The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18
Page 2
In the Internet age, you can subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible. Internet sites such as Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com) and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), sell electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, which is becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvy set. Therefore, I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf.
There were some other big changes in the magazine market this year. The longtime editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois, stepped back from his full-time role to take a consulting editor job with the magazine instead, freeing up time to pursue other interests. The new editor is Sheila Williams, moving up from her longtime role as executive editor; the changeover is official as of the January 2005 issue, when Dozois’s name came off the masthead and Williams’ name went on. The British magazine Interzone has been going through chaotic times as well, missing issues and demonstrating all the signs of being a magazine in trouble; at last, in the spring of 2004, longtime editor David Pringle, who’d run Interzone for twenty-two years, stepped down to deal with personal difficulties. For a while it looked like the magazine might die, but Andy Cox, editor and publisher of The Third Alternative, came to the rescue, buying the magazine, which will continue under the TTA Press umbrella as a sister magazine to The Third Alternative. The new Interzone is trying for a slicker, more contemporary look, more like the graphics and design in The Third Alternative than those of the old magazine, and has also grown slightly in size to match its new sister. The first TTA issue of Interzone was something of a mess, with interior design and layout that made it almost impossible to read the text in some places, but this problem has been straightened out to some extent in subsequent issues. I didn’t like the first two TTA covers, which struck me as murky and bland, generic cyberpunk, but the cover of the most recent issue, featuring a giant woman in a skin-tight spacesuit striding across the landscape, is probably a lot more effective in “popping” from the newsstand. Andy Cox is to be congratulated for saving this grand old lady, long the flagship of British science fiction, but I hope that he doesn’t entirely lose the old Interzone regulars such as Alastair Reynolds, Dominic Green, Eric Brown, and Greg Egan in the transition; to date, most of the Cox Interzones have featured largely the same crew that sells to The Third Alternative. The magazine was a little weaker than usual this year, but there was good stuff in both the final Pringle issues and the new Cox issues from Alastair Reynolds, Dominic Green, Liz Williams, Jay Lake (so prolific that he seemed to be everywhere in the semiprozine market this year), Karen Fishler, Michael T. Jasper, and others.
Amazing Stories came back to life yet again in 2004, a Lazarus trick it’s performed a number of times in the past, reincarnating itself this time as a slick, glossy, large-format magazine with media images on the cover. There was too much emphasis on media and gaming for my old-fashioned tastes, and too much of what fiction they did run was short Twilight Zone–ish twist-ending stuff. But they did feature some good work, especially a story by James Van Pelt, as well as stories by Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling, and there were interesting interviews with George R.R. Martin, Frederick Pohl, and others. Amazing Stories started out being edited by David Gross, but in midyear he stepped down to be replaced as editor by Jeff Berkwitz. A couple of 2005–dated issues appeared, and then the publishers announced, rather mysteriously, that the magazine was going “on hiatus” because it had been “too successful.” No one is quite sure what this actually means, but, in my experience, magazines that go on hiatus seldom return from it, so this may well be a very bad sign.
(Subscription addresses for the professional magazines follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, annual subscription – $44.89 in the U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $43.90 for annual subscription in U.S. Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $43.90 for annual subscription in the U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, UK, $65 for an airmail one-year [twelve issues] subscription; Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703 – $16.95 for an annual subscription in the U.S.; Amazing Stories, www.paizo.com/amazing.)
Turning to the increasingly important Internet scene, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone by this point that some of the best stories of the year appeared on Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION (www.scifi.com/scifiction) page on the Internet, including stories by Pat Murphy, Christopher Rowe, Terry Bisson, Robert Reed, George R. R. Martin, Daniel Abraham, Michaela Roessner, Walter Jon Williams, Mary Rosenblum, Alex Irvine, Howard Waldrop, and others. This is still the best place on the Internet to find good professional-level science fiction, although they also publish a lot of horror, fantasy, and hard-to-classify slipstreamish stuff. Eileen Gunn’s The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) hung on for another year, although in a somewhat diminished state due to budget problems, but there was still a lot of interesting, quirky stuff to read there, including columns by Howard Waldrop, David Langford, and John Clute, stories by Karen D. Fishler, Leslie What, and others, and a whole archive of good stuff from previous years. Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) continues to “publish” (we really do need a new term for this!) a lot of good professional-level stuff, although very little of it is science fiction. The majority of it is fantasy, slipstream, and soft horror, including, this year, worthwhile work by Vandana Singh, Liz Williams, Brenda Cooper, Ellen Klages, Daniel Starr, Kate Bachus, Bill Kte’pi, and others. I’d sure like to see them publish more science fiction, though, especially rigorous hard SF, which isn’t a description that can really be applied even to the few SF stories that do appear on the site. On the other hand, Oceans of the Mind (www.trantorpublications.com/oceans.htm), which is available by electronic subscription, publishes mostly core science fiction, with only the occasional slip into something else. Overall quality here seemed a bit lower than last year, but they still featured interesting stuff by Russell Blackford, Mark W. Tiedeman, Paul Marlowe, K.D. Wentworth, and others. New electronic magazines continue to proliferate like (what’s a polite metaphor? Like flies? Like maggots?) like quickly proliferating things on the Internet, and many of them won’t last out the year ahead. One new electronic magazine that is already operating on a reliable professional level of quality, though, and that seems quite promising, is Aeon, whose first issue this year featured an almost novel-length story by Walter Jon Williams, plus strong work by John Meaney, Jay Lake, Lori Ann White, and others.
And SF stories continued to spread across the Internet, appearing in places where it wouldn’t seem intuitively logical to look for them. Salon (www.salon.com), for instance, now features several SF stories per year, including, this year, strong stories by Cory Doctorow, D. William Shunn, Alex Irvine, and others. Stories, including a few of the year’s best, also showed up in such peculiar places as the Web site of an organization of electrical engineers (Vernor Vinge’s “Synthetic Serendipity”) and as, of all things, an advertisement for a novel being sold on Amazon.com (M. John Harrison’s “Tourism”)!
There are also lots of sites that feature mostly slipstream and soft horror, among the best of which are Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), which, although not always of reliable professional quality, did feature interesting stuff this year from Steven Utley, Lou Antonelli, Danith McPherson, and others; Fortean Bureau – A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.forteanbureau.com/index.html), which featured quirky stuff this year from Greg Beatty, Bill Kte’pi, Paul Melko, Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, and others; Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.klio.net/abyssandapex); Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com); Futurismic (www.futurismic.com/fiction/i
ndex.html), and Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).
After this point, although good original SF and fantasy becomes somewhat scarce, there’s still a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy stories out there to be found. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aurealis, and others, have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and some of them regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues; SCI FICTION also has a substantial archive of “classic reprints,” as do The Infinite Matrix and Strange Horizons. The British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus), also has a wide selection of good-quality reprint stories, in addition to biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays. As long as you’re willing to read it on a computer screen, all of this stuff is available to be read for free.
An even greater range of reprint stories becomes available for a small fee, though. One of the best such sites is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), a place where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer. In addition to individual stories, you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, as well as a selection of novels in several different genres; more important to me, you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here – including Asimov’s Science Fiction – in a number of different formats (as you can at the Peanut Press site). ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com) is a similar site, but here, in addition to the downloadable stuff (both stories and novels) that you can buy, you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material. Access for a small fee to both original and reprint SF stories is also offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (tale.com/genres.htm), and Alexandria Digital Literature (alexlit.com) as well.
Reading fiction is not the only reason to go online, though. There’s also a large cluster of general-interest sites that publish lots of interviews, critical articles, reviews, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Perhaps the most valuable genre-oriented sites on the entire Internet, and one I check nearly every day, is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the news magazine Locus; not only do you get fast-breaking news here (in fact, this is often the first place in the entire genre where important stories break), but you can also 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 and invaluable database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. Other essential sites include: Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw), more media-and-gaming oriented than Locus Online, but still featuring news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassut, and Wil McCarthy; Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com), which changed editors again in late 2004 and looked like it was going to die for a while, but which has recovered under a new editor, and still is publishing a lot of short-fiction reviews; Best SF (www.bestsf.net/), another great review site, and one of the few places, along with Tangent Online, that makes any attempt to regularly review online fiction as well as print fiction; SFRevu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), a review site that specializes in media and novel reviews; the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com), which provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION and for Science Fiction Weekly, and to the bimonthly SF–oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; the SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews; but also serves as host site for the Web pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Interzone; SFF NET (www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, plus sites for genre-oriented “live chats”; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; and Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), where SF–oriented radio plays can be accessed. New review sites include The Internet Review of Science Fiction (www.irosf.com), which features L. Blunt Jackson’s short-fiction reviews as well as critical articles, and Lost Pages (lostpagesindex.html), which features some fiction as well as the critical stuff. Multiple-Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his funny and iconoclastic fanzine Ansible is available at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible, and Speculations (www.speculations.com) is a long-running site that dispenses writing advice, writing-oriented news, and gossip (although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site).
Things change fast in the Internet world, though, so a lot of this information may already be obsolete by the time you read it. The only way to be sure what sites of genre interest are out there is to fire up your computer and go look for yourself.
It wasn’t a particularly good year in the semiprozine market, with even many long-established magazines only managing to produce one issue, although some promising new magazines were born and joined their older brethren in struggling to survive.
Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, the newszine Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), and the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence, with titles consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications, suffered another year of being unable to keep anywhere near to their announced publishing schedules this year, with the exception of Chronicle; Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination only managed one issue apiece, and even Weird Tales, which until now had been pretty reliable in meeting its schedule, only managed three issues out of a scheduled four. Circulation figures are not available for the DNA magazines, so it’s impossible to say how well or how poorly they’re doing.
I saw no issues this year of Century, Eidolon, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, or Spectrum SF, which are all probably dead. I also saw no issues of Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, Neo-Opsis, and Jupiter, although whether these magazines were still active was unclear. There was only one issue of the Irish fiction semiprozine Albedo One this year, one of Tales of the Unanticipated, one of the Sword & Sorcery magazine Black Gate, one of the fantasy magazine Alchemy, one of the long-running Space and Time, one of the flagship of the slipstream movement, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and one of the similarly slipstreamish Say . . . (here each issue has a different title, such as this year’s Say . . . why aren’t we crying?). Electric Velocipede, Flytrap, Full-Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, Talebones: The Magazine of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy, Hadrosaur Tales, the new “Alternate History” magazine Paradox, and the long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis all brought out two issues apiece this year (although the most recent Aurealis arrived here after the end of the year, so we’ll consider it for next time). Of these, some of the best stuff was to be found in Talebones, which featured good stories this year by Paul Melko, David D. Levine, Devon Monk, and others, and in Electric Velocipede, which featured good work by William Shunn, Jay Lake, Chris Roberson, Christopher Rowe, Liz Williams, and others.
The most vigorous of the fiction semiprozines, judging by how well they meet their production schedules, anyway, seem to be The Third Alternative, the leading British semiprozine, long-running Canadian semiprozine On Spec, and the cheeky new Australian semiprozine, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Of these, by far the best in terms of literary quality is The Third Alternative; although the stories, which run to slipstream and dark, surreal, understated horror, are not always to my taste, they’re almost always extremely well written line by line, and the mag
azine attracts some of the best talent in the business; good stuff appeared here this year by Tim Lees, John Grant, Karen Fishler, Jay Lake, Susan Fry, Tim Pratt, Vandana Singh, and others. A superficial description of On Spec – little science fiction, lots of slipstream and soft horror – makes it sound very similar to The Third Alternative, but somehow there’s a discernible difference in tone; the stuff in The Third Alternative is more sophisticated and more elegant, and somehow On Spec comes across as “gloomy” rather than “dark.” This gray gloominess seems to be something that a lot of Canadian publications take pride in – the subscription ad for On Spec even boasts that “Nobody does dark like Canadians!”, although I’m not sure they really ought to be boasting about that – and I think it might be good for them to lighten up a bit. The covers here were great, as usual, but often more evocative than the fiction, although interesting stuff by Karen Traviss, A. M. Dellamonica, Jack Skillingstead, E. I. Chin, and others. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine runs mostly science fiction, but often not stuff at a terribly high level of professionalism, and there’s an (I feel) misguided emphasis on “humorous” pieces here, something that’s hard to do well; the fact that the magazine is edited by someone different every issue, one of a group of rotating editors, also makes it difficult to maintain a level of quality from issue to issue. The best stuff here this year, in my opinion, was the more “serious” and less jokey stories by Stephen Dedman, Mark W. Tiedmann, Liz Williams, Colin P. Davies, and others (unlike On Spec, they could darken a shade or two, or at least become more substantial).