Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14 Read online

  All of these magazines (and a half dozen others) deserve your support. One of the best things you can do to ensure that short science fiction remains alive and plentiful in the market is to subscribe to whatever magazine you like best. In fact, subscribe to as many of them as you can—it’ll still turn out to be a better reading bargain, more fiction of reliable quality for less money, than buying the year’s hit-or-miss crop of original anthologies could possibly supply. Do it now, while you’re thinking about it, and while it still has a chance to help. If you’re a fan of short SF, as someone reading this book presumably is, and you don’t bother to do it, you’re taking a chance that there could be a lot less short SF around to enjoy in the future.

  There were another couple of upbeat notes in this troubled market this year. The year 2000 saw a very impressive and promising debut made by a new Scottish SF magazine, Spectrum SF, edited by Paul Fraser, which published four issues in 2000. By rights, since the circulation is still low, this should be mentioned in the semiprozine section, but as Spectrum SF was not only totally professional in content, but very high-end professional at that, featuring two of the year’s best stories, by Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, as well as good work by Jack Deighton, Eric Brown, Garry Kilworth, Mary Soon Lee and others, and the serialization of the late Keith Roberts’s as-yet-otherwise-unpublished last novel, Drek Yarman, that I’m going to go ahead and list it here in the professional section instead, and you can send me complaining letters about that if you want. Spectrum SF was certainly the most promising debut of a British magazine since Interzone—and, like Interzone, one that’s especially welcome to me because it’s one of the few British magazines to concentrate on core science fiction; most British magazines emphasize slipstream and/or horror instead. Fraser clearly doesn’t have a lot of money to work with—this is obviously a labour of love—so let’s hope that he can build a subscription base quickly before he runs out of funds, cash and hope, since this is a tasty little magazine that deserves to survive, and another magazine that deserves your support.

  PS Publishing (http://www.editorial-services.co.uk/pspublishing), a British small press, brought out some of the year’s best novellas, in individual chapbook form, as part of a series, edited by Peter Crowther, that included Tendeleo’s Story, by Ian McDonald, Watching Trees Grow, by Peter F. Hamilton, Making History, by Paul J. McAuley, Reality Dust, by Stephen Baxter, and others, with more to come next year. These novellas will eventually be gathered in omnibus collections, first published in Britain, and then in the United States. Keep your eye out for them, and for the new novellas that will be coming out, for so far they’ve included some of the best work to be found anywhere in the genre this year.

  As usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to Playboy. The science magazine Nature, in-honour of the millennium, published a very short science fiction story (some of them by very Big Names) in every weekly issue for the past 52 weeks—most of them were too short to have much impact as fiction, but they certainly managed to introduce some sophisticated genre conceptualization and concepts to wide nongenre audiences that were probably unfamiliar with them, and the staff of Nature is to be commended for that. On the other hand, on a sour note, Playboy fired longtime fiction editor Alice Turner, saying that maintaining a full-time fiction editor was “a luxury” that they could no longer afford, and that future stories would be selected by a committee. They didn’t ask me, and don’t care what my opinion is, but I think that this was a mistake—at a time when endless numbers of photos of naked women can be downloaded from the Internet for far less than the cost of an issue of Playboy, they need to emphasize those touches of class and quality that differentiate them from the average online porn site if they want to survive, not throw them away. At any rate, Alice will be missed.

  (Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., PO 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 US; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323—$39.97 for annual subscription in US; 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, PO Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR, United Kingdom—17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum Publishing”. PS Publishing, 98 High Ash Drive, Leeds L517 8RE, England, UK—$17 each for Tendeleo’s Story, by Ian McDonald, Watching Trees Grow, by Peter F. Hamilton, Making History, by Paul J. McAuley; and Reality Dust, by Stephen Baxter. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to online, at their various Web sites.)

  It was a wild year in the young field of “online electronic publishing”, with some upbeat stories to partially balance some major reversals and disappointments—things change so fast in this ephemeral market, though, that what I write here is likely to be already obsolete by the time this book sees print, so if you’re interested, keep that in mind, and keep a close eye on the markets themselves.

  The big stories here this year were probably the terminal decline of Galaxy Online, and the rise of SCI FICTION. Galaxy OnLine, supervised by veteran editor/writer Ben Bova, and introduced in early 2000, was perhaps the most glossy and ambitious such site to date, featuring a distinguished lineup of columnists such as Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and many others, running scientific articles and book and movie reviews as well as original short SF stories, and promising eventually to provide everything from downloadable novels to online movies to animation to Web TV. By the middle of the year, though, their money had run out, their venture capitalists had dried up (the same thing that had killed the Event Horizon site the year before), new investors could not be found -and Galaxy OnLine was dead before the end of the year. A major disappointment, and another major blow to the dream that such sites can be made self-sustaining. Another ambitious fiction site, which was creating an anticipatory buzz and already drawing the work of top authors, The Infinity Matrix, to be edited by SF writer Eileen Gunn, also ran out of backing money, and had the plug pulled on it just before we went to press, losing the SF online world a site of great potential. It was the same story with yet another site with large-scale plans, Bookface, which was making books available to the online community for free (as long as you read them on screen online, the idea being to entice people into buying a download of a book, after they’d “browsed” it), and which was also “publishing” some original short fiction by young writers, but which also ran out of money, and was unable to find sufficient amounts of “Web advertising” revenue to replace it, and had also closed down shop by the end of the year.

  The faltering of the “dot.com” market, one of the year’s big financial stories, is probably the proximate cause of the failure of most of these sites. All of them were funded by big initial rushes of money from venture capitalists back when the market was hot (amounting to multiple millions of dollars in some cases), all ran through their money without being able to find an effective way of bringing any money back in, and then, once the market had soured and venture capitalists had become cautious and conservative again, were unable to find new investors to keep things going.

  The big problem in this market is still a simple one: nobody has yet figured out how you can reliably make money “publishing” fiction online. The Last Great Hope here, the model that suggested that you could draw in enough income with “Web-advertising” to pay your expenses and even make a profit, seems to have been pretty thoroughly discredited, and the “patronage model”, that big companies will support the arts online as part of their Public Relations campaigns, to improve their image, depends on a prosperous
and growing economy; once belts start being seriously tightened, art for the sake of improving your image is probably the first thing to go. For the most part, with fiction sites, you either support it yourself, as what amounts to a hobby (an old tradition among print semiprozines,where magazines like Crank! were paid for for years out of the editor’s own pockets), you absorb the costs because you hope to get an equal value in promotion, publicity and prestige for some other product back out of it, you use it as a place to sell subscriptions or some other physical product that exists in the real world — or you find some way to make the customers pay for accessing the fiction, and hope you can get them to cough up in sufficient numbers to keep you afloat. This last is the tricky one, although many are working on it. Sites that sell “e-books” and even individual stories, to be downloaded to various “Palm-Pilot&8221;-type platforms, may be on to a potentially successful model, especially as a wave of new and supposedly greatly improved technology in this area is just about to break upon us.

  Although we’ve run through a lot of grim news so far, not all the stories in this market were negative, though, by any means. Early in 2000, the Sci-Fi Channel site (scifi.com) went through an extensive expansion and renovation, which included buying the long-running e-zine Science Fiction Weekly (the new editor of which is former Science Fiction Age editor Scott Edelman, replacing Craig Engler, who has moved up the corporate ladder in the SCI FI organization), and also launching a major new Web site, SCI FICTION, a fiction site within the larger umbrella of the Sci-Fi Channel site, edited by Ellen Datlow, the former Fiction Editor of Omni, as well as of the now-defunct web sites Omni Online and Event Horizon. As she did before with those other sites, Ellen has quickly established SCI FICTION as one of the best places on the Internet to find reliably professional-quality short fiction, putting up one new story and one “classic reprint” story every week (all of which are kept archived). This year SCI FICTION published good original stories this year by Severna Park, Steven Utley, Nancy Kress, Howard Waldrop, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Hand, A. R. Morlan, Linda Nagata and many others, most of this work at a level of quality and professionalism unrivalled almost anywhere else online. Since the Sci-Fi Channel seems to be operating here on the “promotion, publicity, and prestige” model, SCI FICTION is not expected to make money (nor is there any real way for it to make money), which makes it far less vulnerable than Omni Online or Event Horizon had been, and the chances are good that it will probably survive as long as the parent company itself remains prosperous and healthy. Certainly the Sci-Fi Channel is getting its money’s worth as far as promotion, publicity and prestige is concerned, since SCI FICTION to date has generated a great deal of all three for them, and in areas outside the usual media-fan circles, where people may not even have heard of the Sci-Fi Channel or paid much attention to it, before this.

  Another good new fiction site is Strange Horizons (http:// www.strange horizons.com), edited by Jed Hartman. Strange Horizons isn’t yet operating reliably on the (very high) level of quality maintained by SCI FICTION, but there is some good stuff here, including, in 2000, good professional-level stories by Tamela Viglione, Chuck Rothman, Bruce Holland Rogers, and others; in recent months, they scored points with me by taking a retrospective look at the work of Howard Waldrop, many of whose stories can be accessed there. Another seeming success story (so far—knock wood!) is Fictionwise (http:/ 7www.fictionwise.com), which is not really an “electronic magazine” at all, but rather a place to buy downloadable e-books; however, not only is there a very large selection of individual “reprint” stories here of high professional quality by some of the best writers in the business available to be bought for a small fee, either on a story-by-story basis or in “fiction bundles” (see mention also in the short-story collection section, below), which should make them of interest to our readers, but they have just recently begun to offer original short science fiction stories for sale as well—at the moment, this is mostly limited to some original, heretofore unpublished stories by Kage Baker, but their intention is to add more original fiction by other popular authors, and that could in time become an important feature of the site. Along similar lines, ElectricStory (http://www.electricstory.com) is another site where you can buy downloadable e-books, including reprints of books by Terry Bisson, Paul Park and others, but they make the site interesting with such stuff as movie reviews by Lucius Shepard and articles by Howard Waldrop, which can be read online for free; ElectricStory is also starting to experiment with original content—there’s an original novel by new writer Richard Wadholm available there, and a new short-story collection, never published in print form, by Howard Waldrop). Coming later in 2001 is a site called Ipublish (http://www. ipublish.com), which will offer, among other enticements, downloadable original science fiction stories in e-form, selected by SF writer Paul Witcover; they’ve already bought a novella by Greg Feeley, as well as work by other writers.

  Short original SF tends to become harder to find after this; you’re more likely to find original horror, fantasy or slipstream stories on the sites that follow, although you will find an occasional SF story as well: Talebones (http://www.fairwoodpress.com/), Dark Planet (http:// www.sfsite.com/darkplanet/), Ticonderoga On-Line (http://www. omen.net.au/~rustle/ticonderaga/) Electncwine (http://www.electric wine.com); Chiaroscuro (interText (http://www.intertext.com/), Quantum Muse (http:www.quantummuse.com) and E-Scape (http:// www.interink.com/escape.html).

  Although it’s relatively hard to find good short original SF online, it’s not hard at all to find good short reprint SF stories. At sites like the above-mentioned Fictionwise, Mind’s Eye Fiction (http:// tale.com/genres.htm) and Alexandria Digital Literature (http:// alexlit.com), you’ll have to pay a small fee to access reprints (usually amounting to less than fifty cents per story, in most cases), but there are also a fairly large number of sites here and there around the Internet which archive good reprint SF stories that can be accessed for free. Perhaps the best such site is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.infini-typlus.co.uk), a good general site which features a very extensive selection of good-quality reprint stories, most (though not all) by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews and critical essays. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, 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.

  Finding good fiction to read, though, is not the only reason to go Web-surfing. Among the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet are general-interest sites that, while they don’t publish fiction, do publish lots of reviews, critical articles and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Among the best of these sites are: the SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com/), 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 a significant percentage of all the SF/fantasy print magazines in existence, including Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone and the whole DNA Publishing group (Absolute Magnitude, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, Dreams of Decadence); Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the online version of the news magazine Locus; a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, extensive database archives, and lists of links to other sites of interest (Mark Kelly’s short-fiction review column only sporadically appears now, alas, but Locus has made up for it to some extent by regularly featuring short-fiction reviews by other hands); the English site BEST SF (http://www.bestsf.net/), which also features reviews of the short fiction to be found in current SF magazines and anthologies; Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifi.
com/sfw/), more media-and-gaming-oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but which also features news and book reviews every issue, as well as providing a home for columns by such shrewd and knowledgeable genre insiders as John Clute and Michael Cassut; and SFF NET (http//www.sff.net), a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and newsgroups for SF writers, genre-oriented live chats, a link to the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, and a link to the research data and reading lists available on the Science Fiction Writers of America page (which can also be accessed directly at http://www.sfwa.org/.); and the above-mentioned Sci-Fi Channel (http://www.scifi.com), which not only provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION and for Science Fiction Weekly, but which is also home to the acclaimed audio-play site Seeing Ear Theater, and to the monthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; audio-plays can also be accessed at Audible (http://www.audible.com) and at Beyond 2000 (http://www.beyond2000.com); multiple-Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his fanzine Ansible (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/), which provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, is well worth checking out on a regular basis.

  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; 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.