The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Close your eyes for a moment in the Internet world, though, and everything will be different when you open them again. By this time next year, the odds are that some of these sites will be gone, and some will have grown more prominent. The only way you can keep up on a day-to-day basis is to go on the Internet and see for yourself what’s there. (I can almost guarantee you that there’ll be a lot of interest to find, whatever specific sites come and go.)

  It was not a particularly good year in the print semiprozine market, one of a succession of bad years in the new century so far, although, as usual, new semiprozines, particularly fiction semiprozines, struggled to be born even as the old ones fell by the wayside. Last year, a number of prominent semiprozines, including Century, Eidolon, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, and the excellent Spectrum SF, either died or went “on hiatus” – or continued “on hiatus,” in the case of Century – which usually amounts to the same thing in the semiprozine market. I’ll be surprised if we ever see any of those magazines again.

  Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, the newszine Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence – the titles consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications – still had trouble keeping to their announced publishing schedules this year; Weird Tales and Chronicle met it, but Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Dreams of Decadence all published only one issue apiece. Circulation figures were not available for the DNA magazines, so it’s impossible to say how they’re doing. Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, the Irish fiction semiprozine Albedo One, and the long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis also only managed one issue apiece this year. If there was an issue of Tales of the Unanticipated this year, I didn’t see it.

  The two most seemingly healthy of the fiction semiprozines at the moment, judging by frequency of publication if nothing else, would have to be the long-running Canadian semiprozine On Spec and the leading British semiprozine, The Third Alternative. On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic (the subtitle changed this year from the former, and somewhat snide, More Than Just Science Fiction) features some of the best covers in the business, including the professional magazines, but the fiction this year seemed somewhat minor, with no real standouts. On the other hand, the slick, large-format The Third Alternative is not only one of the handsomest magazines out there, but publishes fiction at a fully professional level (most of it slipstream and horror, although there is an occasional science fiction story), including, this year, excellent stuff by Eric Brown, Alexander Glass, Karen Fishler, Jay Lake, Lucius Shepard, Patrick Samphire, Mary Soon Lee, and others. Although it’s managed only four issues in the last two years (it’s supposed to be quarterly), Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge still seems a lively and hardy little magazine, and featured good SF and fantasy stories by James Van Pelt, Jay Lake, Mark Rich, Martha J. Allard, and others. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine survived a patch of financial difficulties last year, and seems to also be fairly vigorous, publishing six issues this year; their fiction is not yet up to the same reliable level of The Third Alternative or Talebones, but they did publish good stuff this year by Stephen Dedman, Geoffrey Maloney, Ruth Nestvold, and others.

  Other SF-oriented (more-or-less, almost all “SF semiprozines” feature a mix of fantasy or slipstream stories as well) fiction semiprozines out there included Hadrosaur Tales, which had two issues this year (with a good story by Neal Asher in issue 16), Electric Velocipede, which also managed two issues (featuring good work by William Shunn, Paul Di Filippo, Rick Klaw, and others), the long-running Space and Time, and the newly launched Neo-Opsis and Jupiter (which instead of issue numbers has issues named after moons of Jupiter, such as Jupiter: Europa, and so forth); these last two are amateuristic-looking (frankly, rather crappy-looking) productions, but they’re attracting some interesting young professionals such as Derryl Murphy, Ian Creasey, and Nicholas Waller, and have nowhere to go but up.

  Another rather amateurish-looking magazine, with almost nothing to offer in the way of production values, is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which has overcome these drawbacks to become one of the most respected magazines in the business; it’s done this by attracting first-rate work by top writers (almost always slipstream and stylish surrealism of one sort or another rather than science fiction or even genre fantasy), including, this year, Molly Gloss, Eliot Fintushel, Richard Parks, Sarah Monette, and others. Not only has Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet become the flagship of the whole emerging slipstream/fabulist subgenre, it’s inspired a host of clones, also very amateuristic-looking, publishing much the same sort of material, and, in fact, often drawing upon many of the same general group of authors; these magazines include the Say . . . group, where each issue has a different title, such as this year’s Say . . . Aren’t You Dead?, Full Unit Hookup, Intracities, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, Flytrap #1, and, perhaps the most promising of the bunch, Alchemy, a fantasy magazine which featured stories by Theodora Gross, Alex Irvine, and Sarah Monette this year.

  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-iss
ue 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, £9.00 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 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 Gryphon 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.