Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14 Page 3

  Other sites are more problematical. The extremely valuable short-fiction review site, Tangent Online, seemed to have died in 1999, with no new content being published there for more than seven months, came back to life briefly in 2000, “died” again for several months, and since then has maintained a very slow trickle of activity, with a few new reviews being published every so often, but nothing like the rate of refreshment it promised, or that it needs to really succeed in fulfilling the function it was created to fulfil, of reviewing the bulk of the year’s short fiction. Recently, editor David Trusdale announced the birth of a new and revitalized Tangent Online site (http://www.tangent online.com), welcome news that inspired a surge of hope in Tangent fans—but since his initial announcement, more than a month back now, nothing new has appeared on the revamped and redesigned site, and there’s almost no real content there, just broken links that hopefully one day will lead to the reviews they promise. So, will Trusdale actually get his act together and successfully revive Tangent Online, or will it remain just hopeful vaporware? Who knows? Check in to the site occasionally to see if there’s anything new going on, as I do, and see for yourself. Along similar lines, I think that the review site SFRevu (http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu) is still in existence, after having died late in 1999 and then come back to life again, but every time I try to get to the site it crashes my system, so you’ll have to go there and see for yourself. Many of the print critical zines also have Web sites, but most of them haven’t been refreshed in years. Speculations, which abandoned its print edition last year, still maintains a Web site (http://www.speculations.com) and no doubt is still dispensing writing advice, but you’ll, have to subscribe to the site online if you want to access it.

  It’s worth mentioning again that things change with such lightning speed in the online world that it’s worth surfing around every once in a while to see what’s still there, what’s gone and what’s new. I can almost guarantee you that a lot of things will be different in this market by this time next year—it seems to be the nature of the beast.

  Things were fluid in the print semiprozine market as well, as they have been for decades, with magazines dying and new magazines springing up to replace them.

  One of the most astonishing stories in this market was the rebirth of the fiction semiprozine Century after almost four years of total silence, long after everyone (including, I must admit, me) had given it up for dead. Nevertheless, a new issue appeared in late 1999 (dated 2000), and was followed by another issue in the middle of 2000, and so Century will have to be considered to be alive again. Although they lean away from centre-core SF and towards more literary stuff, with a high percentage of mainstream and fantasy stuff, Century was widely considered back in its Glory Days to be perhaps the most literate and sophisticated of all the fiction semiprozines, and this version of it lives up to that reputation, with good stories (most of them outside the genre, or with only thin traces of it) by Michael Bishop, Ian MacLeod, Michael Kandel, Robert Reed (one of the few real SF stories), Terry Windling, Greer Gilman and others. Whether Century will disappear again or not, nobody knows (or what effect the recent tragic death of associate editor Jenna A. Felice will have on the magazine)—but the quality of these two issues is high enough to probably make it worthwhile taking a chance that they can maintain their schedule this time around, and subscribe. Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society is another magazine that had been talked about and promised for years without ever actually materializing, so that many people had probably given up on it, but, like Century, it actually appeared late in 1999, with another issue coming out later on in 2000. The overall level of literary quality here is not as high or as consistent as that of Century — on the other hand, unlike Century, almost everything here is honest-to-gosh actual science fiction. Artemis published some good stuff this year, including a story by Stan Schmidt that made the Final Nebula Ballot, but to me they already seem to be chafing against their self-imposed restriction of only publishing stories about moon colonization, and I’d advise them to widen their purview a bit—in my opinion, if a story’s about space exploration, that ought to be enough to get it in, without insisting that it take place on the Moon (they’re already rationalizing ways around this stricture—stories that take place on a moon are OK—so why not do away with it altogether?).

  In 1998, several fiction semiprozines were consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications, which now publishes Aboriginal Science Fiction, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (formerly titled Pirate Writings), Weird Tales, and the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; as well as Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures. Lapine continues to publicly announce that he’s well-satisfied with the progress of the magazines, and it’s true that the circulation of all the DNA magazines is growing, unlike most of the other magazines in the field, although only by minuscule degrees (the circulation for Absolute Magnitude, for instance, increased from 2,500 copies to 3,000 this year)… still, any forward motion is better than none, or, worse, motion in the other direction, and Lapine has some reason to congratulate himself on this. On the other hand, there are still problems: in spite of the fact that most of these magazines are supposed to be quarterlies, most of them (with the exception of Weird Tales) only managed to produce two issues apiece this year. And the overall quality of the fiction they contained in 2000 seemed a bit more lacklustre than in some years past, with fewer standout stories. The DNA empire continues to expand—this year taking over the newsmagazine Science Fiction Chronicle—but it may be time for them to pause in expansion and devote more time and energy to things like stabilizing publication schedules for the magazines and working on producing a more reliable level of quality in the fiction. It would be a mistake for them to overextend themselves, a mistake the once-mighty Pulphouse empire made before them. Let’s hope they can avoid that fate and keep the magazines they do have growing—the fiction semipro market could use a success story for a change. (Information about all of the DNA Publications magazines can be found at http://www.dna publications.com/.)

  Of the remaining SF fiction semiprozines, Terra Incognita, one of the brighter new lights on the fiction semiprozine scene, rivalled only by Century and Eidolon for their consistently high level of literary quality, managed to produce two issues in 2000 (after publishing no issues at all in 1999), featuring good work by Terry McGarry, Stefano Donati, L. Timmel Duchamp, David J. Hoffman-Dachelet and others (although I still think that their self-imposed restriction of only using stories that take place on Earth is too limiting; it’s hard enough to find good material for a magazine, without ruling out a very large percentage of it sight unseen). For the last couple of years, Australia has been bringing us three fiction semiprozines (two of them, Aurealis and Eidolon among the longest-running of all fiction semiprozines), but there seems to be trouble Down Under, and most of these magazines are emitting distressed wobbling noises. Just a few years back, much print was spilled hyping the new “Golden Age of Australian Science Fiction”, but, although there are still plenty of good Australian writers working in the genre market, the Australian Boom seems to have sprung a leak as far as the Australian magazines themselves are concerned. Altair, the newest of the Australian semiprozines, published one double issue this year, out of a scheduled four, and then seems to have gone on hiatus due to lack of funds—perhaps permanently, if things don’t work out. Aurealis published two issues (out of a scheduled four), one also a double issue but then got itself embroiled in some sort of strange controversy with most of its major writers (the details of which remain obscure to non-Australians, with most of the Australians being rather close-mouthed about it) which ended with most of them swearing to boycott the magazine from then on, leaving Aurealis’s future somewhat in doubt, although they are still officially continuing. Eidolon, of recent years the most reliable of the Australian semiprozines, published a double issue that featured some good
, high-professional-level stories from writers such as Chris Lawson, Damien Broderick, Geoffrey Maloney, Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling and others, undoubtedly the best issue by far produced by any Australian semiprozine this year, and then announced that they were abandoning their print edition to “reinvent” themselves on their Eidolon Online Web site (http:// www.eidolon.com) as an online-only “electronic magazine“—an announcement drawing cries of dismay from many industry insiders, who, after watching other print magazines such as Omni and Tomorrow try the same thing and fail, considered it to be tantamount to an announcement that Eidolon was going down the tubes (whether this turns out to be true or not remains to be seen; but I must admit that I myself am far from sanguine about its chances). So whether or not I can honestly advise you to subscribe to any of these magazines, I don’t know. Do you feel lucky? I’ll post what subscription information I have, and you can make up your own minds. (Meanwhile, a new Australian fiction semiprozine, Orb, is starting up, having produced two issues I’ve not yet seen. Rather than post a subscription rate for overseas subscriptions, they say to “please send enquiries regarding overseas subscriptions”; you can do so at their Web site, //home.vicnet.net.au/ ~kendacot/Orb/welcome.htm.)

  The other longest-running fiction semiprozine, the Canadian On Spec, had seemed a bit dull and lacklustre the last few years, overshadowed by the more robust Eidolon, but as the Australian magazines head into a rocky patch, it seems to have improved, with the overall quality of the fiction better than it’s been in a while, with worthwhile stories by Cory Doctorow, Derryl Murphy, Kain Massin, Rebecca M. Senese, and others appearing there this year. Meanwhile, the other Canadian fiction semiprozine, Transversions, seems to have disappeared completely.There’s also an Irish fiction semiprozine, an interesting and eccentric little magazine called Albedo One, which managed two issues this year. The leading British fiction semiprozine has for some years now been The Third Alternative, which is a slick and handsome full-size magazine that attracts the work of some top professional authors—but which also runs very little SF or fantasy, featuring “slipstream”, literary surrealism and horror instead. I only saw one issue of Tales of the Unanticipated and Space & Time, and LC-39 died after a final issue. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine died this year, after thirteen years of publication. I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, but there the most prominent magazine seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance and the lively and audacious little magazine Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, which also sneaks some science fiction in from time to time.

  A quirky and interesting newcomer in the fiction semiprozine market is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (http://www.lcrw.net); as you can tell from the title, it tends to be a bit selfconsciously eccentric and “literary”, but although you’ll find no centre-core SF here (or even fantasy, as it’s usually known in the genre), you will find some good stories, most of them existing somewhere on the borderline between slipstream and surreal literary fantasy; this year, they ran interesting stuff by Ellen Klages (a story which is on this year’s Final Nebula Ballot), Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, James Sallis and others.

  Another newcomer is Black Gate (http://www.blackgate.com), a handsome slick large-format fantasy magazine, supposedly concentrating on “Sword &c Sorcery” and “High Fantasy” (although, oddly, the debut issue also contains a science fiction story by Jeffrey Ford); the first issue features a gorgeous cover by Keith Parkinson, as well as good work by Richard Parks, Charles de Lint, Michael Moorcock and others (there are already rumours of behind-the-scenes trouble at Black Gate, though, so we’ll have to wait and see if it survives).

  Turning to the critical magazines, the top two magazines, and just about the only two published on a reliable schedule (or even anywhere near one), are Charles N. Brown’s “newszine” Locus, and David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine The New York Review of Science Fiction. Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle, for years Locus’s chief rival, has fallen on hard times of late, with its publishing schedule becoming so erratic that often there were only a couple of issues per year. In 2000, however, SF Chronicle became part of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications group, theoretically freeing Porter to concentrate on editing rather than the mundane details of production and distribution, and it is sincerely to be hoped that this change will put SF Chronicle back in contention as a top newszine again. There were two issues of Lawrence Person’s playful and intelligent Nova Express out this year, prompting some to exclaim that the millennium must be at hand (as indeed it is, isn’t it?) There’s not really a lot more left to the critical semiprozine market any more, what with some magazines falling silent, and Tangent and Speculations converting (supposedly, in Tangent’s case) to online-only electronic versions—a fate which I sometimes think might overtake all critical semiprozines in time.

  (Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $56.00 for a one-year first class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $32.00 per year, 12 issues; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; On Spec. More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars”; Eidolon, the journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6906, $45 (Australian) for four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair. Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction, PO Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia, $36 for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland; $34 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make cheques payable to “Albedo One”; Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, Science Fiction Chronicle—all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988, all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, although you can get a group subscription to all five DNA fiction magazines for $70 a year, with Science Fiction Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all cheques payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Century, Century Publishing, P.O. Box 150510, Brooklyn, NY 11215-0510, $20 for a four-issue subscription; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue 3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $15 for a four-issue subscription; Space & Time, 138 W. 70th Street (4B), New York, NY. 10023-4468, $10.00 for a two-issue subscription (one year), $20.00 for a four-issue subscription (two years); Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn NY 11230-6011, $15 for a four-issue subscription, cheques payable to LRC Publications; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, $18 for four issues; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK, $22 for a four-issue subscription, cheques made payable to “TTA Press”; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $25.95 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB #132, Brooklyn, NY 11217, $12 for four issues, all cheques payable to Gavin Grant. Many of these magazines can also be ordered online, at their Web sites; see the online section, above, for URLs.)

  All in all, 2000 was another weak year for original anthologies, with only a few bright spots here and there. The best original SF anthology of the year, with even less competition for the title than usual, was probably Vanishing Ac
ts (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow. Although it carries the assertive subtitle, “A Science Fiction Anthology”, a number of stories here, including a few of the best ones (the Chiang, the Stableford, the McDowell), are fantasy by any reasonable definition—but enough of the rest of them are centre-core SF to tip the balance and let us judge this as an SF anthology. The best story here is probably Ted Chiang’s eccentric and brilliant novella “Seventy-two letters”, a story which dances right on the razor-thin boundary between fantasy and science fiction; I finally decided that it actually was a fantasy, as it depends at base on the core assumption that cabalistic magic really does work, but it’s a member of that small but select sub subgenre of stories that rigorously examine fantasy material through the logical and rational lens of the scientific method — in fact, “Seventy-two Letters” reminds me the most strongly of those sections in Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror concerned with the making of the speculum majorum. Other than the Chaing, clearly the cream of the crop here, the best stories in Vanishing Acts are M. Shayne Bell’s “The Thing About Benny”, Daniel Abraham’s “Chimera 8”, and Paul. J. McAuley’s “The Rift”, with Brian Stableford’s “Tenebrio” and Ian McDowell’s “Sunflowers” a half step below that. The book also contains worthwhile but somewhat flawed stories by Mark W. Tiedemann and A. R. Morlan, and William Shunn, as well as less successful pieces by Michael Cadnum and David J. Schow. Vanishing Acts is also anchored by strong reprints by Suzy McKee Charnas, Avram Davidson, Karen Joy Fowler, and Bruce McAllister (be sure to catch in particular Charnas’s strong and underrated “Listening to Brahms&8221;), and graced by an intriguing poem by Joe Haldeman, and is a good value at $24.95.