According to the news magazine Locus, there were 1,999 books “of interest to the SF field”, both original and reprint, published in 1999, nearly the same as last year’s total of 1,959. Original books were down by 1 per cent, down to 1,107 from last year’s total of 1,112, after a 12 per cent gain last year brought the totals up from 1997’s low of 999. The number of new SF novels was up, with 251 novels published, as opposed to 242 novels published in 1998, and 229 published in 1997, almost back up to the 1996 total of 253; the number of new fantasy novels was also up, with 275 published, as opposed to 233 novels published in 1998, the highest total since 1994’s 234, and the first time in five years that more fantasy than SF novels were published; horror continued to slide downward after a brief upturn in 1998, with 95 horror novels published as opposed to 110 novels in 1998, down considerably overall from 1995’s high of 193 titles.
A spot of perspective is perhaps in order: the number of original mass-market paperbacks published this year, 350, is alone higher than the total number of original genre books, of any sort, published in 1972, which was 225. Unless there’s a crash so disastrous coming that it amounts to the de facto collapse of most of the publishing industry (possible, but not likely, unless there’s a general society-wide Great Depression), it’s hard to imagine that the genre will be reduced to those kind of numbers – which everyone regarded as “normal” and even healthy, in the 1970s – any time soon.
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I don’t have time to read many novels, and this year I’ve had perhaps even less time than usual, so I can contribute no really definitive overview – but certainly among the best novels of the year, you’d have to list Teranesia (HarperPrism), by Greg Egan, A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (Tor), Darwin’s Radio, by Greg Bear (Del Rey), All Tomorrow’s Parties, by William Gibson (Putnam), The Cassini Division, by Ken Macleod (Tor), Ancient of Days, by Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos), Forever Free, by Joe Haldeman (Ace), The Martian Race, by Gregory Benford (Warner Aspect), Manifold: Time, by Stephen Baxter (Del Rey), and The Naked God, by Peter Hamilton (Warner Aspect). Although I haven’t yet read it, Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (Avon), was enough of a cult success, with an appeal stretching far outside the boundaries of the field as they are usually drawn, that it probably should have special attention called to it in any year-end wrap-up. As should the immensely popular Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, which may have outsold anything else in the genre this year; in fact, the chances are good that if somebody who is not a regular fantasy or science fiction reader has heard of any book with fantastic elements this year, it’s a Harry Potter book that they’ve heard of; that ought to be more than enough to get them included in any year-end wrap-up that hopes to give an accurate picture of what was happening in 1999.
Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1999 include Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card (Tor); On Blue’s Waters, Gene Wolfe (Tor); Sky Coyote, Kage Baker (Harcourt Brace); Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle (Roc); Greenhouse Summer, Norman Spinrad (Tor); The Far Shore of Time, Frederik Pohl (Tor); Dog Eat Dog, Jerry Jay Carroll (Ace); Finity, John Barnes (Tor); Precursor, C.J. Cherryh (DAW); Bios, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor); A Calculus of Angels, J. Gregory Keyes (Del Rey); Kirinya, Ian McDonald (Millennium); The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett (HarperPrism); A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen); Down There in Darkness, George Turner (Tor); The Extremes, Christopher Priest (St. Martin’s Press); The Conqueror’s Child, Suzy McKee Charnas (Tor); Mammoth, Stephen Baxter (Millennium); Minions of the Moon, Richard Bowes (Tor); The Rainy Season, James P. Blaylock (Ace); Architects of Emortality, Brian Stableford (Tor); Dark Cities Underground, Lisa Goldstein (Tor); Climb the Wind, Pamela Sargent (HarperPrism); Return to Mars, Ben Bova (Avon); Still Life, Hal Clement (Tor); Cavalcade, Alison Sinclair (Millennium); The Stone War, Madeleine E. Robins (Tor); A Red Heart of Memories, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Ace); Moonfall, Jack McDevitt (HarperPrism); Waiting, Frank M. Robinson (Forge); Memoranda, Jeffrey Ford (Avon Eos); Against the Tide of Years, S.M. Stirling (Roc); Souls in the Great Machine, Sean McMullen (Tor); Singer from the Sea, Sheri S. Tepper (Avon Eos); Tower of Dreams, Jamil Nasir (Bantam Spectra); Foreign Bodies, Stephen Dedman (Tor); Starfire, Charles Sheffield (Bantam Spectra); There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell, Pat Murphy (Tor); Cave of Stars, George Zebrowski (HarperPrism); The Eternal Footman, James Morrow (Harcourt Brace); Black Light, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); The Veiled Web, Catherine Asaro (Bantam Spectra); The Terrorists of Irustan, Louise Marley (Ace); The Stars Compel, Michaela Roessner (Tor); The Silicon Dagger, Jack Williamson (Tor); The Quiet Invasion, by Sarah Zettel (Warner Aspect); The Marriage of Sticks, Jonathan Carroll (Tor); Mr. X, Peter Straub (Random House); and Saint Fire, Tanith Lee (The Overlook Press).
Mention should also be made of some recent omnibus reissues of classic novels, back in print again after an absence of years (or, in some cases: even decades): Dark Ladies, Fritz Leiber (Tor/Orb), which gathers together two classic Leiber novels, Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness; Rings, by Charles L. Harness (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203 – $25), which collects together the Harness novels The Paradox Men, The Rings of Ritornel, and Firebird, and adds to them a never-before-published novel, Drunkard’s Endgame; The Great Book of Amber: The Amber Chronicles 1–10, by Roger Zelazny (Avon Eos), an omnibus of the first ten volumes in the Amber series; Biting the Sun, by Tanith Lee (Bantam Spectra), which includes Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine; and The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule & Typewriter, by Hal Clement (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203 – $25.00), which gathers his classic novels Needle, Iceworld, and Close to Critical, Some very good stand-alone novels also were reprinted this year, including: Emphyrio, by Jack Vance (Orion Millennium); The War Against the Rull, by A.E. van Vogt (Tor/Orb); The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers (Ballantine Del Rey); The Dreaming Jewels, by Theodore Sturgeon (Vintage); Free Live Free, by Gene Wolfe (Tor/Orb); The Silver Metal Lover, by Tanith Lee (Bantam Spectra); The Deceivers, by Alfred Bester (i Books/Simon & Schuster); The Wonder, by J.D. Beresford (Bison Books); Omega: The Last Days of the World, by Camille Flammarion (Bison Books); 334, by Thomas M. Disch (Vintage); and Camp Concentration, by Thomas M. Disch (Vintage). All of these publishers are to be commended for bringing long-out-of-print titles back into print, something that for too long has been left to the small presses by most of the trade publishers. The new Orion Millennium line, the Tor/Orb line, and the Vintage line are particularly worth checking out, with almost everything they reissue of interest. It’s really encouraging to see backlist titles starting to come back into print again with increasing regularity, although even more could – and probably should – be done along these lines.
It seemed a somewhat weaker year for first novels than the last couple of years have been. Shiva 3000, by Jan Lars Jensen (Harcourt Brace), seemed to attract the most attention this year, followed by The Silk Code, by Paul Levinson (Tor) and Starfish, by Peter Watts (Tor). Other first novels included Gardens of the Moon, Steven Erikson (Bantam UK); King Rat, China Miéville (Tor); Code of Conduct, Kristine Smith (Avon Eos); Shanji, James C. Glass (Baen); The Shadow of Ararat, Thomas Harlan (Tor); Nocturne for a Dangerous Man, Marc Matz (Tor); and The Thief’s Gamble, Julliet E. McKenna (HarperPrism). As usual, all publishers who are willing to take a chance publishing first novels should be commended, since the publishing of such novels is a chance that must be taken by someone if new talent is going to be able to develop, and if the field itself is going to survive.
Although I didn’t read anywhere near all of the novels this year (probably physically impossible, for anyone for whom it wasn’t a full-time job), or even the majority of them, what I did have time to read was of pretty high quality, and on the basis of that sample alone, it looked like a pretty strong year for the novels to me – as indeed it has been for the past several years now. Tor obviously had a strong year, as did Avon Eos (in spite of catastrophic shake-ups there), as did the new
English line Millennium in its debut year, and HarperPrism in what, alas, proved to be its last year. And since I still frequently hear the old line about how nobody publishes “real” science fiction anymore (in spite of what’s amounted to a renaissance in the ultra-hard SF novel in the last four or five years, paired with a boom in scientifically literate modern space opera), the fact is that the majority of novels on this year’s list of notable books were centre-core science fiction novels. Even omitting the fantasy novels and the borderline genre-straddling work on the list, you still had the Egan, the Vinge, the Gibson, the Bear, the Haldeman, the Benford, the Bova, the McAuley, the Clement, the Baxter, the Macleod, the Stableford, and close to a dozen others – all unquestionably pure-quill core SF, with many of them “hard SF” as rigorous and challenging as any that’s ever been written by anyone in the history of the genre.
As usual, predicting what’s going to take the major awards this year is a daunting task. I think that Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky has a shot at winning the Hugo. The Vinge novel might also have a shot at the Nebula, but there the situation is complicated by the fact that SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule enables popular books from last year such as George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings and Maureen McHugh’s Mission Child to compete for this year’s award, so the probable winner becomes very hard to call. We’ll just have to wait and see what does win!
Borderline novels by SF writers this year included The Rift (Avon), by Walter Jon Williams (writing as Walter J. Williams), a Big Fat Disaster novel, set in the near future, about a humongous earthquake striking the Mississippi Valley, that contains enough of Williams’s typical stylishly bleak tropes to be satisfying to his usual fans, and which is compellingly readable enough to appeal to a broader audience as well. There were also two intriguing borderline novels this year that will have to be special-ordered from small presses, but which are well worth the trouble: Interstate Dreams (Mojo Press), by Neal Barrett, Jr., a bizarre and occasionally very funny mix of mystery, fantasy, and black humour in a mode that has been called Texas magic realism, similar in tone to Barrett’s cult classic The Hereafter Gang (which John Clute called “the Great American novel”, and which moved Joe Landsdale to exclaim “God Himself couldn’t have written a better novel!”) . . . and The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan (Xlibris), by William Sanders, a freewheeling, gritty, and funny mix of fantasy, SF, and hard-edged thriller that will appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed Sanders’s short fiction, such as the recent Nebula finalist “The Undiscovered”. (Mojo Press, P.O. Box 1215, Dripping Springs, TX 78620 – $14 for Interstate Dreams, by Neal Barrett, Jr.; The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, by William Sanders, can be ordered from Xlibris Press for $25 for a hardcover edition and $15 for a trade paperback edition, or it can be ordered from Sanders’s own Web site at www.sff.net/people/sanders/bbrt.htm or ordered from Amazon.com.)
Associational novels by genre authors this year included Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem; The Crook Factory (Avon), by Dan Simmons; Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story (St. Martin’s Press), by Lewis Shiner; and Essential Saltes: An Experiment (St. Martin’s Press), by Don Webb; plus a slew of mystery novels by SF writers, including Defense for the Devil (St. Martin’s Press), by Kate Wilhelm; two novels by Mary Rosenblum writing as Mary Freeman, Devil’s Trumpet (Berkeley) and Deadly Nightshade (Berkeley); Freezer Burn (Mysterious Press), by Joe L. Lansdale; and two novels by Ron Goulart, Groucho Marx, Private Eye (St. Martin’s Press) and Elementary, My Dear Groucho (St. Martin’s Press).
It was another pretty strong year for collections, something that’s been true for a couple of years now. The best collections of the year included: A Good Old-Fashioned Future, by Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra); The Robot’s Twilight Companion, by Tony Daniel (Golden Gryphon); The Martians, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra); The Dragons of Springplace, by Robert Reed (Golden Gryphon); Sex and Violence in Zero, by Allen Steele (Meisha Merlin); Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories, by Lucius Shepard (Four Walls, Eight Windows), and Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King (Scribner).
Also good were: Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, by Terry Dowling (MP Books); A Safari of the Mind, by Mike Resnick (Wildside Press); Apostrophes & Apocalypses, by John Barnes (Tor); The Lady of Situations, by Stephen Dedman (Ticonderoga); Dakota Dreamin’, by Bill Johnson (Cascade Mountain); Dragon’s Fin Soup, by S.P. Somtow (EMR); The Dream Archipelago, by Christopher Priest (Earthlight); New Adventures in Sci, by Sean Williams (Ticonderoga); Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories, by Rick Wilber (University of Tampa Press); Seven for the Apocalypse, by Kit Reed (University Press of New England); and Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories, by John Shirley (Night Shade).
There were also several strong retrospective collections – collections that return long-unavailable work to print – this year, including: Baby Is Three: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VI (North Atlantic), by Theodore Sturgeon; Futures Past, by A.E. van Vogt (Tachyon Publications); Farewell to Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber (White Wolf); The Complete Boucher, by Anthony Boucher (NESFA Press); The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume 1: The Metal Man and Others, by Jack Williamson (Haffner); and The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume 2: Wolves of Darkness, by Jack Williamson (Haffner).
Several of these collections function almost as theme collections, with Christmas the unifying theme in the Willis collection, baseball in the Wilber collection, while Somtow’s Dragon’s Fin Soup offers us “eight modern Siamese fables” set in Thailand, and Steele’s Sex and Violence in Zero-G collects near-future stories mostly dealing with the construction of orbital habitats and the early stages of solar system exploration and interworld commerce. Robinson’s The Martians also has an obvious enough theme, and has been described as a collection of outtakes from the writing of his massive Mars novel trilogy, but while that’s true enough in a way, with characters from the trilogy reappearing in stories here, the collection also features poetry, scraps of “nonfiction”, some (rather self-indulgent) autobiographical metafictional bits, and even Martian “alternate worlds” stories that don’t share the story line of the trilogy, including a few where the terraforming of Mars has gone wrong, and even a couple of “mainstream” pieces in which we never went to Mars in the first place; in fact, rather than being just a straightforward collection of stories set on Robinson’s fictional Mars, it’s a tricky, elusive, postmodern grab bag of a book, whose closest relative in the genre is probably Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home – although if Robinson included recipes, or a cassette of flute music, I missed them (but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were there!). Although many of the “stories” are barely stories at all as we usually understand the term in the genre, the cumulative effect of the collection is powerful, and oddly moving. Speaking of Mars, Rainbow Mars, by Larry Niven (Tor), is an odd item, an omnibus of collection of Niven’s long-running series of stories about Svetz, the hapless time traveller, matched with a complete new novel, the eponymous Rainbow Mars, which takes Svetz to an alternate-world Mars for further adventures; I’ll mention it both here and in the novel section, since it’s both a collection and a novel wrapped up in one package.
Turning to fantasy, the late Robert A. Heinlein is not usually thought of as a fantasy writer (in spite of Glory Road, one of the major fantasy novels of the early 1960s, before Tolkien’s widespread popularity), but The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein, by Robert A. Heinlein (Tor), ought to be checked out as an eye-opener both by fantasy purists who’ve never read anything by Heinlein before and by hardcore Heinlein fans who’ve never read anything but his science fiction work; there’s good stuff here such as “Waldo” and “ ‘– And He Built a Crooked House’”, mixed with light-weight stuff such as “The Man who Traveled in Elephants” and “Our Fair City”, but note particularly “ ‘ They –’ ”
and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”, pioneering classics of the ultimate paranoia How-Do-You-Know-What-Is-Real? story; today we’d say they were Dickian, but both were published before Phil Dick even started writing, and they’ve influenced almost all subsequent work in this mode, including recent movies like The Matrix. And although it’s really neither science fiction nor fantasy, as the terms are conventionally used, Avram Davidson fans will certainly want the mystery collection The Investigation of Avram Davidson (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff; these are not hardcore classical whodunnits being rather of the ironic “biter bit” variety that in many cases might just as easily have fit into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (where many of them did appear), but they display all of Davidson’s usual wit and offbeat erudition, and several of them (such as the wonderful “The Lord of Central Park”) have minor fantastic elements as well. As you can see, the big trade houses like Tor and Bantam Spectra are bringing out more collections these days, not only collections by big names such as Larry Niven and Robert A. Heinlein and Connie Willis, but, increasingly, even collections by middle-level names such as Bruce Sterling, John Barnes, and Kim Stanley Robinson. If you want collections by New Young Writers, though, for the most part, you still have to turn to small presses such Golden Gryphon Press and Meisha Merlin. (One of the most encouraging stories of the year is that Golden Gryphon Press, which could have died with its founder, Jim Turner, is going to continue under the stewardship of Turner’s brother Gary; in fact, under that stewardship, excellent collections by Tony Daniel and Neal Barrett, Jr., have already appeared – we’ll list the Barrett next year – and new collections by Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Paul Russo, and others, are already in the pipeline.) While small presses like NESFA Press, North Atlantic, Tachyon, and Haffner remain vital – and unrivalled by the trade publishers – for bringing collections of long-out-of-print work of historical importance back in a form where it can be accessed by modern readers.
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