The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Read online

  The lively little Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF has published so much good professional-quality work over the last three years, including good stories this year by Colin P. Davies, Eric Brown, Chris Lawson, Adam Roberts, and the serialization of Charles Stress’s novel The Atrocity Archive, that I’m listing it here with the professional magazines, rather than in the semiprozine section, where its circulation by rights ought to put it. Unfortunately, not all is well at Spectrum SF; they managed to produce only two out of a scheduled four issues this year, and in the most recent issue, editor Paul Fraser announced that in the future, due to financial difficulties and constraints on his time, Spectrum SF is going to be an “occasional” magazine, cut-back from its quarterly schedule to appearing perhaps a couple of times a year. I’m not sure how much practical difference this really makes, since the magazine never came remotely close to keeping its schedule anyway, but it would be a shame if Fraser became even more discouraged and threw in the towel altogether. So everyone, write lots of encouraging letters to Paul, with even more encouraging subscription money folded inside, because science fiction needs as many markets of this caliber as it can get; this little magazine publishes a disproportionate share of the year’s good fiction every year, and it would be a shame to lose it.

  A new British magazine started up this year, 3SF, edited by Liz Holliday, the former editor of Odyssey magazine, which died several years back. The first issue was released in 2002. It’s a nice-looking magazine, with a range of interviews, book reviews, media reviews, and interesting articles on such offbeat topics as alternate history and the fate of English political refugees in eleventh-century Russia. The weakest part of the magazine to date, in fact, is the fiction—issue one features solid talents such as Richard Parks, Jay Lake, and Lawrence Watt-Evans, but nothing here rises much above average—competent, certainly nowhere near the level of the first-rate stuff that has been appearing in Spectrum SF. Let’s hope they can bring the quality of the fiction up in subsequent issues; certainly they have some very talented writers announced as appearing in upcoming issues: a good sign. We should all wish them well, as the field really does need as many viable short-fiction markets as it can get.

  Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, annual subscription—$38.97 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO, 80322-4033—$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S., Analog, Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO, 80323—$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom—$60.00 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 U.S.; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, P.O. Box 10308, Aberdeen, ABU 6ZR, United Kingdom—17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum Publishing”; 3SF, Big Engine Co., Ltd, P.O. Box 185, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 1GR—$45.00 for a six-issue (one year) overseas subscription, or subscribe online at www.3SFmag.co.uk. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various Web sites.

  The internet scene evolves with such lightning speed, with new e-magazines and internet sites of general interest being born and dying in what seems a blink of the eye, that it remains possible that everything I say about it here will be obsolete by the time this book makes it into print and gets out on a bookshelf somewhere where you can buy it. The only way you can be sure to keep up with the online world is to check out what’s happening there yourself, and keep checking frequently.

  Once again this year, one of the major players in the whole genre short-fiction market, not just the online segment of it, was Hugo-winner Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction page on the internet (www.scifi.com/scifiction/), a fiction site within the larger umbrella of The Sci-Fi Channel site, which published (or “published,” if you insist) a lot of the year’s best fiction, including stories by Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Alex Irvine, Paul McAuley, Steven Popkes, James Van Pelt, Terry Bisson, and others. The site also features classic reprints, and a different original short-short story by Michael Swanwick every week.

  Although Sci Fiction is no doubt your best bet on the Internet for good short fiction, it’s not the only place to look. Eileen Gunn’s The Infinite Matrix page (www.infinite matrix.net) also published literate and quirky fiction of high quality this year by Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Michael Swanwick, Walter Jon Williams, John Kessel, Maureen F. McHugh, Neal Barrett, Jr., John Varley, and others. The site also features a weblog from Bruce Sterling, a daily feature by Terry Bisson, a series of short-shorts from Richard Kadrey and the indefatigable Michael Swanwick, reviews by John Clute, and other neat stuff. (How long it will survive is, alas, another question; they’re running low on money again, after a grant from an unnamed benefactor kept them going throughout 2002, and have resorted to trying Public Television-style campaign-drives, offering offbeat prizes in return for contributions; let’s hope it works!) The Strange Horizons site (www.strangehorizons.com) is also worth checking out; as well as reprints, reviews, and articles, they run lots of original science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, and mild horror stories—I tend to like their fantasy better than their science fiction, but they published good stories of all sorts this year by Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ellen Klages, Tim Pratt, Ruth Nestvold, Greg Van Eekhout, Michael J. Jasper, Karen L. Abrahamson, and others. Another site where professional-quality stories can be found is at Oceans of the Mind (www.trantor publications.com/oceans.htm), where they’ll sell you an electronic download of one of their four annual issues as a PDF file to be read on your home computer or PDA; they ran good stories last year by Richard Paul Russo, Ryck Neube, John Alfred Taylor, Michelle Sahara, among others, and an additional point in their favor is that most of the stuff seems to be core science fiction (for some reason, original science fiction is relatively hard to find on the Internet, although you can find slipstream and horror by the ton; in fact, slipstream and horror (particularly horror) seem to be the Internet default-setting, as far as original short fiction is concerned). Another promising site, Future Orbits (www.futureorbits.com), which ran on the same principal as Oceans of the Mind, died this year after only having been introduced last year, showing you how quickly things can turnover in the online world.

  A site called Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), also publishes some original fiction, although the bulk of its space is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, essays, and interviews; the quality of the fiction has been uneven, but some quite interesting stuff has appeared there this year, including stories by Steven Utley, David Hutchinson, and Chris Nakashima-Brown. Short science fiction stories have even been turning up on Salon (www.salon.com) of all places, which has so far published two good SF stories by Cory Doctorow.

  Below this point, it becomes difficult to find short original science fiction of any sort of reasonably professional quality on the Internet. Good short reprint SF, though, is not at all hard to find. For starters, 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 appearing in forthcoming issues. Another great place to read reprint stories for free (although you have to read them on the screen) is the British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good quality reprint stories, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. And don’t forget that extensive archive of classic reprint stories at Sci Fiction that I mentioned, or the archived backlog of stories at The Infinite Matrix and Strange Horizons, all available to be read for free.
r />   If you’re willing to pay a small fee, though, you can access an even greater range of reprint stories, some of which have been unavailable anywhere else for years. Perhaps the best site to do this at is at Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com). Unlike a site like Sci Fiction or The Infinite Matrix, Fictionwise is not an “electronic magazine,” but rather a place to buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer—and it’s probably the best place on the Internet to do this (as far as accessing good science fiction is concerned), with most of the stuff of high professional quality. 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 important 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). Another similar site where you can buy downloadable e-books of various lengths by top authors is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com). But here, as at a site like Infinity Plus, you can also access online for free a large array of critical material, including a regular column by Howard Waldrop, movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, and other things. Access for a small fee to both original and reprint SF stories is also offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (tale.com/genres.htm), and Alexandria Digital Literature (alexlit.com) as well.

  People go online, though, for other reasons other than just finding stories to read. In fact, there’s a large cluster of general interest sites that don’t publish fiction but do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds, which can be great fun to drop in on. Among my most frequent stops while Web-surfing are: Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, which won a Hugo Award year as “Best Web Site,” one of the most valuable sites on the whole Internet for the SF buff—a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, and extensive and invaluable data-base archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards; Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw/), a similar site, more media-and-gaming oriented than Locus Online, but that also features news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassut, and Wil McCarthy; Tangent Online (www.sfsite.com/tangent/), perhaps the most valuable SF-oriented review site on the Internet, especially for short fiction; Best SF (www.bestsf.netf), 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; Bluejack (www.bluejack.com), less exhaustively comprehensive than Tangent On line or Best SF, but still a place to find insightful magazine reviews, as well as bluejack’s own online diary; SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), another review site, although rather than reviewing short fiction, they specialize 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 bimonthly SF-oriented chats hosted 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, Interzone, and the above-mentioned SFRevu; SFF net (www.sff.net), a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, plus sites for genre-oriented “live chats”; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (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, 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 (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 (www.cybling.com); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (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 F.net, and probably on other BBSs as well.

  Nobody in this market has as yet figured out a good, steady, reliable way to make money by publishing fiction online, and until that happens, many of these sites and e-zines are going to die from lack of capital and funds (production costs may be a lot lower for “publishing” an e-zine than for publishing an old-fashioned print magazine, but at the very least you still have to have money to pay for the stories, to say nothing of money to pay your staff—and it adds up), and the online market is not going to reach its full potential, which is considerable. Maybe the Fictionwise model, selling individual stories and books in the form of downloads for your PDA, or the Oceans of the Mind model, selling subscriptions to purchase whole issues of a magazine in downloadable form at regular intervals, will prove to be commercially viable, and become the wave of the future. Or maybe not. Only time will tell.

  It was at best a so-so year in the print semiprozine market. Nothing has been heard from the once-prominent fiction semiprozine Century for more than two years now, and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re ever going to hear from it again. The acclaimed and long-running Australian fiction semiprozine Eidolon died this year, and Orb, Altair, and Terra Incognita have all gone “on hiatus,” a limbo from which few magazines ever return in the semiprozine world.

  The titles consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications—Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; and Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures—were all still having trouble keeping to their announced publishing schedules this year, except for Chronicle, which met it, and which seemed to have held steady in circulation as well. The other DNA magazines all registered slight drops in circulation, although no disastrous plunges, and the sell-through for most of them was high as well. An ominous note was struck, though, by a note from publisher Warren Lapine in recent renewal notices to subscribers, which warns that unless subscribers not only renew but subscribe to an additional magazine or purchase a book listed on the back of the renewal flyer, DNA will have to cut costs, including the possibility that at least two magazines will be dropped. This doesn’t sound good.

  The most stable of the fiction semiprozines seem to be the long-running Canadian semiprozine On Spec and the leading British semiprozine The Third Alternative, which were among the very few magazines in the entire semipro market to meet their announced production schedules this year. The slick, large-format The Third Alternative is one of the handsomest magazines out there, semiprozine or pro, and seems to just keep getting better, publishing fiction at a fully professional level, most of which remains slipstream and horror, although they’ve been adding a bit of science fiction to the mix of late as well—good stuff by John Grant, Ian Watson, Graham Joyce, Douglas Lain, and others, appeared in The Third Alternative th
is year. On Spec is another handsome magazine, and also published some good stuff this year by Charles Coleman Finlay, Karen Traviss, Kate Riedel, and others. Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge managed only two issues out of a scheduled four this year, but the editors had the best of excuses: the birth of a new baby. Talebones remains a lively little magazine, steadily improving, and published good fiction this year from William Barton, James Van Pelt, James Sallis, Beverly Suarez-Beard, and others.

  Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society again managed only two issues this year out of their scheduled four; I like the fact that Artemis features center-core science fiction in a marketplace where the bulk of the fiction semiprozines run mostly slipstream or horror instead, but they need to work on making their stories more vivid and powerful; much of the work here this year was rather gray, although there were interesting stories by Edward Willett and Roxanne Hutton. A magazine which couldn’t be more different from Artemis in editorial personality is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (about all they have in common is that they both only managed to get two issues out this year), which almost never publishes core science-fiction, but does publish some good slipstream stuff, including stories by Jeffrey Ford, Greg Van Eekhout, and others. The other long-running Australian semiprozine, Aurealis, was taken over by a new editor, and managed two of its scheduled four issues this year, with interesting stories by Robert N. Stephenson and Lee Battersby; it’s good to see it surviving, since the fear last year was that it would follow Eidelon into the grave. A new Australian fiction semiprozine, the oddly titled Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, launched this year, but is already reported to be in financial trouble; we’ll see if it makes it. I saw one issue of the quirky Irish semiprozine Albedo One this year and heard rumors that there was a Tales of the Unanticipated, but I never saw it.