The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Read online

  It was a strong year for original fantasy anthologies, with Legends II (Voyager), edited by Robert Silverberg; The Dragon Quintet (SFBC), edited by Marvin Kaye; The Dark: New Ghost Stories (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow; Mojo: Conjure Stories (Aspect), edited by Nalo Hopkinson; and the last in a long-running series, Sword and Sorceress: Volume XX (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. There were also two original Young Adult fantasy anthologies, Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold (Simon & Schuster), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling; and Firebirds (Penguin/Firebird), edited by Sharyn November. Horror saw big anthologies such as Gathering the Bones (Tor), edited by Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, and Jack Dann, and an interesting mystery/horror cross (Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulu, basically) Shadows Over Baker Street (Del Rey), edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan.

  It was a good year for dragon fans, with not only the publication of Lucius Shepard’s long-awaited “Dragon Grauile” sequel, “Liar’s House,” in SCI FICTION, but also the publication of The Dragon Quintet as well, five dragon novellas or novelettes, the most exceptional of which was Michael Swanwick’s somehow-related-to-The Iron Dragon’s Daughter story “King Dragon.” It was also a good year for alternate-history stories, with Howard Waldrop’s

  “Calling Your Name” and Harry Turtledove’s “Joe Steele” from Stars; Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Eyes of America” from SCI FICTION; Waldrop’s chapbook A Better World’s in Birth!; Robert Reed’s “Hexagons” from Asimov’s; and a number of others. It was also a year that saw Lucius Shepard return to something like his startling prolificacy of old; by my count, he had at least ten or eleven stories published in the genre this year, many of them novellas!

  Out on the ambiguous edges of genre, there were a number of original anthologies this year, like last year, that mixed science fiction (occasionally) with fantasy, horror, surrealism, and “slipstream,” “New Weird,” “Magic Realism,” “post-transformation fiction,” “interstitialism,” “fabulism,” or whatever the new buzzword for it is this week, not only within the pages of the same anthology but often within the boundaries of the individual stories themselves – this shows every indication of becoming a subgenre in itself (complete with its own magazines such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and, to some extent, The Third Alternative), only partially overlapping – although it does so overlap – with the regular reading audience of “core SF” (many of whose fans can’t stand it, or find it disappointing or baffling . . . a sentiment shared, to be fair, at least as far as the “disappointing” is concerned, by at least some of the slipstream audience toward science fiction itself). The most entertaining of these anthologies to me this year was Polyphony 2 (Wheatland Press), edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake; most of the stories here are clear mixtures of one or more genres, rather than straight mainstream or classic slipstream (which I’ve heard defined as “Magic Realism written by people who don’t come from South America”), and many of the hybrids are robust and vigorous, a relief after the too solemn and pretentious stuff sometimes found in anthologies of this kind; best stories here are by David Moles and Alex Irvine, although there’s also good stuff by Lucius Shepard, Lisa Goldstein, Jack Dann, Theodore Goss, and others. Polyphony 3 (Wheatland Press), also edited by Layne and Lake, is a little less vivid and more somber, but still contains good work by Jack Dann, Bruce Holland Rogers, Jeffrey Ford, Vandana Singh, Lori Ann White, and others. Album Zutique #1 (Ministry of Whimsy), edited by Jeff VandeMeer, is similar, perhaps leaning a bit further toward the “surrealism” edge than Polyphony, but still containing striking work by Jay Lake, Jeffrey Ford, Ursula Pflug, James Sallis, Michael Cisco, Steve Rasnic Tem, and others. Considerably further away from anything easily recognizable as genre, whether “multi-” or “mixed” or not, is Trampoline (Small Beer Press), edited by Kelly Link; this is much more of a classic “slipstream” anthology, and – like last year’s Conjunctions 39 – a number of stories strike me as not even slipstream or Magic Realism, but as mostly mainstream stories with occasional very faint fantastic – or at least “odd” – touches; some of them don’t even have the odd touches; considerations of genre classification aside, the best work here is by Jeffrey Ford (the workhorse of anthologies of this sort, it seems), Alex Irvine, Maureen McHugh, Glen Hirshberg, Richard Butner, Karen Joy Fowler, and others, plus a stylishly written but somewhat opaque fantasy novella by Greer Gilman. Witpunk (Four Walls Eight Windows), edited by Claude Lalumiere and Marty Halpern, is a mixed reprint-and-original anthology (mostly science fiction and slipstream, although there is some horror, mainstream, and even crime fiction) of stories that “range in style from dark comedy to laugh-out-loud farce,” and were chosen for “the timelessness of their satirical bite.” Humor being as subjective a matter as it is, not all of these will strike everybody as funny, but there is good stuff here, both reprint and original, “funny” or not, by Pat Cadigan, Ernest Hogan, Robert Silverberg, David Langford, Allen Steele, William Sanders, Pat Murphy, Jeffrey Ford, Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet, and others. McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (Vintage), edited by Michael Chabon, promises to be a sort of retro-pulp anthology – old wine in new bottles – strongly plotted genre adventure fiction of several different sorts written by well-known mainstream and “literary” writers, but doesn’t really deliver very well on that promise; Chabon’s condescending and rather patronizing introduction, which doesn’t bother to mention any of the SF, fantasy, or mystery magazines that have been keeping alive the kind of fiction he claims to be revitalizing or rediscovering here, pissed off most genre critics and readers, but if you can get beyond that, although it really isn’t the book that it presents itself as being, the anthology does feature good work by Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Jim Shepard, Dave Eggars, Karen Joy Fowler, and others. And The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (Ministry of Whimsy), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, is a sort of a slyly written “nonfiction” guide to things that (fortunately) don’t really exist, witty and very dark; not for the squeamish.

  If you’re looking for novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, your best bets were L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume IX (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys, and Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology (Phobos Books), edited by Orson Scott Card, Keith Olexa, and Christian O’Toole, which features winners of the 2nd Annual Phobos Fiction Contest. There’s decent work in both, but Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown may have a slight edge, due to an intriguing story by David D. Levine.

  There were supposed to be two regional anthologies of Canadian SF edited by Claude Lalumiere, but I was unable to find them before the selections for this book had to be made, and so they’ll have to wait for next year.

  Coming up next year: A new anthology edited by Peter Crowther, Constellations, and the long-delayed Microcosms, edited by Gregory Benford.

  Addresses: PS Publishing, 98 High Ash Drive, Leeds L517 8RE, England, UK – $16.00 for Dear Abbey, by Terry Bisson, $16. 00 for Light Stealer, by James Barclay, $16.00 for Jigsaw Men, by Gary Greenwood, $16.00 for Jupiter Magnified, by Adam Roberts, $16.00 for In Springdale Town, by Robert Freeman Wexler, $65.00 for Infinity Plus Two, edited by Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers (mentioned in reprint anthology section); Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802 – $27.95 for The Silver Gryphon, edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern, $15.95 for A Better World’s in Birth!, by Howard Waldrop, $15.95 for The Angel in the Darkness, by Kage Baker ; Wildside Press – for William Hope Hodgon’s Night Lands, Volume 1, Eternal Love, go to www.wildsidepress.com for pricing and ordering; Wheatland Press, P.O. Box 1818, Wilsonville, OR, 97070 – $16.95 for Polyphony 2, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, $17.95 for Polyphony 3, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake; Agog! Press, P.O. Box U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia – A$ $24.95 for Agog! Terrific Tales, edited by Cat Sparks; Night Shade Books, 3
623 SW Baird St., Portland, OR 97219 – $35.00 for The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker, $45.00 for The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts; Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB# 132, Brooklyn, NY 11217 – $17.00 for Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092 – $26.99 for Imagination Fully Dilated: The Literated Artwork of Alan M. Clark, edited by Robert Kruger and Patrick Swenson; Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003 – $14.95 for Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology, edited by Orson Scott Card, Keith Olexa, and Christian O’Toole; SFF.NET – $14.95 for Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, order online from www.sff.net/store/index.asp; Ministry of Whimsy Press, POB 4248, Tallahasse, FL 32315 – $12.99 for Album Zutique #1, edited by Jeff VanderMeer.

  2003 seemed like another strong year for novels – not quite as strong in overall literary quality as last year, perhaps, but close, with not only a lot of books coming out, but a lot of good books coming out as well.

  According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,429 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint (but not counting “media tie-in novels” such as Star Trek and Star Wars novels, gaming novels, novelizations of movies, or novels drawn from other TV shows such as Angel, Charmed, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer), published in 2003, up by 8% from 2002’s total of 2,241. Original books were up by 8% to 1,375 from last year’s total of 1,271; reprint books were up by 9% to 1,054 titles over last year’s total of 970. The number of new SF novels was down slightly, with 236 new titles published as opposed to 256 novels published in 2002. The number of new fantasy novels was up slightly, to 340, as opposed to 333 novels published in 2002. Horror was also up, rising to 171, its highest total since 1995, from last year’s total of 112. (Keep in mind that, for the most part, these totals don’t even reflect Print-On-Demand novels, or novels offered as downloads on the Internet.)

  I suppose that the “SF is dying” crowd will gleefully point out that the number of SF novels is down – but twenty titles is hardly a precipitous drop; in fact, in spite of changes in the publishing scene, lines gained and lines dropped, the number of new SF titles published every year has not varied by any significant amount for the last decade. So there’s still a lot of new SF novels being published every year. I wonder how many people have read all of the 236 new SF titles published this year? Probably nobody has. My guess is that few individual readers have even read a significant percentage of them.

  Certainly I have not. As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels this year.

  So instead I’ll limit myself to mentioning the novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2003 include: The Light Ages (Ace), Ian R. MacLeod; Darwin’s Children (Del Rey), Greg Bear; Singularity Sky (Ace), Charles Stross; Crossfire (Tor), Nancy Kress; Air (St. Martin’s Griffin), Geoff Ryman; Omega (Ace), Jack McDevitt; Absolution Gap (Gollancz), Alastair Reynolds; Ilium (Eos), Dan Simmons; The Anvil of the World (Tor), Kage Baker; The Sundering (Earthlight), Walter Jon Williams; Coalescent (Del Rey), Stephen Baxter; Sister Alice – considered as a novel rather than a collection – (Tor), Robert Reed; 1610: A Sundial in a Grave (Gollancz), Mary Gentle; Extremes (Roc), The Sundering (Avon), Walter Jon Williams; Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Red Thunder (Ace), John Varley; Memory (Tor), Linda Nagata; In the Presence of Mine Enemies (NAL), Harry Turtledove; The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (Scribner), Stephen King; The Salt Roads (Warner), Nalo Hopkinson; Noise (Tor), Hal Clement; The Crystal City (Tor), Orson Scott Card; Midnight Lamp (Gollancz), Gwyneth Jones; The Return of Santiago (Tor), Mike Resnick; Felaheen: The Third Arabesk (Earthlight), Jon Courtenay Grimwood; The Line of Polity (Tor UK), Neal Asher; The Golden Age: The Phoenix Exultant (Tor), John C. Wright; The Golden Age: The Golden Transcendence (Tor), John C. Wright; The Poison Master (Bantam Spectra), Liz Williams; Nine Layers of Sky (Bantam Spectra), Liz Williams; Paladin of Souls (Eos), Lois McMaster Bujold; The Lost Steersman (Del Rey), Rosemary Kirstein; Monstrous Regiment (HarperCollins), Terry Prachett; Natural History (Macmillan), Justina Robson; Blind Lake (Tor), Robert Charles Wilson; Maul (Orbit), Tricia Sullivan; In the Forests of Serre (Ace), Patricia A. McKillip; The Wreck of the River of Stars (Tor), Michael Flynn; Lady Robyn (Forge), R. Garcia y Robertson; Sunshine (Berkley), Robin McKinley; Any Man So Daring (Ace), Sarah A. Hoyt; Mortal Suns (Overlook), Tanith Lee, The Briar King (Del Rey), Greg Keyes; Wyrmhole (Roc), Jay Caselberg; Tinker (Baen), Wen Spencer; (Tor), The Braided World (Bantam Spectra), Kay Kenyon; The Seperation (Gollancz), Christopher Priest; The Night Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Stewart O’Nan; and The War of the Flowers (DAW), Tad Williams.

  The first novel that drew the most attention this year seemed to be Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor), by Cory Doctorow, although The Time Traveler’s Wife (Cage), by Audrey Niffenegger and Veniss Underground (Prime), by Jeff VanderMeer drew a good number of reviews as well. Other first novels included: Clade (Bantam), by Mark Budz; Star Dragon (Tor), by Mike Brotherton; Paper Mage (Roc), by Leah R. Cutter; The Buzzing (Vintage), Jim Knipfel; Spin State (Bantam Spectra), by Chris Moriarty; The Etched City (Prime), by K. J. Bishop; The Darknesses That Comes Before (Penguin Canada), by R. Scott Bakker; Magic’s Silken Snare (DAW), by ElizaBeth Gilligan; and A Telling of Stars (Penguin Canada), by Caitlin Sweet.

  There were several big-selling novels that were out on the ambiguous edge of genre this year, including Pattern Recognition (Putnam), by William Gibson, a novel set in the present day rather than in Gibson’s usual “Sprawl” future, and Quicksilver (Morrow), a secret history novel by Neal Stephenson. The small presses are publishing more novels than ever these days, even small-press houses such as Golden Gryphon, Subterranean, and PS Publishing that up until now have concentrated mostly on short story collections. First-rate novels from small-presses this year included a slew of novels by Lucius Shepard – Colonel Rutherford’s Colt (Subterranean), Floater (PS Publishing), Louisiana Breakdown (Golden Gryphon), and Aztechs (Subterranean) – as well as Nothing Human (Golden Gryphon), by Nancy Kress, Year Zero (Five Star), by Brian Stableford, Mockeymen (Golden Gryphon), by Ian Watson, Reading the Bones (Tachyon), Sheila Finch; and Fuzzy Dice (PS Publishing), by Paul Di Filippo.

  Associational novels by SF writers this year included Lust (St. Martin’s Press), by Geoff Ryman, and The Druid King (Knopf), by Norman Spinrad. Robert A. Heinlein’s sixty-six-year old first novel, For Us, the Living (Scribners), first written in 1938 and first published this year, is science fiction of the Tour of a Future Utopia sort, but is so completely dated by now that it might as well be listed as an associational novel, as it probably will not be of real interest to any but the most dedicated Heinlein fans (although critics also seem to have found it intriguing to pour over it to pick out the seeds of future – and better – novels that are visible here). All that really needs to be said about this book, it seems to me, is that Heinlein himself tried to destroy all traces of it to ensure that it would never be printed. I think that his wishes ought to have been respected.

  And since I continue to hear the complaint, usually from people who haven’t read any new science fiction in years, that there’s no “real” science fiction out there anymore, let me point out that, even discounting the fantasy and the borderline genre-mixing stuff on the list, the Bear, the Reynolds, the two Kress novels, the Baxter, the McDevitt, the Reed, the Stross, the Nagata, the Clement, the Flynn, the two Wright novels, the Williams, and more than a dozen others are clearly and unmistakably science fiction – many of them “hard science fiction” as hard and as rigorous as it’s ever been written, at that.

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, shortsighted bottom-line corporate publishing practices meant that books almost never came back into print once they had gone out of it, and even classics of the genre remained unavailable for decades. Fortunately, this has turned around in the Oughts, and the last few years have
proved to be the best time since the 1970s to pick up new editions of out-of-print classics of science fiction and fantasy, books that have been long unavailable to the average reader.

  There’s such a flood of reprints now that it’s become difficult to keep track of all the reprint editions coming out – with Tor/Orb, ibooks, Baen, and the Science Fiction Book Club especially active – particularly when you factor in the availability of Print-On-Demand books from places such as Wildside Press, and the availability of formerly out-of-print books as electronic downloads on Internet sources such as Fictionwise. Therefore, rather than trying to produce an exhaustive list of such titles, I’ll just mention a few that caught my eye. There were a number of good omnibus volumes, usually including two or more of an author’s novels, including, The Dragon Masters (ibooks), by Jack Vance; Latro in the Mist (Tor/Orb), by Gene Wolfe; Dorsai Spirit (Tor/Orb), by Gordon R. Dickson; John Grimes: Tramp Captain (SFBC), by A. Bertram Chandler; General Practice (Tor/Orb), by James White; Tales of Sector General (SFBC), by James White; Med Ships (SFBC), by James White; The Peace War (Tor), by Vernor Vinge; Heavy Planet (SFBC), by Hal Clement; The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring (Del Rey), by Larry Niven; Planet of Adventure (Baen), by Murry Leinster; At the Edge of Space (DAW), by C. J. Cherryh; Swan Songs (SFBC), by Brian Stableford, and Carlucci (Ace), by Richard Paul Russo. Good singleton reprints included, from ibooks: Brain Wave, The High Crusade, and Ensign Flandry, all by Poul Anderson, Swords Against Death and Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber, Nostrilla, by Cordwainer Smith, Shadrach in the Furnace, by Robert Silverberg, Strangers, by Gardner Dozois, Maske: Thaery, by Jack Vance, Beyond Heaven’s River and Hegira, by Greg Bear, and To Die in Italbar and Changling, by Roger Zelazny; Tor/Orb reprinted, in addition to those titles already mentioned: Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock, The Summer Queen, by Joan Vinge, and Red Prophet and Seventh Sun, by Orson Scott Card; Gollancz reprinted The Blue World, by Jack Vance, Son of Man, by Robert Silverberg, The Ophiuchi Hotline, by John Varley, and The Miracle Visitors, by Ian Watson; The Science Fiction Book Club reprinted Three Hearts and Three Lions, by Poul Anderson; Vintage reprinted Eye in the Sky, The Cosmic Puppets, and Solar Lottery, all by Philip K. Dick; HarperCollins/Perennial reprinted The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Carroll & Graf reprinted On Wings of Song, by Thomas M. Disch; Bantam Spectra reprinted Windhaven, by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, and Swordpoint, by Ellen Kushner; Eos reprinted The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman; Del Rey reprinted Have Space Suit – Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky, and The Door into Summer, all by Robert A. Heinlein; DAW reprinted The Edge of Space, by C. J. Cherryh; Starscape reprinted Putting Up Roots, by Charles Sheffield, and The Eye of the Heron, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Modern Library reissued The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. Plus, no doubt, many reprints that I missed. Check around for them, and buy them while you can.