The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  So the digest magazines may not be in quite as much danger of imminent death as the circulation figures might at first suggest—but no publication can afford to lose circulation steadily, and there’s no doubt that the digest magazines will have to find ways to turn the decline around and increase circulation again if they want to survive in the long term. And I continue to think—although you can of course discount this opinion, since I am, after all, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction—that the survival of the SF magazines, particularly the three digest titles, is vital to the continued health of the field. Such magazines, as well as being by far the best showcase for emerging writers, provide what little continuity and cohesive sense of community there is in the genre these days.

  The British magazine Interzone completed its sixth full year as a monthly publication. Circulation went down slightly again this year, in spite of last year’s Hugo win, which I had been hoping would translate into increased support for the magazine, particularly in the British fannish community, who largely seem unsupportive of, or even hostile to, Interzone. The literary quality of the stories in Interzone remains high; Interzone, in fact, is one of the most reliable places to find first-rate fiction in the entire magazine market, and it deserves your support in that most practical of forms: money sent in for a subscription. There are still relatively few American subscribers to Interzone—although it’s flat-out impossible to find it on newsstands here, or even in most SF specialty bookstores—and the magazine deserves to have a lot more.

  Science Fiction Age successfully completed their fourth full year of publication. The overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped in 1996 as well, with them losing over 4,400 subscription sales and over 2,600 newsstand sales, for a 12.5 percent loss in overall circulation. Editor Scott Edelman attributes most of this loss to readers switching subscriptions to Science Fiction Age’s companion magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and to the publisher’s newly launched SF-media magazine Sci-Fi Entertainment (also edited by Edelman), both of which made extensive use of Science Fiction Age’s subscription list in their start-ups; Edelman points out that Sovereign Media, the parent company, now has three successful genre-oriented magazines in place, where a few years before there had been only one, and that this is worth some siphoning of the original subscription base for Science Fiction Age. This is a good argument, and will hold up as long as the circulation of Science Fiction Age doesn’t continue to slip in years to come, at which point it will be hard to blame it on the launching of Realms of Fantasy and Sci-Fi Entertainment. For the moment, though, the Sovereign Media magazines look like success stories, rare bright spots in the gloom of the magazine market. In terms of literary quality, Science Fiction Age had perhaps its best year ever, in part because its increased number of pages allows it now to run long novelettes and novellas, the categories in which the highest number of first-rate stories probably appear. For the first time ever, I found Science Fiction Age to be a more reliable source for good core science fiction overall than was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the ratio of fantasy and soft horror stories to SF stories swung way out of balance this year.

  Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, which has struggled with undercapitalization since its beginning, published five bimonthly print issues this year, and then abandoned its print incarnation in the face of rising costs, announcing instead that it would reinvent itself as an “online electronic magazine” (see below). The more cynical industry insiders seem to think that this is tantamount to Tomorrow having died, but I’m not so sure—in fact, it may do well in its new electronic format; only time will tell. Another severely undercapitalized magazine, Aboriginal Science Fiction, suspended publication in 1995 and was widely reported to have died, but came back to life in 1996, publishing three issues this year; a welcome return, in a market that can use all the short fiction outlets it can get.

  Realms of Fantasy, a slick, large-size, full-color magazine similar in format to its companion magazine Science Fiction Age, except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction, completed their second full year of publication. They were the only genre magazine whose overall circulation actually increased in 1996, rising in subscription sales by about 4,500, although they decreased in newsstand sales (perhaps because of regular readers converting to subscription) by 3,473, for an overall gain in circulation of 2.4 percent—not a lot, perhaps, but much better than any other magazine was doing. In terms of literary quality, Realms of Fantasy is now easily the best of the all-fantasy magazines, with editor Shawna McCarthy delivering a diverse mix of first-rate fantasy stories, rivaled for sophistication and literary excellence only by the best of the fantasy stories published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Among the other fantasy magazines, Worlds of Fantasy and Horror also publishes some good work, but continues to have trouble meeting its publication schedule, publishing only two issues in 1996; let’s hope they can improve this record next year. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, on the other hand, is one of the most reliably produced of all genre magazines, now in its ninth year of publication, but the fiction here remains largely not to my taste, light-years away from the stuff in Realms of Fantasy or F&SF in terms of depth and literary sophistication.

  (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT, 06796, annual subscription, $29.90 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 5130, Harlan, IA, 51593-5130, $33.97 for annual subscription; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60 for an airmail one year—twelve issues—subscription; Analog, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 5133, Harlan, IA, 51593-5133, $33.97 for annual subscription; Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Terminus Publishing Company, 123 Crooked Lane, King of Prussia, PA 19406-2570, $16 for four issues in U.S.; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $21.50 for four issues; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.)

  Since an increasing number of genre magazines are abandoning the print world for the still largely unexplored territory of “online electronic publication,” it’s probably time to take a closer look at this developing market. The most famous story of this type is that of Omni, a high-visibility, big-budget magazine that fled the print world early in 1995 to establish an “electronic magazine” version of itself, largely because production costs were becoming prohibitive in spite of the fact that they had a circulation base of more than 700,000. (Discouraging news for other magazines, who are struggling to survive with circulations only a fraction of that; if Omni couldn’t make it with a circulation of 700,000 … although production costs at Omni were unusually high, and many of their subscriptions were cut-rate PCH “stamp card” subscriptions, which cost more to fulfill than they bring in.)

  So, how is Omni faring, now that it’s an “online magazine?”

  Thus far, signals are mixed. In 1995, Omni Online “published” a new novella every month through most of the year, and those novellas included some of the best stories available anywhere that year, but the novella program sputtered into silence early in 1996, and so far has not been reinstituted, alas, a big loss to the genre. The original Omni site itself, on AOL, seemed to fall quiescent for several months, and has been more or less abandoned. Then Pamela Weintraub took over from Keith Ferrell as editor of Omni Internet, and Omni Online was relaunched in September, with a brand-new site on the Internet. Ellen Datlow, longtime fiction editor of the print Omni, is still acting as fiction editor for the online version, and has “published” several of the best stories of the year on Omni Online since the new site went up, including stories by Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, James P. Blaylock, Cherry Wilder, and Kathleen Ann Goonan. In fact, the best online-only science fiction stories published only in electronic format, that I’ve been able to find on the Internet are to be found at Omni Online (h
ttp://www.omnimag.com), and that’s where I’d advise you to look first for high-quality SF.

  Is anybody actually reading these stories, though? Again, signals are mixed. The Omni site seems to be popular, claiming thousands of “hits” every day, but I get the uneasy feeling that many genre readers are just not seeing the Omni Online stories, based on admittedly subjective factors such as how often the stories are showing up on award ballots and being mentioned in Year End wrap-up lists (which is not as often as you would think they would, especially as they are high-quality stories by big names), and on how many core SF fans I talk to have ever heard of them. To date—ironically, considering that SF is supposed to be a forward-looking literature—much of the core SF reading audience doesn’t seem to be surfing the net, and stuff that’s published there seems to be going largely unnoticed by the genre audience. I suspect that this situation will change rapidly over the next few years, though, as the Internet itself continues to expand.

  So where else can you look for good SF stories online? Well, at the moment, genre electronic publishing remains a largely unfulfilled promise—although there are other promising sites out there, and signs that things may get more interesting in the near future.

  Other than Omni Online, your best bet for finding good professional-level SF online would seem to be the online reincarnation of Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, now called Tomorrow SF, which can be found on the Internet at http://www.tomorrowsf.com. Although only put up in January of 1997, this is already proving itself to be a lively and very promising site, with good fiction already available there by Geoffrey A. Landis, Rob Chilson, Sheila Finch, and others. It’ll also be an experiment that those interested in the electronic publishing of fiction should keep a close eye on, as editor Algis Budrys’s idea is to “publish” the first three online issues of Tomorrow SF for free, and then to begin charging for access to the Web site. Most other current sites, like the Omni Online site, don’t charge for access (Omni Online seems to be being supported mostly by Web advertising from some fairly substantial companies), and it will be very interesting to see if Tomorrow can actually make the online audience pay for access to their site in any sort of reliable fashion, and in numbers large enough to be profitable. If they can, then the face of electronic genre publishing could change very rapidly.

  Quality of the fiction falls off quickly after the Omni Online and Tomorrow SF sites—there’s oceans worth of amateur-level, slushpile-quality stuff out there, more than you could wade through in a year, but, for the moment, not a lot of professional-quality SF. There are some longer-established sites that are worth keeping an eye on, though, such as InterText (http://www.etext.org/Zines/InterText/), which, although uneven, does occasionally publish some good material, including several good stories by Jim Cowan, and E-Scape (http://www.interink.com/escape.html), which has published good stuff by K. D. Wentworth, James Gunn, C. J. Cherryh, and others. At Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/genres.htm), you can check out the first half of stories by writers such as Spider Robinson, Bud Sparhawk, David Brin, and other professionals, and then decide whether or not you want to pay to read the second half—it’ll also be very interesting to see how well this experiment works. Talebones (http://www.nventure.com/) is oriented toward horror and dark fantasy rather than SF, but is a lively site that seems worth checking out as well. If you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can find lots of other genre “electronic magazines,” most of them extremely bad, by doing a search of http://www.yahoo.com/arts/humanities/literature/genres/science_fiction_fantasy_horror/magazines/.

  As long as you’re surfing the Net, you might want to also check out some of the genre-related sites that don’t publish fiction. Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifiweekly.com) is a good, lively general-interest site, with interviews and book and media reviews (and with plans to begin publishing fiction as well next year), and, as it has links to many genre-related sites, a good place to start. As is SFF NET (http://www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine Index 1984–1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web Page at http://www.sfwa.org/sfw. HotWired does weekly live interactive interviews with genre figures, Tuesday at nine P.M. EST in their HeadSpace area (http://www.hotwired.com), and Omni Online regularly features live interactive interviews as well. Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GEnie, Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, with GEnie having perhaps the largest and most active such community, and also feature live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, as does SFF NET—the SF-oriented chat on Delphi starts every Wednesday at about 10 P.M. EST (Delphi has also just opened a Web site, at http://www.delphi.com/sflit/).

  Emerging back into the print world with a shock and a shiver, we should also mention in passing that, as usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Playboy. Playboy in particular, under Fiction Editor Alice K. Turner, continues to run some important SF stories every year. On the downside, VB Tech, which had been publishing at least one SF story per issue, dropped the fiction this year, and if the promised “Playboy rival,” Rage, which was supposed to use a good deal of short SF, ever hit the newsstands this year, I was unable to find it.

  It was not a particularly good year in the semiprozine market either, although new fiction semiprozines continue to proliferate in spite of the very long odds against them even surviving, let alone increasing their circulation to the point where they would be considered professional magazines.

  One of the newish fiction semiprozines that seemed last year to have a pretty good shot at establishing itself was Century, perhaps the best fiction semiprozine to be launched in the last ten years or more. Century received more positive reviews and widespread acclaim than any other newly-launched fiction semiprozine I can think of, with stories from it reaching major award ballots and being frequently mentioned in Year End wrap-up lists, and seemed poised on the brink of success. And the one issue they did manage to publish in 1996, Century 4, lived up to the magazine’s reputation or bettered it, featuring one of the year’s best stories, Jim Cowan’s “The Spade of Reason,” as well as first-rate SF by Kathleen Ann Goonan and Marc Laidlaw, and interesting, quirky, harder-to-classify stuff by Jack Cady, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Karen Jordan Allen, Karawynn Long, and others. Unfortunately, Century only published one of its scheduled four issues in 1996 (they’d only published two out of four in 1995), and, worse, fell into a long silence that lasted for most of the year, not responding to letters or phone calls, something that spawned widespread rumors that Century had died, and spread panic among the ranks of authors who still had unpublished stories in inventory there. Both Publisher Meg Hamel and Editor Robert K. J. Killheffer assured me at the end of the year that Century was not dead (in spite of the rumors), that the magazine was going to continue, and that they would make every effort to stick to a more reliable publication schedule in 1997. You have to wonder, though, if these problems will scare off potential subscribers; at the very least, they’ve cost Century much of the momentum, good will, and critical “buzz” it had been generating in the genre audience in 1995. Let’s hope that this very promising magazine can get its act together in 1997 and build some trust in its reliability again, as it has the potential to be one of the most important magazines of the nineties.

  A semiprozine similar in quality and the eclecticism of the material (although with perhaps a rawer in-your-face attitude) is Bryan Cholfin’s Crank!, which also struggled with keeping to its publication schedule this year, although it did manage to produce two issues, featuring quirky stuff (although little—if any—real science fiction) from Karen Joy Fowler, Carter Scholz, Michael Kandel, Jonathan L
ethem, Eliot Fintushel, R. A. Lafferty, A. M. Dellamonica, and others.

  There was a special one-shot revival of New Worlds magazine, edited by Michael Moorcock in honor of the magazine’s 50th Anniversary (oddly, it only now exists as an anthology series of the same name), and featuring good work by Brian W. Aldiss, Harvey Jacobs, and others.

  Turning to the more science fiction–oriented of the newer semiprozines, your best bets remain Absolute Magnitude: The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, two slick, professional-looking, full-size magazines with full-color covers, both of them hovering just under professional status, which they might be able to reach if they could increase their circulations (and, in the case of Absolute Magnitude, which only published two issues out of their scheduled four, stabilize its production schedule—although they claim they’ll be “back on schedule” in 1997). Pirate Writings continues to have a slight edge in the quality of the fiction, featuring worthwhile stuff this year by Allen Steele, Paul Di Filippo, Sue Storm, Esther M. Friesner, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and others. Absolute Magnitude has had the better cover art of the two, although it also published worthwhile stuff by Geoffrey A. Landis, Denise Lopes Heald, Barry B. Longyear, and others. Both Absolute Magnitude and Pirate Writings publish a lot of reprints, and I still don’t understand the rationale for this, especially when many of the reprints are of relatively recent material that is still fairly accessible elsewhere; you’d think that they’d want to save their limited space for their own original material instead. I also think that Pirate Writings is making a mistake (the same mistake that Tomorrow made) by publishing so many short-short stories. It’s very hard to find really good short-shorts, harder than it is to find good longer stories. Most of the short-shorts I see during the year strike me as undistinguished at best; and that’s the case here, as well. (I also notice, with amusement, that in spite of similar polemic stances about how they were going to use nothing but Good Old-Fashioned SF, both Absolute Magnitude and Tomorrow have ended up using a good deal of fantasy as well.)