The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Black Gate, the new large-format fantasy magazine, again published only two issues out of a scheduled four, but each issue was fat enough to make up three or four issues of most of the other fiction semiprozines. Good fantasy of different types appeared there this year by Mark W. Tiedemann, Rick Norwood, Anne Sheldon, Jennifer Busick, Brian A. Hopkins, and others. Paradox is a new magazine which features both historical fiction and “speculative/historical fiction”—alternate-history stories, in other words, by writers such as Brian Stableford and James Van Pelt.

  Since I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market anymore, I’ll limit myself to saying that the most prominent magazine there, as usual, seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance.

  There’s not a lot left to the critical magazine market, with Lawrence Person announcing that he’s retiring Nova Express, but the good news is that what’s left is solid, including some of the most reliably published and long-lasting semiprozines in the entire industry. Locus, now edited by Jennifer A. Hall, with founder and longtime editor Charles N. Brown hovering in the background somewhere in the role of publisher to keep an eye on things, wins the Hugo for Best Semiprozine year after year, often to loud groans from the audience from those who are tired of seeing it win, but there’s a reason why it wins—it’s an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews for anyone interested in science fiction, particularly from a writer’s perspective; I know very few writers who don’t subscribe to Locus. Now that it’s been taken over by Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing Group (who changed the name and installed new editor John Douglas), Chronicle, formerly Science Fiction Chronicle, is back on track as a reliably published magazine again, and is also a very valuable reference source. The best critical magazine out there at the moment is David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine, The New York Review of Science Fiction, which has a wide-enough range of articles and reviews that everybody is sure to find something to like and dislike in every single issue; it also comes out with clocklike regularity, twelve issues a year. The Fix is a short-fiction review magazine, the only one in print (all the other short-fiction review sources are online), brought to you by the people who put out The Third Alternative.

  Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $60.00 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, $36.00 per year, make checks payable to “Dragon Press,” 12 issues; The Fix: The Review of Short Fiction, TTA Press, Wayne Edwards, 360 W. 76th Ave., #H, Anchorage, AK 99518, $29.00 for a six-issue subscription, make checks payable to “TTA Press”; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK, $36.00 for a four-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, $20.00 for four issues; On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $22.00 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $24.00 Canadian for a four issue subscription; Jupiter, Ian Redman, 23 College Green, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 4JR, UK, 9 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription; Aurealis: The Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $50.00 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars”; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland; $25.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One”; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, and 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 four DNA fiction magazines for $60 a year, with Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $15 for a four-issue subscription; 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, checks payable to “LRC Publications”; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060, $16.00 for four issues; Say …, The Fortress of Worlds, P.O. Box 1304, Lexington, KY 40588-1304, $10.00 for two issues in the U.S. and Canada; Alchemy, Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238, $7.00 for an issue; Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, Conical Hats Press, 622 West Cottom Avenue, New Albany, IN 47150-5011, $12.00 for a three-issue subscription; Flytrap, Tropism Press, P.O. Box 13322, Berkeley, CA 94712-4222, $16 for four issues, checks payable to “Heather Shaw”; The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, c/o Thom Davidson, 34 Curtis Ave., #P-9, Marlborough, MA 01752, $6.50; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 495, Chinchilla QLD 4415 Australia, $35.00 for a one-year subscription; Hadrosaur Tales, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194, $16.50 for a three-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Hadrosaur Productions”; Electric Velocipede, $15 for a four-issue subscription—it seems like you can only order this online, so for more subscription information, check their Web site at http://members.aol.com/evzine/index.html; Space and Time: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction, Space and Time, 138 West 70th Street (4B), New York, NY 10023-4468, $10.00 for a one year (two issue) subscription; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box 22897, Brooklyn, NY 11202-2897, $15.00 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, 132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill, MD 21050, $27.00 for six issues.

  There were a lot of original anthologies this year, most of them fairly mediocre in overall quality, although most of them did also contain a couple of worthwhile—if not exceptional—stories. The best original SF anthology of the year was probably Live Without a Net (Roc), edited by Lou Anders; a few of the stories here wander too far off the ostensible theme—futures where the Internet wasn’t developed, or was developed and then abandoned for one reason or another—and merely explore fantasy scenarios instead, but the book does contain a high percentage of first-rate and highly inventive work by Charles Stross, Paul Melko, Michael Swanwick, Chris Roberson, Alex Irvine, Paul Di Filippo, John Meaney, and others.

  A fairly close follow-up candidate for the title of best original science fiction anthology of the year was Stars: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Janis Ian (DAW), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick; there’s perhaps a higher percentage of mediocre stories here than in the Anders, but, as it’s quite a large book, also a lot of good material as well. It’s unfortunate that the editors didn’t just select a group of authors and let them write about whatever they wanted to write about, without the insistence that the stories be “inspired by” Janis Ian’s songs, because the worst stories here are those that make an obvious one-to-one correlation to one of Ian’s songs—replacing the black kid of “Society’s Child” with an alien, for instance—while the strongest stories are usually those that have the least to do with the songs themselves. Still, in spite of some weak stories, this is a good value for your money, containing first-rate work by Howard Waldrop, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove, John Varley, Spider Robinson, Susan Casper, Terry Bisson, Tad Williams, and others.

  Another worthwhile original anthology, this one a mixed-genre effort containing fantasy, horror, mystery, and mainstream stories as well as SF (although both the Anders and the Ian/Resnick anthologies contain some fantasy stories as well), is The Silver Gryphon (Golden Gryphon), edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern, a volume in celebration of the twenty-fifth book published by Golden Gryph
on Press, which contains good work of various sorts by Robert Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kage Baker, Andy Duncan, Jeffery Ford, Michael Bishop, Howard Waldrop, Lucius Shepard, Geoffrey A. Landis, and others.

  As I said above, most of the rest of the year’s original SF anthologies contained no more than a few worthwhile if not exceptional stories apiece: Space Inc. (DAW), edited by Julie E. Czerneda; Future Wars (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff; Low Port (Meisha Merlin), edited by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; Give Me Liberty (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Mark Tier; Women Writing Science Fiction as Men (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick; and Men Writing Science Fiction as Women (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick (for what it’s worth, the Men Writing as Women volume struck me as somewhat higher in overall quality than the Women Writing as Men volume, which surprised me a bit, since if I’d had to bet it, I would have bet it the other way around). The fact that they’re all cheap mass-market paperbacks means that you may well get your money’s worth in entertainment value out of any of these—but for the most part, they’re probably not where you’re going to find next year’s award-winners and most-talked-about stories. New Voices in Science Fiction (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick, is a worthwhile and self-explanatory idea, and one that probably should be published annually to be of greatest use. I didn’t always agree with Resnick’s selection of who the “new voices” were, thinking that he missed several I would have used, and I questioned that a few of those included were actually “new” enough to make the cut for such a volume (although that’s a subjective call to some extent, one reader’s “never-heard-of-before” being another reader’s “already-well-established,” depending on how much reading they do within the field every year)—but that hardly matters; nearly every editor is going to come up with their own list of “new voices,” and few of them will agree. It did bother me a bit, though, that the majority of the stories in a book called New Voices in Science Fiction were actually fantasy stories by any reasonable definition. Imaginings, An Anthology of Long Short Fiction (Pocket Books), edited by Keith R. A. DeCandido, is that rara avis in today’s publishing world, an anthology of original fiction without any organizing “theme,” except that they’re all novelettes (or, to use DeCandido’s somewhat clumsy term, “long short fiction”), an opportunity that many editors would kill for; unfortunately, the book itself is a bit weak overall, especially as a $14 trade paperback, with nothing exceptional in it, although it does contain good work by H. Courreges Le Blanc, Charles L. Harness, Harry Turtledove, and others.

  As usual, PS Publishing, edited by Peter Crowther, turned out a good crop of novellas in individual chapbook form, including Dear Abbey, by Terry Bisson (the best of them this year), Light Stealer, by James Barclay, Jigsaw Men, by Gary Greenwood, Jupiter Magnified, by Adam Roberts, and In Springdale Town, by Robert Freeman Wexler. Golden Gryphon Press got into the same business last year, and again this year brought out several novellas in individual chapbook form, including A Better World’s in Birth!, by Howard Waldrop and The Angel in the Darkness, by Kage Baker. Recently, Subterranean Press began doing the same, with The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker.

  An unusual but interesting small-press item is William Hope Hodgson’s Night Lands, Volume 1, Eternal Love (Wildside Press), edited by Andy W. Robertson, an anthology of homages by various hands, all set in the milieu of William Hope Hodgson’s eccentric and very strange masterpiece The Night Land, one of the probable inspirations for later work such as Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, among many others. Some of the writers here handle the deliberately retro, somewhat fustian, mannered Victorian-era prose that this milieu demands better than others, and one of the fundamental problems overarching the whole project is that the more closely one observes and interacts with Hodgson’s eerie, poetically charged horrors and wonders on a mundane adventure-fiction level, the more power they lose, being much more effective at an only-half-seen distance. Still, some of the authors here get it right; the anthology contains two powerfully strange novellas by John C. Wright, plus good work by Nigel Atkinson, Brett Davidson, and Robertson himself. (The stories are also available online on The Night Lands website, at http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/nightmap.html.) Another interesting small-press item is Imagination Fully Dilated: The Literated Artwork of Alan M. Clark (Fairwood Press), edited by Robert Kruger and Patrick Swenson, stories written around Clark’s illustrations (thus “literating” them), which are also included; there’s nice work here by David Levine, James Van Pelt, Ray Vukevich, Patrick O’ Leary, Leslie What, and others, although nothing here is really top level. Much the same can be said of the floridly titled Agog! Terrific Tales (Agog! Press), edited by Cat Sparks, which presents the view from Down Under; nice stuff here by Lucy Sussex, Kyla Ward, Simon Brown, Chris Lawson, Sue Isle, Sean Williams, and others, but nothing too memorable. And ditto for Beyond the Last Star (sff.net), edited by Sherwood Smith, which featured good work by David D. Levine, Gregory Feeley, Jay Lake, Brian Plante, and William Shunn, but no award winners.

  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,” “posttransformation 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 hybr
ids 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.