The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  So far, the impact of all this merging has been smaller than feared, with Ace, Roc, DAW, Del Rey, and Bantam Spectra surviving, for the moment, as separate imprints; nor has the overall number of books released from Millennium gone down appreciably (it may even have gone up). Things went less quietly with the HarperCollins/Avon merger, though, with seventy-four people losing their jobs, and the disappearance of the HarperPrism line, which will be merged into Avon Eos to produce a new line (incorporating bought-but-not-yet-published HarperPrism titles) called Eos.

  The merger also touched off another round of Editorial Musical Chairs, after several quiet years, with Lou Aronica, John Silbersack, and John Douglas all leaving jobs at either Avon or Harper (a little later, fallout from the earlier Bertelsmann/Random House merger, Pat Lo Brutto left Bantam Spectra as well) – unlike earlier years, though the game may have run critically short of chairs, as, by press time, none of these very experienced publishing people had managed to find permanent employment elsewhere.

  Although all this was sufficient to cause many a sleepless night for many an editor, including me, the chances are that the ordinary reader didn’t even notice that there was anything going on, and wouldnt, even if things got much worse. After all the smoke had cleared, Avon Eos was left standing – as Eos – and, since it absorbed many of the upcoming HarperPrism titles, the overall number of titles published during the year remained about the same. There were even those who suggested that the efficiency and the profitability of the genre would improve because of these mergers, and certainly SF in recent years has been a field where a good deal of fat could be trimmed without coming anywhere near vital muscle tissue.

  So far, then, SF as a genre has come remarkably well through some choppy seas, with only the troubled magazine market really taking on any significant amounts of water. Big changes are ahead, though, as we steer into a new century, and although my guess is that the sum total of those changes will probably prove to be positive, I think there’s little doubt that ten years down the line, the publishing industry is going to look quite different than it does today – perhaps even radically, fundamentally different.

  One of the most valid of the negative criticisms levelled against today’s genre is that the big trade publishers, with a cautious eye on their bottom line and large amounts of money invested in each book, knowing that they have to appeal to mass audiences, are sometimes too timid in the kinds of books they’ll accept, making it difficult to impossible for authors with quirky, eccentric work, stuff that might appeal more to a niche audience than to a mass audience, to get their books into print in the first place. With the advent of print-on-demand systems, however, this is changing fast, and deals that would have been sneered at as vanity publishing ten years ago are beginning to look surprisingly attractive – if you can print your own book, or have it printed for you by a small press, have it listed on key Internet sites such as Amazon.com, and even get it into the higher-end chain bookstores, as some of the more prominent print-on-demand publishers are able to do, with no need to stockpile large numbers of printed books, and orders filled only as they come in (no wastage, no returns, no print-five-books-to-sell-one), then what do you really need a traditional trade publishing house for at all? One answer is, for the upfront money, the advance. But since you get the royalties from publishing your own book, with no need to split with the publisher, if your book really sells well, in high enough numbers, you may not miss the advance much, if at all. Of course, if it doesn’t sell well, you’ve basically published your book for nothing, no cash return whatsoever. So it’s a gamble. But then, publishing has always been a gamble anyway, even by the traditional methods. (Another answer to “Why do you need a trade house?” is, to provide publicity and promotion – but with most lines doing little or none of that these days, except for the lead titles they expect to make big money on, the Internet may soon give you a fighting chance of doing that job yourself as well or better, too.)

  Trade publishers will probably never entirely disappear, even in the most radical of scenarios. But they may well end up publishing mostly the high-end, high-stakes, high-expectation books by Big Authors, while everything below that level is published by an array of small-press publishers filling niche markets in a much more specialized (and efficient) way than has been possible up until now, so that nothing will be too quirky or offbeat or “marginal” to get a chance to seek its own audience . . . however small that audience may turn out to be. Nor do I think that this would necessarily be a bad thing. It’s probably harder (though not impossible) for an author to get rich in this scenario – but then, getting rich has always been an improbable outcome for the overwhelming majority of authors anyway.

  Nor is print-on-demand technology the only potential change just down the road that could radically alter the nature of the publishing world as we know it. The on-line booksellers, such as Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, are just starting to have a big effect on things, with quite probably a much bigger impact yet to come. The field of electronic books, e-books, is also in its infancy, but already books and even magazines are available to be downloaded into portable handheld computers such as Palm Pilots, Cassiopeias, Rocket eBooks, Visors, Psions, and others through sites such as Peanut Press, Alexandria Digital Literature, Memoware, Mobibook, Rocket E-Book, Project Guttenburg, and a dozen other such sites. An industry insider told me a few months ago, sneeringly, that the sales of such electronic books would never amount to anything more than chump change, but I’m not so sure. Sales of handheld computers are climbing fast, and I’m willing to bet that within two or three years, four or five at most, most of the homes that have a PC will also have a handheld – or more than one.

  So there are interesting times ahead of us, in the next century, in the next millennium. Things will probably be “interesting” after the fashion of the famous old Chinese curse, of course, but let’s hope that things will also be “interesting” in the more traditional, straightforward usage of the word, interesting because suddenly we can see dozens of new potentials and new horizons opening up before us where before there was only one possibility – or none. In that sense, the century ahead may be very interesting indeed. Or so we can hope.

  Once again, it was a bad year in the magazine market, with sales down almost across the board, and not just of science fiction magazines, either; many magazines far outside genre boundaries were affected as well.

  Last year, I predicted, perhaps incautiously, that most of the genre magazines would probably survive into the next century – well, alas, I was wrong. Because the big story in the professional magazine market was the death, early in 2000, of Science Fiction Age, which ceased publication with its May 2000 issue.

  Science Fiction Age’s circulation had slipped steadily for the last four years, slipping another 26.3 per cent in 1999. According to Science Fiction Age’s former editor, Scott Edelman, though, the magazine was still profitable when it was killed, mostly because of the advertising revenue it brought in – just not profitable enough for parent company Sovereign Media, who are making greater profits on their nongenre magazines such as wrestling, media, and log-cabin hobbyist magazines, and decided to use the money tied up in Science Fiction Age to start some other kind of magazine instead where they could expect a greater return on their investment.

  The death of Science Fiction Age is a major blow to the field; not only was Scott doing a good job with the magazine, having turned it into one of the top markets in the business, but it was one of the few magazines these days that was publishing a predominance of good solid core science fiction, rather than the fantasy, horror, and slipstream that saturates much of the rest of the field, particularly at the semiprozine level. It will be sorely missed.

  The news in the rest of the magazine market was hardly much more cheerful. Sales were down everywhere. After an 11 per cent gain in overall circulation in 1998, Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 24.1 per cent loss in overall circulation in 1999, although newsstand
sales were still slightly higher than in 1997. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 13.4 per cent loss in overall circulation in 1999, although their newsstand sales were also slightly higher than in 1997. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 6.3 per cent loss in overall circulation, the smallest drop of any of the professional magazines, most of that in newsstand sales. Realms of Fantasy registered a 10.7 percent loss in overall circulation, slipping in both subscription and newsstand sales. Interzone held steady at a circulation of about four thousand copies, more or less evenly split between subscriptions and newsstand sales. Circulation figures for Amazing are not available, but sales are rumoured to be somewhere in the ten-thousand-copy per issue range, most of that sold on the newsstands.

  As I’ve mentioned before, some of these figures probably look worse than they actually are. Many of these magazines, even the ones with declining circulations, may have actually increased their profitability in the last couple of years by adjusting their “draw” (sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine’s efficiency, and thereby lowering costs – and so increasing profitability) instituting cost-saving procedures in printing and physical production, targeting direct-mail outlets such as bookstores as opposed to scattershot mass markets (magazine racks in supermarkets – where SF magazines usually don’t sell well), and eliminating their reliance on Publishers Clearing House-style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, which can actually cost more to fulfil than they actually bring in in revenue. The (more or less) digest-sized magazines (trim size went up slightly for Asimov’s and Analog last year, with F&SF the only remaining “true” digest-sized magazine – but the principle remains the same) also have the traditional advantage that has always helped the digest magazines to survive, that they’re so cheap to produce in the first place that you don’t have to sell very many of them to make a profit – whereas a large-format slick magazine like Science Fiction Age is much more expensive to produce, which in turn means that you need to sell a greater number of copies in order to be profitable.

  Nevertheless, the continued decline in circulation of the professional magazines is worrisome. Part of the problem for these magazines is their relative invisibility. It’s harder than ever for the SF magazines to get out on the newsstand, because of magazine wholesaler consolidation and the recent upheavals in the domestic distribution network, which means fewer chances to attract new subscribers to replace the loss of old subscribers through natural attrition. The blunt fact is that most people – including many habitual science fiction readers (even, astonishingly, many convention-attending SF fans) – have no idea that the SF magazines even exist, and even if they do know about their existence, have probably never seen a copy offered for sale. Actually, considering that there is absolutely no advertising or promotion done for most of these magazines, none, zero, it’s no wonder that most people have never heard of them. In a way, it’s surprising that they sell as well as they do. What other product do you know that sells itself completely by word of mouth, with no advertising or promotional budget at all?

  I have a feeling that use of the Internet as a promotional tool, using Web sites and other on-line means to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions, is what’s going to save these magazines in the end, if anything can. Only time will tell if Internet promotion can turn things around, help the magazines do an end-run around the bottleneck of dwindling presence on the newsstands, or if it’ll turn out to be a case of too little, too late.

  Meanwhile, not all of the news in this market was downbeat. The Internet Web sites for both Asimov’s and Analog, which went up in 1998 (Asimov’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog’s is at www.analogsf.com) continue to bring in a small but steady flow of new subscriptions every month, many of them from heretofore untapped new audiences (particularly from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems), and I presume that the same is the case with the newish Web sites for other professional magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/) and Interzone (http://www.sfsite.com/interzone/). Asimov’s and Analog also worked out a deal with Peanut Press (http://www.peanutpress.com) late in 1999 that enables readers to download electronic versions of the magazines into Palm Pilot handheld computers, with the choice of either buying an electronic “subscription”, or of buying them individually on an issue-by-issue basis; the numbers here have been small so far, but sales are growing steadily, and since it seems to me that this is an area with almost unlimited potential for growth, this could be a lot of help as well.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, while Analog celebrated its seventieth anniversary early in 2000, Asimov’s celebrated its twenty-second anniversary, Interzone its ninth full year as a monthly magazine (the magazine itself was founded in 1982), and Realms of Fantasy completed its fifth full year of publication as one of the healthiest of the genre magazines, partially because of the enormous amount of advertising revenue it is reputed to draw. Amazing Stories, which returned from the dead last year as a glossy mixed SF/media magazine, completed its second full year of publication in its new incarnation (the title itself has been around, in one version or another, since 1926); parent company Wizards of the Coast was sold to Hasbro in 1999, but early indications are that this won’t hurt Amazing – in fact, it may even mean a new influx of money for it, and help it get distribution along with Hasbro’s card-gaming magazine, Top Deck.

  Other than changes discussed above, the general information for most of these magazines remains more or less the same as last year, as far as personnel and format are concerned.

  All of these magazines deserve your support, and, in fact, in today’s troubled magazine market, one of the very best things you can do to ensure that short fiction remains alive and viable in the science fiction/fantasy market (and, by extension, that the genre itself remains healthy, since most of the significant evolution of the field goes on at short-story length) is to subscribe to the magazines that you like. In fact, subscribe to as many of them as you can – it’ll still turn out to be a better reading bargain, more fiction of reliable quality for less money, than buying the year’s hit-or-miss crop of originals anthologies could supply.

  (Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796 – $29.97 for annual in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033 – $39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323 – $39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60 for an airmail one-year (twelve issues) subscription. Amazing Stories, send e-mail to or call 800-395-7760, $10.95 for a four-issue (one-year) subscription. Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co., Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703 – $16.95 for annual subscription in U.S. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically on-line, at their various Web sites.)

  It was another chaotic year in the still very young field of on-line electronic publishing, and although it remains true that the great promise of on-line-only fiction remained largely unfulfilled this year (as far as SF is concerned, anyway), this is an area where things are changing very fast, and everything can (and probably will) look completely different just a few months down the line.

  Most of the year’s big stories in this market were negative, although some potentially very positive stories are still just over the horizon as I write these words. Last year saw the death (as an active electronic magazine, anyway) of Algis Budrys’s e-zine Tomorrow, while this year saw the death of Ellen Datlow’s Event Horizon site (itself a repla
cement for the earlier Omni Online site, now also defunct, for which Datlow had been fiction editor). Launched in mid-1998, Event Horizon had quickly established itself as perhaps the most reliable place on-line in which to find good professional-level original SF/fantasy/horror stories, one of which, Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat”, had won a World Fantasy Award by the end of 1999. Unfortunately, by the end of 1999, the money had also run out, and, unable to find further financial backing, Event Horizon died.

  By the beginning of 2000, though, the indomitable Ellen Datlow had already landed a new job on-line, as the fiction editor for a forthcoming major new Web site to be launched in April of this year, part of an extensive expansion and renovation of the Sci Fi channel site (scifi.com), which recently bought the long-running e-zine Science Fiction Weekly, and is also home to the audio-play site Seeing Ear Theater, and to the monthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog; Datlow will be publishing SF stories and novellas on the site on a monthly basis, and, if history is any guide, the chances are that this will make it a major player in the on-line fiction market. Also opening at the beginning of the year was another major new site, GalaxyOnLine (run by renowned SF editor/writer Ben Bova), which features a distinguished lineup of columnists such as Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and many others, runs scientific articles and book and movie reviews, and which, to date, has published one on-line original SF story, by Orson Scott Card. If they continue to publish originals (and it’s to be hoped that they do), this site could become a major player in this market as well. More on both of these sites next year.