The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Interzone is technically not a “professional magazine,” by the definition of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), because of its low rates and circulation, but the literary quality of the work published there is high that it would be ludicrous to omit it. Interzone was also a bit weaker this year than last year, but still published good work by Rich Larson, Ray Cluley, Sarah Brooks, Samantha Henderson, and others. Exact circulation figures are not available, but is guessed to be in the 2,000 copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but of a similar level of professional quality. Interzone and Black Static changed to a smaller trim size in 2011, but maintained their slick look, switching from the old 7 ¾"-by-10 ¾" saddle-stitched semigloss color cover sixty-four page format to a 6 ½"-by-9 ¼" perfect-bound glossy color cover ninety-six page format. The editor and publisher is Andy Cox.

  If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, something that these days can be done with just the click of a few buttons, nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Amazon (www.Amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible.

  So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do, and there’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y., 10007–2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y., 10007–2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, N.J., 07030, annual subscription—$34.97 in the U.S, $44.97 overseas. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, 42.00 Pounds Sterling each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of 78.00 Pounds Sterling for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.”

  Most of these magazines are also available in various electronic formats through the Kindle, the Nook, and other handheld readers.

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  With the departure of long-running Australian magazine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine for the digital realm this year, where it will maintain existence as an all-digital e-zine (at www.andromedaspaceways.com), there’s not a lot left of either the print fiction semiprozine market or the print critical magazine market. (It’s also getting a bit problematical to say which are print semiprozines and which are e-zines, since some markets, like Galaxy’s Edge, are offering both print versions and electronic versions of their issues at the same time.) I’m tempted to just merge the surviving print fiction and critical magazines into the section covering online publication, but for now I’ll keep it as a separate section.

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  The Canadian On Spec, the longest-running of all the print fiction semiprozines, which is edited by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, again brought out three out of four scheduled issues; there have been rumors about them making the jump to digital format, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the next to abandon the print format.

  There were two issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Space and Time Magazine managed three issues, and Neo-opsis managed one. There were also two issues of Ireland’s long-running Albedo One, Long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis has transitioned to a downloadable format. Once again, most of the fiction published in the surviving print semiprozines this year was relatively minor, with better work appearing in the online magazines mentioned below.

  For general-interest magazines about SF and fantasy, about the only one left is the venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensable source of news, information, and reviews, now in its fiftieth year of publication, operating under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Jonathan Strahan, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, and many others.

  One of the few other remaining popular critical print magazines is newcomer The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly (www.thecz.com), a feminist magazine of reviews and critical essays, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Nisi Shawl, and Kath Wilham, which published four issues in 2016. The most accessible of the other surviving print critical magazines—most of which are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader—is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation.

  Subscription addresses are: Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $76.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in the U.S.A;. On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to Web site www.onspec.ca; Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $25.00 for a three-issue subscription; Albedo One, Albedo One Productions, 2, Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland; $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One” or pay by PayPal at www.albedol.com; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, subscription and single issues online at www.thecsz.com, $16 annually for a print subscription, print single issues 5, Electronic Subscription—PDF format—$10 per year, electronic single issue, $3, to order by check, make them payable to Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 9845-2787.

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  The world of online-only electronic magazines now rivals—and often surpasses—the traditional print market as a place to find good new fiction.

  The electronic magazine Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, had perhaps its strongest year yet, publishing first-rate work by Rich Larson, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Sam J. Miller, James Patrick Kelly, Gregory Feeley, Eleanor Arnason, Maggie Clark, and others. They also host monthly podcasts of stories drawn from each issue. Clarkesworld has won three Hugo Awards as best semiprozine. In 2014, Clarkesworld co-editor Sean Wallace, along with Jack Fisher, launched a new online horror /magazine, The Dark (www.thedarkmagazine.com). Neil Clarke has also launched a monthly reprint e-zine, Forever (forever-magazine.com).

  Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, featured strong work by strong work by Ted Kosmatka, Craig DeLancey, Rich Larson, Steven Barnes, Mercurio D. Rivera, Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, and others. Lightspeed won back-to-back Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine in 2014 and 2015. Late in 2013, a new electronic companion horror magazine, Nightmare (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by John Joseph Adams, was added to the Lightspeed stable.

  Tor.com
(www.tor.com), edited by Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published a mix of SF, fantasy, dark fantasy, soft horror, and more unclassifiable stuff this year, with good work by Lavie Tidhar, Nina Allan, Paul McAuley, Peter S. Beagle, Glen Hirshberg, Kij Johnson, David D. Levine, Joe Abercrombie, and others. Still not enough science fiction here to entirely satisfy me, although the percentage is creeping up.

  Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the Internet, started in 2000. Niall Harrison is editor-in-chief, with Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde listed as associate editors. This year, they had strong work by Lavie Tidhar, Alexandra Manglis, Vajra Chandrasekera, Shawn Scarber, and others.

  Apex Magazine (www.apex-magazine.com) had good work by Lavie Tidhar, Stephen Cox, Jason Sanford, C.S.E. Cooney, Ursula Vernon, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, replacing Sigrid Ellis, who took over from Lynne M. Thomas.

  Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by James Van Pelt, Bud Sparhawk and Cat Rambo, Amy Sisson, Barbara Krasnoff, and others. Wendy S. Delmater, the former longtime editor, has returned to the helm, replacing Carmelo Rafala.

  An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, had a strong year, with lots of entertaining sword and sorcery stuff, and even some SF, by Aliette de Bodard, K. J. Parker, Sarah Pinsker, Cat Rambo, Yoon Ha Lee, Anaea Lay, and others.

  Long-running sword and sorcery print magazine Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill, transitioned into an electronic magazine in September of 2012 and can be found at www.blackgate.com. They no longer regularly run new fiction, although they will be regularly refreshing their nonfiction content, essays and reviews, and the occasional story will continue to appear.

  Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, reached its third year of publication, and its twenty-third bimonthly issue, and is still going strong; it’s available in various downloadable formats, although a print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue. They published good stuff this year by Martin L. Shoemaker, Ian Whates, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Sunil Patel, Kary English and Robert B. Finegold, although the reprint stories here, by Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, George R.R. Martin, Kij Johnson, and others, were still stronger than the original stories.

  Newish (fourteen issues) magazine Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, which won the best semiprozine Hugo this year, had entertaining stories by Seanan McGuire, Alyssa Wong, Paul Cornell, Brooke Bolander, Ferrett Steinmetz, and others, while brand-new magazine Persistent Visions (persistentvisionsmag.com), edited by Heather Shaw, had interesting work by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Naomi Kritzer, Leah Cypress, and others. New magazine Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform), edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant, also looks promising.

  The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos (www.cosmosmagazine.com) seems to have ended its policy of running an occasional science fiction story and gone to being an all-science news publication instead.

  Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF.

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), now edited by Scott R. Roberts under the direction of Card himself, ran interesting stuff from James Van Pelt, Harry Turtledove, Eric James Stone, and others.

  SF/fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, many of these were not really up to professional standards, but there were some good stories here and there by Eric Brown, James Van Pelt, Caroline M. Yoachim, William Ledbetter, and others. Editors there are Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

  Shimmer Magazine (www.shimmer.com), edited by E. Catherine Tobler, published interesting fiction by Patricia Russo, Arkady Martine, Rich Larson, Rachael Acks, and others.

  GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), now edited by Rashida J. Smith, taking over from Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Lucy Stone, Alex Jeffers, and others.

  Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, published interesting work by Megan Arkenberg, Joe Pitkin, and others.

  The World SF Blog (worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, was a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also published news, links, roundtable discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.” The site is no longer being updated, but an extensive archive is still accessible there.

  A similar site is International Speculative Fiction (internationalSF.wordpress.com), edited by Roberto Mendes.

  Weird Fiction Review (weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

  Other newcomers include Omenana Magazine of Africa’s Speculative Fiction (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu.

  Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, with most magazines featuring slipstream or literary surrealism instead. Such sites include Fireside Magazine (www.firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White; Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); and Interfictions Online (interfictions.com/), executive editor Delila Sherman, fiction editors Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron.

  Not only original fiction is available on the Internet, though. There’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy to be found on Internet. There are sites where you can access formerly published stories for free, including Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Apex Magazine, and most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites as well, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), and a large selection of novels, collections, and anthologies, can either be bought or be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus (www.infinityplus.co.uk) and The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible (an extensive line of Infinity Plus Books can also be ordered from the Infinity Plus site).

  There are plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet, though, beyond just the search for good stories to read. There are many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, where you can access an incredible amount of information—including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. The previously mentioned Tor.com is also one of the most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that, in addition to its fiction, regularly publishes articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, book “rereads” and episode-by-episode “rewatches” of television shows, as wel
l as commentary on all the above. The long-running and eclectic The New York Review of Science Fiction has ceased print publication, but can be purchased in PDF, e-pub, mobi formats, and POD editions through Weightless Press (weightlessbooks.com; see also www.nyrsf.com for information). Other major general-interest sites include Io9 (www.io9.com), SF Site (www.sfsite.com), although it’s no longer being regularly updated, SFReyu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (forums.sfreader.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com). A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk). Another fantastic research site is the searchable online update of the Hugo-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sf-encyclopedia.com), where you can access almost four million words of information about SF writers, books, magazines, and genre themes. Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus and Locus Online, but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf.net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com).