The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  At the beginning of 1998, Penny Press announced that all of their fiction magazines, Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, will change size, starting with the June 1998 issue. The new format will add a little over an inch in height and about a quarter inch in width to each issue of Asimov's or Analog; the page count will drop from 160 pages to 144 pages for regular issues, and from 288 pages to 240 for double issues, although the larger pages will allow Asimov's and Analog to use about 10 percent more material per issue. The hope is that the increase in size will increase the visibility of the magazines on the newsstands (where, at the moment, digest-sized titles tend to get lost because other, larger magazines are shuffled in front of them), and increase their attractiveness as a product to distributors, who seem to favor larger-format magazines over digest-sized magazines these days. This marks the end of an era; for almost fifty years now, there have always been at least three digest-sized SF magazines on the newsstands (although which three changed as time went by), but now The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction stands alone as the only true digest magazine left in the genre.

  The other significant change for Asimov's and Analog was the establishment in early 1998 of Internet Web sites for both magazines; Asimov's's site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog's is at http://www.analogsf.com, both sites sponsored by SF Site. Both sites feature story excerpts, book reviews, essays, and other similar features; and live interviews, "chats," and other on-line-only features are planned for the near future. More significantly, perhaps, you can subscribe to both magazines electronically, on-line, by giving a credit card number and clicking a few buttons, and this feature is already bringing in new subscribers, particularly from other parts of the world where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems (Asimoy's, for instance, has already picked up new subscribers from France, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and even the United Arab Emirates).

  The Magazine of fantasy 6 Science Fiction completed its first year under new editor Cordon Van Gelder, although most of the material that appeared there this year was probably part of the extensive inventory left behind by former editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A favorite literary parlor game this year was to try to pick out which stories in the magazine had been bought by Gordon and which by Kris, with even one of the Locus columnists joining in with speculations as to what inferences about "new directions" for the magazine you could draw from the stuff in the June issue, the first one with Gordon's name on the masthead. Gordon merely smiles like a Cheshire cat and refuses to answer these questions, but I suspect that most of the speculations to date have been wrong. It'll be interesting to see how the magazine does change in coming months, and in which directions, as Kris's inventory finally runs out. Cordon has brought new science columnists Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty in to supplement Gregory Benford, and the book reviews seem to be rotating on an irregular basis among Robert K. J. Killheffer, Michelle West, Elizabeth Hand, and Douglas E. Winter, with a review column by Charles de Lint also in most issues, occasionally a review column by Gordon himself, and Paul Di Filippo (who is doing critical columns for Asimov's, F&SF, and Science Fiction Age all at the same time, which may be a genre first!) contributing quirky metafictional literarily oriented comic pieces from time to time. F&SF changed its Web site; the new one at www.sfmag.com had not gone up in time for me to report on it for this book.

  The British magazine Interzone completed its seventh full year as a monthly publication. Circulation went down very slightly this year, but remained more or less the same as last year-disappointingly, no major gains, but at least no catastrophic drops either. Interzone is one of the most reliable places to find first-rate fiction in the entire magazine market, with the literary quality of the stories consistently high, and it's one of the magazines that you really should subscribe to, especially as it is almost impossible to find Interzone on newsstands or in bookstores on the American side of the Atlantic. To miss it is to miss some of the best stuff available anywhere today. Interzone also has a Web site (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm), although there's not really much there you can subscribe to the magazine there, though, which is perhaps the salient point.

  Science Fiction Age successfully completed their fifth full year of publication. Although overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped again in 1997, by a substantial 14 percent, the magazine seems in general to be successful and profitable, with editor Scott Edelman attributing the drop in circulation to readers switching subscriptions to Science Fiction Age's companion magazines, Realms of Fantasy and the media magazine Sci-Fi Entertainment, as well as to the newly purchased media magazine Sci-Fi Universe (both media magazines are also edited by Edelman). As Edelman points out, this gives Sovereign Media four successful genre titles where before they had only one (Science Fiction Age itself, the first magazine published by Sovereign), and that that is worth siphoning off some of the original magazine's subscription base. (It's a good argument, but one that will look a little thin if Science Fiction Age's circulation continues to drop in the future.) Artistically, Science Fiction Age had its best year yet, publishing some very strong stories, and for the second year in a row was a more reliable source for good core science fiction overall than was The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, which still published more fantasy and soft horror stories this year than they did good SF stories.

  Tomorrow Speculative Fiction is now an "on-line electronic magazine" called Tomorrow SF, and is reviewed below. Aboriginal Science Fiction, reported to be dead in 1995, came back to life in 1996; it managed only one issue in 1997, but published another one just after the beginning of the year in 1998.

  Realms of Fantasy is a companion magazine to Science Fiction Age, a slick, large-size, full-color magazine very similar in format to its older sister, except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction. They completed their third full year of publication in 1997. Under the editorship of Shawna McCarthy, Realms of Fantasy has quickly established itself as by far the best of the all-fantasy magazines (the other, the much longer-established Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine-in its tenth year of publication in 1997-comes nowhere near it in terms of literary quality or consistency); in fact, the best stories from Realms of Fantasy are rivaled for craft and sophistication only by the best of the fantasy stories published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction. Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, a magazine that publishes both fantasy and mild horror, had fallen into silence, publishing no issue in 1997, and was being said to likely be dead, but in early 1998 it was announced that DNA Publications, who also publish the SF fiction semiprozine Absolute Magnitude (see below), will be reviving the magazine under its original titlewhich it lost when its license lapsed-Weird Tales; Darrell Schweitzer and George Scithers will stay on as the magazine's editors.

  A promising newcomer to the magazine market is a full-size, full-color British magazine called Odyssey, which published one practice issue and one real issue in 1997. This is a nice-looking magazine, although the interior layout is a touch chaotic and confusing; and it ran some good stuff by Brian Stableford, Jeff Hecht, and others, although in my opinion they should concentrate on actual science fiction and stay away from the gaming fiction, horror, and fantasy (which tends to be weak here, as it also is in Interzone). They also need to forge an identity for themselves other than "not Interzone," a positive, strong identity and flavor of their own. At the moment, the magazine could go in any of a halfdozen directions, and it's hard to tell in which of them it's more likely to go. If it goes in the right direction, though, it could be a quite valuable addition to the magazine scene, and I wish them well.

  It was also announced early in 1998 that Amazing Stories, reported to have died back in 1994, will rise yet again from the grave, something it has done several times in its seventy-year-plus
existence. This time Amazing Stories will be brought out in a full-size, full-color format by Wizards of the Coast Inc., who recently bought TSR Inc., Amazing's former owner. The new version will feature media fiction as well as more traditional science fiction, with several Star Trek stories in each issue, and will be edited by the editor of the former incarnation, Kim Mohan. It's scheduled to be launched at the 1998 Worldcon in Baltimore.

  We should mention in passing that short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, as usual, from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine to Playboy.

  (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796, annual subscription $25.97 in U.S.; Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 803234625, $33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BNI 6FL, United Kingdom, $60.00 for an airmail one year, twelve issues, subscription; Analog, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323, $33.97 for annual subsciption in U.S.; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $21.50 for four issues; Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; Odyssey, Partizan Press 816-816, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 3NH, United Kingdom, $35 for a five-issue subscription, $75 for a twelve-issue subsciption.)

  The promise of "on-line electronic publication" remained largely unfulfilled in 1997-there aren't really that many good, professional level science fiction stories being published on-line at the moment, although I did find two stories I liked this year that were published only as phosphor dots on an "on-line magazine," one from Omni Online and one from Eidolon: SF Online, that we're bringing to you in print form for the first time anywhere in this anthology. But this whole area is growing so fast, with changes coming so rapidly and new Web sites springing up so rapidly, that the potential here is enormous, and I can't help but feel that this market will end up being a very significant one before we're too many years into the next century. The SF community on the Web, in particular, is growing and expanding with dizzying speed, growing even as you watch it, and is not only getting larger, but is also (perhaps more importantly) growing more interconnected, forging links from site to site, with traffic moving easily between them, growing toward becoming a real community-and a community with no physical boundaries, since it's just as easy to click yourself to a site on the other side of the Atlantic or on the other side of the world as it is to click to one next door. This growth and evolution of a tightly interconected on-line SF community is a development that may prove to have significant consequences in the not-too-distant future. So even though this whole area at the moment probably produces less worthwhile fiction annually than a couple of good anthologies or a few good issues of a top-level professional print magazine, it's worth keeping an eye on this developing market, and even taking a closer look at it.

  As has been true for a couple of years now, your best bet for finding good online-only science fiction, stories published only in electronic format, would be to go to Omni Online http://www.omnimag.com), where the stories are selected by veteran editor Ellen Datlow, longtime fiction editor of the now-defunct print version of Omni. To date, Omni Online "publishes" the best fiction I've been able to find on the Web, including this year's strong stories by Simon Ings, Brian Stableford, Paul Park, Michael Bishop, Michael Kandel, and others, but it seemed to publish fewer stories this year than last; and with the recent death of Omni founder Kathy Keeton, a strong supporter of the Omni Online concept, some insiders have speculated that perhaps General Media is losing interest in the Omni site and that it may be in danger of being closed down. This conjecture has been officially denied, though, and I hope that the Omni site stays up and running, as, at the moment, it is the most reliable place I know of on the Internet to find professional-level SF, fantasy, and horror. (There's other stuff there as well: nonfiction pieces, interviews, reviews, a place where you can "walk" through a virtual representation of the Titanic, and so on, and they also do regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or "chats" with various prominent authors).

  A new innovation there this year are "round-robin" stories, written by four authors in collaboration, each writing a section in turn, and cycling in that fashion until the story is done. "Round-robin" stories rarely hold up well against " real" stories, since usually some of the pieces don't really match very well, and these don't either, but they're fun and much better-executed than stories of this sort usually are. Authors who participated in the round-robins this year included Pat Cadigan, Maureen F. Mchugh, Terry Bisson, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Murphy, Jonathan Lethem, and others, so at the very least, they offered you a rare opportunity to watch top creative talents at play.

  The only other "on-line magazine" that really rivals Omni Online as a fairly reliable place in which to find good professional-level SF is Tomorrow SF (http://www.tomorrowsf.com), edited by veteran editor Algis Budrys, the on-line reincarnation of another former print magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. This is also a very interesting and worthwhile site, although the fiction here is not quite as strongly to my taste as that of the Omni site, something that was true of their respective print incarnations as well. Still, the stuff here is always solidly professional, and they published ("posted?" "promulgated?") good work this year by Kandis Elliot, Michael H. Payne, Robert Reed, Paul Janvier, K. D. Wentworth, and others. Tomorrow SF is also engaged in an experiment that, if successful, could have profound implications for the whole electronic publishing area. Starting last year, they "published" the first three on-line issues of Tomorrow SF for free; then, this year, they have begun charging a "subscription fee" for access to the Web site, hoping that the audience will have been hooked enough by the free samples that they will continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. The wise money is betting that this will not work, the argument being that so much stuff is available to be read for free on the Internet-oceans and oceans of it, in fact-that nobody is going to pay to access a site; they'll just click to a site where they can read something for free instead. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, however. It's true that there are oceans and oceans of free fiction available on the Internet, but most of it is dreadful, slush-pile quality at best, and if Budrys has sufficiently convinced a large-enough proportion of the audience that he can winnow out the chaff and find the Good Stuff for them, they may well be willing to pay so that they don't have to wade through all the crap themselves. This has been the function of the editor from the beginning of the print fiction industry after all, and people buy print magazines for the very same reason: because of the implicit promise that the editor has gone out into the wilderness of prose and hunted down and bagged and brought back for them tasty morsels of fiction they'll enjoy consuming, and I don't see why this wouldn't work for an on-line magazine as well. The question then becomes, has Budrys succeeded in so convincing a large-enough portion of the potential audience to actually keep him in business? The jury's still out on that question so far. But if Tomorrow SF can succeed in getting readers in significant numbers to pay to access the site, it could have a big effect on the shape of genre publishing on-line.

  Another interesting experiment on which the jury's still out is taking place at Mind's Eye Fiction (http://www.tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of stories for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. The fees are small, less than fifty cents per story in most cases, and although the wise money is sneering at this concept as well, I think that this setup could actually work if they got some Bigger Name authors involved in the project. At the moment, most of the writers you can access here are writers who don't have large reputations or avid followings (who are willing to take a chance on a screwy concept like this because they have
little to lose), and that may make it harder for this experiment to succeed as fully as it otherwise might.

  The quality of the fiction falls off quickly after these sites, although there are a few new contenders this year. Most of these sites are still in their infancy, however, and not working entirely up to speed as yet; most are also associated with existent print magazines. Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.midnight.com.all/ eidolon/) offers information about back issues of Eidolon magazine and about Eidolon authors and about the Australian professional scene in general, as well as reprint stories from previous issues, available to be read on-line or downloaded. They are also promising to publish a good amount of original on-line-only fiction in the future, though at the moment the only such story available is one by Sean Williams and Simon Brown-and that one was good enough to make it into this anthology. Aurealis, the other Australian semiprozine, also has a site (http://w.aurealis.hi.net) with similar kinds of features available, although so far they've announced no plans for original fiction. I've already mentioned the Asimov's (http://asimovs.com) and Analog (http.//analogsf.com) sites. Both sites are currently running teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, as well as book reviews, critical essays, and so forth, and I plan to start running a certain amount of original on-line-only fiction on the Asimov's site as soon as I can arrange to do so, as well as live interactive author interviews and chats. Another interesting site is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a large selection of reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, critical essays, and so forth. They too promise to begin running a good deal of original on-line-only fiction in the near future, and (as far as I can tell, anyway; it would be helpful, with this and other sites, if they'd label more clearly what's a reprint and what isn't) already have some excerpts from as yet unpublished novels. Terra Incognita (http://www.netaxs.com/-incognit), Century (http://w.supranet.net/century/) and the two Canadian semiprozines On Spec (http://www.icomm.ca/onspec/) and Transversions (http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/harlow/transversions/) also have Web sites, although not terribly active ones. Talebones (http://w.wenture.convtalebones) is another interesting site, although oriented toward horror and dark fantasy rather than SF. Longer established sites that are worth keeping an eye on, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven, include Intertext(http://www.etext.org/Zines/Intertext/), and E-Scape (http://www.interink.coni/escape.litm]).