The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15
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There was actually a shared-world anthology this year that was a better value for your money: The Man-Kzin Wars IX (Baen), edited by Larry Niven, one of the best volumes of this long-running series in some while, featuring four strong novellas, including Poul Anderson’s last science fiction novella, “Pele,” Hal Colebatch’s “The Sergeant’s Honor,” and Niven’s own “Fly-By-Night.”
Once again, there was no big standout original anthology in fantasy this year, although a new volume of Robert Silverberg’s bestselling fantasy anthology, Legends, has been promised for next year or the year after. What original fantasy anthologies there were this year were the usual pack of pleasant but minor theme anthologies, which you may or may not find worth the cover price, including: Creature Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Denise Little; Assassins Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter; Out of Avalon (Roc), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Robertson; Oceans of Magic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brian M. Thomson; Villians Victorious (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers; A Constellation of Cats (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Denise Little; and Historical Hauntings (DAW), edited by Jean Rabe.
From what I could tell, the big original horror anthologies of the year seemed to be Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Horror Writing (Overlook Press), edited by Stephen Pagel and Nicola Griffith; Night Visions 10 (Subterranean Press), edited by Richard Chizmar; and The Museum of Horrors (Leisure Books), edited by Dennis Etchison. On a less ambitious note, I also spotted Single White Vampire Seeks Same (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koran, no doubt there were others I didn’t spot.
Not a lot to look forward to in the original anthology market next year, except Peter Crowther’s Mars anthology, perhaps (or perhaps not) a new anthology edited by Greg Benford, and perhaps (or perhaps not) a follow-up to Robert Silverberg’s Legends. Let’s hope that there are also some (nice) surprises that we haven’t yet heard of.
In spite of persistent (almost gloomily relishing) talk in some circles about how SF is clearly “dying,” the novel market seemed fairly robust again this year, both in terms of how many titles were released and how well they tended to do commercially (sales slowed across the entire publishing industry in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, but picked up toward the end of the year); and in terms of the artistic merit of the books that were published, there were a lot of strong novels published this year, as last year – probably more than any one reader is going to have time to read, in fact, unless they devote themselves to doing little else but reading. (The related fantasy genre did even better commercially, thanks in large part to reissues of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling books, and the issuing of numerous associational books, most of which sold astronomically in advance of the release of the movie versions of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and even more astronomically afterward.)
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,158 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint, published in 2001, up by 12 from 2000’s total of 1,927 – and no doubt there were many Print-On-Demand books in the recent flood of such titles that were overlooked and not even reflected in this total. Original books were up by 18 to 1,210 from last year’s total of 1,027; reprint books were up by 5 to 948 titles over last year’s total of 900, a new record. The number of new SF novels was up slightly, with 251 new titles published as opposed to 230 novels published in 2000. The number of new fantasy novels was also up, to 282, as opposed to 258 novels published in 2000. Horror, another genre that had been pronounced “dead” by pundits a few years ago, made significant gains in 2001, with 151 novels published, as opposed to 80 novels in 2000 (and that’s not even counting “media tie-in” books with horror elements, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel novelizations).
For some perspective on the “SF is dying” theory (almost more of an article of faith than a “theory” in some circles, seemingly impervious to factual rebuttal), keep in mind that, like last year, the number of original mass-market paperbacks published this year, 347 (up 7 from 2000), is alone higher than the total number of original genre books, of any sort, published in 1972, which was 225. Nor do I see any indication of overall decline in literary quality, or the percentage of worthwhile books still getting into print – rather the opposite, in fact.
As usual, I don’t have time to read many novels, with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths; I have read a few novels this year, I usually find time to squeeze a few in, but few enough that I probably shouldn’t endorse anything personally without having read a lot more of the rest of the competitors out there. So instead I’ll limit myself to mentioning novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2001 include: Nekropolis (Eos), Maureen F. McHugh; Passage (Bantam), Connie Willis; The Secret of Life (Tor), Paul McAuley; Whole Wide World (Tor), Paul McAuley; The Other Wind (Harcourt), Ursula K. Le Guin; Metaplanetary (Eos), Tony Daniel; Probability Sun (Tor), Nancy Kress; Fallen Dragon (Warner Aspect), Peter F. Hamilton; Declare (Morrow), Tim Powers; Mother of Kings (Tor), Poul Anderson; Ares Express (Earthlight), Ian McDonald; Chasm City (Ace), Alastair Reynolds; American Gods (Morrow), Neil Gaiman; Cosmonaut Keep (Tor), Ken MacLeod; The Graveyard Game (Harcourt), Kage Baker; Ship of Fools (Ace), Richard Paul Russo; The Spheres of Heaven (Baen), Charles Sheffield; Shadow of the Hegemon (Tor), Orson Scott Card; The Chronoliths (Tor), Robert Charles Wilson; Return to the Whorl (Tor), Gene Wolfe; Manifold: Origin (Del Rey), Stephen Baxter; Manifold: Space (Del Rey), Stephen Baxter; The Cassandra Complex (Tor), Brian Stableford; Deepsix (Eos), Jack McDevitt; Empty Cities of the Full Moon (Ace), Howard V. Hendrix; The King of Dreams (Eos), Robert Silverberg; The Hauntings of Hood Canal (St. Martin’s), Jack Cady; The Wooden Sea (Tor), Jonathan Carroll; Angel of Destruction (Roc), Susan R. Matthews; The Pickup Artist (Tor), Terry Bisson; Kingdom of Cages (Warner Aspect), Sarah Zettel; The Merchants of Souls (Tor), John Barnes; Defender (DAW), C.J. Cherryh; Limit of Vision (Tor), Linda Nagata; Thief of Time (HarperColllins), Terry Prachett; The Treachery of Kings (Bantam Spectra), Neal Barrett, Jr.; The One Kingdom (Eos), Sean Russell; Terraforming Earth (Tor), Jack Williamson; Malestrom (Tor), Peter Watts; Bold as Love (Gollancz), Gwyneth Jones; Going, Going, Gone (Grove Atlantic), Jack Womack; The Curse of Chalion (Eos), Lois McMaster Bujold; A Paradigm of Earth (Tor), Candas Jane Dorsey; Children of Hope (Ace), David Feintuch; Angel of Destruction (Roc), Susan R. Matthews; Eyes of the Calculor (Tor), Sean McMullen; The Onion Girl (Tor), Charles de Lint; Otherland: Sea of Silver Light (DAW), Tad Williams; The Beyond (Eos), Robin Hobb; Child of Venus (Eos), Pamela Sargent; The Shadows of God (Del Rey), J. Gregory Keyes; Past the Size of Dreaming (Ace), Nina Kiriki Hoffman; and Black House (Random House), Stephen King and Peter Straub.
It didn’t seem to be a bad year for first novels, although none of them were quite as prominent as last year’s first-novel leader, Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space. The three first novels that seemed to attract the most attention this year (although, of course, this is a subjective call, based largely on the number of reviews they drew, and how positive the reviews were) were The Ghost Sister (Bantam Spectra), by Liz Williams; The Ill-Made Mute (Warner Aspect), by Cecelia Dart-Thornton; and Ill-Met by Moonlight (Ace), by Sarah A. Hoyt. Other first novels included: Illumination (Tor), by Terry McGarry; Archangel Protocol (Roc), by Lyda Morehouse; Alien Taste (Roc), by Wen Spencer; Swim the Moon (Tor), by Paul Brandon; The Love-Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jane Alison; The Eyre Affair (Viking), by Jasper Fforde; Divine Intervention (Ace), by Ken Wharton; Inca (Forge), by Suzanne Alles Blom; Kushiel’s Dart (Tor), by Jacqueline Carey; Eccentric Circles (Ace), by Rebecca Lickiss; Enemy Glory (Tor), by Karen Michalson; Children of the Shaman (Orbit), by Jessica Rydill; and Dance of Knives (Tor), by Donna McMahon. And of course, all publishers who are willing to take a chance publishing first novels should be commended, since it’s a chance that must be taken by someone if the field it
self is going to survive and evolve. Tor, Roc, and Ace seem to have published a lot of first novels in particular this year. (This year, most of the first novels were by women; last year, most of the first novels were by men. What does this mean? I don’t have a clue!)
Tor and Eos obviously had very strong years, with Tor in particular coming close to dominating the list in science fiction as far as number of titles is concerned (it wasn’t as one-sided in fantasy), although Ace, Del Rey, and Roc also had pretty good years as well. Although it’s largely a subjective judgement, it seems to me that this novel list is at least as substantial as last year’s crop. Looking over the lists, it seems clear that once again the majority of novels here are center-core science-fiction, in spite of the usual complaints about how SF is being “forced off the bookstore shelves” by fantasy; even omitting the fantasy novels and the borderline genre-straddling work from the list, you’re still left with the McHugh, the two Baxter novels, the Daniel, the two McAuley novels, the MacLeod novel, the Stableford, the Kress, the McDonald, the Reynolds, the Hamilton, the Wilson, the Cherryh, the Baker, the McDevitt, the Nagata, the Wolfe, the Sheffield, and half-a-dozen others (or more) as clearly and unmistakably science fiction, many of them “hard science fiction” as well. So much for being forced off the shelves!
It’s been a good couple of years for the reissuing of long-out-of-print classic novels, helping to alleviate a problem (books going out-of-print and never coming back into it) that had grown to crisis proportions by the mid-’90s. The SF Masterworks and the Fantasy Masterworks reprint series, from English publisher Millennium, brought forth another slew of classic reprints this year (of particular note, although they’re all worth having, are Jack Vance’s Emphyrio, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Fritz Lelber’s The First Book of Lankhmar and The Second Book of Lankhmar, and Jack Finney’s Time and Again), and in these days of online internet bookstores, where it’s no more difficult to order something from amazon.co.uk as it is from amazon.com, and doesn’t take significantly longer for you to receive your book, there’s no reason why you can’t order them to fill long-unfillable slots in your basic SF and fantasy libraries; in fact, that’s just what you should do, before these titles become unavailable again. On this side of the Atlantic, the year’s classic reprints included: Keith Roberts’s Pavane (Del Rey Impact); Edgar Pangborn’s West of the Sun (Old Earth Books); Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (Stealth Press); Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master; and Entities: Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (NESFA Press). Print-On-Demand publishers are also having a big impact on making classic work available to readers again. Wildside Press (www.wildside.com) seems so far to be the most SF-oriented of these publishers; check their site for lists of what’s currently available. Another such site to check is Big Engine (www.bigengine.com), as well as internet sites such as Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), Peanut Press (www.peanut-press.com), Ereads (www.ereads.com) and others where you can buy novels, both original and reprint, in the form of electronic “downloads” for your PDA or home computer. A new, never-before-published-and-unavailable-in-other-forms novel by Lucius Shepard, Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, was available from ElectricStory and Fictionwise this year, for instance. Another new Lucius Shepard novel, Valentine, was available this year from a more traditional small press, Four Walls, Eight Windows.
It’s probably futile to try to guess which of these novels are going to win the year’s major awards, especially as SFWA’s bizarre and increasingly dysfunctional “rolling eligibility” rule meant that only one novel from 2001 (Passage, by Connie Willis) made it on to the ballot for an award to be given out in 2002. It’s hard to call a clear favorite for the Hugo as well, although Passage, Le Guin’s The Other Wind, Wolfe’s Return to the Whorl, Daniel’s Metaplanetary, Reynold’s Chasm City, McHugh’s Nekropolis, and Williamson’s Terraforming Earth all have a chance to be in the hunt (as do others, though, so it’s still probably anybody’s game).
Borderline or associational novels by SF writers this year included Lust (HarperCollins), an erotic fantasy by Geoff Ryman, and Hardcase (St. Martin’s Minotaur), a hardboiled detective novel by Dan Simmons.
It was perhaps a bit weaker year for short-story collections overall than last year, but there were still some strong collections to be found. The year’s best collections included: Tales From Earthsea (Harcourt), by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (Tor), by Vernor Vinge; Jubilee (Voyager Australia), by Jack Dann; The Other Nineteenth Century (Tor), by Avram Davidson; Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (Golden Gryphon), by Geoffrey A. Landis; Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon (Golden Gryphon), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Strange Trades (Golden Gryphon), by Paul Di Filippo; Supertoys Last All Summer Long (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Brian W. Aldiss; Quartet (NESFA Press), by George R.R. Martin; and Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press), by Kelly Link.
Other good collections included: Skin Folk (Warner Aspect), by Nalo Hopkinson; Claremont Tales (Golden Gryphon), by Richard A. Lupoff; Futureland (Warner Aspect); Darkness Divided (Stealth), by John Shirley; Redgunk Tales: Apocalypse and Kudzu from Redgunk, Mississippi (Invisible Cities Press), by William R. Eakin; City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (Cosmos Books), by Jeff VanderMeer; Meet Me in the Moon Room: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Ray Vukcevich; and Bad Timing and Other Stories (Big Engine), by Molly Brown.
The year also featured strong retrospective collections such as The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (Tor), by Arthur C. Clarke; Coup de Grace and Other Stories (The Vance Integral Edition), by Jack Vance; Agent of Vega and Other Stories (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; Trigger and Friends (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; The Hub: Dangerous Territory (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume One, Immodest Proposals (NESFA Press), by William Tenn; The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume Two, Here Comes Civilization (NESFA Press), by William Tenn; The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective (Morpheus International), by Harlan Ellison; The Jaguar Hunter (Four Walls, Eight Windows), by Lucius Shepard; 50 in 50 (Tor), by Harry Harrison; The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings (Night Shade Books), by Manly Wade Wellman; Fearful Rock and Other Dangerous Locales (Night Shade Books), by Manly Wade Wellman; The Complete Short Stories (Flamingo), by J.G. Ballard; and From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown (NESFA Press), by Fredric Brown.
Noted without comment: Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (NESFA Press), by Gardner Dozois.
It’s worth noting that several of the year’s collections contained never-before-published material. For instance, Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea featured three excellent original fantasy stories, and Vinge’s The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge showcased a strong original science fiction novella.
It’s encouraging to see regular trade publishers such as Tor, Baen, and Warner Aspect publishing more collections these days, but, of course, as has been true for over a decade now, small press publishers remain vital to the publication of genre short story collections. Golden Gryphon Press is becoming particularly important in getting the work of new and relatively new writers out before the public, as was Arkham House before it in the days when the late Jim Turner was editing it, while NESFA Press continues to provide invaluable service by publishing retrospective collections of past masters, returning volumes of long out-of-print work to easy availability. Even smaller small presses, such as Small Beer Press, Invisible Cities Press, and others, are concentrating on authors whose work is too quirky and offbeat to attract even the more traditional small press outfits, and, since bookstore sales – even in specialty stores – are usually not an option, are doing much of their selling by mail-order over the Internet – something that I think we’re going to see a lot more of as time goes by.
“Electronic collections” continue to be available for
downloading online at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory. (Publish, a site where such collections were available, died this year, as mentioned above – but no doubt other such sites will be coming along to replace it.) Print On Demand (POD) publishers continue to supply short story collections as well, but its a difficult market to track, and it’s often hard to say what’s available where. Your best bet is probably to go online and check out what’s listed on POD sites – the biggest and most SF-oriented POD publisher so far seems to be Wildside Press (www.wildsidepress.com), although there are other POD publishers such as Xlibris, Subterranean Press, and Alexandria Digital Library, as well.
As very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain superstore, that means that mail-order is still your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, MA 01701-0809 – $30 for Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois, by Gardner Dozois; $29 for The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume One, Immodest Proposals, by William Tenn; $29 for The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume Two, Here Comes Civilization, by William Tenn; $25 for Quartet, by George R.R. Martin; $29 for The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, by Fredric Brown (plus $2.50 shipping in all cases). Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802 – $24.95 for Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, by Geoffrey A. Landis; $24.95 for Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo; $24.95 for Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; $23.95 for Claremont Tales, by Richard A. Lupoff. The Vance Integral Edition, 4100-10 Red Wood Road, PMB 338, Oakland, CA 94619-2363 – $27 for Coup de Grace, by Jack Vance. Morpheus International, 9250 Wilshire Blvd., STE LL 15, Beverly Hills, CA 90212 – $34.95 hardcover, $24.95 trade paperback for The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective, by Harlan Ellison. Night Shade Books, 563 Scott 304, San Francisco, CA 94117 – $35 for The Devil Is Not Mocked, by Manly Wade Wellman; $35 for Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales, by Manly Wade Wellman. Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB 132, Brooklyn, NY 11217 – $16 for Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link; $16 for Meet Me in the Moon Room: Stories, by Ray Vukcovich. Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519; Stealth Press, 128 E. Grant St., Lancaster, PA 17602-2854 – $24.95 for Darkness Divided, by John Shirley. Big Engine Co. Ltd., Box 185, Abingdon OX14 1GR, UK – $12.97 for Bad Timing and Other Stories, by Molly Brown; Invisible Cities Press, 50 State Street, Montpelier VT 05602 – $14.95 for Redgunk Tales: Apocalypse and Kudzu from Redgunk, Mississippi, by William R. Eakin.