The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24 Read online

  The above-mentioned John Joseph Adams, already a prolific anthologist, launched a new SF e-zine, Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), early in 2010, and will edit both Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine at the same time, as well as his numerous anthologies, which will make him a busy fellow. Lightspeed hit the ground running, and has already established itself as a major new SF market, publishing good stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Carrie Vaughn, Ted Kosmatka, Jack McDevitt, Alice Sola Kim, and others.

  The long-running e-zine Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), one of the longest-established fiction sites on the Internet, ran good stuff this year, their usual mix of SF, fantasy, slipstream, and soft horror by Lavie Tidhar, Theodora Goss, Samantha Henderson, John Kessel, Sandra McDonald, and others. Longtime editor-in-chief Susan Marie Groppi, stepped down (although she, Jed Hartman, and Karen Meisner will continue as fiction editors), to be replaced by Niall Harrison.

  Tor.com (www.tor.com) has established itself as one of the coolest and most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that regularly publishes SF, fantasy, and slipstream, as well as articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, and commentary. It’s become a regular stop for me, even when they don’t have new fiction posted. The fiction at Tor .com this year seemed a bit weaker overall than in recent years, perhaps the result of running too many excerpts from upcoming novels that Tor wanted to push and too many “special interest” promotions like its months devoted to paranormal romance and steampunk, but it still published good stuff by Jay Lake, Ken Scholes, Eileen Gunn, Michael Swanwick, Kij Johnson, and others, and remains a fascinating place to visit. Liz Gorinsky joined Patrick Nielsen Hayden as co-editor of fiction.

  Abyss & Apex, (www.abyssapexzine.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, which seems to run more SF than many of the other sites, had good stuff by Alan Smale, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Swanwick, Caren Gussoff, Bud Sparhawk, and others.

  Apex Magazine (www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online), returned after a hiatus for a redesign with a new fiction editor, Catherynne M. Valente, although Jason Sizemore remains as the owner and editor-in-chief. They featured good work by Theodora Goss, Saladin Ahmed, Peter M. Ball, Amal El-Mohtar, and others.

  An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy”, Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, published good stuff by Richard Parks, Yoon Ha Lee, Ann Leckie, Marissa Lingen, and others.

  Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work by Megan Arkenberg, Ilan Lerman, LaShawn M. Wanak, and others.

  The flamboyantly titled Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, had good work by Peter S. Beagle, Jason Sanford, and others.

  New SF/fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (http://dailysciencefiction. com) tackled the perhaps overly ambitious task of publishing one new SF or fantasy story for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, most are undistinguished, but there were some good ones by Lavie Tidhar, Tim Pratt, Jeff Hecht, Mary Robinette Kowal, and others.

  New SF e-zine M-Brane (www.mbranesf.com) produced twelve issues this year, with seventy-four original stories.

  Fantasy magazine Zahir (www.zahirtales.com) moved from a print incarnation to an online venue this year, publishing twenty-four original stories.

  A mix of science fact articles and fiction is available from the e-zine Futurismic (http://futurismic.com) and from Escape Velocity (www.escapevelocitymagazine.com). The futurist Web site Shareable Futures (http://shareable.net/blog/shareable-futures) has been publishing stories set in futures with nonconventional economic systems by writers such as Bruce Sterling and Benjamin Rosenbaum.

  Shadow Unit (www.shadowunit.org) is a Web site devoted to publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, sort of a cross between CSI and The X-Files. I continue to find this an unexciting idea, but top professionals such as Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and others are involved in producing scripts for it, so you might want to check it out.

  The Australian popular-science magazine COSMOS (www.cosmosmagazine.com) is not a SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their Web site). Broderick is stepping down, but is being replaced by Cat Sparks, and since she’s also an SF professional, I assume that this policy will continue under her as well.

  Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, and most of the stories are slipstream or literary surrealism. Sites that feature those, as well as fantasy (and, occasionally, some SF) include Rudy Rucker’s Flurb (www.flurb.net), Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), CoyoteWild (www.coyotewildmag.com); Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com)

  There’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy stories out there on the Internet too, usually available for free. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, and so on, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue.” Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, 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 (http://promo.net/pg/), 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/). Site such Infinity Plus (http://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 accessable.

  If you’re willing to pay a small fee for them, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. Perhaps the best, and the longest-established place to find such material is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA, Kindle, 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 – you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), where in addition to the fiction for sale you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.

  There are plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet, though, than just finding fiction to read. There are also 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 easily 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 – it’s rare when I don’t find myself accessing Locus Online several times a day. As mentioned earlier, Tor.com is giving it a run for its money these days as an interesting place to stop while surfing the Web.

  Other major general interest sites include SF Site (www.sfsite.com), SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), SFcrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (http://sfscope.com) io9 (http://io9.com), Green Man Review (www.greenmanre
view.com), The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), Science Fiction and Fantasy World (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (www.sfreader.com), SFWatcher (www.sfwatcher.com), Salon Futura (www.salonfutura.net), which runs interviews and critical articles; and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (http://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). 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), which has gone intermittently in and out of hiatus, but which seems to be up and running at the moment. Other sites of interest include: 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; SciFiPedia (www.scifipedia.com), a Wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia; Ansible (http://news.ansible.co.uk), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; Book View Cafe (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.

  An ever-expanding area, growing in popularity, are a number of sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed: at Audible (www.audible.com), Escape Pod (http://escapepod.org, podcasting mostly SF), StarShipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com), Pseudopod (http://pseudopod.org, podcasting mostly fantasy), and PodCastle (http://podcastle.org, podcasting mostly fantasy). There’s also a site that podcasts nonfiction interviews and reviews, Dragon Page Cover to Cover (www.dragonpage.com).

  There were plenty of anthologies published in 2010, from both trade publishers and small presses, and although most of them didn’t stick out as particularly outstanding, most of them had a few good stories a piece. (The decision to postpone the latest volume of Jonathan Strahan’s anthology series Eclipse until next year probably weakened the year’s anthology market.) The strongest SF anthology of the year was almost certainly Godlike Machines (SFBC), edited by Jonathan Strahan, although being published exclusively by the Science Fiction Book Club (which had delayed publishing it for at least a year) probably limited the number of people who saw it; one of the year’s best novellas, by Alastair Reynolds was here as well as strong novellas by Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, and Sean Williams. The Fred Pohl tribute anthology, Gateways (Tor), edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, was somewhat weaker than had been hoped, although it did feature good stories by Cory Doctorow, Joe Haldeman, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe, and others. The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (Robinson; published in the United States by Running Press under the title The Mammoth Book of the End of the World, apparently because Americans are presumed to be too stupid to know what “apocalyptic” means), edited by Mike Ashley, was not only one of the year’s best reprint anthologies, but also featured a spine of first-rate original stories by Alastair Reynolds, Kage Baker, Robert Reed, and others. Is Anybody Out There? (DAW Books), edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern, featured good work by Pat Cadigan, Jay Lake, Alex Irvine, Matthew Hughes, and others. Postscripts has transformed itself from a magazine into an anthology series; this year’s volume, The Company He Keeps, Postscripts 22/23 (PS Publishing), struck me as being not as memorable as other recent issues had been, although there were interesting stories by Lucius Shepard, Don Webb, Jack Deighton, Holly Phillips, and others. Shine (Solaris), edited by Jetse de Vries, an admirable attempt to create “anthology of optimistic SF” created in reaction to the prevailing pessimism and gloom of much modern SF, didn’t entirely succeed, although it did feature ambitious stories by Lavie Tidhar, Gord Sellar, Eric Gregory, Alastair Reynolds, and others. The Dragon and the Stars (DAW Books), edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, was an anthology of stories (mostly fantasy) inspired by Chinese culture, with interesting work by Tony Pi, Emily Mah, Brenda W. Clough, Ken Liu, and Choi himself.

  There were several big cross-genre anthologies this year that featured mystery, mainstream, and romance as well as SF and fantasy. They included Stories (William Morrow), edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, which featured good work by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Block, and others, and – noted without comment – Warriors (Tor) and Songs of Love and Death (Gallery Books), both edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

  Interesting small press anthologies, usually mixing SF, fantasy, and slipstream, included Conflicts (NewCon Press), edited by Ian Whates, with solid work by Una McCormack, Chris Beckett, Keith Brooke, Neal Asher, and others; The Immersion Book of SF (Immersion Press), edited by Carmelo Rafala, featuring good stories by Lavie Tidhar, Gord Sellar, Chris Butler, Aliette de Bodard, and others; Panverse Two (Panverse Publishing), edited by Dario Ciriello, featuring two excellent novellas by Alan Smale and Michael D. Winkle; Clockwork Phoenix 3 (Norilana), edited by Mike Allen, which had interesting work by John C. Wright, Cat Rambo, John Grant, Gregory Frost, C.S.E. Cooney, and others; Destination: Future (Hadley Rille), edited by Z. S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds, with Elizabeth Bear, Caren Gussoff, K. D. Wentworth, Sandra McDonald, and others; and Music for Another World (Mutation Press), edited by Mark Harding

  Pleasant but minor science fiction anthologies included Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow (Douglas & McIntyre), edited by Zsuzsi Gartner, Sky Whales and Other Wonders (Norilana), edited by Vera Nazarian; Steampunk’d (DAW Books), edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg; Timeshares (DAW Books), edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg; and a mixed SF/romance anthology, Love and Rockets (DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes.

  The best original fantasy anthology of the year was Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (Eos), edited by Lou Anders and the ubiquitous Jonathan Strahan, which featured good work by Joe Abercrombie, K. J. Parker, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix, C. J. Cherryh, and others. Also first rate was a mixed reprint/original anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, The Way of the Wizard (Prime Books), with nice stuff by Lev Grossman, Nnedi Okorafor, Christie Yant, Charles Coleman Finlay, and others. Also good is Legends of Australian Fantasy (HarperCollins Australia), edited by Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, which features a powerful novella by Garth Nix and good stuff by Sean Williams, Isobelle Carmody, and others; a YA anthology The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People (Viking), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling, which has good stuff by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Tanith Lee, Ellen Kushner, Gregory Frost, and others; and a mixed original/reprint anthology of updated fairy tales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin), edited by Kate Bernheimer.

  Pleasant but minor original fantasy anthologies included A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters (DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes; She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (Dybbuk Press), edited by Tim Lieder; Alembical 2 (Paper Golem), edited by Arthur Dorrance and Lawrence M. Schoen; Jabberwocky 5 (Prime Books), edited by Sean Wallace and Erzebet Yellowboy; and More Stories from the Twilight Zone (Tor), edited by Carol Serling.

  There were at least three dedicated original zombie anthologies this year (plus at least one reprint anthology), The New Dead (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Christopher Golden, The Living Dead 2 (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams (partly reprint), and Zombies vs. Unicorns (Margaret K. McElderry Books), edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier, two anthologies of werewolf stories, Full Moon City (Simon & Schuster), edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Martin H. Greenberg, and Running with the Pack (Prime Books), edited by Ekaterina Sedia, two books of comic vampire stories, Blood Lite II: Overbite (Gallery Books), edited by Kevin J. Anderson, and Fangs
for the Mammaries (Baen), edited by Esther M. Friesner, a book of ghost stories, Haunted Legends (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, a book of Lovecraftian stories, Cthulhu’s Reign (Tor), edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Martin H. Greenberg, a paranormal romance anthology, Death’s Excellent Vacation (Ace), edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner, and an anthology of superhero stories, Masked (Simon & Schuster), edited by Lou Anders.

  A long-running series featuring novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, continued under editor K. D. Wentworth, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXVI (Galaxy).

  There were a lot of stories this year about either the end of the world or life in a severely ecologically challenged future, as well as stories about future Great Depressions and the resultant dystopias they generate – perhaps not surprising in a year where writers had a bad “economic downturn” and the spectacle of a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to inspire them.

  (Finding individual pricings for all of the items from small presses mentioned in the Summation has become too time-intensive, and since several of the same small presses publish anthologies, novels, and short-story collections, it seems silly to repeat addresses for them in section after section. Therefore, I’m going to attempt to list here, in one place, all the addresses for small presses that have books mentioned here or there in the Summation, whether from the anthologies section, the novel section, or the short-story collection section, and, where known, their Web site addresses. That should make it easy enough for the reader to look up the individual price of any book mentioned that isn’t from a regular trade publisher; such books are less likely to be found in your average bookstore, or even in a chain superstore, and so will probably have to be mail-ordered. Many publishers seem to sell only online, through their Web sites, and some will only accept payment through PayPal. Many books, even from some of the smaller presses, are also available through Amazon .com. If you can’t find an address for a publisher, and it’s quite likely that I’ve missed some here, Google it.)