The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003
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Acknowledgment is Made for Permission to Reprint the Following Materials:
“Off on a Starship,” by William Barton. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“It’s All True,” by John Kessel. Copyright © 2003 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, November 5, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Rogue Farm,” by Charles Stross. Copyright © 2003 by Charles Stross. First published in Live Without a Net (Roc), edited by Lou Anders. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Ice,” by Steven Popkes. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ej-es,” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 2003 by Nancy Kress. First published in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (DAW), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Jesse,” words and music by Janis Ian, copyright © Tao Songs Two. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“The Bellman,” by John Varley. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley.
“The Bear’s Baby,” by Judith Moffett. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Calling Your Name,” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 2003 by Howard Waldrop. First published in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (DAW), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Calling Your Name,” words and music by Janis Ian, copyright © Tao Songs Two. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“June Sixteenth at Anna’s,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Green Leopard Plague,” by Walter Jon Williams. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Fluted Girl,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dead Worlds,” by Jack Skillingstead. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“King Dragon,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 2003 by Michael Swanwick. First published in The Dragon Quintet (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Marvin Kaye. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Singletons in Love,” by Paul Melko. Copyright © 2003 by Paul Melko. First published in Live Without a Net (Roc), edited by Lou Anders. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Anomalous Structures of My Dreams,” by M. Shayne Bell. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Cookie Monster,” by Vernor Vinge. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Joe Steele,” by Harry Turtledove. Copyright © 2003 by Harry Turtledove. First published in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (DAW), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. Lyrics from the song “god and the fbi” by Janis Ian, copyright © 2000 by Rude Girl Music, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Birth Days,” by Geoff Ryman. Copyright © 2003 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, April 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Awake in the Night,” by John C. Wright. Copyright © 2003 by John C. Wright. First published in William Hope Hodgson’s Night Lands, Volume 1: Eternal Love (Betancourt & Company), edited by Andy W. Robertson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Long Way Home,” by James Van Pelt. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Eyes of America,” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Copyright © 2003 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, May 7, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst,” by Kage Baker. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.
“Night of Time,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 2003 by Robert Reed. First published in The Silver Gryphon (Golden Gryphon Press), edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Strong Medicine,” by William Shunn. Copyright © by William Shunn. First published electronically on SALON, November 11, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Send Me a Mentagram,” by Dominic Green. Copyright © 2003 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, December 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon,” by Paul Di Filippo. Copyright © 2003 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, November 19, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Flashmen,” by Terry Dowling. Copyright © 2003 by Terry Dowling. First published electronically in Oceans of the Mind X. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dragonhead,” by Nick DiChario. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dear Abbey,” by Terry Bisson. Copyright © 2003 by Terry Bisson. First published as a chapbook, Dear Abbey (PS Publishing). Reprinted by the author and the author’s agent, Susan Ann Protter.
Contents
Summation: 2003
Off on a Starship • William Barton
It’s All True • John Kessel
Rogue Farm • Charles Stross
The Ice • Steven Popkes
Ej-es • Nancy Kress
The Bellman • John Varley
The Bear’s Baby • Judith Moffett
Calling Your Name • Howard Waldrop
June Sixteenth at Anna’s • Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Green Leopard Plague • Walter Jon Williams
The Fluted Girl • Paolo Bacigalupi
Dead Worlds • Jack Skillingstead
King Dragon • Michael Swanwick
Singletons in Love • Paul Melko
Anomalous Structures of my Dreams • M. Shayne Bell
The Cookie Monster • Vernor Vinge
Joe Steele • Harry Turtledove
Birth Days • Geoff Ryman
Awake in the Night • John C. Wright
The Long Way Home • James Van Pelt
The Eyes of America • Geoffrey A. Landis
Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst • Kage Baker
Night of Time • Robert Reed
Strong Medicine • William Shunn
Send Me a Mentagram • Dominic Green
And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon • Paul Di Filippo
Flashmen • Terry Dowling
Dragonhead • Nick DiChario
Dear Abbey • Terry Bisson
Honorable Mentions: 2003
Acknowledgments
Summation: 2003
In spite of rough financial seas in the general economy, the genre publishing world remained not only afloat but relatively stable throughout 2003— it took some hits, yes, as did most sectors of the e
conomy, but, so far (knock wood), nothing catastrophic or crippling, nothing that would seem to indicate a depression or even a serious recession ahead.
In fact, over the last couple of years, the science fiction and fantasy genres have been, for the most part, expanding rather than contracting. Yes, we lost the British SF line Earthlight in 2003, a casualty of the chaotic reorganization and global cutbacks going on within Simon & Schuster; Roc and Ace are merging their editorial staffs (while remaining separate imprints); Big Engine, one of the more ambitious new small presses, discovered that they had bitten off more than they could chew and went out of business; and several more SF-specialty book-shops closed their doors, unable to compete with the discounts offered by the chain bookstores and online bookstores. But, on the other hand, five new genre Young Adult lines were added to the field at the end of 2003 or the beginning of 2004: Dorchester Publishing is adding a new trade paperback fantasy imprint; Tor is adding a new “paranormal romance” line; Harlequin is adding a new “fantasy line with romantic elements”; Five Star Books is expanding this year to seventy-eight books per year (while changing its emphasis from short-story collections to novels), with twenty-six of those being SF or fantasy; Night Shade Books is expanding to twenty books, with an eventual goal of doing forty-eight titles annually; and Small Beer Press, Golden Gryphon Press, Subterranean Press, PS Publishing, and others are all expanding their lines and venturing into publishing novels in addition to their usual collections (in fact, the “miniscule press”— to use Charles N. Brown’s memorable phrase for publishers “a layer under the small press”— is booming like never before).
I’ve said this before, but with all the “SF is dying” talk that still goes on at conventions and in online forums and bulletin boards, perhaps its worth saying again. For some historical perspective, the next time that you hear that the SF genre is “dying,” keep in mind that the number of original science fiction novels published in 2003—236, according to the newsmagazine Locus—is alone higher than the total number of original genre books, of any sort, published in 1972, which was 225. An article I saw online at the NYTimes.com site, by Dinitia Smith, had a similar perspective: The best-selling novel of 1975, according to Publisher’s Weekly’s annual fiction best-seller list, was E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, which sold 232,000 copies in hardcover; the best-selling novel of the year 2000 was John Grisham’s novel The Brethren, and it sold 2,875,000 copies, an increase of more than 1,000%! According to a new survey of a quarter-century of publishing, an estimated 114,487 different titles were published in 2001, compared with 39,000 titles in 1975, with more people buying them.
So, there are more books being published than ever before, more people are buying them than ever before, and—thanks to online booksellers and, yes, the much-despised chain book-stores—more people have easier access to those books than ever before. Doesn’t sound like either the much-feared and much-warned-against Death of Literacy or the Death of Science Fiction to me. In fact, it sounds like a lot better world than the one I was born into, where only a relatively small percentage of the population read with any regularity (especially pleasure reading), only a comparatively small number of titles of any sort were published every year (you were lucky if you could find three science fiction titles published per month, for example; sometimes there were none), and if you lived in a small town, as I did, you had to travel miles (twenty miles, in my case) to the nearest large city to find a proper bookstore—and even when you found one, there was no such thing as a science fiction section in it. Nor was there any Internet which you could employ to order books in a wide variety of formats with a few clicks of a button, which are subsequently sent direct to your door.
So maybe the present isn’t as bad as we sometimes make it out to be. Which prompts me to hope that maybe the future won’t be as bad as we fear it will be either.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing in the genre this year, of course. There were some shakeups. Anthony Cheetham, cofounder and CEO of Orion Publishing Group in the United Kingdom, was dismissed, being replaced as CEO by group Managing Director and cofounder Peter Roche; Malcolm Edwards will move into the newly created position of Deputy CEO and publisher, directing publishing policy for the entire Orion Publishing Group, including the SF line Gollancz. Laura Ann Gilman stepped down as Roc editor to pursue a freelance career, and it was announced that Roc is to merge with Ace on the editorial level; Roc will remain an NAL imprint, with separate publications, but editorial will be merged into Berkley’s Ace operations, under Berkley Executive Editor and Ace editor in chief, Susan Allison; while Ace personnel Ginjer Buchanan, John Morgan, and Anne Sowards have been made full editors and will work for both houses. Roc editor Jennifer Heddle subsequently left to become editor at Pocket Books, replaced at Roc by Elizabeth Scheier, hired as an NAL editor who will also work on Roc. And in early 2004, just before press time, it was announced that John Ordover, longtime editor of the Star Trek novel line at Pocket Books, has moved over to become editor in chief of the small press, Phobos Books.
Not a lot of change for the publishing world, where, some years, editors moving from house to house to house can seem like a game of Editorial Musical Chairs. The really big changes were under the surface, and little discussed. One thing likely to have major and far-reaching consequences is the recent legal decision that the Print-On-Demand process used by such POD publishers as Lightning Source is in violation of a preexistent patent, something that could have a chilling effect on the burgeoning world of POD publishing. And the “Internet piracy” case against AOL, spearheaded by Harlan Elllison, continues to churn its way through the court system, although recently some progress seemed to be being made in Ellison’s favor; the ultimate ruling here could also have far-reaching long-term consequences. The behind-the-scenes thing that’s likely to have the most wide-ranging effect, though, is that genre publishing seems to be finally hitting the glass ceiling, as far as how long books can be allowed to get; the reluctance of the chain bookstore to order books priced over $24.95 (the bigger the book, the more it costs to produce, the higher the cover price that has to be put on it—and the fewer customers who will be willing to shell out that much to buy it) is putting the brakes on the trend toward ever-longer novels that kept snowballing throughout the 80s and 90s, and it may be that the days of really Big Fat Novels are behind us. Of course, really heavy hitters like Stephen King or Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist will continue to be allowed to publish books at any length they like—this will have the most effect on most new or middle-level writers, who will have the choice of writing shorter books or seeing their novel split up into three separate volumes in order to be published at all, as happened to John C. Wright’s novel The Golden Transcendence, originally intended to be one volume. (I actually don’t mind the switch to smaller novels; some of the best SF novels ever produced were written back when publishing realities wouldn’t allow you to publish a novel longer than 70,000 words, and most SF and fantasy novels of the last twenty years have been bloated and grossly padded anyway. Maybe, in some cases, less is more.)
2003 was another bad year in the magazine market, throughout the entire magazine industry, nationwide and even worldwide, not just in the genre market—although some commentators continue to use this as ammunition in the “SF Is Dying” argument, and usually go on to comment that magazine circulations must be going down because the magazine editors are buying the wrong kinds of stories, or that the readers have lost interest in core science fiction (a particularly popular argument with the slipstream crowd). In fact, falling circulations—for many technical reasons, including broken or vanishing infrastructure channels (see the Summations in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Nineteenth and Twentieth Annual Collections for more detail)—are a problem throughout the entire magazine industry, far outside genre boundaries. An article in dmnews.com selects 2003 as “the worse year in recent memory for newsstand sales,” with newsstand sales sliding 10- to 15% across the board; according to Oxbridge Co
mmunications’s National Directory of Magazines, the overall number of print and online titles published dropped 9.1% in the United States and Canada in 2003, to 17,670 from 19,436 in 2000. Even magazines such as Playboy and TV Guide, formerly among the best-selling titles in the world, are feeling the pinch, and beginning to emit distressed wobbling noises. Seen from this perspective, the situation in the genre market is relatively stable, with small circulation losses, yes, but so far no repeat of the catastrophic drops that we saw in the mid-90s.
Still, there were changes necessitated by hard economic times. Asimov’s and Analog, as a cost-saving measure, went from an eleven-issue-a-year schedule to a ten-issue-per-year schedule, with a new double issue replacing one issue a year; and Interzone, after missing several issues during the course of 2003, officially announced that they were converting to a bimonthly schedule from a monthly schedule in 2004. This makes the upcoming year the first time since the launch of Weird Tales in 1923 that the field has officially been without a monthly fiction magazine. In other bad news, 3SF, a new large-format SF magazine launched last year, lasted for only three issues before dying, and the excellent Scottish magazine Spectrum SF seems to have gone quiescent, with nothing heard from it in 2003.
In spite of the troubled water in the magazine industry, many new magazines are still being launched, both inside and outside of the genre. In the genre, in addition to a slew of semiprozines and new e-magazines (which are discussed below), the end of the year saw the launch of a handsome multigenre revival of the old men’s magazine Argosy, with some serious advertising bucks behind it (more about this next year), a new horror magazine called H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, and a new mixed-genre magazine from PS Publishing, Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther, one of the best editors in the business, is on the horizon.