The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Subscription addresses follow:

  Postscripts, PS Publishing, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, England, UK, published quarterly, 30 to 50 pounds sterling outside the UK (Postscripts can also be subscribed to online at www.pspublishing.com.uk/postscripts.asp.); Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $66.00 for a one-year first class subscription, twelve issues; The New York Review Of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $40.00 per year, twelve issues, make checks payable to Dragon Press; 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 U.S.A; Talebones, A Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy, 21528 104th St. Ct. East, Bonney Lake, WA 98390, $24.00 for four issues; Aurealis, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2149, Mt. Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia (website: www.aurealis.com.au), $50 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, checks should be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian Dollars; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $22.00 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $28.00 Canadian for a four 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; Tales of the Unanticipated , P.O Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $28.00 for a four-issue subscription (three or four year’s worth) in the U.S.A, $31.00 in Canada, $34.00 overseas; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; Flytrap, Tropism Press, 1034 McKinley Ave., Oakland, CA 94610, $20.00 for four issues, checks to Heather Shaw; Electric Velocipede, Spilt Milk Press, P.O. Box 663, Franklin Park, NJ 08823, www.electricvelocipede.com, $15.00 for a four-issue subscription; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 127, Belmont, Western Australia, 6984, www.andromedaspaceways.com, $35.00 for a one-year subscription; Zahir, Zahir Publishing, 315 South Coast Hwy., 101, Suite U8, Encinitas, CA 92024, $18.00 for a one-year subscription, subscriptions can also be bought with credit cards and PayPal at www.zahirtales.com; Tales of the Talisman, LBF Books, 1515 Blossom Hill Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15234, $24.00 for a four-issue subscription; Aoife’s Kiss, Sam’s Dot Publishing, P.O. Box 782, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52406-0782, $18.00 for a four-issue subscription; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box 22897, Brooklyn, New York 11202-2897, $25.00 for a one year (four-issue) subscription, checks or U.S. postal money orders should be made payable to Paradox, can also be ordered online at www.paradoxmag.com; Weird Tales, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850-7408, annual subscription (four issues) $24.00 in the U.S.A.; H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850, annual subscription (four issues) $19.95 in the U.S.A.; Fictitious Force, Jonathan Laden, 1024 Hollywood Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20904, $16.00 for four issues; Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Apex Publications, P.O. Box 2223, Lexington, KY 40588-2223, $20.00 for a one year, four-issue subscription; Jupiter, 19 Bedford Road, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, 10 Pounds Sterling for four issues; New Genre, P.O. Box 270092, West Hartford, CT 06127, couldn’t find any specific subscription information in the magazine itself, but check www.new-genre.com for details; Shimmer, P.O. Box 58591, Salt Lake City, UT 84158-0591, $22.00 for a four-issue subscription; Thrilling Wonder Stories, it’s unclear whether subsciptions are available or not, but more information can be found at www.thrillingwonderstories.com.

  The online electronic “magazine” market has become increasingly important over the last few years, and, truth be told, I think it’s probably a more likely place to find good SF at the moment than the print fiction semiprozine market covered above. And if the rumors circulating about the imminent launch of a high-paying new professional-level ezine in 2008 prove to be true, the e–zine market will become even more important.

  As I’ve already said, I expect that many of the surviving print magazines are eventually either going to die or covert to pixels–there’s many advantages to doing that, including the elimination of ever-rising postal costs, the elimination of production costs (no printing needed!), and the elimination of the need for expensive overhead, like rent for office space in actual physical buildings somewhere (many if not most of these e-zines are probably run out of somebody’s home, in as much as they can be said to have a physical “location” at all), paper, stationary, and office supplies. Not that going to an all-electronic format is a certain formula for success, though, as has been proved by the death of such e-zines as Omni Online, Tomorrow SF, SCI FICTION, Oceans of the Mind, The Infinite Matrix, and others—this year alone, e-zines such as Darker Matter, Fortean Bureau—A Magazine of Speculative Fiction, Space Suits and Sixguns, and Sentinel SF died, a few of them coming and going with startling rapidity, repeating a pattern that’s been familiar in the print fiction semiprozine market for many years.

  The problem that has haunted the online market from the very beginning, though, is: How do you make money publishing fiction online in electronic formats?

  Even with the considerable advantages of online publication, no postage or printing costs, you’re still going to need some money to keep a publication going—if nothing else (in most cases, anyway, except in real labors of love), you’re going to need money with which to pay the authors. And even though there aren’t many production costs involved in running an online magazine as opposed to a print magazine, there are still a few, such as getting staff to read and select and edit the stories, people to do data-entry and physically maintain the website, and so on, so you need money to pay them, too. Many e-zines have been depending on unpaid volunteer labor to get by, including unpaid volunteer editors, performing that labor of love mentioned above—but eventually, volunteers get worn-out, burn out, and move on. Sooner or later, unless you’re willing to support the whole thing out of your own pocket at a loss, as some semiprozine editors have done for years, you’re going to need to make some money.

  But how?

  The “everything’s free” philosophy that permeated the internet from the beginning makes it difficult to get people to pay for the privilege of reading stuff online, especially since (if you don’t care about quality) there’s ocean full of amateur fiction available everywhere for free. The two major strategies that have evolved to try to deal with this situation are to sell “subscriptions”—access to the fiction, basically—in one form or another, or to give the fiction away for free and encourage the people passing through your site to give you money anyway, if they’ve enjoyed the experience of reading it. This last strategy, soliciting voluntary contributions in a manner similar to the pledge drives or “begathons” mounted by public television stations, seems to have been working pretty well for Strange Horizons for a number of years now, but it didn’t work for The Infinite Matrix, and I suspect that Helix and a few others may be on shaky ground with it as well. As for the subscription model, the big test of it is underway right now with Jim Baen’s Universe and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, but the jury is still out on it—although sites such as Fictionwise have been selling access to stories online in a similar manner for years now, and are still in business, so there may be a glimmer of hope. (The “web-advertising” model, which was more-or-less discredited a few years back, may be becoming more viable as the century progresses, and selling web-advertisements could be another possible source of money for free-access “pledge drive” magazines.) Subterranean, which gives its fiction away for free, is using the magazine as a loss-leader for its parent book line, Subterranean Press, hoping that people who like stories in the magazine will then go over to the publishers website and order books by the
m as well. This is a factor with Jim Baen’s Universe as well, in addition to the subscription sales of the magazine; it’s clearly hoped that the publicity generated by the magazine will translate to increased online sales of Baen books on their website. Whether this will work or not, nobody knows for sure either, although I suspect that it will, to some extent anyway—whether the increase in book sales will be big enough to balance out the costs of producing the e-zine or not is yet to be seen.

  It’s still a brave new world out there, with nobody knowing for sure what’s going to work and what isn’t, and all you can really say for sure is that it’s all going to look completely different ten years from now than it does today.

  As far as literary quality is concerned, the above-mentioned Jim Baen’s Universe (www.baensuniverse.com), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, has in only two years established itself as the powerhouse among e-zines, probably the best place to look online for professional level SF and fantasy, and one of the few places anywhere on the internet to offer some actual hard science fiction along with the other stuff. This year, Jim Baen’s Universe published good stuff by John Barnes, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Garth Nix, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Carrie Vaughn, Eric Witchery, and others; I hope that their subscription model is working, because I’d like to see them hang around for many years to come. Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmond R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, hasn’t managed to establish itself quite as impressively in the same two-year period, but it did improve markedly over the last year, and published good stories in 2007 by Peter S. Beagle, Peter Friend, William John Watkins, Justin Stanchfield, Orson Scott Card himself, and others.

  The granddaddy of the e-zines, one of the longest-established fiction sites on the internet, is Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, which puts up a free story every week; good stories by Theodora Goss, Liz Williams, Lavie Tidhar, Tim Pratt, Kate Bachus, and others appeared there this year. Aeon (www.aeonmagazine.com), edited by Marti McKenna and Bridget McKenna, which is available for download as PDFs through subscription rather than being directly accessible online, published only three of their scheduled four issues this year, one of them an all-reprint issue, but they must be doing okay financially, since they just announced a rise in the rates they pay their authors, which would bring them above the SFWA cutoff for a professional market; good stuff by Jay Lake, David D. Levine, Katharine Sparrow, Melissa Tyler, and others appeared there this year, although as with Postscripts (the two seem similar to each other to me in some ways, although one is pixel and one print), I could wish that they’d print more core science fiction and less slipstream/postmodernism/fantasy. Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbell and Ilona Gordon, affords free access to fantasy and science fiction stories, including strong work this year by Tony Pi, Joseph Paul Haines, and others.

  Two brand-new e-zines, just transitioning in from their former incarnations as print magazines, Subterranean and Fantasy (formerly Fantasy Magazine), have already shouldered their way into the ranks of the most prominent fiction e-zines on the internet. Subterranean, edited by William K. Schafer (http://subterraneanpress.com), in particular has quickly established itself as perhaps the best place on the internet to find stylishly-written horror—but it also publishes fantasy and science fiction as well. There were good stories at Subterranean this year from Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Chris Roberson, Jim Grimsley, Jay Lake, John Scalzi, Joe Lansdale, and others. Fantasy, edited by Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo, which concentrates more on fantasy than horror, although there’s an occasional scary piece, produced good work by Bruce McAllister, Andrea Kail, Lucy Kemnitzer, Richard Parks, and others. Stylishly written and usually faintly perverse fantasy is also available at Clarkesworld Magazine (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Nick Mamatas, which this year published strong stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Jeff VanderMeer, Ken Scholes, Jetse de Vries, Cat Rambo, and others. In addition to the stories they publish monthly in the print version of Australian science magazine Cosmos, there are now good science fiction stories available as unique content on the Cosmos website (www.cosmosmagazine.com), all selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick including a story by Mary Robinette Kowal that made this year’s preliminary Nebula ballot, as well as strong work by Steven Dedman, Bruce Carlson, David Taub, and others, and even the serialization of a novel by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar. New Ceres (www.newceres.com), edited by Alisa Krasnostein, is sort of a shared-world anthology online, which has featured contributions by Stephan Dedman, Jay Lake, Lucy Sussex, Cat Sparks, and others.

  Two newish e-zines that feature work that is supposedly too controversial, too eccentric, or just plain too weird for the commercial print markets, Helix and Flurb, completed their second years of operation in 2007. The stuff in Helix (www.helixsf.com), edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans, may or may not be too controversial for regular markets, but some of it was pretty good; and Helix had another strong year, publishing good work by Robert Reed, John Barnes, Jennifer Pellard, Sarah H. Castle, Samantha Henderson, Brenda Clough, and others. (If you like it, put your hand in your pocket, since this is one of those e-zines that depends on consumer donations to survive.) Rudy Rucker’s Flurb (www.flurb.net), wasn’t as strong this year as last, when it published one of the year’s best stories, but it had quirky stuff by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Fillipo, and others.

  A new website dedicated to YA fantasy and SF, Shiny (http://shinymag.blogspot.com), was launched this year.

  Below this point, science fiction and even genre fantasy becomes harder to find, although there are a raft of e-zines, exactly the equivalent of the print “minuscule press” slipstream magazines such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, that publish slipstream/postmodern stories, often ones of good literary quality. They include: Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), which also features book and media reviews, Coyote Wild (http://coyotewildmag.com); Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com); Futurismic (http://futurismic.com/fiction/index.html), Lone Star Stories (http://literary.erictmarin.com); Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); Chiaroscura (http://chizine.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).

  However, many good reprint SF and fantasy stories can also be found on the internet, usually accessible for free, perhaps in greater numbers than the original ones. The long-running British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus), was one of the best of such sites, running a wide selection of good quality reprint stories, in addition to biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays; editor Keith Brooke recently announced that he was stepping down, sad news, but so far Infinity Plus and their achieve of quality reprints is still accessible on the net. Strange Horizons; and most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and which regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. The SciFi Channel recently took down SCI FICTION’s extensive archive of reprints, which I think was rather mean-spirited of them, but even though The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) is ostensibly dead (although a strong new novella by Cory Doctorow appeared there this year), the last time I checked, its substantial archives of past material were still available to be accessed. 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). Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pc/).

/>   An even greater range of reprint stories becomes available, though, if you’re willing to pay a small fee for them. The best, and the longest-established, such site is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), 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, and you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com); in addition to the downloadable stuff for sale here (both stories and novels), you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material. Mind’s Eye Fiction seems to have gone out of business, and Alexandria Digital Literature (http://alexlit.com) is reconstructing its web site, which it plans to relaunch in 2008 sometime.

  In addition to fiction-oriented sites, though, there are also many general genre-related sites of interest to be found on the internet, most of which publish reviews both of books and movies and TV shows, some of which feature as well interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The most valuable genre-oriented general site on the entire internet, is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, an indispensable site 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 data-base archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards—and which is also often the first place in the genre to find fast-breaking news. Other essential sites include: Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw), which publishes more media-oriented stuff than Locus Online, but which still features news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassut, and Wil McCarthy; SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which features reviews of books, games, movies, TV shows, and magazines, plus a huge archive of past reviews, and Best SF (www.bestsf.net/), which boasts another great archive of reviews, and which is one of the few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues. A similar site, also oriented to short-fiction reviews, was Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com), which closed down due to internal difficulties toward the end of 2007, but which promises to return. A new short-fiction review site The Fix (http://thefix-online.com), launched by a former Tangent Online staffer, started up just about the same time that Tangent was shutting down, and so far is going strong. Other worthwhile general sites include SFRevu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), where you’ll find lots of novel and media reviews, as well as interviews and general news; SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org); where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; The Internet Review of Science Fiction (www.irosf.com), which features both short fiction reviews and novel reviews, as well as critical articles, Green Man Review (http://greenmanreview.com), another valuable review site; The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), media and book reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), more literary and media reviews; SFReader (http://sfreader.com), which features reviews of SF books, and SFWatcher (www.sfwatcher.com), which features reviews of SF movies; newcomer SFScope (www.sfscope.com), edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock, which concentrates on SF and writing business news; Lost Pages (http://lostpagesindex.html), which features some fiction as well as the critical stuff; SciFiPedia (scifipedia.scifi.com), a wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia; and Speculations (www.speculations.com) a long-running site which dispenses writing advice, and writing-oriented news and gossip (although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site). Multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his funny and iconoclastic fanzine Ansible, one of the most enjoyable and entertaining SF sites on the internet, is available at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible, and SF-oriented radio plays and podcasts can also be accessed at Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com).