The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Read online

  According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,951 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2012, down 4 percent from 3,071 titles in 2011, the first year of decline after five years of record numbers. Overall, new titles were down 5 percent to 2,030 from 2011’s 2,140, while reprints dropped 3 percent to 921 from 2011’s 931, cumulatively down 4 percent to 2,951 from 2011’s 3071. Hardcover sales were actually up, from 867 to 875, while the number of trade paperbacks sold saw only a slight decline, from 1,355 to 1,343; the big drop was in mass-market paperbacks, which dipped 14 percent from 849 to 733, probably because of competition with ebooks, which seem to be cutting into mass-market sales more than any other category. The number of new SF novels was up 4 percent to 318 titles as opposed to 2011’s 305. The number of new fantasy novels was up by 2 percent, to 670 titles as opposed to 2011’s total of 660. Horror novels were down 10 percent, after a 9 percent drop in 2010, to 207 titles as opposed to 2011’s 229 titles. Paranormal romances were down to 314 titles as opposed to 2011’s 416 titles (although sometimes it’s almost a subjective call whether a particular novel should be pigeonholed as paranormal romance, fantasy, or horror).

  Young adult novels continued to boom in SF, while declining in fantasy. YA fantasy novels made up 33 percent of the overall fantasy novel total, down from 35 percent in 2011, while YA SF novels rose from 24 percent of the overall SF novel total in 2011 to 28 percent in 2012. Most of this increase was in dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA SF novels, perhaps driven by the success of The Hunger Games novels and films.

  (It’s worth noting that these totals don’t count ebooks, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, or print-on-demand books—all of which would swell the overall total by hundreds if counted.)

  As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning that novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2012 include:

  Blue Remembered Earth (Ace Hardcover), by Alastair Reynolds; 2312 (Orbit), by Kim Stanley Robinson; Intruder (DAW), by C. J. Cherry; The Fractal Prince (Tor), by Hannu Rajaniemi; The Hydrogen Sonata (Orbit), by Iain M. Banks; Red Country (Orbit), by Joe Abercrombie; Range of Ghosts (Tor), by Elizabeth Bear; In the Mouth of the Whale (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; Redshirts (Tor), by John Scalzi; The Drowned Cities (Little, Brown), by Paolo Bacigalupi; Be My Enemy (Pyr), by Ian McDonald; Dodger (Harper), by Terry Pratchett; Existence (Tor), by David Brin; The Long Earth (Harper), by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter; The Great Game (Angry Robot), by Lavie Tidhar; Apollo’s Outcasts (Pyr), by Allen Steele; The Apocalypse Codex (Ace), by Charles Stross; Some Kind of Fairy Tale (Doubleday), by Graham Joyce; Harmony (Solaris), by Keith Brooke; The Inexplicables (Tor), by Cherie Priest; Kitty Steals the Show (Tor), by Carrie Vaughn; The Rapture of the Nerds (Tor), Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross; Empty Space (Gollancz), by M. John Harrison; Bowl of Heaven (Tor), by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford; Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Baen), Lois McMaster Bujold; Shadows in Flight (Tor), by Orson Scott Card; Slow Apocalypse (Ace), by John Varley; Caliban’s War (Orbit), by James S.A. Corey; Sharps (Orbit), by K. J. Parker; City of Dragons (Harper Voyager), by Robin Hobb; Great North Road (Del Rey), by Peter F. Hamilton; The Fourth Wall (Orbit), by Walter Jon Williams; Ashes of Candesce (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Whispers Under Ground (Del Rey), by Ben Aaronovitch; Queen’s Hunt (Tor), by Beth Bernobich; The King’s Blood (Orbit), by Daniel Abraham; Triggers (Ace), by Robert J. Sawyer; Forge of Darkness (Tor), by Steven Erikson; Sea Hearts (Allen & Unwin), by Margo Lanagan; Railsea (Del Rey), by China Mieville; Crucible of Gold (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; Hide Me Among the Graves (William Morrow), by Tim Powers; The Coldest War (Tor), by Ian Tregillis; and Boneland (Fourth Estate), by Alan Garner.

  For at least fifteen years now, I’ve been hearing the complaint that all the SF books have been driven off the bookstore shelves by fantasy books, but there’s still plenty of it around. On the list above, although there’s a number of fantasy titles, there are quite a few undeniably core-SF titles there as well: the Robinson, the Reynolds, the McAuley, the Steele, the McDonald, the Bacigalupi, the Schroeder, the Corey, the Cherryh, the Banks, the Hamilton, and many others. Many more could be cited from the lists of small-press novels and first novels. Yes, fantasy is popular, but science fiction has not vanished yet—there’s still more good core SF out there than any one person could possibly have time to read in the course of a year.

  Small presses are active in the novel market these days, where once they published mostly collections and anthologies. Novels issued by small presses this year included: The Eternal Flame: Orthogonal Book Two (Night Shade Books Books), by Greg Egan; Time and Robbery (Aqueduct Press), by Rebecca Ore; Zeuglodon (Subterranean Press), by James P. Blaylock; Black Opera (Night Shade Books), by Mary Gentle; Ison of the Isles (ChiZine), Carolyn Ives Gilman; Worldsoul (Prime Books), by Liz Williams; Everything Is Broken (Prime Books), by John Shirley; Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine), by Paul Tremblay; The Architect (PS Publishing), by Brendan Connell; Against the Light (47North), Dave Duncan; Hitchers (Night Shade Books), Will McIntosh; Bullettime (ChiZine), Nick Mamatas; The Croning (Night Shade Books), Laird Barron; and Crandolin (Chomu Press), by Anna Tambour.

  The year’s first novels included: The Games (Del Rey), Ted Kosmatka; Throne of the Crescent Moon (DAW), by Saladin Ahmed; Grim (Scholastic), by Anna Waggener; Above (Arthur A. Levine Books), by Leah Bobet; Enchanted (Harcourt), by Alethea Kontis; Alif the Unseen (Grove Press), by G. Willow Wilson; Hidden Things (Harper Voyager), by Doyce Testerman; A Once Crowded Sky (Touchstone), by Tom King; The Minority Council (Orbit), by Kate Griffin; So Close to You (Harper Teen), by Rachel Carter; Blackwood (Strange Chemistry), by Gwenda Bond; Glitch (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Heather Anastasiu; Albert of Adelaide (Twelve), by Howard L. Anderson; Something Strange and Deadly (HarperTeen), by Susan Dennard; Three Parts Dead (Tor), by Max Gladstone; Through to You (Balzer + Bray), by Emily Hainsowrth; Seraphina (Random House), by Rachel Hartman; Shadows Cast by Stars (Atheneum), by Catherine Knutsson; Blood and Feathers (Solaris), by Lou Morgan; Fair Coin (Pyr), by E. C. Myers; Year Zero (Del Rey), by Rob Reid; The Man from Primrose Lane (Sarah Crichton), by James Renner; Something Red (Atria), by Douglas Nicholas; Strange Flesh (Simon & Schuster), by Michael Olson; Starters (Delacorte), by Lissa Price; and Living Proof (Tor), by Kira Peikoff. None of these novels generated an unusual amount of buzz; the most frequently reviewed were probably The Games and Throne of the Crescent Moon.

  The strongest novella chapbooks of the year included On a Red Station, Drifting (Immersion Press), by Aliette de Bodard; Gods of Risk (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; The Boolean Gate (Subterranean Press), by Walter Jon Williams; The Yellow Cabochon (PS Publishing), by Matthew Hughes; After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon), by Nancy Kress; Mare Ultima (PS Publishing), by Alex Irvine; Starship Winter (PS Publishing), by Eric Brown; An Account of a Voyage from World to World (Jurassic), by Adam Roberts; Indomitable (Subterranean Press), by Terry Brooks; Face in the Crowd (Simon & Schuster), by Stephen King and Steward O’Nan; When the Blue Shift Comes (Phoenix Pick), by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; The Thorn and the Blossom (Quirk Books), by Theodora Goss; From Whence You Came (d.y.m.k. Productions), by Laura Ann Gilman; The Pit of Despair (PS Publishing), by Simon R. Green; and ad eternum (Subterranean Press) and Book of Iron (Subterranean Press), both by Elizabeth Bear.

  As you can see, this category is largely dominated by Subterranean Press and PS Publishing.

  Novel omnibuses this year included: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s (Library of America), edited by Gary K. Wolfe; Ride the Star Winds (Baen), by A. Bertram Chandler; Thunder in the Void (Haffner), by Henry Kuttner, edited by Stephen Haffner; The Chalice of Death (Paizo/Planet Stories), by Robert Silverberg; The Planet Killers (Paizo/Planet Stories), by Robert Silverberg; A Song Called Youth (Prime Books), by John Shirley; The Ghost Pirat
es and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson (Night Shade Books), by William Hope Hodgson, edited by Jeremy Lasson (contains short stories as well); Earthblood and Other Stories (Baen), by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (contains short stories as well); and Ice and Shadow (Baen), by Andre Norton. Novel omnibuses are also frequently made available through the Science Fiction Book Club.

  Not even counting print-on-demand books and the availability of out-ofprint books as ebooks or as electronic downloads from Internet sources, a lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Here are some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably impossible. Tor reissued: Mother of Storms, by John Barnes; Earthseed, by Pamela Sargent; After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Foundation’s Friends, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; The Eye of the World, The Fires of Heaven, The Great Hunt, and Lord of Chaos, all by Robert Jordan. Orb reissued: Peace, by Gene Wolfe; Downward to the Earth, by Robert Silverberg; and The Long Price: The Price of War, by Daniel Abraham. Baen reissued When the People Fell, by Cordwainer Smith; Voyage Across the Stars, by David Drake; Strangers, by Gardner Dozois; Nightmare Blue, by Gardner Dozois and George Alec Effinger; The Forerunner Factor, by Andre Norton; and An Assignment in Eternity, Sixth Column, and The Star Beast, all by Robert A. Heinlein. Subterranean Press reissued: Dying of the Light, by George R. R. Martin; Phases of Gravity, by Dan Simmons; and Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link. Ace reissued: Illegal Alien, by Robert J. Sawyer. Bantam reissued Windhaven, by George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle. William Morrow reissued. Stardust: The Gift Edition—Deluxe Signed Limited, by Neil Gaiman. Ballantine/Del Rey reissued: The Annotated Sword of Shannara: 35th Anniversary Edition. Houghton Mifflin reissued: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien; A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Counter-Clock World; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Gather Yourself Together, and Solar Lottery, all by Philip K. Dick. Harcourt/Mariner reissued: The Man in the High Castle and Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick. The Library of America reissued: A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Fairwood Press reissued: Brittle Innings, by Michael Bishop. Roc reissued Majipoor Chronicles, by Robert Silverberg. Arc Manor reissued: The Masks of Time and Thebes of the Hundred Gates, by Robert Silverberg. Chicago Review Press reissued; Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. PM Press reissued Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Cathage, by Michael Moorcock. Farrar, Straus and Giroux reissued: A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Grand Central reissued: The New Moon’s Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. Scribner reissued: Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Wesleyan University Press reissued: Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, by Samuel R. Delany. Open Road reissued; Alien Sex, edited by Ellen Datlow. Underland Press reissued Glimmering, by Elizabeth Hand. HiLoBooks reissued; When the World Shook, by H. Rider Haggard.

  Many authors are now reissuing their old back titles as ebooks, either through a publisher or all by themselves so many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all here. Before you conclude that something from an author’s backlist is unavailable, though, check with the Kindle and Nook stores, and with other online vendors.

  2012 was a strong year for short-story collections. The year’s best collections included: The Best of Kage Baker (Subterranean Press), by Kage Baker; Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr. (Subterranean Press), by Neal Barrett, Jr.; Shoggoths in Bloom (Prime Books), by Elizabeth Bear; The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (PS Publishing), by Andy Duncan; At the Mouth of the River of Bees (Small Beer Press), by Kij Johnson; Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas (PS Publishing), by Robert Reed; The 400-Million-Year Itch (Ticonderoga), by Steven Utley; Win Some, Lose Some: The Hugo Award Winning (And Nominated) Short Fiction of Mike Resnick (ISFIC Press) by Mike Resnick; Fountain of Age: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Nancy Kress; A Stark and Wormy Knight (Subterranean Press), by Tad Williams; and The Dragon Griaule (Subterranean Press), by Lucius Shepard. Also good were: Captive Dreams (Arc Manor), by Michael F. Flynn; Neil Gwyne’s On Land and At Sea (Subterranean Press), by Kage Baker and Kathleen Bartholomew; First and Last Contacts (NewCon), by Stephen Baxter; Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille and Other Stories (Fairwood Press), by James Van Pelt; Angels and You Dogs (PS Publishing), by Kathleen Ann Goonan; Errantry (Small Beer Press) by Elizabeth Hand; Crackpot Palace (Morrow), by Jeffery Ford; Birds and Birthdays (Aqueduct Press), by Christopher Barzak; Jagannath (Cheeky Frawg Books), by Karin Tidbeck; Near + Far (Hydra House Books), by Cat Rambo; Master of the Galaxy (PS Publishing), by Mike Resnick; Resnick’s Menagerie (Silverberry), by Mike Resnick; Moscow But Dreaming (Prime Books), by Ekaterina Sedia; Cracklespace (Twelfth Planet), by Margo Lanagan; Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (Subterranean Press), by Catlin R. Kiernan; You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home (Lethe Press), by Alex Jeffers; Trapped in the Saturday Matinee (PS Publishing), by Joe R. Lansdale; Report from Planet Midnight (PM Press), by Nalo Hopkinson; The Janus Tree and Other Stories (Subterranean Press), by Glen Hirshberg; and Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures (Big Mouth House), by Peter Dickinson.

  Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth (Small Beer Press), by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands (Small Beer Press), by Ursula K. Le Guin; Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two (Subterranean Press), by Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan; The Collected Kessel (Baen), by John Kessel; The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 7: We Are For the Dark (Subterranean Press), by Robert Silverberg; The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades (Subterranean Press), by Robert Silverberg; The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (Subterranean Press), by Michael Bishop, edited by Michael H. Hutchins; A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction (Doubleday UK), by Terry Pratchett; The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Three: Upon the Dull Earth (1953–1954) (Subterranean Press), by Philip K. Dick; Kurt Vonnegut: Novels and Stories 1950–1962 (Library of America), by Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Sidney Offit; Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition (Fantastic Books), by Allen Steele; Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (New York Review Books Classics), by Robert Sheckley; A Song Called Youth (Prime Books), by John Shirley; Wonders of the Invisible World (Tachyon), by Patricia A. McKillip; Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner, Volume 1 (Centipede), by Karl Edward Wagner, edited by Stephen Jones; The Ghost Pirates and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson (Night Shade Books—also contains a novel), by William Hope Hodgson, edited by Jeremy Lasson; and A Niche in Time and Other Stories: The Best of William F. Temple, Volume 1 (Ramble House), by William F. Temple.

  As has been true for at least a decade now, small presses again dominated the list of short-story collections, with only a few trade collections being published. Subterranean Press was particularly active in this area this year.

  A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at many sites. The Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.

  The most reliable buys in the reprint-anthology market, as usual, are the various Best of the Year anthologies. At the moment, science fiction is being covered by three anthologies (actually, technically, by two anthologies and by two separate half-anthologies): the one you are reading at the moment, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF series from Constable & Robinson, edited by Gardner Dozois; the Year’s Best SF series (Harper Voyager), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its seventeenth annual volume; by the science-fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (Night Shade Books),
edited by Jonathan Strahan; and by the science-fiction half of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton (in practice, of course, these books probably won’t divide neatly in half with their coverage, and there’s likely to be more of one thing than another). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto Best of the Year anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (Pyr), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. (A similar series covering the Hugo winners began in 2010, but swiftly died.) There were three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 23 (Running Press), edited by Stephen Jones; and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. Fantasy, which used to have several series devoted to it, is now, with the apparent death of David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy series, covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan and Horton anthologies, plus whatever stories fall under the Dark Fantasy part of Guran’s anthology. There was also The 2012 Rhysling Anthology (Hadrosaur Productions), edited by Lyn C. A. Gardner, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year.

  It was a somewhat weak year for large stand-alone reprint anthologies this year, especially in SF, although there were a fair number of good reprint theme anthologies.

  Robots: The Recent A.I. (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, is a strong mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, recent stories about robots and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ’50s). The one original story is a fine one, Lavie Tidhar’s “Under the Eaves,” included in this anthology, but the reprint stories are also strong, including stories by Catherynne M. Valente, Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, Rachel Swirsky, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year.