The short fiction list this year is based on material provided by Jonathan Strahan, Lois Tilton, Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, David G. Hartwell, Ellen Datlow, Alisa Krasnostein, Paula Guran, and others. Stories with three positive mentions, and some with two, made the final list; some had six mentions.
‘‘Publication’’ itself is not an exact term. We used to follow the Tom Clancy court case, which says a book is published when it is offered for sale, but are shifting, at least with the short fiction, to include online appearance, as do the other awards systems, and the publishers (when considering rights sales; please consider this when putting your work online – that’s your first publication). American trade books used to appear months before their official publication date, but now mostly appear in their month of publication. British books have always appeared during their official publication month, and small-press books usually after – sometimes way after, if ever. We are holding some books dated January 2013 until next year for recommendation, and including some books dated 2011 not seen until 2012. British, as well as Canadian or Australian works, are eligible when published. We also include any books first appearing in the English language from other countries.
For short fiction, we use cover date for magazines, but publication date for books.
As usual, there are arguments about where to put novels. Is it SF or fantasy or horror? Is it all three? We’ve picked as best we can and squeezed various rectangular pegs into ellipsoid holes.
SF NOVELS
This year we listed 318 SF novels, including YA, up from 305 last year. We’re recommending 27 titles, well up from last year’s 23. On the US side, the titles came from a spread of imprints, though Tor again published the highest percentage with seven titles. Four came out from Orbit; three from Night Shade Books; two from Ace; and one from Baen, Black Cat, DAW, Knopf, Transreal, and Quirk. On the UK side, seven came out from Gollancz, five came out from Orbit UK, one came out from Heinemann, Gerald Duckworth, and Tor UK. Twelve of the SF titles took place off-planet, with four more including space travel and a return to Earth, several with a colonized Solar System, and at least two looking back at alternate and secret histories.
Of the 27 titles, 12 were parts of series – some very long series – with at least one the concluding volume of a trilogy. Ian Banks’s long-running Culture series reaches its 25th anniversary with The Hydrogen Sonata; Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold continues her popular Miles Vorkosigan series; C.J. Cherryh reaches #13 in her Foreigner series, starting her fifth trio with Intruder; Fate of the Worlds by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner concludes two series in this collaboration – Ringworld and Fleet of Worlds – in a finale that is ‘‘full of flashbacks, explanations, connections and reconnections, and general cleaning-up on the way to hash-settling and happy endings…’’ [Russell Letson]. Karl Schroeder continues with book five of the Virga series in Ashes of Candesce; and Walter Jon Williams’s third volume after This Is Not a Game and Deep State, The Fourth Wall adds a showbiz feel to the usual international intrigue and near-future SF.
The Fractal Prince follows on from Hannu Rajaniemi’s outstanding debut The Quantum Thief, in a sophomore SF thriller with tales within tales á la Arabian Nights; in another second volume, James S.A. Corey, AKA Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck, follows up Hugo nominated Leviathan’s Wake with Caliban’s War, complete with a solar system on the brink of war, super-soldiers, and the ever-growing protomolecule. Empty Space concludes M. John Harrison’s brilliant space opera Kefahuchi Tract sequence as a sequel to both Light and Nova Swing in fine form and in the exquisite language we’ve come to expect from Harrison.
Other favorites for the year were Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 – an ambitious novel centering around artist and asteroid terraformer Swan Er Hong’s circuitous journey through the Solar System for answers about her grandmother’s secret political machinations; seeded with ideas as diverse as genetic manipulation and biotechnology, longevity, gynandromorphism and gender identity, AIs and clones, art and music; and exploring the politics and wondrous expansiveness of a colonized 24th-century Solar System. In a strangely similar setup, though completely different in style, Alastair Reynolds’s new series starter Blue Remembered Earth follows Geoffrey Akinya of the Akinya Empire, who reluctantly goes off into the settled 22nd-century Solar System in search of answers to a puzzle left by his matriarchal grandmother, now aiding him in his search in the form of a not-quite-complete embedded AI. Lost Everything by Brian Slattery, as Adrienne Martini put it in her review, ‘‘turns the horrors of national and cultural collapse into something far more intimate, lacking easy definitions and beyond the scope of most dystopian SF.’’ Any Day Now by Terry Bisson is an alternate history: a cogent and evocative telling of a young man’s experiences during an alternate ’50s and ’60s – in fine Bisson form he draws the reader into the passenger seat of the story for a ride through a subverted timeline that didn’t quite happen. More of the SF titles are covered in the reviewers’ surveys of the year that follow, so look there for more details and titles.
FANTASY NOVELS
We listed 670 fantasy novels, including young adult, up once again from 660, and 209 horror novels, down from 229 last year. We don’t count paranormal romance in fantasy, but urban fantasy (vampires and werewolves included), is counted unless so dark as to be horror; there were 314 listed as paranormal romance, a big drop from 416.
We’re recommending 20 books, down from 25 last year. As always, series books were a significant portion of the list: 11 of the 20, with Worldsoul by Liz Williams launching a new series. Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch is the third in his sequence following the investigations of policeman Peter Grant as he looks into crimes of the occult, this time in the London Underground. The King’s Blood continues Daniel Abraham’s very well-received Dagger and the Coin series started with The Dragon’s Path, and 2012 World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award winner Alan Garner’s Boneland is a return to children’s characters Colin and Susan, made famous 50 years earlier in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), now grown up in this concluding adult sequel. Stina Leicht continues to impress with sophomore title And Blue Skies from Pain, a historical crime fantasy set in the 1970s combining the complex and gritty life of Northern Ireland with a conflict between the Church and the Fey. Mary Robinette Kowal continues her enchanting series with Glamour in Glass, a work of understated humor and delicate spun magic.
Standouts in standalone fantasy included some of my favorites. Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, takes us to the home(s) of a Midlands family whose daughter disappeared years before and has now returned, with no sign of aging – a classic story, but Joyce gives as much weight to the story of those who were left behind as he does to the other world she was abducted to. As Gary Wolfe aptly put it, this is where Joyce excels: ‘‘revealing the interpenetration of the realistic and the fantastic.’’ Another work where the fantastic and the real merge, Caitlín Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl is told through the eyes of schizophrenic Imp, our self-admittedly unreliable narrator, who is haunted by the beautiful (ghost? hallucination? siren?) Eva Canning. Poignant and provocative, this may be Kiernan’s best work yet.
FIRST NOVELS
We listed 138 first novels this year, up from 128 last year. We have 15 on our recommended list, spanning all genres. Only three were SF, ten were fantasy, including the four young-adult titles, and one horror; nine were by women, six by men.
On our list we find both newcomers and accomplished writers presenting their first genre novels: short fiction writer Ted Kosmatka with his long-awaited The Games, a disturbing SFnal thriller about near-future Olympic games with horrific and dangerous genetic creations as combatants; well-known British writer, critic, and poet Roz Kaveney with Rituals, a smart and funny reworking of world mythology in urban fantasy; investigative reporter and non-fiction writer James Renner with his semi-autobiographical mainstream thriller turned time travel conundrum The
Man from Primrose Lane; graphic novelist Rachel Hartman with her fantasy novel debut Seraphina, featuring a clever take on dragons; comics writer and essayist G. Willow Wilson with Alif the Unseen, a fantasy cyberthriller set in a near-future Middle Eastern country, which follows the hacker Alif’s struggle to save himself, and the world, when he goes after the wrong girl and ends up with the secret book of the jinn; National Book Award-winner Goblin Secrets by William Alexander; and more. Our own Gwenda Bond combines the mystery of Roanoke Island’s Lost Colony with a coming of age story in Blackwood. Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling by Michael Boccacino is perhaps best-described in the author’s own words: ‘‘2 cups Jane Eyre, 6 oz of Lovecraft, and a tbsp of Tim Burton….’’
YOUNG ADULT
We listed 475 young-adult novels in 2012, mostly flat from 2011’s increase to 477. This year’s list has 22 titles, down from 25 last year. Seven are science fiction, the rest are fantasy. Eleven were parts of series or in the same universe as a series.
As mentioned earlier, this year’s list is strewn with adult SF/F authors who have migrated to, or are at least visiting, the young-adult category. Paolo Bacigalupi does not disappoint with his latest, The Drowned Cities, set in the same gritty, dystopic future as his 2010 YA Shipbreaker; James Blaylock turns his steampunk skills into a YA foray in Zeuglodon, subtitled ‘‘The True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist’’; Elizabeth Hand channels her impressive skills toward blending biography and time travel as young homeless artist Merle meets her kindred spirit in the 16-year-old poet Rimbaud, a surreal transcension of time and place; Nalo Hopkinson’s The Chaos questions notions of identity and image while pitting her teen protagonist against the supernatural force of the Chaos, which threatens to consume the entire world; China Miéville explores pseudo-nautical, old-fashioned adventure fiction in Railsea, a post-apocalyptic homage to Moby Dick, on seas made of dirt and covered in train tracks, right down to the captain in search of the great, white moldywarpe; and more. Standouts among the standalones include The Diviners by Libba Bray and Every Day by David Levithan, and of those working in series, Kristin Cashore caps off the trio begun with Graceling and its companion book Fire with Bitterblue, called by our YA reviewer her ‘‘masterwork to date;’’ Holly Black concludes her Curse Worker’s series with Black Heart; Rae Carson presents her successful followup to The Girl of Fire and Thorns, The Crown of Embers; Ian McDonald continues Everett’s multiverse adventures in Be My Enemy…. I could go on but this list is long and the reviewers have more to add, so I’ll leave it to them.
–Liza Groen Trombi
COLLECTIONS
This was an exceptional year for collections – we’re recommending 36 titles, way up from 20 last year. Most, as usual, were published by small or independent presses, and quality was very high all around. We received 132, back up from last year’s 111.
We have nine career retrospectives/overviews to recommend this year. The Best of Kage Baker is a fitting tribute to Baker’s life, with 20 compelling stories, 11 previously uncollected. Fantasist Jonathan Carroll’s understated, hard-to-categorize stories about grief, love, and longing are collected in The Woman Who Married a Cloud. Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett Jr. compiles 28 offbeat stories, from Barrett’s characteristic gonzo post-apocalyptic tall tales to quieter yarns that demonstrate his range. Ursula K. Le Guin handpicked the stories in volumes one and two of The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, the earliest dated 1964, the most recent 2005, and there are some unexpected stories brought back to light as a result, as well as more familiar classics. Michael Bishop also selected the stories in The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy, covering 40 years of his career, and took it one step further by revising them, sometimes substantially. Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley is one of the few on the list published by a major publisher, and represents the first such collection of Sheckley brought out since 1989, though there have been many small-press offerings. It’s good to see Sheckley’s satirical, genre-bending tales getting the widespread and perhaps even mainstream attention they deserve. Followups to multi-volume retrospectives include excellent offerings from Robert Silverberg and Jack Vance.
We have seven first collections to recommend this year (compared to last year’s two).
Kiini Ibura Salaam’s Ancient, Ancient is an outstanding debut collection of SF and fantasy stories about sexuality and power, with attention to the power of language and poetry itself as instruments of seduction and creation. Kij Johnson’s first major collection (following an earlier e-book collection in 2001), At the Mouth of the River of Bees, is a must-read, with lovingly crafted, hard-hitting SF and fantasy stories. Jagannath, from newcomer Karin Tidbeck, is populated by the spirits and shades of the author’s native Sweden. From the grotesque to the surreal, these stories never flinch from dark truths. Birds and Birthdays is a slim volume with three exceptional stories and an essay that comprise Christopher Barzak’s tribute to surrealist women artists Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning. Moscow but Dreaming from Ekaterina Sedia offers resonant, melancholy tales, most rooted in Russian history and folklore.
Hugh Howey self-published Wool Omnibus, a collection of SFnal and dystopic linked stories; after their great critical and commercial success as short digital works, the title has since been picked up by Simon & Schuster. From Charles Yu we have metafictional debut collection Sorry Please Thank You, which mines the shifting territories between mainstream and SFnal tropes with skill.
We have 20 followup collections on the list, too many to comment on in depth. We saw important collections from some of our favorite authors including Elizabeth Bear, Andy Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Elizabeth Hand, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, and Patricia A. McKillip. You know these authors’ voices – they are distinctive and beloved – but they can still surprise you, and each of these volumes contains its own delights and surprises, so buy and read.
Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille is James van Pelt’s fourth collection, one of the best we’ve seen this year, with SF, fantasy, and horror stories that are hard to pin down, but always sharp. There’s a great second collection out from Holly Phillips, At the Edge of Waking, offering up a vivid sensory (and extra-sensory) feast. We like Midnight and Moonshine, co-written by Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, with a series of interwoven tales inspired by old Norse mythology, ranging from ninth-century Vinland to modern times in the deep South.
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, subtitled ‘‘25 tales of weird romance,’’ explores monsters and monstrous feelings, dangerous games of seduction and revenge, rituals, and sacrifices both willing and unwilling, all with Kiernan’s characteristic deft touch. In Windeye, Brian Evenson offers a series of elegantly crafted literary tales about alienation and revelation. From Robert Shearman we enjoyed Remember Why You Fear Me, a substantial collection of horror shorts leavened by sly humor, with plenty of heart, sometimes literally still bleeding. Glen Hirshberg’s The Janus Tree and Other Stories explores the subtle cracks in the everyday world in a series of atmospheric horror stories. We like Stephen Baxter’s Last and First Contacts, with ten stories that explore the far edges of both time and space – this is expansive, convincing, big-picture SF. Peter Dickinson’s Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures is a satisfying conclusion to the Four Elements series written with Robin McKinley, with Dickinson taking over as sole author for this installment, pleading his status as an 84-year-old: ‘‘At this rate I’d be ninety-seven by the time Earth sees the light of day. I have no intention of hanging around that long.’’
Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule compiles novellas and short stories about an ancient dragon named Griaule with an almost godlike status. These are stories about storytelling, transgressive speculations on the nature of legend and faith. Robert Reed’s Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas contains varied hard SF from a master of the short form – no one unde
rstands pace and tension quite like Reed!
–Francesca Myman
ANTHOLOGIES
We’re recommending a total of 24 anthologies, up a tick from last year’s 23. We received 111, down from last year’s 125. [FULL DISCLOSURE: People on our reviewing panel edited some of these anthologies. They were not allowed to vote for their own books and received no special treatment.] We split the anthologies the way we list them, though not in the voting, between original, reprint, and Year’s Best categories.
Original anthologies are the most important in that they are a major source of new short fiction. Science fiction had an tremendous year, with four anthologies offering pure science fiction. Jonathan Strahan presented Edge of Infinity, full of strong stories by some of the fields biggest names. Solaris Rising 1.5 is unusual: an e-book-only ‘‘bridge’’ between Solaris Rising and the forthcoming Solaris Rising 2, teasing the reader with examples of excellent fiction. Two were themed: Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After is an impressive collection of both post-apocalyptic and dystopian YA stories that offer both a peek at the various ways the world can go wrong, but, being YA, with a hint of hope on how to fix it, and Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers edited by Ivor W. Hartman offers stories that present not only the range of SF but also of the varied experiences of writers from that culturally rich and diverse continent.
Afro SF was not the only original anthology with an international twist. Of the five mixed anthologies, three were centered around a national identity: edited by Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington, The Future is Japanese is a mostly SF anthology by both Japanese and non-Japanese authors, which boasts a couple of ghosts among the futuristic tales; Breaking the Bow: Stories Inspired by the Ramayana, contains works by South Asian authors, as well as authors from the United States, Canada, Holland, and Israel; and Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo & Chris N. Brown is a mostly fantasy anthology (this time by Mexican authors) that nevertheless contains stories set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. The remaining two mixed anthologies are L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXVIII, the last volume edited by the late K.D. Wentworth presenting the winning writers and illustrators of this contest for amateur writers, and Gardener Dozois’s Rip-Off!, an audiobook anthology with stories based on, and starting with, the first line of each author’s favorite work of fiction (or non-fiction).
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