The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15
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But all this has nothing to do with the health of the genre as a whole, or whether science fiction is “dying.” The mystery magazines, for instance, which started with subscription figures many times higher than any science fiction magazine has ever reached, have suffered similarly drastic falls in circulation over the same period of time, for the same reasons – and yet nobody assumes that this means that the mystery genre is dying. Even huge-circulation magazines far outside of the fiction magazine niche, magazines with circulations far higher than anything ever reached by any sort of genre magazine, such as Playboy, have also taken severe hits to their circulation, bad enough for them to be admitting that they need to “cut corners” financially in order to survive. Should we assume that this is because of the content, because the photos of naked women are not as good as they used to be, or that nobody likes to buy skin magazines anymore? And yet, the assumption in the field is always that circulation in genre magazines has been dwindling because the editors are doing something wrong, buying the wrong sorts of stories, stories that people don’t like, or that SF just isn’t as good as it used to be, or that people don’t want to read science fiction anymore, or that people are too busy surfing the internet or playing computer games to read anything anymore, or that the genre is “dying” or “graying” – and none of the other factors are even taken into account. (On an internet bulletin board, there’s been a long discussion going on in recent weeks about how the circulations of SF magazines are declining not because of these technical issues – which they know nothing about – but because the stories that we publish are “too smart” and “too hard,” and that the way for us to survive is to dumb down our fiction and make it as much like a written version of a Star Trek episode as we possibly can – although why we would want to bother to survive if we did that is a question that is rarely addressed.)
It sometimes seems to me that a certain very vocal segment of the SF audience has a real death wish, that they take gloomy pleasure in claiming that the death of the genre is at hand, that even while shaking their heads and tut-tuting, they are actually looking forward to SF’s demise with something like anticipation and relish. Certainly it seems to be an article of faith among some that the genre is dying, that it’s best days are behind it, that nobody wants to read it anymore, that nothing good is published anymore anyway – and no matter how much factual evidence you provide to the contrary, no matter how many books come out every year or how well they sell, no matter how many really good books and stories come out every year, they cling to their faith and refuse to examine that evidence; they seem to have an emotional investment in the idea that the field is doomed.
The fact that magazine circulation has been dwindling is one of the major bits of ammunition for the SF-is-dying camp – but even there, the situation is not quite as clear-cut as they make it sound. Science Fiction Age, for instance, wasn’t killed because it was unprofitable – it was killed because it wasn’t as profitable as its owners figured a professional wrestling magazine would be, if they took the money they’d been investing in Science Fiction Age and sunk it into a wrestling magazine instead. Personal issues were as much involved as finical issues in the death of Aboriginal SF as well. And, as I’ve pointed out before, these circulation figures may not be as bad as they look, particularly for the digest magazines, which have the traditional advantage that has kept them alive for decades – they are very very cheap to produce, so you really don’t need to sell very many of them to remain profitable.
If the slide in circulation continues long enough, of course, it must eventually kill the magazines, since if you can’t counterbalance the inevitable attrition of your subscriber base due to death and circumstance, then sooner or later you’re left with no subscribers at all, or at least not enough to keep the magazine in the black, no matter how cheap they are to produce. The genre magazines haven’t reached such a point yet, though. The fact that newsstand sales have risen slightly for some magazines is encouraging. And magazines such as Asimov’s and Analog (I can’t speak for other magazines, but this is probably true of F&SF as well) are getting a steady trickle of new subscribers in through internet sites such as Peanut Press and Fictionwise, which sell electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, a market which can only grow in future years. We’ve also had some success in using the internet as a marketing tool, to get around the newsstand bottleneck and reach new subscribers who might otherwise never see the magazine at all. And we’re now getting in foreign subscribers through internet sites as well, a market that was rarely tapped by us before due to the extreme difficulties involved in subscribing from overseas by snail mail.
I think the use of internet web-sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions is going to be increasingly important, and so I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have web sites: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf/. Interzone’s site is at www.sfsite.com/interzone/. Realms of Fantasy doesn’t have a web-site per se, although content from it can be found on www.scifi.now.com. The amount of activity varies widely from site to site, but the important thing about all of the sites is that you can subscribe to the magazines there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post-office required. And you can subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible to do. The above-mentioned “electronic subscriptions” to several of these magazines, including Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF, are available at Peanut Press and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com).
So things are serious, yes – but whether they are grave remains still to be seen. A lot will depend on whether people who enjoy short SF get out there and subscribe or not – or at least pick the magazines off the newsstands, or download them to their PDAs – and if those wider audiences out there who probably have never even heard of any of the magazines can indeed be tapped.
(Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030 – $38.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033 – $39.97 for annual subscription in US; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323 – $39.97 for annual subscription in US; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom – $60.00 for an airmail one year (twelve issues) subscription; Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703 – $16.95 for an annual subscription in the U.S.; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, PO Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR, United Kingdom, $24.53 for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum Publishing.” PS Publishing, 98 High Ash Drive, Leeds L517 8RE, England, UK – $17 each for The Human Front, by Ken MacLeod, Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds, and A Writer’s Life, by Eric Brown. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various web sites.)
It was another fluid year in the young and still-growing field of “online electronic publishing,” with perhaps more encouraging signs than discouraging ones for a change (although how long some of those encouraging signs will remain encouraging is, of course, quite a different matter; things change so quickly in this area that half the sites I mention could be gone by the time you actually read this).
The big story here this year was probably the solid success of SCI FICTION (www.scifi.com/scifiction/), a fiction site within the larger umbrella of The Sci-Fi Channel site, founded last year, and edited by Ellen Datlow, the former fiction editor of Omni, as well as of the now-defunct web sites Omni Online and Event Horizon. In the two years that SCI FICTION has been up and running, Datlow has managed to make it not only by far the most reliable place on the internet to find good, professional-level, high-quality fantasy and science fictio
n short work, but a major player in the field, worthy of being weighed against any other market, print or online. SCI FICTION this year published excellent fiction by Ian R. MacLeod, Michael Cassutt, Simon Ings, Leigh Kennedy, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, Michael Swanwick, Susan Palwick, Paul Di Filippo, and others.
Although SCI FICTION is no doubt your best bet on the internet for good short fiction, particularly good science fiction (horror, slipstream, and fantasy are much easier to find online than good original short SF, for the most part), there are other promising new sites as well. Last year, we reported on the stillbirth of a proposed new site called The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net), to be edited by SF writer Eileen Gunn – fortunately, reports of its death turned out to be (for the moment, at least) greatly exaggerated, as a grant from an unnamed benefactor has enabled Gunn to get several “issues” of the e-magazine up on the Internet after all. The Infinite Matrix is a jazzy and eclectic site, with all sorts of cool postmodern bells and whistles: a weblog from Bruce Sterling, a daily feature by Terry Bisson, a series of quirky vingetttes from Richard Kadrey and Michael Swanwick, reviews by John Clute, novel extracts from Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and so forth, and although I think that they should leave all that in place, I think the site could also use more actual, honest-to-gosh, stand-alone short stories as well, meat and potatoes to go with the jazzy postmodern gravy. They did publish high professional-level stories this year by Simon Ings and the late Avram Davidson, and it’ll be interesting to see what Gunn can come up with in the months to come. A new site called The Spook (www.thespook.com/) is also running professional-level fiction, although most of it is horror and slipstream, not SF. Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) is another worthwhile site – although not at the same level of professional quality as SCI FICTION or The Infinite Matrix. It published a number of good stories last year by people such as Benjamin Rosenbaum, Michael J. Jasper, Kim Gryer, Cecilia Tan, and others, although for my money it leans more toward fantasy and mild horror than I’d like, with SF of a relatively soft variety (you probably aren’t going to see much hard SF or space adventures or stuff set in the far-future here; on the other hand, it’s nice to see a site that leans more toward fantasy, and even light fantasy, than toward horror or slipstream, the internet default settings for fiction). Perhaps a step below Strange Horizons in the quality of the fiction so far is a brand-new e-magazine called Future Orbits (www.futureorbits.com), which gets a big gold star from me because they’re concentrating on publishing only science fiction, an internet rarity (they’re still a bit uneven in quality at the moment – although they did publish interesting work by R. Neube, Richard Parks, Keith Brooke, K.D. Wentworth, and others). Future Orbits will very probably improve with age, and I wish them well, as we could use more SF-oriented fiction sites online. Another new site, Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), also publishes some original fiction, including a good story by Neal Barrett, Jr., although much of its content is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, interviews, and so forth.
Below this point, the brute fact is that there’s little short original science fiction of reasonable quality to be found on the internet. It’s not at all hard to find good short reprint SF stories elsewhere on the internet, however, and in fact some sites are bringing back into wide availability (assuming you have a computer and an internet connection, of course) good work that’s been unavailable to the average reader for years, if not decades. One of the best and seemingly most successful of these sites, still seeming to flourish after the much-publicized death of the somewhat similar iPublish site, is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com). Although they’ve recently started offering downloads of original stories, mostly a half-dozen or so by Kage Baker at this point, Fictionwise is not really an “electronic magazine” at all, but rather a place to buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer, probably the best place on the internet to do this, as far as accessing good science fiction is concerned. For a small fee, you can not only tap into a very large selection of individual “reprint” stories here, you can also buy “fiction bundles,” which amount to electronic collections. Almost all of the stuff available here is of high professional quality and is by some of the best writers in the business (you can also buy downloads of novels here, and, something nearer to my heart, subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here). Another similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), a place where you can buy downloadable e-books of various lengths by top authors and also access online for free a large and interesting array of critical material, including movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, a regular column by Howard Waldrop, and other stuff. There’s also some original never-before-published stuff to be purchased at ElectricStory that can only be accessed on the site, including a never-published-in-print collection of Howard Waldrop stories and novels by Lucius Shepard and Richard Wadholm. Similar for-a-small-fee access to both original and reprint SF stories is offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (www.tale.com/genres.htm) and Alexandria Digital Literature (www.alexlit.com) as well. One of the best sites on the Internet to read reprint stories for free (although you have to read them on the screen) is the British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good quality reprint stories, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Aurealis, and others, will have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and some of them regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues.
Finding stories to read, though, is not all that the SF community finds to do on the web, by any means. General interest sites that don’t publish fiction but do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds are among the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, and are probably my most frequent daily stops while surfing around. Among the best of these sites are the SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews, but also serves as host-site for the web-pages of a significant percentage of all the SF/Fantasy print magazines in existence, including Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, and the whole DNA Publishing group (Absolute Magnitude, Pirate Writings, Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, Dreams of Decadence); Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, extensive data-base archives, and lists of links to other sites of interest (Mark Kelly has given up his short fiction-review column in favor of devoting more time to editing the site in general, but has brought in new reviewers such as Nick Gevers and Richard Horton as partial compensation); Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw/), more media-and-gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but also features news and book reviews every issue, as well as providing a home for columns by such shrewd and knowledgeable genre insiders as John Clute and Michael Cassut; and SFF NET (www.sff.net), a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” a link to the Locus Magazine Index 1984–1996, and a link to the research data and reading-lists available on the Science Fiction Writers of America page (which can also be accessed directly at www.sfwa.org/); the above-mentioned Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com), which provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION and for Science Fiction Weekly, and to the bi-monthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; audio-plays can also be accessed at Audible (www.audible.com) and at Beyond 2000 (www.beyon
d2000.com); multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his fanzine Ansible (www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/), which provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, is well worth checking out on a regular basis.
Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com/chat/) every other Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST; regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (www.cybling.com/); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (www.talkcity.com/). Many bulletin board services, such as Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate, the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on sff.net, and probably on other BBSs as well.