The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

  As more and more print markets die, emit distressed wobbling noises, or switch to online formats, electronic magazines and Web sites are becoming increasingly important, and that’s not going to change; if anything, it’s likely to become even more true as time goes by. Already, if you really want to keep up with all the good short fiction being “published” during a given year, you can’t afford to overlook the online markets.

  Of course, as we discussed here at length last year, the problem of how these online publications are going to make enough money to survive continues to be a vexing one, with several formulas being experimented with at the moment. Proving that electronic publication alone is not a guaranteed formula for success, several ezines died in 2007, and this year Aeon and Helix folded—Aeon, oddly, almost immediately after announcing that it was going to raise its rate of payment to professional levels. Both markets produced a lot of good work in their time, and both will be greatly missed. (In their last year, Helix published good work by Charlie Anders, Samantha Henderson, James Killus, George S. Walker, Annie Leckie, and others, and Aeon published good work by Jay Lake, Bruce McAllister, Lavie Tidhar, and others.)

  Now that the late lamented Sci Fiction has died, probably the most important ezine on the Internet, and certainly the one that features the highest proportion of core science fiction, is Jim Baen’s Universe (baensuniverse.com), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, which takes advantage of the freedom from length restrictions offered by the use of pixels instead of print by featuring in each issue an amazingly large selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, stories by beginning writers, classic reprints, serials, columns, and features, certainly more material than any of the print magazines could afford to offer in a single issue. The best SF story in Jim Baen’s Universe this year was Nancy Kress’s “First Rites,” but there were also good SF stories by Ben Bova, Jay Lake, Lou Antonelli, Bud Sparhawk, Marissa Lingen, David Brin, and others. The best fantasy stories here were by Tom Purdom and Pat Cadigan. There was a lot of good solid work in Jim Baen’s Universe this year, but somehow it didn’t seem like there was as much first-rate work as last year.

  A similar mix per issue of SF stories, fantasy stories, and features, including media and book reviews and a new story by Orson Scott Card, is featured in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself. There seems to be a greater emphasis on fantasy here than at Jim Baen’s Universe, and they do better with the fantasy, in terms of literary quality. The best story in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show this year, by a good margin, was Peter S. Beagle’s elegant Japanese fantasy “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,” but they also featured good fantasy stories by Dennis Danvers, Stephanie Fray, and others, and good SF stories by Ken Scholes, Aliette de Bodard, Sharon Shinn, and others.

  The new Tor Web site, Tor.com (tor.com), a blog/community meeting ground that features lots of commentary and archives of comics and art in addition to original fiction, has quickly established itself as another important Internet destination. The best stories published there this year were excellent works by Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Jay Lake, and Geoff Ryman, although there were also good stories by Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, and Brandon Sanderson.

  Two former print magazines that have completed a transformation to electronic-only formats, something I think we’ll inevitably see more of as time goes by, are Subterranean (subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, and Fantasy (darkfantasy.org), edited by Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo. Subterranean usually leans toward horror and “dark fantasy,” although they also run SF, and, in fact, the two best stories featured there this year, stories by Chris Roberson and by Mike Resnick, were both SF, as were other good stories by Beth Bernobich and Mary Robinette Kowal; fantasy was represented by Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, and others. Fantasy, as should be expected from the title, usually sticks to traditional genre fantasy and the occasional mild horror story, sometimes a bit of slipstream, almost never running anything that could be considered SF. The best stories here this year were by Holly Phillips and by Rachel Swirsky, although there were also good stories by Gord Seller, Peter M. Ball, Ari Goelman, and others.

  Strange Horizons (strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, features more slipstream and less SF than I’d like, but lots of good stuff continues to appear there nevertheless; best stories this year were by Meghan McCarren, Constance Cooper, and Alan Campbell, but there was also good work by A. M. Dellamonica, Bill Kte’pi, Deborah Coates, and others. The best stories this year in Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbell and Ilona Gordon, were by Cat Rambo, Mecurio D. Rivera, and Ruth Nestvold, but Abyss and Apex also featured good stuff by Alan Smale, Marissa Lingen, Vylar Kaftan, and others. Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), which features elegantly perverse fantasy, slipstream, and even the occasional SF story, was co-edited by Nick Mamatas until July, when Sean Wallace took over as co-editor. My favorite stories here this year were by Jay Lake and Jeff Ford; there were also good stories here by Tim Pratt, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Stephen Dedmen, Eric M. Witchey, Don Webb, and others. Ironically, for an online magazine that has no real physical existence, the covers are quite striking, some of the best I’ve seen in a while. I particularly like the cover for Issue 19.

  The Australian science magazine Cosmos publishes an SF story monthly, but they also frequently feature stories available as unique content on the Cosmos Web site (cosmosmagazine.com), all selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick; good stuff appeared in Cosmos this year, both online and in print, by Brendan DuBois, Steven Utley, Vylar Kaftan, Christopher East, and others. A similar mix of science fact articles and fiction is available from the ezine Futurismic (futurismic.com) and from new publication Escape Velocity (escapevelocitymagazine.com), issues of which can be downloaded to your computer.

  Apex Digest is another former print magazine that has shifted completely to electronic online-only format and can now be found as Apex Online (apexbookcompany.com/apex-online), still being edited by Jason Sizemore; good SF work by Steven Francis Murphy, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lavie Tidhar, and others appeared there, and they publish fantasy and critical articles as well.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies (beneath-ceaseless-skies) is a new ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy” that to date has published good work by David D. Levine, Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay, and others.

  Shadow Unit (shadowunit.org) is a Web site devoted to publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, which in spite of the unlikeliness of the premise has attracted some top talent such as Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and others.

  Book View Café (bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors, including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zittel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a new Web site where work by them is made available for free—mostly reprints for the moment, although new work is promised, and the site also contains novel excerpts.

  Flurb (flurb.net), edited by Rudy Rucker, publishes as much strange Really Weird stuff as it does SF, but there were good stories there this year by Bruce Sterling, Michael Blumlein, Lavie Tidhar, Terry Bisson, and others.

  Below Flurb, science fiction and even genre fantasy become harder to find, although there are a number of ezines that publish slipstream/postmodern stories, often ones of good literary quality (and even the occasional SF story). They include: Revolution SF (revolutionsf.com), which also features book and media reviews; Coyote Wild (coyotewildmag.com); Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (ideomancer.com); Lone Star Stories (literary.erictmarin.com); Heliotrope (heliotropemag.com); Farrago’s Wainscot (farragoswainscot.com); and Sybil’s Garage (www.sensefive.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewild
ering Stories (bewilderingstories.com).

  Chiaroscura and New Ceres seem to have died; at least, I’m no longer able to get to them. Last year I reported that quirky little ezine Spacesuits and Six Guns (spacesuitsandsixguns.com) was dead, but reports of its death seem to have been exaggerated, since it’s still there.

  There’s also a Web site dedicated to YA fantasy and SF, Shiny (shinymag.blogspot.com).

  Many good reprint SF and fantasy stories can also be found on the Internet, perhaps in greater numbers than the original ones, usually accessible for free. The long-running British Infinity Plus (users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus) has ceased to be an active site, but their archive of quality reprint-stories is still accessible on the net, as is their archive of biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays. The Infinite Matrix (infinitematrix.net) is also no longer an active site, but their substantial archives of past material are still available to be accessed online. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free, Fantasy, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizon, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue.” A large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (baen.com/library). Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (promo.net/pc/).

  If you’re willing to pay a small fee for them, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. The best and the longest-established such site is Fictionwise (fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer, in addition to individual stories; you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, as well as a selection of novels in several different genres; and you can subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (electricstory.com); in addition to the downloadable stuff for sale here (both stories and novels), you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.

  But there are other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet besides searching for fiction to read. There are also 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. Locus Online (locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, is easily the most valuable genre-oriented general site on the entire Internet, an indispensable site 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 data base archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards—and which is also often the first place in the genre to reveal fast-breaking news. I usually end up accessing it several times a day. One of the other major general-interest sites, Science Fiction Weekly, underwent a significant upheaval at the beginning of 2009, merging with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a new site called Sci Fi Wire (scifi.com/sfw); the emphasis here is on media-oriented stuff, movie and TV reviews, as well as reviews of anime, games, and music, but they feature book reviews as well. SF Site (sfsite.com) features reviews of books, games, movies, TV shows, and magazines, plus a huge archive of past reviews, and Best SF (bestsf.net/), which boasts another great archive of reviews and which is one of the few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues. Pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online was inactive throughout 2008, and editor David Truesdale finally announced at the end of the year that, as many of us suspected, it was not going to return; a pity. But a new short-fiction review site, The Fix (thefix-online.com), launched by a former Tangent Online staffer, is still going strong, and short-fiction reviews can also be accessed on The Internet Review of Science Fiction (irosf.com), which also features novel reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, and critical articles. Other good general-interest sites include SFRevu (sfsite.com/sfrevu), where you’ll find lots of novel and media reviews, as well as interviews and general news; SFF NET (sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), another valuable review site; The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), media and book reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (sffworld.com), more literary and media reviews; SFReader (sfreader.com), which features reviews of SF books; SFWatcher (sfwatcher.com), which features reviews of SF movies; SFCrowsnest (sfcrowsnest.com); newcomer SFScope (sfscope.com), edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock, which concentrates on SF and writing business news; Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com), io9 (io9.com); and SciFiPedia (scifipedia.scifi.com), a wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia. One of the most entertaining SF sites on the Internet is Ansible (dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Lang-ford’s long-running fanzine Ansible. SF-oriented radio plays and podcasts can also be accessed at Audible (audible.com), Escape Pod (escapepod.org), Star Ship Sofa (starshipsofa.com), and Pod Castle (podcastle.org). Long-running writing-advice and market news site Speculations has died.

  This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe in the seventies. All of the new annual original series launched last year—Lou Anders’s Fast Forward, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction—produced second volumes stronger than the initial volumes had been, a good sign. Even 2008’s second-tier anthologies—there were a lot of anthologies published this year—were often good enough to have been in contention for the title of year’s best anthology in other years.

  It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing—none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet and, in fact, a few are rumored to not be selling so well. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies at hand to choose from.

  The best of them was probably Eclipse Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan, although there was only a whisker’s thickness of difference between it and Fast Forward 2 (Pyr), edited by Lou Anders. A half step below them was The Starry Rift (Viking), edited by Jonathan Strahan; Sideways in Time (Solaris), edited by Lou Anders; The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume 2 (Solaris), edited by George Mann; and Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction (Eos), edited by Jack Dann, all of them strong enough to have carried off the prize in a weaker year. Postscripts 15, edited by Nick Gevers, a double-issue of the magazine that functioned essentially as an anthology, ought to be in the hunt here somewhere too.

  Below these were a number of still-substantial anthologies such as The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Del Rey), edited by Ellen Datlow; Extraordinary Engines (Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers; Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (Norilana), edited by Mike Allen; Seeds of Change (Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams; and Subterfuge (Newcon) and Celebrations (Newcon), both edited by Ian Whates—with yet more anthologies a couple of steps below them

  Several reviewers, including
me, criticized Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse last year for not having enough real science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can be leveled at his Eclipse Two. There are still a couple of fantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, but the bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ core science fiction. My favorite stories are by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroeder, Ted Chiang, and Daryl Gregory. Also good were stories by David Moles, Tony Daniel, Terry Dowling, Paul Cornell, and others. The best of the fantasy stories here are by Peter S. Beagle, Richard Parks, and Margo Lanagan.