The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
SUMMATION: 1987
Pat Murphy
RACHEL IN LOVE
Bruce McAllister
DREAM BABY
Bruce Sterling
FLOWERS OF EDO
Kate Wilhelm
FOREVER YOURS, ANNA
Alexander Jablokov
AT THE CROSS-TIME JAUNTERS’ BALL
Walter Jon Williams
DINOSAURS
Paul J. McAuley
THE TEMPORARY KING
Neal Barrett, Jr.
PERPETUITY BLUES
Ursula K. Le Guin
BUFFALO GALS, WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT
Robert Silverberg
THE PARDONER’S TALE
James Patrick Kelly
GLASS CLOUD
Octavia E. Butler
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING AND THE NIGHT
Howard Waldrop
NIGHT OF THE COOTERS
Pat Cadigan
ANGEL
Lucius Shepard
SHADES
Karen Joy Fowler
THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY
Joseph Manzione
CANDLE IN A COSMIC WIND
Ian Watson
THE EMIR’S CLOCK
Susan Palwick
EVER AFTER
Michael Flynn
THE FOREST OF TIME
Dean Whitlock
THE MILLION-DOLLAR WOUND
R. Garcia y Robertson
THE MOON OF POPPING TREES
Neal Barrett, Jr.
DINER
Gene Wolfe
ALL THE HUES OF HELL
Michael McDowell
HALLEY’S PASSING
Orson Scott Card
AMERICA
Michael Bishop
FOR THUS DO I REMEMBER CARTHAGE
Kim Stanley Robinson
MOTHER GODDESS OF THE WORLD
Honorable Mentions: 1987
Also by Gardner Dozois
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
For my mother
Dorothy Dozois
my sister
Gail Fennessey
and my nephews
Randy and Joey
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Virginia Kidd, Ellen Datlow, Sheila Williams, Tina Lee, Emy Eterno, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Janet and Ricky Kagan, Shawna McCarthy, Lou Aronica, Edward Ferman, Anne Jordan, Ed Bayane, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, Pat LoBrutto, Patrick Delahunt, Tappan King, David Harris, George Scithers, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Mark Van Name, and special thanks to my own editor, Stuart Moore.
Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, Inc. P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $32.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Algol Press, P.O. Box 4175, New York, NY 10163-4157, $23.40 for 1 year, 12 issues) was also used as a reference source throughout.
INTRODUCTION
Summation: 1987
Science Fiction had a good year commercially in 1987, although if you look beyond the best-seller lists, some disturbing trends were in evidence. From the standpoint of sales and book production, 1987 was a record year for the genre. According to the newsmagazine Locus, 177 publishers produced SF or fantasy in 1987, turning out a total of 1,675 books, up 12 percent from 1986. An astonishing 650 of those titles were new science fiction or fantasy novels. SF and fantasy books continued to make their presence strongly felt on nationwide best-seller lists, with writers such as Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen King, Stephen Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and others, staying on those lists throughout much of the year. New book lines also continued to appear in 1987. Doubleday, in conjunction with Bantam, has started an upscale new hardcover line called Foundation, edited by Pat LoBrutto. Baen Books started a new fantasy line, Sign of the Dragon, edited by Betsy Mitchell, and will publish two books a month under this imprint. The Ace Fantasy Specials published their first few titles to good response. And Crown Books, in partnership with the huge bookstore chain Waldenbooks, is planning a mass-market line with twelve titles per month, including SF, fantasy, horror, mystery, and romance. (This last news has caused a ripple of disquiet, however, among publishers, who are not particularly happy that one of the nation’s largest book-buying chains is becoming a direct competitor. It remains to be seen exactly how the arrangement will work out.)
There were a few disturbing portents in 1987, though. Perhaps the most ominous of these was the dramatic upsurge of novels by newer writers set in fictional worlds created by famous SF writers, or novels using thematic material created by established writers. This practice of hiring lesser-known authors to create new adventures set “in the world of” some famous SF novel (for instance, a novel set in the world of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or in the world of Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle) has been referred to as “sharecropping” and strikes me as a very dangerous trend. Many publishers would love to publish only surefire “brand name” bestsellers and eliminate all uncertainty from the process, and since the “brand names” themselves cannot possibly produce enough material to fulfill this dream, why not hire other people to do it for them? For years now, corporate publishing and corporate marketing specialists have been applying homogenizing pressures to the field, hoping to squash the wild diversity of SF into a rigidly standardized, and therefore easily manageable, “product,” one for which profit is simple to predict; this latest trend is perhaps the most blatant and cynical attempt of all. The recent influx of “sharecropper” novels joins a flood of similar items—choose-your-own-adventure books, “Robotech” books, Star Trek novels, shared-world anthologies, “Dungeons and Dragons” scenarios, “Thieves World” novels, and so on. It is possible to argue that none of these items are pernicious in themselves, perhaps not even the “sharecropper” books. Taken together, however, as part of a rapidly growing publishing trend (Locus reports that there were seventy-four such books this year, up from twenty-two last year, and there will almost certainly be more next year), you begin to wonder how many individually created books of merit by young writers they are keeping out of print by filling an ever-increasing number of slots in publishers’ schedules, and by eating up precious rack-display space in bookstores. In the case of the “sharecroppers,” I also feel, perhaps naively, that young writers ought to be busy developing their own worlds and working out their own ideas and fresh material, rather than reworking ground already broken by older and more successful writers. Taken to an extreme, it is possible to envision a future where young writers can get into print only by hiring themselves out to produce work under one of a dozen or so highly marketable “brand names.” Not only would creativity be stifled (which would probably spell the eventual doom of the genre), but it would become much more difficult for younger writers to get out of the midlist category, where advances are much lower than
they need to be for more upwardly mobile authors. A paranoid fantasy? Perhaps. I certainly hope so.
And yet, few observers have noticed that it is already becoming a good deal harder to get out of midlist than it was only a few years ago. Almost every major publisher in SF now has a hardcover-softcover capability, for instance, and insists on buying hard and soft rights simultaneously for many books. Thus, if you have an unaffiliated hardcover, a hardcover for which softcover rights have not already been sold, you are going to find it much more difficult to sell those rights to somebody now than it was a few years back. This also tends to discourage paperback-rights auctions for all but a few of the hottest writers: during the last decade or so, the paperback auction is where most of the really serious money has been made. This will tend to keep advances for novels a lot lower on the whole—thereby making it more difficult to get out of midlist and into the territory where the publishers suddenly start spending a lot more money to promote your book. When publishers have higher expectations for a book and a higher investment to protect (because they had to spend more to get it in the first place), more money goes toward promotion.
In spite of all this—and the constant worry, not helped by the Stock Market crash, that there is another major recession for the publishing industry waiting just down the road—I remain cautiously optimistic about the health of the genre. This (cautious) optimism is fueled by the fact that there is more good science fiction and fantasy being produced by more good writers today than at any other time in the history of the genre—work of all sorts right across the aesthetic spectrum, from High Fantasy to the hardest of hard SF. And this work is being produced by a multigenerational cross-section of writers that extends from Golden Age giants of the 1940s to the kids making their first sales in 1987. Isn’t there a lot of shit being published? Sure there is—there always is—but there is also a lot of worthwhile work being produced by many writers. And I don’t think that anything short of the death of the publishing industry as we know it is going to be sufficient to keep them all out of print.
But only time will tell.
* * *
It was a year of mixed success in the SF magazine market. On the downhill side, the digest-sized horror magazine Night Cry was killed just as it looked—to me, anyway—as though they might have a shot at establishing a steady audience. Another large-format glossy SF magazine was announced and heavily publicized throughout 1987, SF: New Science Fiction Stories … but, like Imago and L. Ron Hubbard’s to the Stars Science Fiction Magazine before it, it died stillborn. There is definitely a niche for a slick, large-format SF/fantasy magazine, in my opinion, and someday a shrewd someone is going to come along with adequate capital and the proper vision and do it right—and quite likely stand the SF magazine world on its ear. It didn’t happen in 1987, though, and it probably will not happen in 1988, either. But someday, it will: mark my words. The recently resurrected Worlds of If also seems to have vanished from mortal ken, and must be presumed dead.
There was an uphill side, although perhaps not a tremendously steep one. The Twilight Zone Magazine has improved markedly under its new editor Tappan King, and Amazing is showing new signs of vigor under its new editor Patrick L. Price. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction recently underwent a complete internal redesign, the first for the magazine in decades. Interzone survived and prospered (modestly) for yet another year. The folks at Aboriginal SF were smart enough to get rid of their odd tabloid format, which many industry observers had seen as the kiss of death for the magazine, and Aboriginal SF survived to produce five issues in 1988. Although insiders were giving odds against the magazine last year, its chances of survival at this point actually look pretty good. And two new magazines will be entering the ring in 1988: a resurrected Weird Tales, edited by veteran George H. Scithers, and a new semiprozine called Argos Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Ross Emry.
As most of you probably know, I, Gardner Dozois, am also editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And that, as I have mentioned before, poses a problem for me in compiling this summation, particularly the magazine-by-magazine review that follows. As IAsfm editor, I could be said to have a vested interest in the magazine’s success, so that anything negative I said about another SF magazine (particularly another digest-sized magazine, my direct competition), could be perceived as an attempt to make my own magazine look good. Aware of this constraint, I have decided that nobody can complain if I say only positive things about the competition … and so, once again, I have limited myself to a listing of some of the worthwhile authors published by each.
Omni published first-rate fiction this year by Howard Waldrop, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, George R. R. Martin, Neal Barrett, Jr., Bruce McAllister, and others. Omni’s fiction editor is Ellen Datlow.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction featured excellent fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Dean Whitlock, Robert Charles Wilson, Paul J. McAuley, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Jonathan Carroll, Keith Roberts, Avram Davidson, and others. F & SF’s long-time editor is Edward Ferman.
Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine featured critically acclaimed work by Pat Murphy, Walter Jon Williams, James Patrick Kelly, Karen Joy Fowler, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, Bruce Sterling, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Neal Barrett, Jr., and others. IAsfm’s editor is Gardner Dozois.
Analog featured good work by Michael Flynn, Harry Turtledove, Charles Sheffield, Eric Vinicoff, Joseph Manzione, Poul Anderson, D. C. Poyer, Jerry Oltion, and others. Analog’s long-time editor is Stanley Schmidt.
Amazing featured good work by R. Garcia y Robertson, Paul Di Fillipo, Susan Casper, Phillip C. Jennings, Susan Palwick, Robert Frazier, Justin Leiber, and others. Amazing’s editor is Patrick L. Price.
The Twilight Zone Magazine featured good work by Kim Antieau, Pat Murphy, Pat Cadigan, Susan Casper, Michael McDowell, Jane Yolen, Lucius Shepard, Peni Griffin, and others. TZ’s editor is Tappan King.
Interzone featured good work by Gregory Benford, Ian Watson, Brian Stable-ford, Geoff Ryman, Richard Kadrey, Michael Swanwick, Ken Wisman, and others. Interzone’s editors are Simon Ounsley and David Pringle.
Short SF continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries, including off-trail markets such as High Times. Playboy in particular continues to run a good deal of SF, under fiction editor Alice K. Turner.
(Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, CT, 06753, annual subscription $19.50 for twelve issues; Amazing, TSR, Inc., P. O. Box 72069, Chicago, IL, 60690, annual subscription $9.00 for six issues; Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Davis Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 1933, Marion, OH 43305, $19.50 for thirteen issues; Interzone, 124 Osborne Road, Brighton, BN1 6LU, England, airmail one-year subscription $13.00 for four issues.)
The semiprozine scene was changing in 1987, with old magazines dying, and new ones either being born or struggling to establish themselves. Among the fiction semiprozines, Fantasy Book and Alphelion have died: Whispers and Fantasy Tales each produced only one issue this year (with the Whispers issue particularly recommended); Aboriginal SF and New Pathways were looking fairly healthy; and two new magazines, as we mentioned before, are waiting in the wings—Weird Tales and Argos F&SF. (Aboriginal SF is still technically a semiprozine, because of its low circulation and its lack of newsstand distribution, but it is being taken seriously as a professional market within the field, and with luck, it will not stay in this category for long. Similarly, Weird Tales is technically a semiprozine, but with an experienced editor like Scithers at the helm, this too may change if the magazine can keep its head above water long enough.) There were also a slew of new horror semiprozines, the most visible of which were probably The Horror Show and Grue Magazine. As ever, Locus and SF Chronicle remain your best bet among the semiprozines if you are looking for an ove
rview of the genre. Among the semiprozines that concentrate primarily on literary criticism, the death of Fantasy Review this year leaves Thrust unchallenged as the best-known and longest-surviving of the criticalzines. Two recent and promising contenders in the criticalzine field are Orson Scott Card’s Short Form and Steve Brown and Dan Steffan’s Science Fiction Eye, although both magazines had a lot of trouble sticking to their announced publishing schedules this year (the second issue of Short Form appeared over eight months late). Perhaps these potentially valuable magazines will work the bugs out and become more reliable in 1988.
(Locus, Locus Publications, Inc., P. O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, one-year first-class subscription $32.00 for 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, Algol Press, P. O. Box 4175, New York, NY 10163–4157, one-year subscription $23.40 for twelve issues; Thrust, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, $8.00 for four issues; Science Fiction Eye, Box 3105, Washington, DC 20010–0105, $7.00 for one year; Short Form, 546 Lindley Road, Greensboro, NC 27410; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P. O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888–0849, $12.00 for six issues, $22.00 for twelve issues; Weird Tales, Box 13418, Philadelphia, PA 19101–3418, $18.00 for six issues [eighteen months]; New Pathways, MGA Services, P. O. Box 863994, Plano, TX 75086–3994, one-year subscription $15.00 for six issues, $25.00 for a two-year subscription; Argos Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, Penrhyn Publishing Company, Box 2109, Renton, WA 98056, one-year subscription $8.00 for four issues; Whispers, 70 Highland Ave., Binghamton, NY 13905, $13.95 for two double issues; Fantasy Tales, Stephen Jones, 130 Parkview, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 6JU, England, Great Britain, $11.00 for three issues; The Horror Show, Phantasm Press, 1488 Misty Springs Lane, Oak Run, CA 96069, $14.00 per year; Grue Magazine, Hells Kitchen productions, Box 370, Times Square Sta., New York, NY 10108, $11.00 for three issues.)
* * *
Overall, 1987 was a pretty good year for original anthologies. The best original anthology of the year, and one of the best in a number of years, was undoubtedly In The Field of Fire (Tor), edited by Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann. This anthology, the first ever of SF stories about the war in Vietnam, was recognized immediately as a landmark anthology. The New York Times Book Review went so far as to call it “a significant contribution to the literature of the 1980s.” There are no really bad stories here, but the best, which are among the year’s best, include stories by Bruce McAllister, Lucius Shepard, Susan Casper, Dave Smeds, and a very affecting poem by Joe Haldeman. The book also contains good stories by John Kessel, Richard Paul Russo, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Frazier, Charles L. Grant, and others, as well as classic reprints by Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, and others. Another good anthology, and an excellent value for your money, is The Universe (Bantam Spectra), edited by Byron Preiss (fiction editor, David Harris). The fiction here is uneven, although there is some very good stuff by Michael Bishop, Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, Robert Silverberg, Rudy Rucker, and others. The anthology also contains a wide array of interesting nonfiction articles, featuring a lot of fascinating upto-the-minute cosmological speculation and some good color artwork by SF and astronomical artists. Great Britain also produced two good original anthologies this year: Other Edens (Unwin), edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, and Tales from the Forbidden Planet (Titan), edited by Roz Kaveny. Other Edens featured good work by Ian Watson, M. John Harrison, Garry Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and others. Tales from the Forbidden Planet featured good work by Keith Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Iain Banks, Tanith Lee, and others. Also interesting was Mathenauts (Arbor House), edited by Rudy Rucker, a mixed reprint-and-original anthology of SF stories about mathematics, especially notable for bringing back into print two neglected classics by Norman Kagan.