The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Once again, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was almost exactly the reverse of Asimov’s, with the fantasy published there being stronger than the science fiction (with the exception of a strong SF novella by Carter Scholz), but they still published good work by Carter Scholz, Rachel Pollack, James Sarafin, Albert Cowdrey, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, David Gerrold, Tamsyn Muir, and others. F&SF registered a 17.1 percent drop in overall circulation from 11,910 to 9,877, although as digital sales figures are not available for F&SF, there’s no way to be certain what the actual circulation number is. Subscriptions dropped from 8,994 to 7,576; of that total, 2,301 copies were sold on the newsstand, with no information on how many digital sales there were. Sell through dropped from 28 percent to 23 percent. After eighteen years as editor, Gordon Van Gelder stepped down as editor with the March/April 2015 issue, being replaced by new editor Charles Coleman Finlay. Van Gelder remains as the magazine’s owner and publisher, as he has was in 2014.

  Interzone is technically not a “professional magazine,” by the definition of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), because of its low rates and circulation, but the literary quality of the work published there is so high that it would be ludicrous to omit it. Interzone was also a bit weaker this year than last year, but still published good work by Rich Larson, Malcolm Devlin, John Shirley, Chris Butler, Alastair Reynolds, T. R. Napper, and others. Exact circulation figures not available, but is guessed to be in the 2,000-copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but of a similar level of professional quality. Interzone and Black Static changed to a smaller trim size in 2011, but maintained their slick look, switching from the old 7 ¾"-by-10 ¾" saddle-stitched, semigloss color cover and sixty-four-page format to a 6 ½"-by-9 ¼" perfect-bound, glossy color cover and ninety-six-page format. The editor and publisher is Andy Cox.

  If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, something that these days can be done with just the click of a few buttons; nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Amazon (www.amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible.

  So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do. There’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions. Its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the US, $44.97 overseas. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the US, $44.97 overseas. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030—annual subscription $34.97 in the US, $44.97 overseas. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK—42.00 Pounds Sterling each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of 78.00 Pounds Sterling for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.”

  Most of these magazines are also available in various electronic formats through the Kindle, Nook, and other handheld readers.

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  The print semiprozine market continues to shrink; with many of the former print semiprozines either dying or making the jump to electronic format, and more likely to jump to electronic format in the future. It’s also getting a bit problematic to say which are print semiprozines and which are e-zines, since some markets are offering both print versions and electronic versions of their issues at the same time. Most of the fiction published in the surviving print semiprozines this year was relatively minor, with better work appearing in the online magazines (following).

  The Canadian On Spec, the longest-running of all the print fiction semiprozines, which is edited by a collective under general editor, Diane L. Walton, brought out three out of four published issues; in 2014, they were reported to be thinking of switching to a digital online format, and I suspect that that still might happen. Another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, managed only one issue this year. There were two issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Space and Time Magazine managed three issues, and Neo-opsis managed one. If there was an issue of Ireland’s long-running Albedo One, I didn’t see it, or any issues of the small British SF magazine Jupiter this year, or of Flytrap. Tales of the Talisman produced three issues and then went on “permanent hiatus.” Long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis has transitioned to a downloadable format.

  There isn’t a whole lot left of the popular print critical magazine market. The New York Review of Science Fiction departed to the electronic world in mid-2012, and with the tragic death of founder and editor David G. Hartwell (see obituary section), its continued existence in any format may be up in the air. For general-interest magazines about SF and fantasy, that leaves the venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensible source of news, information, and reviews, now in its forty-ninth year of publication, as almost the only survivor in this category, operating under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Jonathan Strahan, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, and many others.

  One of the few other remaining popular critical print magazines is newcomer The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Nisi Shawl, and Kath Wilham, a new feminist print magazine of reviews and critical essays, which published four issues in 2015. The most accessible of the other surviving print critical magazines—most of which are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader—is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation.

  Subscription addresses are: Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $76.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in the USA; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to Web site www.onspec.ca; Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $25.00 for a three-issue subscription; Albedo One, Albedo One Productions, 2, Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland, $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One” or pay by PayPal at www.albedo1.com; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, see Web site www.andromedaspaceways.com for subscription information; The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, subscription and single issues online at www.thecsz.com, $16 annually for a print subscription, print single issues $5, electronic subscription—PDF format—$10 per year, electronic single issue, $3, to order by check, make them payable t
o Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145–2787.

  The world of online-only electronic magazines now rivals—and occasionally surpasses—the traditional print market as a place to find good new fiction.

  The electronic magazine Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, had another good year, publishing strong work by Martin L. Shoemaker, Rich Larson, Kelly Robson, Naomi Kritzer, Sara Saab, Emily Devenport, and others. They also host monthly podcasts of stories drawn from each issue. Clarkesworld has won three Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine. In 2014, Clarkesworld co-editor Sean Wallace, along with Jack Fisher, launched a new online horror magazine, The Dark Magazine (thedarkmagazine.com). Neil Clarke has also launched a monthly reprint e-zine, Forever (forever-magazine.com).

  Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, featured strong work by Chaz Brenchley, Matthew Hughes, Carrie Vaughn, Seanan McGuire, Amal El-Mohtar, Cat Sparks, Caroline M. Yoachim, and others. Lightspeed won back to back Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine in 2014 and 2015. Late in 2013, a new electronic companion horror magazine, Nightmare (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by John Joseph Adams, was added to the Lightspeed stable.

  Tor.com (www.tor.com), edited by Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published some first-class work by Michael Swanwick, David Herter, Veronica Schanoes, Priya Sharma, Kelly Robson, Carrie Vaughn, and others. Not a lot of strong science fiction here this year, somewhat disappointingly, but lots of good fantasy and soft horror.

  Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the Internet, started in 2000, has Niall Harrison as editor-in-chief, with former longtime editor Susan Marie Groppi and Brian Peters now serving as associate editors, and An Owomoyela and Catherine Krahe as senior fiction editors. This year, they had strong work by Kelly Link, Amal El-Mohtar, David Bowles, Marissa Lingen, Margaret Ronald, Paul Evanby, and others.

  Apex Magazine (www.apex-magazine.com) had good work by Naomi Kritzer, Rich Larson, Sunny Moraine, Sarah Pinsker, Andy Dudak, Mari Ness, Thoraiya Dryer, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, replacing Sigrid Ellis, who took over from Lynne M. Thomas.

  Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by Ruth Nestvold, George S. Walker, Kate MacLeod, James Victor, Alec Austin and Marissa Lingen, and others. Wendy S. Delmater, the former longtime editor, has returned to the helm, replacing Carmelo Rafala.

  An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, ran good stuff by Richard Parks, Yoon Ha Lee, Stephen Case, Bruce McAllister, Marissa Lingen, Erin Cashier, Ian McHugh, Rich Larson, Karalynn Lee, and others.

  Long-running sword and sorcery print magazine Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill, transitioned into an electronic magazine in September of 2012 and can be found at www.blackgate.com. They no longer regularly run new fiction, although they will be regularly refreshing their nonfiction content, essays, and reviews, and the occasional story will continue to appear.

  Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, reached its twenty-fourth month of publication, and its seventeenth bimonthly issue, and is still going strong; it’s available in various downloadable formats, although a print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue. The frequent reprint stories here—by writers like Maureen McHugh, Pat Cadigan, Robert Silverberg, Jack McDevitt, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Gregory Benford—were still stronger than the original stories, but the magazine did publish interesting work this year by Tom Gerencer, Sean Williams, Sandra M. Odell, Larry Niven, and others, including a previously unpublished story by Robert A. Heinlein.

  The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos (www.cosmosmagazine.com) is not an SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their Web site). Good stuff by Thoraiya Dyer, Rjurik Davidson, Lee Battersby, Dave Luckett, and others appeared there this year. The fiction editor is SF writer Cat Sparks.

  Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF, by Arkady Martine, Michael J. DeLuca, Maya Surya Pillay, and others.

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, ran interesting stuff from Alethea Kontis, Erica L. Satifka, Rob Steiner, and Stephen Case, as well as by Card.

  SF/fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, many of these were not really up to professional standards, but there were some good stories here and there by Caroline M. Yoachim, Bud Sparhawk, Eric Brown, Sean Williams, Cat Rambo, J. Y. Yang, Holly Jennings, Mari Ness, Aria Bauer, and others. Editors there are Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

  GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), now edited by Rashida J. Smith, taking over from Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Patricia Russo, Maggie Clark, E. Catherine Tobler, Mark Pantoja, and others.

  An audacious newcomer is Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damien Thomas, which launched in late 2014, had a strong year in 2015 with good work by Elizabeth Bear, Hao Jingfang, Rose Lemberg, Sam J. Miller, Charlie Jane Anders, Yoon Ha Lee, Sam J. Miller, Mary Robinette Kowal, and others.

  Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, published interesting work by Michael Andre-Driussi, C.A.L, Jeste de Vries, Gemma Files, and others.

  The World SF Blog (worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, was a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also published news, links, round-table discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.” The site is no longer being updated, but an extensive archive is still accessible there.

  A similar site is International Speculative Fiction (http://internationalSF.wordpress.com), edited by Roberto Mendes.

  Weird Fiction Review (weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

  Ideomancer (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, doesn’t seem to have refreshed its content since volume 14, issue 1, which was put up on March 1, 2015. Similarly, Straeon (www.rampantloonmedia.com/straeon), edited by M. David Blake, Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform), edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant, and Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (www.newworlds.co.uk), edited by Roger Gray, haven’t refreshed content for a long time, and Child of Words (www.bigpulp.com), edited by Bill Olver, is running a notice saying that they have a new site under construction. Crossed Genres (www.crossedgenres.com), edited by Bart R. Leib, Kay T. Holt, and Kelly Jennings, is ceasing production. Other newcomers include Omenana Magazine of Africa’s Speculative Fiction (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu.

  Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, with most magazines featuring slipstream or literary surrealism instead. Such sites include Fireside Magazine (www.firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White; Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com); Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); and Interfictions Online (interfictions.com/), executive editor Delila Sherman, fiction editors Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron.

  But there’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy to be found on the Internet. Sites where you can access formerly published stories for free, including Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Apex, and mo
st of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites as well, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), and 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 (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus (www.infinityplus.co.uk) and The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) may no longer be active, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible (an extensive line of Infinity Plus Books can also be ordered from the Infinity Plus site).

  But beyond looking for SF stories to read, there are plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet. There are 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. The best such site is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, 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 database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. The previously mentioned Tor.com is also one of the most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that, in addition to its fiction, regularly publishes articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, book “rereads” and episode-by-episode “rewatches” of television shows, as well as commentary on all the above. The long-running and eclectic The New York Review of Science Fiction has ceased print publication, but can be purchased in PDF, e-pub and mobi formats, and POD editions through Weightless Press (http://weightlessbooks.com; see also www.nyrsf.com for information). Other major general-interest sites include io9 (www.io9.com), SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com), SF Site (www.sfsite.com)—although it’s no longer being regularly updated—SFRevu (http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (sfreader.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com). A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk). Another wonderful research site is the searchable online update of the Hugo-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sf-encyclopedia.com), where you can access almost four million words of information about SF writers, books, magazines, and genre themes. Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus and Locus Online, but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf.net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com). Other sites of interest include: Ansible (news.ansible.co.uk/Ansible), the online version of multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; SFF NET (www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Book View Café (www.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 Web site where their work—mostly reprints, and some novel excerpts—is made available for free.