The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Read online

  Last year I wondered whether Jupiter was dead, but it’s still very much alive. Alchemy did die this year, though, after publishing a final issue. Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society has also died, and although no official announcements have been made, I strongly suspect that Century, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, and Spectrum SF are also dead, to the point where I’m no longer going to bother to list subscription addresses for them.

  With the possible implosion of Chronicle (I haven’t seen a copy in months), there’s not really much left of the critical magazine market, other than professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader. The sturdy survivors, both long-running and reliably published magazines, and both well worth reading, are Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo winner edited by Charles N. Brown and an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews for anyone interested in the science fiction field, and David G. Hartwell’s The New York Review of Science Fiction, which publishes eclectic and sometime quirky critical essays on a variety of academic and pop-culture subjects relating to the genre, as well as reading lists, letters, memoirs, and japes of various sorts.

  Subscription addresses follow:

  Postscripts, PS Publishing, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, England, UK, published quarterly, £30 to £50 outside the UK {Postscripts can also be subscribed to online at www.pspublishing.co.uk/postscripts.asp); Subterranean, Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519, four-issue subscription (U.S.), $22, four-issue subscription (int’l), $36 (Subterranean can also be subscribed to online at www.subterraneanpress.com); Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $66 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $38 per year, make checks payable to “Dragon Press,” 12 issues; Black Static, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK, $36 for a six-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; Talebones, A Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, $20 for four issues; Aurealis, P.O. Box 2164, Mount Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia (Web site: www.aurealis.com.au), $50 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $24 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $28 Canadian for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co. Dublin, Ireland; $39.50 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One”; Tales of the Unanticipated, P.O. Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $28 for a four-issue subscription (three or four years’ worth) in the U.S., $31 in Canada, $34 overseas; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, Prospect Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060, $16 for four issues; Say…, The Fortress of Worlds, P.O. Box 1304, Lexington, KY 40588-1304, $10 for two issues in the U.S. and Canada; Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, Conical Hats Press, 622 West Cottom Avenue, New Albany, IN 47150-5011, $12 for a three-issue subscription; Flytrap, Tropism Press, P.O. Box 13322, Berkeley, CA 94712-4222, $16 for four issues, checks to Heather Shaw; Electric Velocipede, Spilt Milk Press, P.O. Box 663, Franklin Park, NJ 08823, www.electricvelocipede.com, $15 for a four-issue subscription; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 127, Belmont, Western Australia, 6984, www.andromedaspaceways.com, $35 for a one-year subscription; Tales of the Talisman, Hadrosaur Productions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194, $24 for a four-issue subscription; Space and Time, The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction, 1380 Centennial Avenue, Ste. 101, Piscataway, NJ 08854, $10 for a one-year (two-issue) subscription; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box 22897, Brooklyn, NY 11202-2897, $25 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription, checks or U.S. postal money orders should be made payable to Paradox, can also be ordered online at www.paradoxmag.com; Fantasy Magazine, Wildside Press, Sean Wallace, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850, annual subscription—four issues—$20 in the U.S., $25 Canada and overseas; Weird Tales, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850, annual subscription—four issues—$24 in the U.S., H.P. Lovecraffs Magazine of Horror, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850, annual subscription—four issues—$19.95 in the U.S.; Fictitious Force, Jonathan Laden, 1024 Hollywood Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20904, $16 for four issues; Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Apex Publications, 4629 Riverman Way, Lexington, KY 40515, $18 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Jupiter, 19 Bedford Road, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, £10 for four issues; New Genre, P.O. Box 270092, West Hartford, CT 06127, couldn’t find any specific subscription information in the magazine itself, but check www.new-genre.com for details; Argosy Magazine, Coppervale International, P.O. Box 1421, Taylor, Arizona, 85939, $49.95 for a six-issue subscription; Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Dreams of Decadence, Chronicle—all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988, all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, although you can get a group subscription to four DNA fiction magazines for $60 a year, with Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications.”

  Actually, if you were looking for good stories this year, especially for good core science fiction, outside of the major professional magazines, you were probably better off turning to the increasingly important Internet scene than to the original anthology market. The online magazine Jim Baen’s Universe (www.baensuniverse.com) made a very strong debut this year (sadly, and ironically, the same year that its founder died), publishing some of the year’s best science fiction by Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Jay Lake and Ruth Nest void, and John Barnes, as well as good stuff by Lawrence Person, Charles Stross, Garth Nix, and others, and strong fantasy stories by John Barnes, Elizabeth Bear, Eric Witchery, Marissa Lingen, and others. Eric Flint has been the editor, and although he’ll stay on to supervise, early in 2007 it was announced that Mike Resnick will take over as managing editor, probably a good sign since Resnick is one of the shrewdest professionals in the business. It’s too early to say whether Jim Baen’s Universe will ultimately be commercially successful enough to be viable, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for it, since it’s an extremely important new market. Another newly launched online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), has not as yet been as impressive, although it may now be beginning to hit its stride under the leadership of new editor Edmund Schubert, publishing good stuff by Tim Pratt and Card himself. Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), one of the longest-established fiction sites on the Internet, had a good year, publishing strong work by Benjamin Rosenbaum, A. M. Dellamonica, Sarah Monette, Jamie Barras, Elizabeth Bear, and others, as did another newish electronic magazine (which is available for download through subscription rather than being directly accessible online), AEon (www.aeonmagazine.com), where good work by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Daniel Marcus, Ken Scholes, Jay Lake, Bruce McAllister, and others appeared. (Being a grumpy old dinosaur, I still would be happier if markets such as AEon and Strange Horizons and print magazines such as Postscripts published less slipstream/surrealism and horror and more actual science fiction, but discounting the genre classification issue, the quality of the stories themselves is usually quite high in all of them.) Remember that Subterranean (http://subterraneanpress.com) is in the process of converting itself to an online e-magazine, with a novella by Lucius Shepard already up and available to be read on the site; there’ll be more stuff there as the year progresses and as the print version is gradually phased out. Two new e-zines dedicated to publishing eccentric, offbeat, and “controversial
” work that the regular genre markets are supposedly too timid to accept appeared this year, and each produced its first two issues, William Sanders’s Helix (www.helixsf.com), which produced good stuff by Peg Robinson, Janis Ian, Beth Bernobich, Sanders himself, and others, and Rudy Rucker’s Flurb (www.flurb.net), which had one of the year’s best stories, by Cory Doctorow, as well as good stuff by Terry Bisson, Richard Kadrey, Charles Stross, Paul Di Filippo, Rucker himself, and others. New site Clarkesworld Magazine (www.clarkesworld-magazine.com) has to date published mostly fantasy, and rather sexually explicit fantasy at that, but is attracting high-level professional writers and is another site to watch. The SF stories published in the Australian science magazine Cosmos, selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick, are now also available online at the Cosmos site (www.cosmos-magazine.com). Then there are the online equivalents of the print “minuscule press” slipstream magazines, sites that often publish fiction of high professional quality, although only rarely any core science fiction: Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), Fortean Bureau—A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.forteanbureau.com/index.html), Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.abyssandapex.com ); Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com ); Futurismic (www.futurismic.com/fiction/index.html), Lone Star Stories (http://literary.erictmarin.com); Chiaroscura (http://chizine.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).

  Oceans of the Mind, another solid e-magazine, unfortunately went “on hiatus” this year, probably never to return. The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) remains dead, alas, but the corpse continues to twitch in its coffin, with new content still being posted from time to time, including an alternate history story by Andy Hooper in 2006 and a major novella by Cory Doctorow in early 2007.

  Many good reprint SF and fantasy stories can also be found on the Internet. Sites where reprint stories can be accessed for free include the British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus), which has a wide selection of good-quality reprint stories, in addition to biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays; Strange Horizons; and most of the sites that are associated with existing print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and which regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Even sites such as SCI FICTION (www.scifi.com/scifiction) and The Infinite Matrix, which are ostensibly dead, have substantial archives of past material that you can access. A large selection of novels and a few collections can be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library).

  For a small fee, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. Perhaps the best such site is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer, 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, and you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com); 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.

  There are also many general genre-related sites of interest to be found on the Internet, sites that publish reviews, interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Perhaps the most valuable genre-oriented site on the entire Internet is Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, an indispensable site that is not only often the first place in the genre to find fast-breaking news, but a place where you can access an incredible amount of information, including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive 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 (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 (www. tangentonline.com), one of the few places on the Internet where you can access a lot of short fiction reviews; Best SF (www.bestsf.net), another great review site, and one of the other few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues; SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), a review site that specializes in media and novel reviews; the SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, 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 (www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; The Internet Review of Science Fiction (www.irosf.com), which features both short fiction reviews and novel reviews, as well as critical articles, Green Man Review (www.greenmanreview.com), another valuable review site; The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), media and book reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), more literary and media reviews; SFReader (www.sfreader.com), which features reviews of SF books, and SFWatcher (www.sfwatcher.com), which features reviews of SF movies; newcomer SFScope (www.sfscope.com), edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock, which concentrates on SF and writing business news; SciFiPedia (http://scifipedia.scifi.com), a wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia; and Speculations (www.speculations.com), a long-running site that dispenses writing advice and writing-oriented news and gossip (although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site). Multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s online version of his funny and iconoclastic fanzine Ansible is available at http://news.ansible.co.uk, and SF-oriented radio plays and podcasts can also be accessed at Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com).

  There were a number of good, solid, worth-your-money anthologies in both SF and fantasy this year, although no one volume in either genre that was strong enough to clearly establish dominance.

  The two strongest contenders for the title of best original SF anthology of the year both had the same title, oddly enough. Of the two, Forbidden Planets (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther, probably has a slight edge, with a number of strong stories, although several of them are slightly handicapped, in my opinion, by directly referencing the 1956 movie of the same title as either homage or parody—potentially a weakness for a generation of readers who might not even have seen it. Still, there is fine stuff here by Alastair Reynolds, Paul Di Filippo, Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley, Matthew Hughes, Stephen Baxter, and others. The year’s other Forbidden Planets anthology, this one a Science Fiction Book Club original edited by Marvin Kaye, is considerably more straightforward and less postmodern, dealing with the theme in general terms rather than tying it specifically to the movie, with no elements of satire or homage. The best stories here is by Robert Reed, but there are also strong stories by Allen M. Steele, Nancy Kress, Jack McDevitt, Alan Dean Foster, and Julie E. Czerneda. Perhaps our expectations were too high, but Futureshocks (Roc), edited by Lou Anders, whose Live Without a Net had been the best original SF anthology of 2003, was a bit of a disappointment when compared with that earlier anthology; it’s still a good, solid anthology, well worth reading, but somehow few of the stories here, although competent and entertaining, rise to really first-rate, award-quality levels. The best story here, by a fair margin, is by Robert Charles Wilson, but there is also good work by Paul Melko, Caitlin R
. Kiernan, Howard V. Hendrix, Chris Roberson, Sean McMullen, and others. The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, is mostly a reprint anthology (and a very good one, too, featuring strong reprints from Ian McDonald, Greg Egan, Theodore Sturgeon, James Patrick Kelly, Alastair Reynolds, Harlan Ellison, and others), but it does also feature good original stories by Stephen Baxter, Robert Reed, and Jerry Oltion, with the Baxter in particular being one of the year’s best. Millennium 3001 (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, is a cut above the average Greenberg original anthology; no award winners, but satisfying work by Keith Ferrell and Jack Dann, Brian Stableford, Allen M. Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others. Cosmic Cocktails (DAW), edited by Denise Little, is pleasant but minor, a collection of funny SF stories about bars, a curious subgenre that surfaces every once in awhile (I wrote one myself once).

  Noted without comment are One Million A.D. (SFBC), edited by Gardner Dozois, another collection of original novellas from the SF Hook Club, and Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space (SFBC), an original Young Adult SF anthology edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

  A number of good novellas were published as individual chapbooks this year as well. The best was probably Julian: A Christmas Story, by Robert Charles Wilson, from PS Publishing, but PS also published first-rate novellas such as The Voyage of Night Shining White, by Chris Roberson, Flavors of My Genius, by Robert Reed, On the Overgrown Path, by David Herter, and Christmas Inn, by Gene Wolfe. Subterranean Press brought out A Soul in a Bottle, by Tim Powers and Missile Gap, by Charles Stross. Sandstone Press brought out The Highway Men, by Ken MacLeod. Many short-story collections are publishing heretofore unpublished work these days; this was particularly true of Alastair Reynold’s two collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories, but also true of a number of other collections, including Elizabeth Bear’s The Chains That You Refuse, Kage Baker’s Dark Mondays, and Stephen Baxter’s Resplendent.