by Unknown
THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION
OF THE YEAR
Also Edited by Neil Clarke
Magazines
Clarkesworid Magazine—clarkesworldmagazine.com
Forever Magazine—forever-magazine.com
Anthologies
Upgraded
The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1
Galactic Empires (forthcoming 2016)
Modified (forthcoming 2017)
The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (forthcoming 2017)
(with Sean Wallace)
Clarkesworld: Year Three
Clarkesworld: Year Four
Clarkesworld: Year Five
Clarkesworld: Year Six
Clarkesworld: Year Seven
Clarkesworld: Year Eight
The Best of Clarkesworld (forthcoming 2017)
THE BEST
SCIENCE
FICTION
OF THE YEAR
VOLUME 1
Edited by Neil Clarke
Night Shade Books
AN IMPRINT OF START PUBLISHING
Copyright © 2016 by Neil Clarke
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.nightshade.start-publishing.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-854-5
Cover illustration by Eddie Del Rio
Cover design by Jason Snair
Please see page 601 for an extension of this copyright page.
Printed in the United States of America
eISBN: 978-1-59780-588-9
Table of Contents
Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2015
Today I Am Paul—Martin L. Shoemaker
Calved—Sam J. Miller
Three Bodies at Mitanni—Seth Dickinson
The Smog Society—Chen Qiufan
In Blue Lily’s Wake—Aliette de Bodard
Hello, Hello—Seanan McGuire
Folding Beijing—Hao Jingfang
Capitalism in the 22nd Century—Geoff Ryman
Hold-Time Violations—John Chu
Wild Honey—Paul McAuley
So Much Cooking—Naomi Kritzer
Bannerless—Carrie Vaughn
Another Word for World—Ann Leckie
The Cold Inequalities—Yoon Ha Lee
Iron Pegasus—Brenda Cooper
The Audience—Sean McMullen
Empty—Robert Reed
Gypsy—Carter Scholz
Violation of the TrueNet Security Act—Taiyo Fujii
Damage—David D. Levine
The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss—David Brin
No Placeholder for You, My Love—Nick Wolven
Outsider—An Owomoyela
The Gods Have Not Died in Vain—Ken Liu
Cocoons—Nancy Kress
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World — Caroline M. Yoachim
Two-Year Man—Kelly Robson
Cat Pictures Please—Naomi Kritzer
Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan — Ian McDonald
Meshed—Rich Larson
A Murmuration—Alastair Reynolds
2015 Recommended Reading List
INTRODUCTION:
A State of the Short SF Field in 2015
Neil Clarke
Ten years ago, people were proclaiming the death of short fiction in our field and they had good reason to be worried: the leading genre magazines had spent the decade losing nearly half their subscribers; the only widely respected online magazine of its time, SciFiction, had just been shuttered by its owners, the SciFi Channel. It was in that climate that I decided to launch a new online magazine, Clarkesworld. I was told upfront that I was crazy and several professional authors flat-out proclaimed that online magazines were the domain of pirates and unskilled newbies.The one thing I can say for sure is that online publishing was still very much like the Wild West. New magazines came and went at a furious pace and everyone had their own unique business model that was sure to tame the Internet. It really was a chaotic, frustrating, and an exciting time to enter the field!
Over the next three years the attitude towards online fiction changed significantly. It was becoming harder to argue that online venues weren’t producing quality work with increasing frequency. Stories from those markets were being recognized by most of the major awards in our field or being picked up the annual year’s best anthologies. Then, in 2007, Amazon released the Kindle just in time for Christmas and changed the state of short fiction forever.
Digital subscriptions and ebook sales were finally the financial boost the field needed to turn things around. The trend of declining print subscriptions was slowly but surely offset and turned around by digital growth. The online magazines finally had a more reliable way to generate revenue and grow. Alternatives to Amazon also sprang into being at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google, Kobo, and Weightless Books, the latter being a boon to independent authors and many small press magazines and anthologies.
Just a few years earlier, there was a sharp line between print and online magazines. Now it was a blurred mess of old perceptions and new market realities. While overall readership has tilted towards those that offer an online edition, there are still only three magazines that have full-time employees and they are all veterans of the print era: Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. Yet there was more to come.
Enter the next disruption: crowdfunding. While online, digital, and short-run publishing lowered the bar to entry, launching an original anthology or magazine can easily cost over ten thousand dollars, if not more. That financial hurdle represents a considerable deterrent that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, and others can sometimes eliminate.
Now, you can pre-test the market’s interest by launching a campaign that allows people to make financial pledges towards it. Many use it like pre-ordering a book, committing an amount they would expect to pay for the finished product, but others treat it more like investing in a project, but one from which they’ll never see financial rewards. In those cases, it’s more like a town investing in a park so that the kids will have somewhere to play. Many are willing to contribute simply because they believe the project should happen. The downside is that can sometimes that can create an illusion of demand for the product. That illusion appears to have more of a negative impact on recurring projects like magazines than it does on single volume projects like collections and anthologies.
While many of these magazines intended to be self-sufficient from subscriptions in their second, third, fourth, etc. years, it’s never quite as easy as they believe. Quite frequently, their subscription revenue falls far short of what is necessary to continue at the over-ambitious levels their supporters encouraged. This often leads to a “save XXXX” campaign or serial crowdfunding campaigns, the latter of which has many people worried about “Kickstarter fatigue”—a theory that this behavior will discourage people from supporting these kinds of projects in the future.
Crowdfunding can and has been an extremely positive force on our field, so let’s hope this pattern of poor planning doesn’t ruin it for the next generation of projects. However, there are other models of crowdfunding that may be more suited to these new ventures. Patreon, for example, combines some of the fe
atures of Kickstarter with a subscription-style model. Supporters pay-per creation or per-month, making it easier to assess the current state of their income and what they can realistically accomplish with those resources. It does mean starting smaller and growing into their goals, and that style of planning is something we need to see more of in this field.
That brings us to today, with a busy anthology market that has been doing some niche projects, but has been held back by the broken print distribution model that prevents many of them from reaching physical bookstores; and a magazine market that is growing faster than the number of new people willing to pay for it.
The anthology problem is complicated and not likely to be resolved anytime soon, unfortunately. Several of these projects are most likely too narrow in scope for national distribution, but there are others that would certainly benefit from it. Ebooks and print-on-demand (POD) publishing can provide greater access to readers, but they frequently miss having many more due to a lack of presence in physical stores. With my own books, I’ve observed a correlation between ebook sales and a physical presence in a bookstore. It’s almost as though the printed book is becoming a marketing component for digital sales. Some traditional and smaller nationally-distributed publishers have begun reissuing self-published, independent, or small press titles, but these still represent a very small blip in the market and are still too rare to indicate a change in business.
The magazine problem is a bit more complicated. As someone neck-deep in the magazine field, I’ve started worrying about two things: sustainability and quality.
Sustainability
Let’s pretend for a second that a town has enough coffee drinkers to sustain three coffee shops. A local resident has always wanted to run a coffee shop and the rent is cheap here, so he gives it a try. They develop a small, but passionate set of customers, but not enough to be profitable. The other shops see a slight dip in sales, but remain quite healthy. Six more people launch shops in the same town and suffer the same fate, but this is their dream, so they decide to stick it out until inevitably, they give up—only to be replaced by another—or start save-our-store campaigns. Their passionate customer bases are more than happy to drop ten times their normal coffee budget in a single visit to save the store, and this buys the store owner time. Unfortunately, they go right back to doing business as usual and soon enough, we’re right back where we started.
That’s what the magazine market is like right now. Either the market is over-saturated or it’s charging too little for its product. Those three magazines that have been supporting themselves have been around for decades and no one new has broken into their ranks for quite some time. It’s hard to say that any of them have suffered significant declines due to their new competition as they’ve actually picked up subscribers in the last five years. It appears that the struggle is predominantly between the magazines that have opened in the last ten to fifteen years.
At the top of that heap are a few publications that are covering their costs, but not paying their staff as much as would be appropriate for a professional publication. They’ve proven they understand their business and can be smart about it. While their growth is slow, I fully expect one or two to break that ceiling sometime in the next few years. Between now and then, however, I see some market adjustments brewing on the horizon. Even when you love what you do, eventually there reaches a point when even the most determined cry out “Enough!” and leave the field. Sometimes that even comes from the readers when they’ve been asked to save a publication one too many times.
Quality
If the number of quality stories isn’t growing as fast as the number of stories publishers need to fill all their slots, then quality must dip to fill the void. The software I developed to process story submissions at Clarkesworld has provided me with the opportunity to collect a lot of data. In the last three years I’ve logged submissions from over fifteen thousand authors. In 2015, we received an average of one thousand stories each month. Each of those was competing for one of the five slots we have for original fiction in each issue. While the volume will vary for other anthologies and magazines, the rejection rate for short stories is consistently high.
For this book, I had to read everything published by other editors, each undertaking the same process of filtering from a much larger pile. These were the stories they considered the best in their pool. If Sturgeon’s Law (“ninety percent of everything is crap”) holds, their efforts saved me a lot of time and energy. It would be easily to believe that with that level of culling happening, that quality shouldn’t be an issue. Sadly, I’d have to rate this year as a B-. While there were several A and a few A+ stories, I was rarely worried about reprinting too many stories from single market. It certainly felt like an off year for many of those I’d read previously. Whether that was a fluke or the result of market oversaturation is yet to be seen.
From where I sit, though, if things continue on their current trajectories, I believe we’re in for a market contraction. The market can certainly sustain the loss of a few markets. It might even be better for the health of the entire ecosystem, but if you want to help the magazines you love avoid that fate, here’s a few suggestions:
Subscribe to or support any magazine that you’d be willing to bail out if they were to run aground. Just-in-time funding is not a sane or sustainable business model. If you want them to succeed, then be there before they need you.
If the magazine doesn’t offer subscriptions or have something like a Patreon page through which you can support them financially, encourage them to do so.
Don’t support new (or revival) projects until they clearly outline reasonable goals to sustain the publication after their initial funding runs out.
Introduce new readers to your favorite stories and magazines. This is particularly easy with so many online magazines being freely available at the moment. We need more short fiction readers if all this is to remain sustainable.
While I might be a little concerned about 2016, we’re far from anything like the Chicken Little fears proclaimed a decade ago. The overall health of the field is better than it has been in a long time. We might be in for some rocky periods at some markets, but overall, I think everything will work itself out. And even despite all my griping about 2015, I’m quite happy with the stories I ended up selecting for this inaugural volume. To end things on a higher note, though, I thought I’d start the tradition of highlighting some of the best of 2015. I’m not sure I’ll stick with these categories, but to start I’d like to address my picks for best magazine, best anthology, and best new writer.
Magazine
My pick for the best magazine of 2015 is a genre veteran that I’ve been reading for decades. As I read for this volume, they became my rock. I could always count on each issue to include a gem and the quality was always consistent throughout. Sheila Williams is an editor I look up to and this year, she led Asimov’s on a course that impressed me. You’ll find five stories from their pages in this book and many more in the recommended reading list. If only I’d had room to include more!
Anthology
By the middle of the year, I was convinced that picking the winner for this category would be a challenge. I found isolated stories here and there, but no single book was presenting itself as a must-read volume. December then swooped in and saved the day with a few worthy contenders. Leading that charge was Jonathan Strahan’s latest entry in his Infinity series, Meeting lnfinity. I’ve selected four stories from this anthology and happily recommend many more. Buy it. Read it. You’ll thank me later, as it was truly the best last year.
New Author
One of the greatest joys an editor experiences on the job is having the honor of publishing an author first before anyone else. It’s a rare pleasure and one that I experienced in February when “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson appeared in Clarkesworld. When she told me that two more of her stories would appear in Asimov’s and Tor.com, I was surprised�
��because it’s highly unusual for a new author to land three stories at highly-selective professional magazines—but also not surprised. She’s simply that good and the range and quality of her work tell me that this is an author to watch. You can read “Two-Year Man,” her Asimov’s story, in this book. Both her Clarkesworld story and her Tor.com fantasy novella, “Water of Versailles,” are available for free online. I, for one, would not be surprised to see her name on the Campbell Award for Best New Writer ballot, but if she isn’t, she still has yet another year of eligibility on the table.
In closing, growing up, I recall racing to the bookstore shelf to grab the latest in Terry Carr’s year’s best series by the same name. I never would have dreamed that I’d be doing this someday. So, thanks to Terry for planting a seed in my head. I hope he would have liked what it has become. To everyone at Night Shade Books, particularly Cory and Jeremy, thank you for making this book possible. Your faith in me will be remembered. And then there’s Sean Wallace and Kate Baker, who have my back at every turn. Your assistance and encouragement on this project is now noted and undeniable. Mom and Dad, all those books you bought me as a kid appear to have resulted in something. I have no bigger supporters than my wife Lisa and sons Aidan and Eamonn. Without them, I’d be lost and at times, while working this project, they probably thought I was.
Oh, and to that teenage kid that’s just picked up this book or ebook, someday, this could be yours, too.
Neil Clarke
January 20, 2016
Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.