The first novels that drew the most attention this year were probably The Green Glass Sea (Firebird), by Ellen Klages and A Shadow in Summer (Tor), by Daniel Abraham. Other first novels this year included: Summer of the Apocalypse (Edgewood Press), by James Van Pelt; Temeraire (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; The Burning Girl (Prime), by Holly Phillips; Crystal Rain (Tor), by Tobias Buckell; Scar Night (Bantam Spectra), by Alan Campbell; The Patron Saint of Plagues (Bantam Spectra), by Barth Anderson; The Stolen Child (Doubleday), by Keith Donohue; Half Life (HarperCollins), by Shelly Jackson; The Lies of Locke Lamora (Bantam Spectra), by Scott Lynch; and In the Eye of Heaven (Tor), by David Keck.
There were also, as usual these days, some books with strong genre elements by established mainstream writers, including Against the Day (Penguin), by Thomas Pynchon and The Road (Picador), by Cormac McCarthy.
These lists do contain fantasy novels and odd genre-mixing hybrids that dance somewhere on the border between SF and fantasy, but in spite of the frequently heard complaint that fantasy has “driven” SF off the bookstore shelves, there is still plenty of good solid unambiguous center-core SF here, including the Vinge, the Watts, the Rosenblum, the Schroeder, the Stross, the Ashers, the Flynn, the Harrison, the Baxter, and many others.
Tor had a great year this year, and Ace did pretty well, too. Novels released by small presses such as Night Shade, Golden Gryphon, and Subterranean, a relatively new phenomenon (most such presses had concentrated on short-story collections until fairly recently) are also increasingly becoming a part of the scene.
This is the best time in decades to find reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels, so you should try to pick them up while you can. Even discounting print-on-demand books from places such as Wildside Press, and the availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads on Internet sources such as Fictionwise, and through reprints issued by The Science Fiction Book Club, there’re so many titles coming back into print these days, that it’s become difficult to produce an exhaustive list of such titles; therefore I’ll just list some of the more prominent reprints from trade print publishers and small presses that caught my eye this year. Tor reissued: Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet, by Robert A. Heinlein, The Witling, by Vernor Vinge, Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, An Old Friend of the Family, by Fred Saberhagen, and In the Garden of lden, by Kage Baker; Orb reissued: Mindswap, by Robert Sheckley, Treason, by Orson Scott Card, A Fire in the Sun, by George Alec Effinger, The Exile Kiss, by George Alec Effinger; Brokedown Palace, by Steven Brust, and Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, by Jane Lindskold; Ace reissued: The Ophiuchi Hotline and Titan, both by John Varley, and Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein; Del Rey reissued: Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein and The Book of Skulls, by Robert Silverberg; Eos reissued: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; BenBella reissued: Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, by Harry Harrison; Night Shade Books reissued: Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams, Itnaro, by Charles Saunders, and Sung in Blood, by Glen Cook; Starscape reissued: The Ice Dragon, by George R. R. Martin, and Fur Magic and Dragon Magic, both by Andre Norton; Morrow reissued: Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman; HarperPerennial reissued: Stardust, by Neil Gaiman; Golden Gryphon reissued: The Golden, by Lucius Shepard; Pyr reissued: Macrolife, by George Zebrowski; Vintage reissued: A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick and Perfume, by Patrick Suskind; Baen reissued (in addition to the omnibuses already mentioned): Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein; Warner reissued: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler; Babbage reissued: On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers and A Splendid Chaos, by John Shirley; and iBooks reissued: Something Rich and Strange, by Patricia A. McKillip.
In addition to the omnibus collections that mix short stories and novels, which I’ve mostly listed in the short-story collection below, there was an omnibus of four novels in Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster series, Seed to Harvest (Warner). In addition, many omnibuses of novels—and many individual novels—are reissued each year by The Science Fiction Book Club, too many to list here individually.
It’s really hard to tell which novel is going to win the major awards this year. Due to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, four out of the six novels on this year’s Nebula Ballot are actually from 2005, some of them probably already forgotten, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear favorite for the Hugo, either. So your guess is as good as mine.
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2006 was another good year for short-story collections, particularly notable for some big career-spanning retrospectives of big-name authors. The year’s best collections included: Galactic North (Gollancz), by Alastair Reynolds; Zima Blue and Other Stories (Night Shade); The Line Between (Tachyon), by Peter S. Beagle; Visionary in Residence (Thunder’s Mouth), by Bruce Sterling; Resplendent (Gollancz), by Stephen Baxter; The Chains That You Refuse (Night Shade), by Elizabeth Bear; Fragile Things (HarperCollins), by Neil Gaiman; Dark Mondays (Night Shade), by Kage Baker; Past Magic (PS Publishing), by Ian R. MacLeod; Shuteye for the Timebroker (Thunder’s Mouth), by Paul Di Filippo; Where or When (PS Publishing), by Steven Utley; The Empire of Ice Cream (Golden Gryphon), by Jeffrey Ford; The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Bloomsbury), by Susanna Clarke; Giant Lizards from Another Star (NESFA Press), by Ken MacLeod; New Dreams from Old (Pyr), by Mike Resnick; In the Forest of Forgetting (Prime), by Theodora Goss; and a revised and expanded version of Charles Stross’s 2002 collection Toast (Cosmos Books); as well as a number of excellent career retrospective collections: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Vol. One: To Be Continued (Subterranean), by Robert Silverberg; In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era (Subterranean), by Robert Silverberg; A Separate War and Other Stories (Ace), by Joe Haldeman; War Stories (Night Shade), by Joe Haldeman (an omnibus containing two novels, War Year and 1968 and seven stories); The Best of Philip Jose Farmer (Subterranean), by Philip Jose Farmer; Pearls from Peoria (Subterranean), by Philip Jose Farmer (a mixed collection of Farmer’s fiction and nonfiction); Strange Relations (Baen), by Philip Jose Farmer (an omnibus of two Farmer novels, The Lovers and Flesh, plus a collection of stories); From Other Shores (NESFA Press), by Chad Oliver; We the Underpeople (Baen), by Cordwainer Smith (an omnibus of Smith’s novel Nostrillia plus five of his best stories); Transgalactic (Baen), by A. E. van Vogt (an omnibus containing ten stories plus the novel The Wizard of Linn); Clarke’s Universe (iBooks), by Arthur C. Clarke (an omnibus of Clarke’s 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust plus two novelettes); Time Patrol (Baen), by Poul Anderson (an omnibus of nine of Anderson’s “Time Patrol” stories, plus the novel The Year of the Ransom); Vintage PKD (Vintage), by Philip K. Dick (stories plus excerpts from five of Dick’s novels); The Trouble with Aliens (Baen), by Christopher Anvil; The Complete Hammer’s Slammers: Volume One (Night Shade), by David Drake; and The Crucible of Power: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Five (Haffner Press), by Jack Williamson.
Other good collections this year included: Threshold Shift (Golden Gryphon), by Eric Brown; Pictures from an Expedition (Night Shade), by Alexander C. Irvine; American Morons (Earthling), by Glen Hirshberg; Outbound (ISFiC), by Jack McDevitt; Show and Tell and Other Stories (Tropism Press), by Greg Van Eekhout; Absolute Uncertainty (Aqueduct Press), by Lucy Sussex; The Draco Tavern (Tor), by Larry Niven; The Ocean and All Its Devices (Subterranean), William Browning Spencer; Strange Birds (DreamHaven), by Gene Wolfe; Red Spikes (Allen &c Unwyn Australia), by Margo Lanagan; White Time (HarperCollins/Eos), by Margo Lanagan; Basic Black (Cemetery Dance), by Terry Dowling; Alabaster (Subterranean), by Caitlin R. Kiernan; The Engineer Reconditioned (Wildside Press/Cosmos Books), by Neal Asher; Creative Destruction (Wildside Press), by Edward M. Lerner; Map of Dreams (Golden Gryphon), by M. Rickert; The Man from the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain), by Kim Newman; In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead), by George Saunders; Last Week’s Apocalypse (Night Shade), by Douglas Lain; and The Butterflies of Memory (PS Publishing), by Ian Watson. Danc
ing on the edge between fiction and satire/literary criticism in a nimble postmodern fashion is Plumage from Pegasus (Cosmos), a collection of Paul Di Filippo’s satirical columns from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, sharp, funny, and often very clever.
Reissued collections this year included: Swords and Deviltry (DH Press), by Fritz Leiber; Deathbird Stories (Orb), by Harlan Ellison; The City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (Bantam Spectra), by Jeff VanderMeer; Moonlight and Vines (Orb), by Charles De Lint; and Africa Zero (Prime), by Neal Asher.
“Electronic collections” continue to be available for downloading online as well, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory, and the Science Fiction Book Club features many exclusive collections unavailable elsewhere (the best value there this year may be Two-Handed Engine, edited by David Curtis, a huge retrospective collection of the work of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore that in its original small-press edition cost almost a hundred dollars).
Even more so than usual, the bulk of collections released this year were done by small-press publishers; Night Shade Books and Subterranean in particular are becoming powerhouses in this area, although Golden Gryphon, Thunder’s Mouth, NESFA, and other small presses continue to release a gratifying number of collections as well. The regular trade publishers such as Tor, Baen, and Eos continue to do a few collections a year (with Baen being perhaps the only trade publisher that seems to be increasing the number of collections they release) but for the most part, if you want collections, you have to go to the small presses. Fortunately, since the advent of online bookselling, this has become easier, since many small presses now have Web sites that you can order from (do a Google search on the name of the press), so good short-story collections can be found if you go to the small amount of trouble needed to find them.
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The reprint anthology market was fairly strong again this year. The evergrowing crop of “Best of the Year” anthologies is usually your best bet for your money in this market, along with the annual award anthologies. It’s sometimes hard to keep track, they’ve been proliferating so quickly, but, as far as I could tell, there were thirteen “Best of the Year” anthologies of various sorts available in 2006. Science fiction was covered by five anthologies: the one you are holding in your hand at the moment (ostensibly; I suppose you could have it propped open on a table while you bend over it and read), The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s Griffin, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-fourth annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its eleventh annual volume, Best Short Novels: 2006 (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Jonathan Strahan; and two new series, Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2006 (Prime), edited by Richard Horton, and Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2006 (Locus Press), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The annual Nebula Awards anthology usually covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts functioning 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 2006 (Roc), edited by Gardner Dozois. There were three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Caroll & Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, up to its seventeenth volume; the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant, this year up to its nineteenth annual collection; and a new series, Horror: The Best of the Year 2006 Edition (Prime), edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace. Fantasy was covered by four anthologies: by the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the Datlow/Link St Grant anthology, by Year’s Best Fantasy 6, edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, which has switched publishers from Eos to Tachyon; by Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan, which switched publishers from iBooks to Locus Press, dropped an editor (now being edited by Strahan alone rather than by him and Karen Harber), and changed its title slightly; and by a new series, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006 (Prime), edited by Rich Horton. There was also The Best of the Rest 4 (Suddenly Press), edited by Brian Youmans, which covers the small-press magazines, mostly slipstream stuff with perhaps a few stories that could be considered fantasy, and The 2006 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association/Dark Regions Press), edited by Drew Morse, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year. If you count the Nebula anthology and the Rhysling anthology, there were fifteen “Best of the Year” anthology series of one sort or another this year, with more to come—a Space Opera “Best” is rumored for next year.
The year’s best stand-alone reprint anthology was undoubtedly The Space Opera Renaissance (Tor), edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (although the previously mentioned anthologies The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF and Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, mixed original/reprint but mostly reprint, are also worthy of being in consideration); you don’t have to agree with all of the editors’ elaborate aesthetic theorizing to realize that an anthology that contains stories such as Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” Tony Daniel’s “Grist,” Charles Stross’s “Bear Trap,” Paul J. McAuley’s “Recording Angel,” Alastair Reynolds’s “Spirey and the Queen,” and twenty-seven other first-rate stories, including the complex text of Samuel R. Delany’s novel Empire Star, is, without question, going to be one of the very best reading bargains of the year, more than worth the cover price. Also worthwhile were the self-explanatory Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Justine Larbalestier, an anthology that also functions as a collection of critical articles, as each of its stories is mated with a critical article about the author of the story; Novel Ideas—Science Fiction (DAW) and Novel Ideas—Fantasy (DAW), both edited by Brian M. Thomsen, and both collecting stories that were later expanded into novels; The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy (Dedalus), edited by Johanna Sinisalo; and This Is My Funniest: Leading Science Fiction Writers Present Their Funniest Stories Ever (BenBella), edited by Mike Resnick. Noted without comment is Futures Past (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
Reissued anthologies of merit this year included Far Horizons (Eos), edited by Robert Silverberg, and The Science Fiction Century, Volume One (Orb), edited by David G. Hartwell.
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The standout book of what was otherwise a fairly lackluster year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field was undoubtedly Julie Phillips’s long-awaited Tiptree biography, James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin’s Press); this is not only likely to remain the definitive biography of this complex and fascinating literary figure, but it’s one of the best literary biographies of any writer, inside the genre or out, that I’ve read in a long time. Other books about specific authors this year, biographies, critical studies, or combinations of both, included Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E- Howard (MonkeyBrain), by Mark Finn; The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticisms on Clark Ashton Smith (Hippocampus Press), edited by Scott Connors; The Long and the Short of It: More Essays on the Fiction of Gene Wolfe (iUniverse), by Robert Borski; Myths for the Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe (MonkeyBrain), edited by Win Scott Eckert; Visions and (Re-) Visions (Liverpool University Press), by Robert Philmus; and a study of Robert A. Heinlein’s so-called juvenile novels (today they’d be called Young Adult novels), Heinlein’s Children: The Juveniles (Advent Publishers), by Joseph T. Major. The aforementioned anthology Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Justine Larbalestier, deserves to be mentioned here, too, considered this time as a collection of critical essays rather than a collection of stories. Another critical work is The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (Payseur & Schmidt), by John Clute.
The o
nly reference book per se is the somewhat eccentric The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave), by Adam Roberts, some of whose opinions are arguable, but who provides a lot of interesting information, particularly about pre-1900 SF. And authors speaking in their own words and voices can be found in Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches (ISFiC), edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari, and The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy (Candlewick), edited by Leonard S. Marcus.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 4