The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Read online

  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 was also a bit weaker this year than last year, but still published good work by D. J. Cockburn, Malcolm Devlin, James Van Pelt, Karl Bunker, John Grant, Suzanne Palmer, Gareth L. Powell, and others. Exact circulation figures are not available, but is guessed to be in the 2,000 copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but of a similar level of professional quality. Interzone and Black Static changed to a smaller trim size in 2011, but maintained their slick look, switching from the old 7 ¾"-by-10 ¾" saddle-stitched semigloss color cover sixty-four-page format to a 6 ½"-by-9 ¼" perfect-bound glossy color cover ninety-six-page format. The editors include publisher Andy Cox and Andrew Hedgecock.

  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 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, N.Y., 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $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, N.Y., 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $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 U.S, $44.97 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 Pounds Sterling each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of 78.00 Pounds Sterling for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.”

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

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  There’s not a whole lot left of the print semiprozine market, although it may be a good sign that hopeful newcomers continue to appear.

  One of these hopeful newcomers is a new SF magazine (available both in electronic formats and print copies), Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, which launched in 2013 and completed its first full year of publication in 2014. So far, the reprints, by people such as Nancy Kress, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Kij Johnson, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, of which there are four in every issue, have been stronger than the original stories, but there has been interesting work by Tobias S. Buckell, Lisa Tang Liu and Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, Tina Gower, Lou J. Berger, and others. A print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue.

  Most of the older print semiprozines had trouble bringing out their scheduled issues, a common problem in that market. The Canadian On Spec, the longest-running of all the print fiction semiprozines, which is edited by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, only brought out three out of four published issues, and is reported to be thinking of switching to a digital online format. Another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, managed only two issues this year. There were two issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, in 2014, and two of Ireland’s long-running Albedo One. Space and Time Magazine managed three issues, and Flytrap and Neo-opsis managed one. We didn’t see an issue of the small British SF magazine Jupiter this year. Tales of the Talisman is going “on hiatus,” as are Science Fiction Trails and Steampunk Trails. Shimmer has transitioned to an online digital format, and long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis has transitioned to a downloadable format. I saw nothing from the revamped version of Weird Tales this year, and suspect that it has died. Bull Spec has transitioned to digital format, and is no longer publishing fiction.

  Most of the stuff published in the surviving print semiprozines this year was relatively minor, with better work appearing in the online magazines (see below).

  With the departure of The New York Review of Science Fiction to the electronic world in mid-2012, there’s really little left of popular print critical magazine market, except for the venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, now in its forty-eighth year of publication. A multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensible source of news, information, and reviews, Locus survived the death of founder, publisher, and longtime editor Charles N. Brown and has continued strongly and successfully under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Jonathan Strahan, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, and many others.

  One of the few other remaining popular critical print magazines is newcomer The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Nisi Shawl, a new feminist print magazine of reviews and critical essays, which published four issues in 2014. The most accessible of the other surviving print critical magazines—most of which are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader—is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation.

  Subscription addresses are: Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $76.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; 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 U.S.A.; On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to 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; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, see Web site www.andromedaspaceways.com for subscription information; The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, subscription and single issues online at www.thecsz.com, $16 annually for a print subscription, print single issues $5, Electronic Subscription—PDF format—$10 per year, electronic single issue, $3, to order by check, make them payable to Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787.

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  The world of online-only electronic magazines now rivals the traditional print market as a place to find good new fiction—in fact, this year, your chances of finding good stories were probably a bit higher in the e-zine market than in the print market.

  Subterranean Magazine (subterr
aneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, is going out on a very strong year that featured good work by K. J. Parker, Rachel Swirsky, Chaz Brenchley, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kat Howard, Eleanor Arnason, Ellen Klages, Karen Joy Fowler, and others. I regret Schafer’s decision to close up shop to concentrate on his Subterranean book line, as the loss of Subterranean Magazine leaves a real hole in the genre market—especially as it was one of the few online markets that was willing to publish novellas and long novelettes. (Oddly, since they don’t have the practical word-length limitations that affect print magazines, little is published in the majority of electronic magazines that isn’t short story length or shorter. In the whole rest of the market, only Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies will occasionally publish novellas.)

  The electronic magazine Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace also had a good year, publishing strong work by Michael Swanwick, Ken Liu, Susan Palwick, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Robert Reed, An Owomoyela, James Patrick Kelly, and others. They also host monthly podcasts of stories drawn from each issue. Clarkesworld has won three Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine. Last year, Clarkesworld coeditor Sean Wallace, along with Jack Fisher, launched a new online horror magazine, The Dark (thedarkmagazine.com).

  Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, featured strong work by Carrie Vaughn, Matthew Hughes, Jessica Barber, Anaea Lay, Theodora Goss, Sunny Moraine, Sarah Pinsker, An Owomoyela, Rhonda Eikamp, Kris Millering, Linda Nagata, and others. Lightspeed won its first Hugo Award as Best Semiprozine this year. Late in 2013, a new electronic companion horror magazine, Nightmare (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by John Joseph Adams, was added to the Lightspeed stable.

  Tor.com (www.tor.com), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published some first-class work by Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, Elizabeth Bear, Nicola Griffith, Jo Walton, Harry Turtledove, Bruce McAllister, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Veronica Schanoes, and others.

  Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the Internet, started in 2000, had a change of editorial staff this year. Longtime editors Jed Hartman and Susan Marie Groppi stepped down in 2013; the new editor-in-chief there is Niall Harrison, with Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and An Owomoyela as fiction editors. This year, they had strong work by Indrapramit Das, Marissa Lingen, Rich Larson, Ann Leckie, Sunny Moraine, Malcolm Cross, Alyssa Wong, Sarah Brooks, and others.

  Longtime print semiprozine Electric Velocipede, edited by John Klima, which had transitioned to online-only format, finally gave up the ghost late in 2013. There is a retrospective anthology this year, drawn from work published in the magazine, The Best of Electric Velocipede (Fairwood Press).

  Apex Magazine (www.apex-magazine.com) had good work by Rich Larson, Marissa Lingen, Seth Dickinson, Caroline M. Yoachim, Sunny Moraine, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, replacing Sigrid Ellis, who took over from Lynne M. Thomas.

  Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by Rich Larson, Fran Wilde, John C. Wright, Rati Mehrotra, and others. New editor Carmelo Rafala stepped down to be replaced by the former longtime editor, Wendy S. Delmater, who returned to the helm.

  An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, ran good stuff by K. J. Parker, Richard Parks, Aliette de Bodard, Gregory Norman Bossert, Gemma Files, M. Bennardo, and others.

  Long-running sword and sorcery print magazine Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill, transitioned into an electronic magazine in September of 2012 and can be found at www.blackgate.com. They no longer regularly run new fiction, although they will be regularly refreshing their nonfiction content, essays and reviews, and the occasional story will continue to appear.

  The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos (www.cosmosmagazine.com) is not an SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their Web site). They seem to have published less fiction this year than before, but good stuff by Ken Liu, Sean Williams, Greg Mellor, and others appeared there this year. The fiction editor is SF writer Cat Sparks.

  Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF, by Arkady Martine, Michael J. DeLuca, Maya Surya Pillay, and others.

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, ran interesting stuff from Alex Shvartsman, James Van Pelt, Bud Webster, Gareth D. Jones, and others.

  SF/fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, many of these were not really up to professional standards, but there were some good stories here and there by Ken Liu, Eric Brown, James Van Pelt, Edoardo Albert, Marissa Lingen, Kelly Jennings, M. Bennardo, Anatoly Belilovsky, and others. Editors there are Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

  GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), now edited by Rashida J. Smith, taking over from Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Patricia Russo, A. C. Wise, Vanessa Fogg, Rachel Sobel, and others.

  An audacious newcomer is Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, which launched in late 2014 with good work by Christopher Barzak, Amelia Beamer, Ken Liu, and others. Other newcomers are Straeon 1 (www.rampantloonmedia.com), edited by M. David Blake, Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform), edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant, Child of Words (www.bigpulp.com), edited by Bill Olver, and Omenana (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Mazi Nwonwu, as well as relative newcomers Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, Shimmer (www.shimmerzine.com), edited by Beth Wodzinski, which transitioned to digital format in 2014, and Crossed Genres (www.crossedgenres.com), edited by Bart R. Leib, Kay T. Holt, and Kelly Jennings.

  The World SF Blog (worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, was a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also published news, links, roundtable discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.” The site is no longer being updated, but an extensive archive is still accessible there.

  A similar site is International Speculative Fiction (internationalSF.wordpress.com), edited by Roberto Mendes.

  Weird Fiction Review (weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

  The (sort of) relaunch of Amazing Stories (amazingstoriesmag.com), edited by Steve Davidson, seems to be mostly a multicontributor blog, publishing reviews, interviews, and essays, but fiction only occasionally.

  Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, with most magazines featuring slipstream or literary surrealism instead. Such sites include Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com), Fireside Magazine (www.firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White, Interfictions Online (interfictions.com), edited by Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron, and Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (www.newworlds.co.uk), edited by Roger Gray.

  But in addition to original work, there’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy to be found on Internet. Sites where you can access formerly published stories for free include Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, and most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonf
iction available for access on their sites as well, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), and a large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus (www.infinityplus.co.uk) and The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible (an extensive line of new Infinity Plus Books can also be ordered from the Infinity Plus site).

  There are plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet, though, other than looking for SF stories to read. There are many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, 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. The previously mentioned Tor.com is also one of the most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that, in addition to its fiction, regularly publishes articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, book “rereads” and episode-by-episode “rewatches” of television shows, as well as commentary on all the above. The long-running and eclectic The New York Review of Science Fiction has ceased print publication, but can be purchased in PDF, epub, mobi formats, and POD editions through Weightless Press (weightlessbooks.com; see also www.nyrsf.com for information). Other major general-interest sites include io9 (www.io9.com), SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com), SF Site (www.sfsite.com), although it’s no longer being regularly updated, SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.org.uk), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), The Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (www.bookotron.com/agony), SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (sfreader.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com). A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk). Another fantastic research site is the searchable online update of the Hugo-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sf-encyclopedia.com), where you can access almost four million words of information about SF writers, books, magazines, and genre themes. Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus and Locus Online, but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf.net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com). Other sites of interest include: Ansible (news.ansible.co.uk), the online version of multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Book View Café (www.bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors,” including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zettel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a Web site where work by them—mostly reprints, and some novel excerpts—is made available for free.