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

  If none of these sites has satisfied you, you can find lots of other genre "electronic magazines" by accessing http.//www.yahoo.convarts/humanitiesaiterature/genres/science-fiction-fantasy-horror/magazines/, but I hope you're extremely patient and have a strong stomach, since many of these sites are extremely bad in fact, there's more amateur-level, slush-pile quality fiction out there on the Internet than you could wade through in a year of determined reading.

  While you're on-line, don't forget to check out some of the genre-related sites that don't publish fiction. Science Fiction Weekly (http://w.scifiweekly.com), which has been around long enough to be venerable by on-line standards, is a good place to start, a lively general-interest site, with SF-related news, reviews of other SF sites of interest, and lots of media, gaming, and book reviews (including an occasional column by John Clute), as well as links to many genrerelated sites. Also valuable as a home-away-from-home for genre readers is SFF NET (http//w.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages for SF writers, genre-oriented we chats," and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web page at http://www.sfwa.org/sfw.

  There are some new contenders in this area this year as well. The newszine Locus now has an on-line version up and running, Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), and it's quickly become one of my most frequent stops on the Internet, in part because of the rapidity with which breaking news gets posted there, and for the other reviews and features, but mostly to browse Mark Kelly's comments about recent short fiction, which are similar to the contents of his column in the print Locus, but with some additional perspectives not available in the print edition. Another ambitious new site, which has quickly become one of my favorite destinations while Web-surfing, is SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which, in addition to hosting the Asimov's and Analog sites, and having lots of links to other genre-related sites of interest, also features extensive review sections, and is perhaps more oriented toward print literature (as opposed to media and gaming stuff) than is Science Fiction Weekly. SF Site has also just started carrying a short-fiction review column by Dave Truesdale of the print semiprozine Tangent, which is one of the few places on-line other than Locus Online where you can find genre short fiction being reviewed on a regularly scheduled basis. And for a refreshingly iconoclastic and often funny slant on genre-oriented news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the on-line version of his fanzine Ansible (http://www.des.gla.ac.uk/ansible/). Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New York Review of Science Fiction (http://eebs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html), Nova Express (http://www.delphi.convsflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), SF Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), and Tangent (http://www.sff.net/tangent/), but most of these sites are fairly inactive.

  Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GENIE, Delphi (which also now has a Web site, http://www.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, with GENIE having perhaps the largest and most active such community. Most of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time "chats" or conferences, as does SFF NETTHE SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I'm most familiar, and which gives you the opportunity to schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. It starts every Wednesday at about 10:00 P.m. EST.

  It was a bad year in the semiprozine market, particularly in the fiction semiprozines, although even as old titles falter, new titles appear on the horizon to replace them-or try to anyway. Some of the proposed new titles look promising, but the odds are greatly against any new magazine succeeding in the current market and under the current distribution system, I fear, particularly an undercapitalized magazine, and that description fits most semiprozines. Those long odds don't seem to discourage people enough to stop them from trying though.

  There was no issue of Century published in 1997, just as they didn't publish their last three scheduled issues in 1996; and although the editor was claiming as recently as a couple of weeks ago that Century would eventually rise again from the ashes, he was assuring me of exactly the same thing at the end of 1996, so at this point I'm skeptical. Century was the most promising fiction semiprozine launch of the '90s, but for the moment, I'm afraid that I have to consider it dead; they'll have to Show Me that I'm wrong by actually publishing an issue before I change my mind, and even then I'd think they'd have to show they can publish on something approaching a regular schedule before they'd entirely regain the trust of their subscribers. I'm going to continue to list their subscription address here, in case you want to take a chance on them, but at this point in time I can't in good faith recommend that you subscribe, since there's at least a decent chance you'll never see anything in return for the money. There was also no issue of Crank!, another eclectic and literarily sophisticated fiction semiprozine, published this year, although one is promised for early in 1998; let's hope they can hold it together and not follow Century into the black hole that seems to claim most ambitious fiction semiprozines these days.

  The two fiction semiprozines that seem closest to making it up into the ranks of the professional magazines, and which do get some nationwide distribution on the newsstands, are Absolute Magnitude: The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction. These are both slick, professional-looking, full-size magazines with full-color covers, both of them-especially Absolute Magnitude, which often has very spiffy covers-frequently looking better than any of the professional magazines, including Science Fiction Age. What's on the inside is a lot more uneven, however, and the fiction in both magazines ranges from good to awful, with little overall consistency of quality; neither magazine had a particularly good year in 1997 in fact-both being easily outstripped in the quality of the fiction they published even by much-less prominent semiprozines such as Tera Incognita and Tales of the Unanticipated-although there were interesting stories by Barry B. Longyear, William F. Wu, and others in Absolute Magnitude and interesting stories by Paul Di Filippo, Don D'Ammassa, and others in Pirate Writings.

  Absolute Magnitude seems to have had a slight edge in overall quality over Pirate Writings this year, although other years it has been the other way around. Pirate Writings does get more variety by publishing mystery and generalized adventure stories as well as science fiction, but they also make the mistake of devoting a section of the magazine to "short-short" stories, almost all of which have been dreadful (there are very few good "abort-short" stories published in any given year, and so far Pirate Writings has not managed to find any of themnot really surprising, since often there are none published at all). The nonfiction is also uneven in both magazines, but Absolute Magnitude has an edge here because Allen Steele's regular column is solid and interesting; Pirate Writings, on the other hand, loses points for publishing the "Surreal World" column, which really should be called "Credulous World" instead, as it reverentally trots out one old woo-woo chestnut-like the Philadelphia Experiment or the Men in Black-after another: there's already too much of this crap floating around in the SF readership, and I don't like to see it encouraged. Both magazines could stand to improve the quality of their book reviews.

  Both magazines continued to struggle with their production schedules this year, with Pirate Writings managing three issues out of their scheduled four and Absolute Magnitude managing two out of their scheduled four. Absolute Magnitude also went through internal upheavals this year, with the rest of the business partners involved in the magazine pulling out of the partnership, leaving Warren Lapine as both editor and sole publisher. Lapine swears that the magazine will continue, though, and I tend to believe him, especially as Lapine has recently expanded his empire to include Dreams of Dec
adence, an all-vampire fiction magazine, and is in the process of reviving Weird Tales. I wish both of these magazines well, and they deserve to survive and prosper, but they also need to work harder to improve, especially in the area of making the quality of their fiction more consistant.

  The three longest-established fiction semiprozines now are two Australian magazines, Aurealis and Eidolon, and a Canadian magazine, On Spec. Eidolon was strong again in 1997-not quite as strong as it had been in 1996, but strong enough to prove itself the best of the three magazines once again this year, publishing strong fiction by Dirk Strasser, Simon Brown, Sean Williams, Rosaleen L4ove, Russell Blackford, and others, and publishing a collaboration by Scan Williams and Simon Brown on their Eidolon Online site that was one of the year's best stories. Perhaps this is a reflection of the recent boom in Australian science fiction, where they appear to be enjoying an upsurge of creative energy and artistic excitement. Aurealis also had a good year, publishing strong fiction by Peter Friend, Rick Kennett, Michael Pryor, and others. As opposed to the Australian magazines, the Canadian magazine On Spec seems to have gone into a bit of a slump for the last couple of years, and little of really exceptional quality appeared there in 1997, although they did publish interesting work by Derryl Murphy, Steven R. Laker, Ursula Pflug, and others. The idea that Canadian science fiction should be gray, depressing, dystopian, and set in the near-future, that these somehow are defining national characteristics, looks like it's growing toward codification in recent years, but it seems like a curiously self-limiting set of indicators to choose, and much of the Canadian stuff seems pale and bloodless when contrasted to the more vigorous and exuberant (although sometimes rawer) Australians. Perhaps part of the problem is that On Spec is edited by a collective, rather than by a single editor who could impose his or her personality powerfully on the magazine. Still, On Spec has published a lot of interesting stuff over the years and has helped to find and develop a lot of new writers, so it is worth your support. All three of these magazines have been around long enough to be considered fairly stable and reliable, as such things are judged in the semiprozine market, and all have good track records for delivering interesting and unusual fiction, so they're good bets for your subscription money; odds are they they will all be around and producing issues next year. Eidolon and Aurealis managed only two issues out of a scheduled four this year, while the morereliably-published On Spec brought out all four of its scheduled issues.

  Of the other fiction semiprozines, the most interesting of the American newcomers was probably Terra Incognita, which published some of the best stuff to be found in the semiprozine market this year, including good, high-end professional-level stories by Timons Esaias, Terry Mcgarry, Brian Stableford, and others, including a couple that made my shortlist of stuff to consider for this anthology. On the other hand, they only managed to produce one issue in 1997, so they'll have to increase their reliability before they really become a contender, and their self-imposed restriction of publishing only stories that take place on Earth still strikes me as being too limiting-seems to me that to survive and prosper, a magazine must publish any really first-rate fiction it can find, whether it's set on Earth or Mars or inside a black hole or wherever. Still, Terra Incongnita is a very promising magazine, well worth keeping an eye on. Good professionalquality work was also being published this year in the long-established Tales of the Unanticipated,which managed two issues this year, featuring strong work by R. Neube, Stephen Dedman, Martha A. Hood, Gerard Daniel Hourarner, Neil Gaiman, H. Courreges Le Blane, Robert J. Levy, and others.

  Also worth checking out, although not quite at the level of the above two magazines yet, is a promising new Canadian magazine called Transversions, which seems to be publishing livelier stuff than On Spec has managed of late. Non-Stop Science Fiction Magazine (somewhat clumsily subtitled Ultra Dystopias of Future 6 Fantasy Utopias) reappeared in a new, somewhat smaller (although still larger than digest-sized) format this year, and managed one issue out of a scheduled four. Non-Stop is still a brash, swaggering, boastful magazine, proud of its in-your-face arrogance, that doesn't quite live up to the self-congratulatory claims it makes for itself, although there is some interesting stuff here, and at least the magazine can't be accused of being dull or stuffy. There's worthwhile fiction (although no actual science fiction) here by Barry N. Malzberg and Paul Di Filippo, but, as was true the last time they published an issue, the nonfiction here is considerably more interesting than the fiction, including an interview with Vernor Vinge (listed as "Vernon" Vinge on the contents page) and intriguing essays by Paul Di Filippo and Charles Platt. In England, The Third Alternative seems to be one of the most prominent semiprozines at the moment, and Back Brain Recluse is still going strong, although both of these magazines tend toward literary surrealism and horror rather than core science fiction, and may be too far out on the edge for some readers. A confusingly named Irish semiprozine called Albedo I (which leads to issues being listed as, say, Albedo I #14) is very crudely printed and amateurish-looking compared to the above magazines and also leans toward literary surrealism; but it also published some interesting professional-level work this year by Brain Stableford, Ian Mcdonald, and others. Space & Time, which tends more toward fantasy, in spite of its title, had one issue this year (with interesting work by Bill Eakin, Don D'Ammassa, Don Webb, Sue Storm, and others), as did Xizquil. Adventures of Sword 6 Sorcery continued to publish, up to issue four now (featuring, I notice, a story from the wiquitous Stephen Baxter!), but I didn't see it. If there were issues of Plot Magazine or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, I didn't see them. Keen Science Fiction officially died, and I believe that Argonaut Science Fiction and Next Phase are also dead.

  Promised for next year is a SF fiction semiprozine called Age of Wonder, which is already announcing that its premiere issue will feature stories by Gregory Benford and Stephen Baxter-sounds pretty promising.

  I don't follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, in fact I try to keep them away from my door with crucifixes and holy water, but Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge still seems to be a lively little magazine, and it's broadening out to include a fair amount of science fiction in its editorial mix as well as fantasy and horror, a development I welcome. It published interesting stuff by Amy Sterling Casil, Leslie What, and others this year. The highly respected Cemetery Dance seems to be back in full swing again after a long hiatus caused by the illhealth of the editor. I suspect that there were issues of Aberrations out this year, but, if so, I didn't see them. The Urbanite published two issues, featuring work somewhere on the borderline of horror and surrealism. I saw no issues of Deathrealm or Grue this year, although I didn't look for them exhaustively, either.

  Turning to the critical magazines, Charles N. Brown's Locus and Andy Porter's SF Chronicle, as always, remain your best bet among that subclass of semiprozines known as "newszines," and are your best resource if you're looking for publishing news and/or an overview of what's happening in the genre. (SF Chronicle seems back on track again, after missing several issues last year due to health problems on the part of editor and publisher Andy Porter, and it's a good to see them back.) The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, completed its ninth full year of publication, once again not only publishing its scheduled twelves issues but publishing them all on time; that it can do this year after year in a field where most other criticalzines are lucky if they can manage to bring out one issue out of four is something of a small miracle and may lead some other semiprozine editors to wonder if Hartwell has signed a pact with the devil. The reliability of its publishing schedule is not all that The New York Review of Science Fiction has going for it, not by any means. It has always been eclectic and interesting, but in the last year or two I've been finding it more interesting than ever before, publishing not only the usual reviews and critical articles but playful bits of metafiction by Michael Swanwick, "Read This" lists of recommended books by various authors, and fa
scinating items such as Avram Davidson's exchange of letters with Philip K. Dick.

  Once again, there was only one issue of Steve Brown's SF Eye and of Lawrence Person's Nova Express in 1997, something that's been true for several years in a row now-both magazines are insightful, intriguing, and entertaining, when you can find them, but take their publishing schedule with a large grain of salt; perhaps Nova Express should follow SF Eye's lead and stop claiming to be a quarterly publication. It's already hard to imagine how the field would get by without David A. Truesdale's Tangent, which has become such an institution in the genre after only a few years that it seems like it has always been around. In a field where almost no short fiction gets reviewed, with the emphasis in almost every other review source on novels, Tangent performs an invaluable service for the genre by providing a place where interested readers can find reviews of most of the year's short fiction-something that can be found almost nowhere else except for Mark Kelly's review column in Locus. Tangent is also doing yeoman service for the field by becoming deeply involved in helping to assemble a recommended reading list for the yearly Sturgeon Award, and although the quality of the criticism here is still uneven, the coverage is remarkably complete, reviewing stories from obscure sources that probably never get reviewed anywhere else, including very minor semiprozines and on-line "electronic magazines."