If I’ve missed some, as is quite possible, try Googling the name of the publisher. (Isn’t it odd that we’re in an era where “Googling” is actually a word?)
In spite of the usual laments that SF is dying or diminishing or being driven off the bookstore shelves, there were more good SF and fantasy novels (to say nothing of hard-to-classify hybrids) published in 2007 than any one person could possibly read, unless they made a full-time job of it
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were a record 2,723 books “of interest to the SF field, both original and reprint (but not counting “media tie-in novels,” gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, most Print-on-Demand books, or novels offered as downloads on the internet—all of which would swell the total by hundreds if counted) published in 2007, up 9% from 2,495 titles in 2006. The really big increase this year was a boom in the number of “paranormal romances” published, which surged to a total of 290 titles this year; for the first time, Locus has begun counting paranormal romance as a separate category, which skews the figures somewhat, since last year some of them would have been counted as fantasy or even horror titles instead. Magna is also booming, but that isn’t reflected in the totals at all. Original books were up by 13% to 1,710 from last year’s total of 1,520, a new record. Reprint books were up by 4%, to 1,013 compared to last year’s total of 975, although that doesn’t make up for the decline here in the previous two years. The number of new SF novels was up 12% to a total of 250 as opposed to last year’s total of 223. The number of new fantasy novels was down by 1% to 460 as opposed to last year’s total of 463. Horror dropped by 27%, to 198 titles, as opposed to last year’s total of 271, still up from 2002’s total of 112.
Busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so, as usual, I’ll limit myself to mentioning that novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2006 include:
Brasyl (Pyr), by lan McDonald; The Accidental Time Machine (Ace), by Joe Haldeman; The Execution Channel (Tor), by Ken MacLeod; The Sons of Heaven (Tor), by Kage Baker; Cowboy Angels (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; Players, (Simon & Schuster UK), by Paul McAuley; Axis (Tor), by Robert Charles Wilson; The White Tyger (Tor), by Paul Park; Recovery Man (Roc), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Pirate Freedom (Tor), by Gene Wolfe; Sixty Days and Counting (Bantam Spectra), by Kim Stanley Robinson; Halting State (Ace), by Charles Stross; The Merchant’s War (Tor), by Charles Stross; The Prefect (Gollancz), by Alastair Reynolds; In War Times (Tor), by Kathleen Ann Goonan; Queen of Candescence (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Spindrift (Ace), by Allen Steele; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (Little, Brown UK), by Iain Banks; Quantico (Vanguard); by Greg Bear; Keeping It Real (Pyr), by Justina Robson; Selling Out (Pyr), by Justina Robson; The Last Colony (Tor), by John Scalzi; HARM (Del Rey), by Brian W. Aldiss; Conqueror (Ace), by Stephen Baxter; Brass Man (Tor), by Neal Asher; Hilldiggers (Tor UK); by Neal Asher; Undertow (Bantam Spectra), by Elizabeth Bear; Whiskey and Water (Roc), by Elizabeth Bear; A Companion to Wolves (Tor), by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear; Postsingular (Tor), by Rudy Rucker; Off Armageddon Reef (Tor), by David Weber; Empire of Ivory (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; Flora Segunda (Hartcourt), by Ysabeau S. Wilce; Un Lun Dun (Del Rey), by China Mieville; Heart-Shaped Box (Morrow), by Joe Hill; Helix (Solaris), by Eric Brown; Ally (Eos), by Karen Traviss; The Terror (Little, Brown), by Dan Simmons; Set the Seas on Fire (Solaris), by Chris Roberson; Cauldron (Ace), by Jack McDevitt; Command Decision (Del Rey), by Elizabeth Moon; Mainspring (Tor), by Jay Lake; Farseed (Tor), by Pamela Sargent; Ysabel (Roc), by Guy Gavriel Kay; Daughter of Independence (DAW), by Simon Brown; Titans of Chaos (Tor), by John C. Wright; Bloodmind (Tor), Liz Williams; A Betrayal in Winter (Tor), Daniel Abraham; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins), by Michael Chabon; Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey), by Michael Chabon; Deliverer (DAW), by C.J. Cherryh; Ink (Del Rey), by Hal Duncan; Ilario:The Lion’s Eye (Eos), by Mary Gentle; The Dreaming Void (Tor UK), by Peter F. Hamilton; The New Moon’s Arms (Warner), by Nalo Hopkinson; Fleet of Worlds (Tor), by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner; Ha’penny (Ace), by Jo Walton; Time’s Child (Roc), by Rebecca Ore; The Sunrise Lands (Roc), by S.M. Stirling; Shelter (Tor), by Susan Palwick; Till Human Voices Wake Us (Bantam Spectra), by Mark Budz; Black Man (Gollancz), by Richard Morgan; Saturn Returns (Ace), by Sean Williams; Shadowplay (DAW), by Tad Williams; The Silver Sword (Tor), by David Zindell; and Making Money (HarperCollins), by Terry Pratchett.
Used to be that the small presses published mostly collections and anthologies, but these days they’re active in the novel market as well. Novels issued by small presses included: Endless Things (Small Beer Press), by John Crowley; Tsunami (Aqueduct Press), by L. Timmel Duchamp; Generation Loss (Small Beer Press), by Elizabeth Hand; Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft (Ramble House), by Richard A. Lupoff; The Spiral Labyrinth (Night Shade Books), by Matthew Hughes; The Commons (Robert Sawyer Books), by Matthew Hughes; The Guardener’s Tale (Sam’s Dot), by Bruce Boston; The Secret Books of Paradys (Overland Press), by Tanith Lee; Butcher Bird (Night Shade Books), by Richard Kadrey; Softspoken (Night Shade Books), by Lucius Shepard; and Precious Dragon (Night Shade Books), by Liz Williams. Howard Waldrop’s long-awaited The Moone World was announced by Wheatland Press but didn’t actually appear, so I guess we’ll just have to wait some more.
Associational novels by people connected with the science fiction and fantasy fields included: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (Tor), by Philip K. Dick; Voices from the Street (Tor), by Philip K. Dick; Dark Reflections (Carroll & Graf), by Samuel R. Delany; A Wrongful Death (Mira), by Kate Wilhelm; The Heart of Horses (Houghton Mifflin), by Molly Gloss, and You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem. Novels that dance on the ambiguous razor’s-edge between SF and the thriller novel, some tipping one way, some the other, included: Quantico (Vanguard), by Greg Bear; Spook Country (Putnam), by William Gibson; The H-Bomb Girl (Faber & Faber), by Stephen Baxter; and Players (Simon & Schuster UK) and Cowboy Angels (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley, if considered as “technothrillers” rather than near-future SF novels. Some mainstream critics seem to be making an attempt to distance books such as Dan Simmons’s The Terror and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union from the genre ( just as they did with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last year), but the fantastic elements in each are clear.
First novels included Breakfast with the Ones You Love (Bantam Spectra), by Eliot Fintushel; Radio Freefall (Tor), by Matthew Jarpe; The Outback Stars (Tor), by Sandra McDonald; The Name of the Wind (DAW), by Patrick Rothfuss; One for Sorrow (Bantam Spectra), by Christopher Barzak; Jade Tiger (Juno), by Jenn Reese; Wicked Lovely (HarperCollins Children’s Books UK), by Melissa Marr; The Summoner (Solaris), by Gail Z. Martin; Spaceman Blues: A Love Story (Tor), by Brian Francis Slattery; Maledicte (Del Rey), by Lane Robins; Grey (Night Shade Books), by Jon Armstrong; KOP (Tor), by Warren Hammond; Crooked Little Vein (Morrow), by Warren Ellis; The Princes of the Golden Cage (Night Shade Books), by Nathalie Mallet; The Book of Joby (Tor), by Mark J. Ferrari; Winterbirth (Orbit), by Brian Bukley; Amberlight (Juno), by Sylvia Kolso; and City of Bones (McElderry), by Cassandra Clare. None of these novels stuck out of the pack, in terms of the critical attention paid to them, as other first novels have done in other years; probably the Fintushel and the Jarpe got reviewed the most frequently, and the McDonald made it on to the Preliminary Nebula Ballot.
The best-selling novel of the year, of course, was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic), which outsold everything else by an enormous margin, perhaps even everything else combined. In my neighborhood, special postmen were assigned for the sole purpose of delivering mail-ordered copies of the new Harry Potter to those who had ordered it—which, it seemed, meant at least two or three houses in every block. My guess is that we’ll never see anything like this again in our lifetimes.
As usual, these lists contain fantasy novels and odd-genre-mixing hybrids that are difficult to categorize, but, far from being a vanishing br
eed, as is sometimes suggested, most of them are good solid unambiguous center-core SF—the McDonald, the Haldeman, the MacLeod, the Baker, the Wilson, the Reynolds, the Goonan, the Schroeder, the Steele, the Baxter, the Scalzi, the Ashers, and more than twenty other titles. Many of them hard science fiction as well. There’s no shortage of science fiction out there on the shelves, if you bother to look for it, probably more than any one person will have time to read in a given year.
Even discounting Print-on-Demand books from places such as Wildside Press, and the availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads on internet sources such as Fictionwise, and through reprints issued by The Science Fiction Book Club, this is the best time in decades to pick up reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels. Producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably difficult to impossible, but here’s some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year:
Tor reissued: Soldier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe, Sky Coyote, by Kage Baker, Hellstrom’s Hive, by Frank Herbet, The White Plague, by Frank Herbet; Psion, by Joan D. Vinge, The Martian Child, by David Gerrold; Empire, by Orson Scott Card, and Eon, Legacy, and Eternity, all by Greg Bear; Orb reissued: Slan, by A.E. Van Vogt, Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson, Memory and Dream, by Charles de Lint, Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, Moving Mars, by Greg Bear, and Experation Date, and Earthquake Weather, both by Tim Powers; HarperFantasy reissued: Stardust, by Neil Gaiman; Pyr reissued: The Man Who Melted, by Jack Dann, and Ivory, by Mike Resnick, Ace reissued: Mother of Storms, by Ian R. MacLeod, and Lunar Descent, Orbital Decay, and Clarke County, Space, all by Allen M. Steele; DAW reissued Pretender, by C.J. Cherryh; Penguin/Signet reissued: The Stand, by Stephen King; Cosmos reissued: Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper, The Door Through Space, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, If Wishes Were Horses, by Anne McCaffrey, Star Born, by Andre Norton, and People of the Dark, by Robert E. Howard; Roc reissued: The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle, and Lady of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley; Tachyon reissued: A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle; Bantam Spectra reissued: The Armageddon Rag, by George R.R. Martin; Fairwood Press reissued: Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin; Paizo/Planet Stories reissued: Almuric, by Robert E. Howard, The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett, and The City of the Beast/Warriors of Mars, by Michael Moorcock; Night Shade Books reissued: The Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams; MonkeyBrain Books reissued: The Hollow Earth, by Rudy Rucker; BenBella Books reissued: Prophet, by Mike Resnick; Overlook reissued: Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake, Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock, and The Unreasoning Mask, by Philip Jose Farmer; and Edgeworks Abbey reissued the associational novel Spider Kiss, by Harlan Ellison.
In addition to the omnibus collections which mix short stories and novels, which I’ve mostly listed in the short-story collection section below, there was an omnibus of four novels by Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigma of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Ubik), issued as Four Novels of the 1960s (Library of America), selected by Jonathan Lethem, which marks the first time the highly prestigious Library of America has dained to treat a science fiction writer to this kind of literary canonization (although horror writer H.P. Lovecraft got lionized before him). There was also a novel omnibus of the famous “Harold Shea” novels by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Mathematics of Magic (NESFA Press); an omnibus of novels by Patricia A. McKillip, Cygnet (Ace), an omnibus of Glen Cook’s “Black Company” novels, Chronicles of the Black Company (Tor), and an omnibus of two short novels or long novellas by Ray Bradbury, Now and Forever (Morrow). In addition, many omnibuses of novels—and many individual novels—are reissued each year by The Science Fiction Book Club as well as being made available electronically online, too many to individually list here.
It’s too early to venture a prediction as to what novel is going to win the major awards next year; my track record has not been great at this anyway. Your guess is as good as mine.
2007 was another good year for short-story collections, especially in the area of big career-spanning retrospectives. The best collection of the year, and one of the best in some time, was The Jack Vance Treasury (Subterranean), by Jack Vance, although other first-rate career retrospectives included Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (Subterranean), by Bruce Sterling, Things Will Never Be the Same, Selected Short Fiction 1980–2005 (Old Earth), by Howard Waldrop, The Winds of Marble Arch (Subterranean), by Connie Willis, and The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg : To the Dark Star (Subterranean), by Robert Silverberg. Other good retrospective collections included: To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories (Baen) by Poul Anderson (an omnibus also containing the novel After Doomsday); When the People Fell (Baen), by Cordwainer Smith; Rynemonn (couer de lion), by Terry Dowling; The Long Twilight and Other Stories (Baen), by Keith Laumer (an omnibus that also contains the novels Night of Delusions and The Long Twilight); The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume II: The Door to Saturn (Night Shade Books), by Clark Ashton Smith; The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (Darkside Press), by Clifford D. Simak; Shadow Yard and Other Stories (Darkside Press), by Clifford D. Simak; The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: Crimson Shadows (Del Rey), by Robert E. Howard; The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volune 2: Grim Lands (Del Rey), by Robert E. Howard; The Skyscraper and Other Tales from the Pulps (Wildside), by Murry Leinster; A Niche in Time (Darkside Press), by William F. Nolan; The Childless Ones (Darkside Press), by Daniel F. Galouye; The Trouble With Humans (Baen), by Christopher Anvil; and The Nail and the Oracle (North Atlantic), by Theodore Sturgeon.
Any list of the best collections of 2007 would also have to include Gods and Pawns (Tor), by Kage Baker; Water Rites (Fainwood Press), by Mary Rosenblum (an omnibus that also includes the novel The Drylands); Overclocked (Thunder’s Mouth), by Cory Doctorow; The Dog Said Bow-Wow (Tachyon), by Michael Swanwick; Getting to Know You (Subterranean), by David Marusek; The Girl Who Loved Animals (Golden Gryphon), by Bruce McAllister, Promised Land (PS Publishing), by Jack Dann; Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books), by Paolo Bachigalupi; and Dagger Key and Other Stories (PS Publishing), by Lucius Shepard. Other good collections included The Fate of Mice (Tachyon), by Susan Palwick; Hart & Boot (Night Shade Books), by Tim Pratt; New Amsterdam (Subterranean Press), by Elizabeth Bear; Portable Childhoods (Tachyon), by Ellen Klages; The God of the Razor (Subterranean), by Joe R. Lansdale (an omnibus that also contains the novel The Nightrunners); M Is for Magic (HarperCollins), by Neil Gaiman; 20th Century Ghosts (Morrow), by Joe Hill; Worshipping Small Gods (Prime), by Richard Parks; A Thousand Deaths (Golden Gryphon), by George Alec Effinger (an omnibus that also contains the novel The Wolves of Memory); Ten Sigmas and Other Stories (Fairwood Press), by Paul Melko; Dangerous Space (Aqueduct), by Kelley Eskridge; Lord John and the Hand of Devils (Delacorte), by Diana Gabaldon; The Spaces Between the Lines (Subterranean), by Peter Crowther; An Alternate History of the 21st Century (Spilt Milk Press), by William Shunn; Aliens of the Heart (Aqueduct), by Carolyn Ives Gilman; Ice, Iron and Gold (Night Shade Books), by S.M. Stirling; The Involuntary Human (NESFA Press), by David Gerrold; The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories (Two Free Lancer Press), by Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer; Moon Flights (Night Shade Books), by Elizabeth Moon; Mad Professor: The Uncollected Stories of Rudy Rucker (Thunder’s Mouth), by Rudy Rucker; The Sam Gunn Omnibus (Tor), by Ben Bova; Tales from the Woeful Platypus (Subterranean), by Caitlin R. Kiernan; The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (Zubaan), by Vandana Singh; The Bone Key (Prime), by Sarah Monette; Absalom’s Mother and Other Stories (Fairwood Press), by Louise Marley; The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade Books), by Laird Barron; Twice Dead Things (Elder Signs Press), by A.A. Attanasio; The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain Books), by Kim Newman; and The Guild of Xenolinguists (Golden Gryphon), by Shila Finch.
Even more than usual, the collections field was dominated by the small-presses this year, with few collections to be found fr
om the regular trade publishers. (Although Baen Books should be complimented on bucking this trend, and are providing an invaluable service in returning the short work of long-unavailable authors to print.) Subterranean in particular had a terrific year, publishing one excellent collection after another, and establishing themselves as one of the real powerhouses in the entire collections area; Night Shade Books and Tachyon had pretty strong years as well.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 111
