial staff intact.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction again published a lot of good fantasy this year, but only occasionally a strong SF story. Good stories by Robert Reed, Ian R. MacLeod, Steven Popkes, Paul Park, James L. Cambias, Albert E. Cowdrey, Rachel Pollack, Aaron Schultz, Ian Tregillis, and others appeared in F&SF in 2010. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction mostly remained stable, registering only a slight 2.1 percent loss in overall circulation, from 15,491 to 15,172, with subscriptions dropping from 12,045 to 10,907, but newsstand sales rising from 3,446 to 4,264; sell-through rose from 37 percent to 42 percent. Gordon Van Gelder is in his fourteenth year as editor and his tenth year as owner and publisher.

  Asimov’s Science Fiction was once again almost the reverse of F&SF, publishing a lot of good SF, but not as much good fantasy. Good stories by Robert Reed, Geoffrey A. Landis, Michael Swanwick, Tom Purdom, Felicity Shoulders, Allen M. Steele, Steven Popkes, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Rick Wilber, and others appeared in Asimov’s in 2009. For the first time since 2001, Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a gain in overall circulation, up 26.1 percent from 16,696 to 21,057. Subscriptions rose from 13,731 to 17,866, a substantial part of that due to digital copies sold for e-readers through devices such as the Kindle; perhaps electronic subscriptions will be the saving of the print SF magazines after all, as I’ve been suggesting they might be for several years now. Newsstand sales dipped a bit, from 2,965 to 2,781; sell-through stayed steady at 31 percent. Sheila Williams completed her sixth year as Asimov’s editor.

  Analog Science Fiction and Fact had a somewhat weak year, although good work by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael F. Flynn, Allen M. Steele, Stephen Baxter, Brenda Cooper, Sean McMullen, and others did appear. Analog Science Fiction and Fact registered a 4 percent rise in overall circulation, from 25,418 to 26,440, with subscriptions rising from 21,636 to 22,791, also largely because of digital sales. Newsstand sales dropped from 3,782 to 3,359; sell-through dropped from 34 percent to 32 percent. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there for thirty-three years, and 2010 marked the magazine’s eightieth anniversary.

  Interzone is technically not a “professional magazine,” by the definition of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), because of its low rates and circulation, but the literary quality of the work published there is so high that it would be ludicrous to omit it. Interzone also had a strong year, publishing good work by Nina Allan, Lavie Tidhar, Jim Hawkins, Aliette de Bodard, Jay Lake, Mercurio D. Rivera, Matthew Cook, and others. Circulation there seems to have held steady, in the 3,000-copy range. The editors include publisher Andy Cox and Andy Hedgecock. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes the straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but of a similar level of professional quality.

  Realms of Fantasy managed six issues under new publisher Tir Na Nog publications, who’d acquired them in 2009 after the magazine had been cancelled by longtime publisher Sovereign Media, before dying again in 2010 – only to be rescued again by another new publisher, Damnation Books, who plans to resume publishing it in 2011. Founding editor Shawna McCarthy, who has edited the magazine since 1994, will remain editor of Realms of Fantasy in its new incarnation. Good stuff appeared here in 2010 by Jay Lake, Aliette de Bodard, Harlan Ellison, M. K. Hobson, T. L. Morganfield, and others.

  The British magazine Postscripts has reinvented itself as an anthology, and is reviewed as such in the anthology section that follows, but I’ll list the subscription information up here, for lack of anywhere else to put it, and, because, unlike most other anthology series, you can subscribe to Postscripts.

  If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, something that these days can be done with just the click of a few buttons, nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com) and Amazon (www.amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle, NOOK, or iPad. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible.

  So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do, and there
’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352 – $34.97 for annual subscription in the United States, $44.97 overseas. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352 – $34.97 for annual subscription in the United States, $44.97 overseas. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, N.J. 07030, annual subscription – $34.97 in the United States, $46.97 overseas. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK – £42.00 each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of £78.00 for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.”

  Most of these magazines are also available in various electronic formats through Fictionwise, or for the Kindle and other handheld readers.

  The print semiprozine market continues to contract, vulnerable to the same pressures in terms of rising postage rates and production costs as the professional magazines are. In 2009, Subterranean, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Magazine, and Zahir all transitioned from print formats to electronic-only online formats, and I suspect that most of the surviving print semiprozines will sooner or later go the same route themselves.

  The most prominent of the surviving print semiprozines, in terms of the quality of the fiction they publish, may be Weird Tales, Black Gate, and Electric Velocipede. Weird Tales is a fine-looking magazine, with a coolness quotient higher than most other magazines in the field, but they again managed only two of their scheduled four quarterly issues in 2010, as they had in 2009, and they need to work on the reliability of their publishing schedule if they’re to become a major player. Ann VanderMeer is now the editor, promoted from fiction editor at the beginning of 2010, and Weird Tales published good work this year by Ian R. MacLeod, Aidan Doyle, Catherynne M. Valente, and others. The sword and sorcery magazine Black Gate managed only one issue this year, although it was a double issue, even huger than their issues usually are, featuring strong stuff by James Enge, Robert J. Howe, Michael Jasper, Jay Lake, and others; the longtime editor is John O’Neill. Electric Velocipede, edited by John Klima, managed only one of its scheduled four issues in 2010, with interesting work by Cyril Simsa, Daniel Braum, and others.

  The longest running of all the fiction semiprozines, and the most reliably published, one of the few that kept to its announced publishing schedule, is the Canadian On Spec, which is edited by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton. Once again, I found the fiction here mostly kind of bland, although there was interesting work by Toni Pi, Marissa K. Lingen, and Tina Connolly that did appear. Another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which is usually a bit livelier than On Spec, published seven issues this year, running good stuff by Karl Bunker, Janeen Samuel, Ferrett Steinmetz, and others.

  There were two issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. The Australian magazine Aurealis, edited by Stuart Mayne, who is stepping down in 2011, also produced two issues, as did Ireland’s long-running Albedo One, and the fantasy magazine Shimmer. The small British SF magazine Jupiter, edited by Ian Redman, produced all four of its scheduled issues in 2010. Fantasy magazine Tales of the Talisman put out four issues, the long-running Space and Time Magazine produced three, and a new start-up SF magazine, Bull Spec, produced two. There were single issues of Neo-opsis, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Sybil’s Garage, the South African magazine Something Wicked, Space Squid, and Tales of the Unanticipated.

  There’s not much of the print critical magazine market left – many of them have either died or moved onto the Web in electronic format, something I suspect will happen to most of them sooner or later. One of the hearty survivors, the best of them and certainly your best bet for value, is the newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo winner, which for more than thirty years has been an indispensable source of news, information, and reviews. Sadly, founder, publisher, and longtime editor Charles N. Brown died in 2009, but Locus has continued strongly and successfully under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Amelia Beamer, and many others. The New York Review of Science Fiction, a critical magazine edited by David G. Hartwell and a staff of associate editors, is another hearty perennial, which has been reliably publishing a variety of eclectic and sometimes quirky critical essays on a wide range of topics for many years now.

  Most of the other surviving print critical magazines are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader. The most accessible of these is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation.

  Subscription addresses follow:

  Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $72.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction. Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570, $40.00 per year, twelve issues, make checks payable to “Dragon Press”; Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in the United States; Weird Tales, $20.00 in the United States, $40 elsewhere for four issues, go to Wildside Press, www.wildsidemagazine.com/Weird-Tales to subscribe; Realms of Fantasy, $19.95 for a yearly (six issues) subscription in the United States, overseas $34.95, go to www.rofmag.com for subscription information; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four issues) subscription; Aurealis, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia (Web site: www.aurealis.com.au), $59.75 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, checks should be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian dollars; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to the Web site www.onspec.ca; Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $25.00 for a three-issue subscription; Albedo One. Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk Co., Dublin, Ireland, $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One” or pay by PayPal at www.albedo1.com; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; Electric Velocipede, Spilt Milk Press, see Web site www.electricvelocipede.com for subscription information; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, see Web site www.andromedaspaceways.com for subscription information; Tales of the Talisman, Hadrosaur Productions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 8804-2194, $24.00 for a four-issue subscription; Jupiter, 19 Bedford Road, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, £10 for four issues; Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Greatest Uncommon Denominator Publishing, P.O. Box 1537, Laconia, NH 03247, $18 for two issues; Sybil’s Garage, Senses Five Press, 76 India Street, Apt A8, Brooklyn, NY 11222-1657, no subscription information available but try the Web site www.sensesfive.com; Shimmer, P.O. Box 58591, Salt Lake City, UT 84158-0591, $22.00 for a four-issue subscription; Space Squid, no subscription address available, but you could try [email protected]; Something Wicked, no subscription address available, try www.somethingwicked.co.za; Bull Spec, P.O. Box 13146, Durham, N.C. 27709, doesn’t seem to be available for subscription, but find it in your local book or comic shop or online at www.bullspec.com.

  The online world of electronic magazines becomes more important with every passing year. Already they’re a more reliable place to find quality fiction than most of the semiprozine market, and they’re giving the top print professional
magazines a run for their money too, and sometimes beating them. It was a year of relatively few changes in the online market. Jim Baen’s Universe died after its April issue, a major disappointment; on the other hand, a new magazine, Lightspeed, was founded, and has already established itself as a major source of good fiction.

  The best stuff on the Internet this year was probably to be found at Subterranean Magazine (www.subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, with one issue guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan. Lots of superior work, both science fiction and fantasy, appeared there this year by Damien Broderick, Hannu Rajaniemi, Maureen McHugh, Rachel Swirsky, K. J. Parker, Ted Chiang, Lucius Shepard, Kage Baker, Mike Resnick, and others. Subterranean is particularly to be commended for publishing several strong novellas, a rare length in the Internet world, where most stories tend to be short.

  Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Sean Wallace and publisher and editor Neil Clarke, also had a good year, publishing strong SF, fantasy, and slipstream stories by Peter Watts, Robert Reed, Brenda Cooper, Yoon Ha Lee, Jay Lake, Eric Brown, and others. Sean Wallace stepped down as editor in November 2010.

  Sean Wallace is also stepping down as editor of Fantasy Magazine (www.fantasy-magazine.com), as is co-editor Cat Rambo; they will be replaced by John Joseph Adams, who is also editing Lightspeed. Fantasy Magazine ran good stuff this year, mostly straight genre fantasy, with a little slipstream thrown in and even the occasional SF story, by Lavie Tidhar, Sarah Monette, Rachel Swirsky, Tony Pi, Aidan Doyle, Eilis O’Neal, Matthew Johnson, An Owomoyela, Jay Lake, Shannon Page, and others.