I haven’t been following the horror field closely for several years, but it seemed to me that the most prominent original horror anthologies of the year probably included Peter Straub’s Ghosts (Pocket Star), edited by Peter Straub, and Tombs (White Wolf), edited by Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer. We were also up to our asses in vampires this year, with gimmicky theme vampire anthologies everywhere, including Sisters of the Night (Warner Aspect), edited by Barbara Hambly and Martin H. Greenberg (female vampires); Blood Muse (Donald I. Fine), edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg (artists who are vampires); Vampire Detectives (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (self-explanatory—silly perhaps, but self-explanatory); and Celebrity Vampires (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other celebrities as bloodsuckers); and the mixed reprint/original anthology 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg (really short vampire stories, so that now you can have the pleasure of reading about vampires even while you’re on the toilet). In addition, there were lots of vampire stories in fantasy magazines, SF magazines, other general fantasy anthologies, less specialized horror anthologies, and hordes (flocks? herds? prides?) of them in the horror semiprozines. Needless to say, there are lots more vampire anthologies on the way for next year. Vampire anthologies also shade off into the “Erotic Horror” anthologies, especially as there are few Erotic Horror anthologies that don’t feature a vampire story or two. An example of a deliberate cross between the vampire anthology and the Erotic Horror anthology is Love Bites (Richard Kasak Books), edited by Amarantha Knight, although most of the year’s other Erotic Horror anthologies—such as Dark Love (Roc), edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer, and Martin H. Greenberg; Forbidden Acts (Avon), edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer; and Seeds of Fear (Pocket), edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett—have their share of vampires as well. As though they had been demanding equal time with the vampires, there were also anthologies about werewolves and the Frankenstein monster, most of them reprints—although The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, (actually late 1994, but we missed it) is mostly original. There were also anthologies about witches, including the Resnick and Greenberg mentioned above and a mixed reprint/original anthology, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, and even an anthology of less-easy-to-classify monsters from less familiar cultures, Orphans of the Night (Walker), edited by Josepha Sherman.
I am waiting confidently for someone to combine the year’s two hot trends and come up with Arthurian Vampires, or maybe Vampire Arthurs! or The Bloodsucking Idylls of the King. I’m sure we won’t have long to wait.
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The number of new SF novels went up slightly in 1995, after declining a bit in 1994. According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,250 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1995, up 13 percent from 1994, and reversing three years of decline. Of that total, not counting gaming- and media-related novelizations, 659 titles were novels … and of that total, 239 of them were SF novels (up from 204 in 1994), 227 were fantasy novels (down from 234 in 1994), and 193 were horror novels (up from 178 in 1994). It should be noted that while adult horror is sometimes claimed to be “dying”—although there still seemed to me to be plenty of it around—young adult horror is booming, and this explains why the number of horror titles continues to climb. Of those 193 titles, 84 of them were Young Adult horror (of the adult horror novels, a whopping 22 percent were vampire novels). Young Adult horror now makes up 55 percent of all Young Adult novels with genre elements. Young Adult fantasy is proliferating, too, accounting for 18 percent of the fantasy novel total; Young Adult science fiction, once a vibrant field, now, alas, lags far behind both Young Adult Horror and Young Adult Fantasy … which may well help to explain, as Charles Sheffield has suggested, why young readers seem to be going into reading horror and fantasy when they grow up, rather than science fiction. There were fewer original mass-market paperbacks published this year, continuing a trend now several years old; according to Locus, there are now fewer new mass-market paperbacks published than there are new hardcovers. The trade paperback format in particular has grown at the expense of the mass-market paperback format; there were almost four times as many trade paperbacks published in 1995 as there were in 1982, the total up 30 percent even since last year, and it’s the mass-market format, once the center of the field, whose numbers dwindle to make room for them. This makes a certain amount of sense—with most mass-market paperbacks these days costing nearly six dollars, and some edging up toward eight dollars, many readers would prefer to pay twelve to fourteen dollars for a trade paperback instead, getting for the extra money a larger and more “prestigious”-looking (and often sturdier) book with bigger type and (often) better paper and better covers, something that looks more impressive when displayed on a library shelf at home; some readers are even willing to move up into the twenty- to twenty-five-dollar range for a hardcover, for the same kind of reasons. As long as the prices of a mass-market paperback and a trade paperback remain fairly close to one another, a lot of people are going to decide they’re getting a better buy for their money with the trade paperback … and since paperback prices are certainly not going to go down anytime soon (especially with paper prices headed up), the mass-market paperback format seems likely to continue dwindling for the foreseeable future.
In spite of all the grim recessionary talk that has preoccupied the field for the last couple of years, SF is still an enormous genre by any reasonable standards, and gets even larger if we count the fantasy titles. There are a lot of new novels published every year. Even limiting discussion to the SF novels alone—and most SF readers will read at least some of the fantasy novels as well, even if they don’t read much of the horror—it’s obviously just about impossible for any one individual to read and review 239 new novels—let alone somebody with all of the reading that I have to do at shorter lengths for Asimov’s and for this anthology.
Therefore, as usual, I’m going to limit myself to listing those novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1994, including: Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz); Evolution’s Shore, Ian McDonald (Bantam Spectra); Legacy, Greg Bear (Tor); The Stone Garden, Mary Rosenblum (Del Rey); Sailing Bright Eternity, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); Waking the Moon, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (Bantam Spectra); Metropolitan, Walter Jon Williams (HarperPrism); Slow River, Nicola Griffith (Del Rey); The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); Alvin Journeyman, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Remake, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); The Ganymede Club, Charles Sheffield (Tor); The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay (HarperPrism); Kaleidoscope Century, John Barnes (Tor); Testament, Valerie J. Freireich (Roc); An Exaltation of Larks, Robert Reed (Tor); Amnesia Moon, Jonathan Lethem (Harcourt Brace); The Terminal Experiment, Robert J. Sawyer (HarperPrism); Invader, C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Flux, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); The Weight, Allen Steele (Legend); Gaia’s Toys, Rebecca Ore (Tor); The Killing Star, Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski (Morrow AvoNova); Brightness Reef, David Brin (Bantam Spectra); The Golden Nineties, Lisa Mason (Bantam Spectra); The Tower of Beowulf, Parke Godwin (Morrow); From Time to Time, Jack Finney (Simon & Schuster); Archangel, Mike Conner (Tor); Flowerdust, Gwyneth Jones (Tor); The Color of Distance, Amy Thomson (Ace); Kamikaze L’Amour, Richard Kadrey (St. Martin’s); Earthfall, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Vivia, Tanith Lee (Little, Brown); Challenger’s Hope, David Feintuch (Warner Aspect); Worldwar: Tilting the Balance, Harry Turtledove (Del Rey); The Silent Strength of Stones, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (AvoNova); A Sorcerer and a Gentleman, Elizabeth Willey (Tor); Mortal Remains, Christopher Evans (Gollancz); All the Bells on Earth, James P. Blaylock; Tech-Heaven, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Harvest the Fire, Poul Anderson (Tor); Mirrorsun Rising, Sean McMullen (Aphelion); and When Heaven Fell,
William Barton (Warner).
(Allen Steele’s The Weight (Legend), Connie Willis’s Remake (Bantam), and Poul Anderson’s Harvest the Fire (Tor) are novellas published as individual books; they don’t really fit here, but then, they don’t really fit anywhere else, either, so, as they are being sold as individual books, I’ve decided to list them here under novels.)
Of those novels on the list above that I did have time to read, I’d recommend Paul J. McAuley’s Fairyland, Ian McDonald’s Evolution’s Shore, Mary Rosenblum’s The Stone Garden, and Nicola Griffith’s Slow River.
It seemed a somewhat weaker year for first novels than the last two years have been, with nothing receiving the degree of attention that Griffith’s Ammonite, Rosenblum’s The Drylands, and Anthony’s Cold Allies did in 1993, or that Goonan’s Queen City Jazz, Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music, or Noon’s Vurt did in 1994. The first novels that stirred up the most excitement and acclaim this year were probably Becoming Human, Valerie J. Freireich (Roc); Quasar, Jamil Nasir (Bantam Spectra); The Bohr Maker, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Humility Garden, Felicity Savage (Roc); and Legacies, Alison Sinclair (Millennium). Valerie J. Freireich and Linda Nagata repeated the trick pioneered by Mary Rosenblum and Patricia Anthony in 1993 by having well-received second novels (Freireich’s Testament and Nagata’s Tech-Heaven) published before the end of the year. Other first novels included: Primary Inversion, Catherine Asaro (Tor); Lethe, Tricia Sullivan (Bantam Spectra); Dead Girls, Richard Calder (St. Martin’s); The Printer’s Devil, Chico Kidd (Baen); Headcrash, Bruce Bethke (Warner Aspect); The Baker’s Boy, J. V. Jones (Warner Aspect); The Gatekeepers, Daniel Graham, Jr. (Baen); and The Shape-Changer’s Wife, Sharon Shinn (Ace). The Del Rey Discovery line, launched in 1993, does seem to have been allowed to die, which strikes me as sadly shortsighted—if you don’t develop new writers, you have nobody with whom to replace your current high-sellers when they die, or move on to some other publishing house able to offer them more money. I salute all those editors who are brave and/or farsighted enough to buy first novels, in spite of the seductive lure of sticking with established “sure-thing” authors instead; as can be seen from the list above, Bantam Spectra, Roc, and Warner Aspect published a respectable number of first novels this year.
There doesn’t seem to me to be a clear favorite here for the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the situation is complicated by SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, which allows books from previous years to compete for this year’s Nebula Award—and so, it’s anyone’s guess what will end up winning the major awards for 1995.
Bantam Spectra and Tor had strong years, and books from the newish HarperPrism line are beginning to show up on these lists with some regularity, making their mark in the collections and anthologies lists as well as the novel list.
It should be noted that in the list above the books by Benford, Baxter, Stephenson, Banks, Reed, Anderson, McAuley, Rosenblum, Griffith, Cherryh, McDonald, Sheffield, Sawyer, Pellegrino and Zebrowski, Steele, Freireich, Ore, and a number of others are clearly and unequivocally science fiction by any reasonable definition—and that a few, especially the Bear, the Benford, and at least one of the Baxters (Flux), are “hard” science fiction as hard as it has ever been, if not harder. I mention this to counter the often heard assertion, usually spoken in sour tones, that no “real” science fiction is being published anymore; to the contrary, plenty of unquestionably pure-quill core science fiction still comes out every year, and even a good deal of “hard science fiction” rigorous enough to satisfy the most exacting of purists.… In fact, I think that more of both is being published now than was the case a few years back (to say nothing of “soft science fiction,” “sociological science fiction,” “satirical science fiction,” “space opera,” “military science fiction,” and a number of other varieties, all of which are also being published in large numbers). At the same time, just as there were more good fantasy anthologies this year, it also seemed to me that there were more good fantasy novels—and vigorous and exciting hybrids continued to form all along the borderline between science fiction and fantasy as well. One such hybrid, the nascent subgenre of “hard fantasy,” to use Michael Swanwick’s term, represented last year by Swanwick’s own The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, was represented this year by a major new novel by Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan, which also mixed classic fantasy tropes with a gritty and particularly urban sensibility.
Some excellent novels appeared as associational or borderline items this year; in fact, some of the strongest novels of the year were to be found lurking on the outer edges of the field. One of the best of these was Jack Dann’s vivid and exotic The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci (Bantam), a fat and fanciful book that exists somewhere on the borderline between historical novel, alternate history, and fantasy, partaking of all three forms without being entirely dominated by any of them. Much the same could be said of Joe Haldeman’s 1968 (Morrow), Haldeman’s most substantial book in years, ostensibly a straight mainstream novel (and a harrowing one) about the Vietnam War and its distorting effect on our society, but one which, because it is told largely through the eyes of a devoted science fiction reader, is drenched with science fiction imagery and sensibilities, and which recasts several “memories” of combat in aesthetic modes borrowed from fantasy, horror, and science fiction, most notably (and with high irony) from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Similarly, S. P. Somtow’s rich and antic Jasmine Nights (St. Martin’s) is ostensibly a mainstream novel, but this thinly disguised fictionalized memoir of a boy growing up in Thailand in the fifties is so full of surreal touches and descriptions of the bizarre societal tropes produced by the head-on collision of Western and Eastern cultures that it provides much the same kind of “Sense of Wonder” as does a fictional tour of an alien world, and so will doubtless appeal to many genre readers … perhaps even more to them than it will to the standard mainstream literary audience. Three other novels that exist somewhere on the ambiguous borderline between the mainstream and the fantastic were William Browning Spencer’s sly and quirky Zod Wallop (St. Martin’s) and Résumé with Monsters (Permanent Press), and Jack Cady’s eloquent The Off Season (St. Martin’s). Judith Tarr’s Pillar of Fire (Forge) is a historical novel by a well-known fantasy writer, and One King’s Way (Tor), by Harry Harrison and John Holm, is, strictly speaking, an Alternate History novel, but one which reads closely enough to the historical novel mode that it could easily be taken for one by someone whose knowledge of history was a bit shaky. Associational historical Western novels by well-known SF writers, published late last year, included Wilderness (Tor), by Roger Zelazny and Gerald Hausman, The Cannibal Owl (Bantam), by Chad Oliver, and Journal of the Gun Years (Jove), by Richard Matheson. Mystery novels by SF writers this year included Death by Degrees (St. Martin’s), by Robin Scott Wilson, and Death on the Mississippi (Berkley), by Peter J. Heck.
There were several reissues of classic novels this year, and considering how fast things go out of print these days, and how long they stay out of print (several of the following novels have been out of print for decades), I’d advise you to go out right now and buy copies of them while you have a chance: Cordwainer Smith’s only SF novel, Norstrilia (NESFA Press), not quite up to the standards of the best of his short fiction, but still containing much that is rich and numinous and strange, and unavailable for years; Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (Del Rey), one of the classic “hard science” novels; Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (Vintage), one of Dick’s best, strange even for him; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (HarperPrism), sociological SF at its best; Frederik Pohl’s The Years of the City (Baen), intriguing near-future speculation; Larry Niven’s Flatlander (Del Rey), an omnibus edition of two early Niven novels; Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel (both Tor), omnibus volumes bringing Wolfe’s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun back into print; Jack Vance’s Emphyrio (Charles F. Miller), one of Vance’s best, and so, almost by definition, one of the bes
t “alien world” adventures you can find; Jack Vance’s Alastor (Tor), an omnibus collection of three more classic Vance novels; Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn (Del Rey), one of the seminal fantasy novels; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Walker), simply one of the best SF novels ever written. Buy ’em while you can.
(Addresses follow for the small-press items that may be hard to find in bookstores: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $20.95 for Norstrilia; Permanent Press, Noyac Road, Sag Harbor, NY 11963, $22 for Résumé with Monsters; Charles F. Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601, $60 for Emphyrio.)
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It was a moderately strong year for short-story collections, with several excellent ones, several good ones, and a few retrospective collections that probably belong in every library.
The two strongest collections of the year were certainly Four Ways To Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (HarperPrism) and Axiomatic, by Greg Egan (Millennium), both landmark collections of the sort that come along only a few times a decade. Both are strong enough, in very different ways, that it’s difficult to choose between them. If forced to it, I guess I would give an edge to Four Ways To Forgiveness, since this is Le Guin writing at the very top of her form, better than she’s written in years—in fact, if you consider Four Ways To Forgiveness to be a novel rather than a collection (which it is possible to do, since the story lines of the four novellas here share some important characters, and subtly intertwine at several key points), then I’d have to say that Four Ways To Forgiveness may well be the strongest science fiction book (as opposed to fantasy or some of her more-difficult-to-classify work) that Le Guin has produced since The Dispossessed. Considered in that light, it would become one of the best novels of 1995 … but I think that it’s more useful, and more in line with the author’s intentions, to consider it as a short-story collection instead. Whatever you classify it as, though, you’re missing some of the best work of one of SF’s true giants if you don’t buy it.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 6