(One of the very best books of the year is Central Station (Tachyon), by Lavie Tidhar, although there is some controversy as to whether it should be considered to be a collection of previously published stories or a “braided mosaic novel.” I’ve dealt with this by recommending it in both the novel section and the short fiction collections section.)
In the list above, the McAuley, the Steele, the Cherryh, the Wilson, the Bear, the Reynolds, the Corey, the Cixin Liu, and many others are pure-quill center-core SF, in spite of decades of fretting about how fantasy is going to drive SF from the bookstore shelves.
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Novels by established authors issued by small presses this year included: Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar (if considered as a novel rather than a collection—Tachyon); The Doomed City, by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky (Chicago Review Press); The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae, by John Crowley (Small Beer Press); War Factory, by Neal Asher (Skyhorse/Nightshade Books); The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu (Head of Zeus); The Light Warden, by Liz Williams (NewCon Press); Down and Out in Purgatory, by Tim Powers (Subterranean); and Zen City, by Eliot Fintushel (Zero).
The year’s first novels included: Arabella of Mars, by David D. Levine (Tor); Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US); Roses and Rot, by Kat Howard (Saga); Everfair, by Nisi Shawl (Tor); A Fierce and Subtle Poison, by Samantha Marby (Algonquin); The Star-Touched Queen, by Roshani Chokshi (St. Martin’s Press); The Reader, by Traci Chee (Putnam); Vigil, by Angela Slatter (Jo Fletcher Books); Azanian Bridges, by Nick Wood (NewCon Press); and Devil and the Bluebird, by Jennifer Mason-Black (Amulet). It’s a very subjective call, but it seems to me that the novels by Shawl, Levine, and Ha Lee got more attention that the rest did.
There were not too many novel omnibuses available this year, but they included Two Great Novels: Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air (Orion/Gollancz), by James Tiptree, Jr.; Three Classic Novels: Ossian’s Ride, October the First Is Too Late, Fifth Planet (Orion/Gollancz), by Fred Hoyle; Ill Met in Lankhmar and Ship of Shadows (Open Press), by Fritz Leiber; and Seventh Son and Red Prophet (Tor), by Orson Scott Card.
Novel omnibuses are also frequently made available through the Science Fiction Book Club.
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Not even counting print-on-demand books and the availability of out-of-print books as e-books or as electronic downloads from Internet sources, a lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Here are some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably impossible.
Orion/Gollancz reissued Limbo, by Bernard Wolfe, Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter S. Tevis, The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, and Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith; Gollancz reissued Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks; Tor reissued Mars Crossing, by Geoffrey A. Landis, Christmas Magic, edited by David G. Hartwell, Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod, The Memory of Whiteness, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen; Penguin Classics reissued The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Titan reissued The Condition of Muzak, The English Assassin, A Cure for Cancer, and The Final Programme, all by Michael Moorcock; DAW reissued Death’s Master and Hunting the White Witch, both by Tanith Lee; Valancourt Books reissued The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest; Random House/Ebury/Del Rey UK reissued He, She and It and Woman at the Edge of Time, both by Marge Piercy; Pocket Books reissued Swan Song, by Robert McCammon; Vintage reissued Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang; Harper Voyager reissued The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter; and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reissued The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.
Many authors are now reissuing their old back titles as e-books, either through a publisher or all by themselves, so many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all here. Before you conclude that something from an author’s backlist is unavailable, though, check with the Kindle and Nook stores, and with other online vendors.
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For short-story collections 2016 was another good year.
The year’s best collections included: The Best of Ian McDonald, by Ian McDonald (PS Publishing); Central Station (if considered to be a collection rather than a novel), by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon); Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, by Alastair Reynolds, edited by Jonathan Strahan and William Schafer (Subterranean Press); Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens, by Eleanor Arnason (Aqueduct Press); Not So Much, Said the Cat, by Michael Swanwick (Tachyon); The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Saga Press); The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin by Ursula K. Le Guin (Simon & Schuster); The Complete Orsinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America); Concentration, by Jack Dann (PS Publishing); and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, by Ken Liu (Simon & Schuster).
Also good were Sharp Ends, by Joe Abercrombie (Orbit); Amaryllis and Other Stories, by Carrie Vaughn (Fairwood Press); Neither Here Nor There, by Cat Rambo (Hydra); Frankenstein on Ice and Other Stories, by Kim Newman (Titan US); Otherworld Secrets, by Kelley Armstrong (Penguin/Plume); Slipping, by Lauren Beukes (Tachyon); Other Stories, by Paul Park (PS Publishing); A Natural History of Hell, by Jeff Ford; (Small Beer Press), Dreams of Distant Shores, by Patricia A. McKillip (Tachyon); Swift to Chase, by Laird Barron (JournalStone), Fathoms, by Jack Cady (Underland); Two Travellers, by Sarah Tolmie (Aquaduct Press); Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Fairwood Press); A Feast of Sorrows, by Angela Slattter (Prime), and Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories, by Michael Bishop (Fairwood Press).
Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear, Volume One: Just Over the Horizon, by Greg Bear (Open Road); The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear, Volume Two: Far Thoughts and Pale Gods, by Greg Bear (Open Road); The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear, Volume Three: Beyond the Farthest Suns, by Greg Bear (Open Road); Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era, by Robert Silverberg (Subterranean); The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson. Volume 7: Question and Answer, by Poul Anderson (NESFA Press); The Complete Short Stories of the 1970s (Part 1), by Brian W. Aldiss (Harper Voyager); The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 2, by Carol Emshwiller (NonStop Press), Grotto of the Dancing Deer: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Volume Four) by Clifford D. Simak, (Open Road); Earth for Inspiration and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Nine by Clifford D. Simak, (Open Road); The Door to Saturn: The Collected Fantasies, Volume 2, by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (Skyhorse/Nightshade Books); A Vintage from Atlantis: The Collected Fantasies, Volume 3, by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (Skyhorse/Night Shade Books); The Best of Bova Volume I, by Ben Bova (Baen); The Best of Bova, Volume II, by Ben Bova (Baen); The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories, by Joan Aiken (Small Beer Press); and Interior Darkness: Selected Stories, by Peter Straub (Doubleday).
As usual, small presses dominated the list of short-story collections, with trade collections having become rare.…
A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at many sites. The Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.
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As usual, the most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are the various best of the year anthologies, the number of which continues to fluctuate. One series covering SF was lost with the demise of David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF series (Tor), but we gained several new series. Continuations of relatively new series this year included: The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera 2015 (Baen), edited by David Afsharirad; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fan
tasy Novellas: 2016 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), this volume edited by Karen Joy Fowler, with the overall series editor being John Joseph Adams. The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly was published last year, but if there was a new volume this year, I didn’t see it. New this year is The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume One, edited by Neil Clarke (Skyhorse/Night Shade Books). These join the established best of the year series: the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, edited by Gardner Dozois, now in its thirty-fourth year; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2016 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton; The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eight (Skyhorse/Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2016 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume 27 (PS Publishing), edited by Stephen Jones.
That leaves science fiction being covered by three dedicated best of the year anthologies, my own, the Clarke, and the Afsharirad, plus four separate half anthologies, the science fiction halves of the Strahan, Horton, Fowler, and Guran novella book, which in theory adds up to two additional anthologies (in practice, of course, the contents of those books probably won’t divide that neatly, with exactly half with their coverage going to each genre, and there’ll likely to be more of one thing than another). With three dedicated anthologies and four half-anthologies (adding up to two more), that’s actually more “best of” coverage than SF has had for a while. There is no dedicated fantasy anthology anymore, fantasy only being covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan, Horton, Fowler, and Guran novella book (in effect, by two anthologies when you add the halves together). Horror is now being covered by two dedicated volumes, the Datlow and the Jones, and the “horror” half of Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (although the distinction between “dark fantasy” and “horror” is a fine—and perhaps problematical—one). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto “best of the year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (Pyr), edited by Mercedes Lackey. A more specialized best of the year anthology is Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by A. M. Dellamonica and Steven Berman.
The most prominent title in the stand-alone reprint anthology market was undoubtedly The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, a massive retrospective anthology that makes even this book look small at 800,000 words and more than 102 stories from authors around the world. As is always true with these big retrospectives, it would be possible to question the use of one author’s particular story over that of another story by the same author—but any anthology that reprints Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” John Crowley’s “Snow,” Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Emprires and More Slow,” R. A. Lafferty’s “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,’ and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” plus stories by Greg Bear, Michael Bishop, Samuel R. Delany, Pat Cadigan, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. J. Cherryh, James Blish, Iain M. Banks, and ninety-two (!) other authors is obviously a book worth reading, and one that belongs in every SF fan’s library.
There were several retrospective anthologies of feminist SF this year, including Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp; and Women of Futures Past (Baen), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. An anthology of stories drawn from Irish semiprozine Albedo One is Decade 1: The Best of Albedo One (Aeon Press), edited by John Kenny.
The best fantasy reprint anthology was probably Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (Night Shade Books), edited by Paula Guran, with good work from Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Jane Yolen, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, and others. Monsters of various sorts were covered in The Mammoth Book of Kaiju (Robinson), edited by Sean Wallace; The Mammoth Book of the Mummy (Robinson), edited by Paula Guran; and In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus (Pegasus), edited by Stephen Jones; Obsidian: A Decade of Horror Stories by Women (NewCon Press), edited by Ian Whates; and Tales from the Miskatonic Library (PS Publishing), edited by Darrell Schweitzer and John Ashmead.
Pleasant but minor reprint anthologies included Galactic Games (Baen), edited by Bryant Thomas Schmidt, and Things from Outer Space (Baen), edited by Hank Davis.
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There were a few intriguing items this year in a generally somewhat weak genre-oriented nonfiction category. Probably the most interesting were those directly involved with SF writers to one degree or another: The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism (Aqueduct), by Judith Merril, reprints Merril’s long-unavailable (and still well worth reading) review columns from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany, Volume 1, 1957–1969 (Wesleyan), edited by Kenneth R. James, gives readers a long-awaited look at the private journals of SF writer Samuel R. Delany, the first batch covering his early years in the publishing industry. Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg (Fairwood Press), edited by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, is exactly what it says it is: a collection of fascinating and entertaining interviews with Silverberg conducted by Zinos-Amaro over a period of years. Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990 (Liverpool University Press), edited by Mike Ashley, would interest almost anyone who’d like a behind-the-scenes look at what was happening with the science fiction magazines during that tumultuous decade—unfortunately, most readers will probably be put off by the price, a steep $120. Making Conversation (NESFA Press), edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, is a collection of her fan writing on a multitude of subjects. Where Memory Hides: A Writer’s Life (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform), by Richard A. Lupoff, takes a look back over his long and distinguished career. My Father the Pornographer (Simon & Schuster), by Chris Offutt, is an often-touching memoir of his father, SF writer Andrew Offutt—who also wrote a lot of pornography.
There were three biographies of SF/fantasy writers: Octavia E. Butler (University of Illinois Press), by Gerry Canavan; Alfred Bester (University of Illinois Press), by Jad Smith; and Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright), by Ruth Franklin.
There were two books of essays about SF, literature, and life in general: The View from the Cheap Seats (HarperCollins/William Morrow), by Neil Gaiman, and Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016 (Small Beer Press), by Ursula K. Le Guin.
A bit more on the academic side were: The Geek Feminist Revolution (Tor), by Kameron Hurley; The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), by Adam Roberts; Trekonomics: The Economies of “Star Trek” (Inkshares/Pipertext), by Manu Saadia; Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press), by André M. Carrington; Castaway Tales: From Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi (Wesleyan), by Christopher Palmer; Art and War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction (Repeater), by Lavie Tidhar and Simon Adolf; and The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsbach on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Grant Wythoff.
A new addition to what by now must surely be a twenty-foot-long shelf of books about Philip K. Dick was The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick (Oxford University Press), by Kyle Arnold.
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Much like the nonfiction category, it seem like a generally weak year for art books, with a few strong items scattered here and there. As usual, your best bet for good value for your money
was probably the latest in a long-running “best of the year” series for fantastic art, Spectrum 23: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Flesk Publications), edited by John Fleskes. Also of interest, particularly to SF fans, was Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and Imagined (Smithsonian/Elephant Book Company), by Ron Miller, and Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie (Abrams), by Ralph McQuarrie. For the fantasy fans, we had The Fantasy Illustration Library, Volume Two: Gods and Goddesses (Michael Publishing), edited by Malcolm R. Phifer and Michael C. Phifer, Walking Through the Landscape of Faerie (Faerie Magazine), by Charles Vess, and The Art of the Film: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Harper Design; HarperCollins UK), by Dermot Power.
Also of interest were The Sci-Fi and Fantasy Art of Patrick J. Jones (Korero), by Patrick J. Jones, and Descants & Cadences: The Art of Stephanie Law (Shadowscapes), by Stephanie Law.
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According to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), all ten of 2016’s ten top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”)—something that hasn’t happened since 2010. Usually a mainstream action movie or a spy movie of some sort, frequently a James Bond movie, sneaks into the top ten list, but this year it’s genre (or “genre”) all the way down. Not only were all of the top ten movies genre films of one sort or another, by my count, although I may have missed a few, eighteen out of the top twenty, and thirty-eight out of the one hundred top-grossing movies were genre films. In the past seventeen years, genre films have been number one at the box office fifteen out of seventeen times, with the only exceptions being American Sniper in 2014 and Saving Private Ryan in 1998.
Coming in at number one on the top ten box-office list was Rogue One: A Star Wars Movie, a direct prequel to the original Star Wars movie Star Wars: A New Hope and the closest thing to science fiction (you could call it science fantasy, or sci-fi adventure, or space opera—the science is absurd, but at least it has spaceships and robots and aliens) in the top ten. Its rise to first was even more meteoric, as it was released only on December 16, and doubtless has a lot more money still to haul in throughout 2017. The year’s other big budget sci-fi action movie, Passengers, has been fairly beaten up on by the critics and fan word-of-mouth, and only made it to the thirtieth spot on the top Hundred list (although, to be fair, it too had a late December start).
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 4