The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  While all this furor has been going on, starting in February of 1995, Omni Online began “publishing” a new novella every month in electronic format. Some of these novellas have since shown up in print format, while some are still available to be read only as phosphor dots on a computer screen (unless you download them and print them out, of course). The quality of these novellas has been very high, ranging from good to excellent, including a few of the year’s best stories. The Omni Online series, featuring work by such prominent writers as Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, Jack Dann, Paul J. McAuley, Robert Silverberg, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and many others, has greatly increased the number of good novellas available this year … a very positive thing, since there are few places in the genre where it is possible to sell a novella. Only Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and, now, Science Fiction Age are able to accommodate them—which in turn discourages writers from attempting to write them in the first place. So it’s great to see a new market for novellas, encouraging authors to write more of them, especially as I consider the novella to be perhaps the form most perfectly suited for the production of good science fiction. On the other hand, I get the uneasy feeling that almost nobody is actually reading these novellas, even the bulk of the core SF-reading audience—certainly they are not showing up on award ballots or even nomination lists or recommended reading lists in anything like a proportion commensurate with their quality. If this is true, it may bode ill for the eventual success of this series. We’re in unknown territory here, however, so it’s anybody’s guess as to what will happen; perhaps the availability of these novellas on the World Wide Web will not only help the core SF-reading audience catch up with them but find them vast new audiences as well. It’s an encouraging sign that even after the publication of the initial six novellas commissioned by Dodge Neon, Omni Online has continued to publish a novella a month, continuing through the early months of 1996, and is still continuing to do so as I type these words. Only time will tell if this is indeed the opening-up of an exciting new frontier or merely a doomed dead end. Award-winning editor Ellen Datlow has been maintained as the fiction editor for both the “electronic online magazine” version of Omni on America Online and the Omni Online series of novellas, which is good news, and another encouraging sign.

  Other major stories in this market this year were as grim or grimmer, alas. Amazing was shopped around by parent company TSR throughout 1994, found no buyers, and at last officially died in 1995, after publishing one final digest-sized issue, dated as winter 1995. Thus ends its remarkable sixty-nine-year history. Amazing has been pronounced dead before during the twenty years I’ve been editing Best of the Year anthologies, only to come miraculously back to life in another form, but I get the glum feeling that this time, in this economically depressed publishing climate, it’s not going to be able to pull off its usual Lazarus trick, and that it’s gone for good. Several anthologies designed to use up Amazing’s leftover inventory are apparently scheduled to be published, and one actually did make it into the bookstores in 1995 (see below). Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine managed to publish two issues in 1995, one a special “Jesus” issue guest-edited by Damon Knight, and then was killed by editor-publisher Dean Wesley Smith, who is closing down both Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine and Pulphouse Publishing in general in order to devote more time to his own career as a fiction writer. Thus ends, with a whimper rather than a bang, the history of Pulphouse Publishing, one of the most ambitious small-press publishing programs of our times, and a line that only a few years back was widely expected to evolve into one of the major players in the SF publishing scene of the nineties. The print edition of the revived Galaxy was killed this year as well, although supposedly it too will continue as an “electronic online magazine”; I can’t say that I’ll miss Galaxy much, since, frankly, most of the fiction in it struck me as dreadful. Louis L’ Amour’s Western Magazine, a stablemate of Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction which occasionally featured borderline or associational work by SF writers such as Steven Utley and W. M. Shockley, died, proving too expensive to produce in a large, full-size format even though it had reached a respectable circulation (by digest-magazine standards) of 130,000 copies per issue. Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, formerly Weird Tales before a title change was forced on it last year, only managed to publish one issue this year out of its supposed quarterly schedule, but they promised to make a comeback next year, and I hope that they do. Along similar lines, Aboriginal SF, which was declared officially dead in the early spring of 1995, may not be quite so dead after all—editor Charles Ryan has announced that Aboriginal SF will return to print in 1996. Industry insiders remain skeptical of this, but time will tell; meanwhile, we wish them well.

  It was another precarious year for the three major digest magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which all continued to lose circulation to one degree or another, with Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction undergoing some major internal changes as well.

  Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction—particularly Asimov’s—suffered from being dropped from Publisher’s Clearing House “stamp cards” as a belt-tightening measure by PCH. Analog lost about 4,000 in subscriptions and another 1,000 in newsstand sales, for a 7.1 percent loss in overall circulation. Asimov’s Science Fiction lost about 9,000 in subscriptions (most of these PCH “stamp” subscriptions) and another 1,000 in newsstand sales, for a 16.9 percent loss in overall circulation (a possible minor bright spot here is that early 1996 figures show the newsstand/bookstore sales creeping up by about a thousand copies). The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had lost almost 10 percent of its overall circulation in 1994, managed to slow its losses to the point where it almost broke even in 1995, losing 600 newsstand sales but gaining 391 subscription sales, thus losing only 209 copies overall, a very encouraging sign. Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction got a new president and publisher, Carla Graubard, replacing Joachim P. Rosler, who himself had replaced Christoph Haas-Heye only six months earlier. Early in 1996, it was decided that, as an economizing move in the face of rising paper costs, Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction would drop sixteen pages per issue, and would also be cut back to a schedule of publishing eleven times per year, ten regular issues plus one “double” issue on sale for two months, the same yearly schedule followed by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Then, only hours ago as I typed the final clean copy of this summation, it was announced that Dell Magazines, including Analog and Asimov’s and the two mystery magazines Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s, as well as a large number of crossword-puzzle and astrology magazines, had been sold to Penny Press, a family-owned Connecticut-based publisher.

  This could turn out to be a positive change for Analog and Asimov’s, which have been hurt by the huge corporate overhead and corporate rent charged against them by the parent corporation Bertelsmann, eating into the profitability, making them more marginal than they had been at a much smaller company such as Davis Publications, where the overhead had been correspondingly lower. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, is in the enviable position of having very low overhead, produced as it is by a minimal staff pretty much out of the living rooms of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Ed Ferman, so the magazine’s profitability stays high. In like fashion, a smaller company, with much smaller corporate overhead, could send the relative profitability of Analog and Asimov’s soaring, even if there was no immediate increase in overall circulation.

  Let’s hope that this optimistic scenario is the one that comes to pass. Although you can, of course, discount this opinion—since I am, after all, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction—I still feel that the three digest magazines are the real core of the field, providing what little continuity and cohesive sense of community there is in the genre these days, as well as showcasing emerging new writers, and that the loss of them would be a devastating blow to science fiction—one that in the long run
might even prove fatal to the evolution of the SF genre as a genre, eliminating most of the continuity from one literary generation to another. So keep your fingers crossed that the traditional digest magazines manage to survive through the precarious days ahead.

  The British magazine Interzone completed its fifth full year as a monthly publication and won its first Hugo—oddly, because of circulation requirements, in the semiprozine category. Overall circulation was down slightly again, continuing a trend a couple of years old, but the magazine passed its hundredth-issue anniversary, a rare benchmark in a genre crammed with short-lived magazines, and—I hope!—doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger of vanishing. The literary quality of the stories remained high, perhaps a bit higher than last year overall (although, because of the way things fell out, I actually ended up using fewer stories from Interzone in this year’s Best than in last year’s), perhaps because they seemed to be using less fantasy this year; the quality of the fantasy stories in Interzone has in general not been very good, and it’s my own opinion that they would be better off sticking mainly to science fiction, as, for instance, in the interesting (although very uneven) “high-tech” issue guest-edited by Charles Platt. Overall, Interzone is one of the most reliable genre sources in which to find first-rate material—rating right up there, in my of course biased opinion, with magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (I still think that the much-vaunted “redesign” of the magazine has done nothing but make it uglier and harder to read, but perhaps that’s just my old-fashioned taste.) Talking to British fans while in Scotland for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I was dismayed by how little support for Interzone there seems to be among the British fannish community, with many fans actually saying that they hoped it would die soon. I remember a similar attitude in British fandom in the late sixties about New Worlds magazine—it was shortsighted then, and it’s even more shortsighted now. Without Interzone, the already depressed British SF publishing scene would become a wasteland, and there would be no place left for new British writers to develop their craft. Most of the people who decry Interzone as being “artsy” and “not really science fiction” conveniently forget that Interzone helped to develop major new writers such as Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Iain Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Ian R. MacLeod, and others—almost all of whom are hard-science writers, and some of whom are writing “hard science fiction” in as pure and rigorous a form as it has ever been written. If these people are not writing science fiction, I’d like to know who is. No, far from being the “marginal” artsy not-kosher not-really-SF magazine that some British fans claim that it is, Interzone is and has been vital to the evolution of science fiction in the eighties and nineties, and I personally hope that it continues to be so for many years to come.

  Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow, two newish large-size SF magazines, each successfully completed their third full year of publication. The overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped slightly for the first time since its launch in 1993; it lost about 1,476 subscription sales and 3,536 newsstand sales, for a 9 percent loss in overall circulation; the magazine attributes most of this loss to readers switching to their newly launched sister fantasy magazine, Realms of Fantasy, which is a reasonable explanation, as long as the circulation doesn’t continue to drop. Last year, editor Scott Edelman took me to task for speculating here—as many genre insiders were speculating at the time—about whether Science Fiction Age could really be profitable, considering how much more expensive it ought to be to produce a slick, full-color, large-format magazine like Science Fiction Age than a digest-sized magazine like Asimov’s or F&SF; in rebuttal, on one of the online networks, Scott insisted in no uncertain terms that Science Fiction Age was indeed doing very well financially. I’m glad to hear this and to stand corrected, especially since, considering what’s happening with most of the other SF magazines, the genre could certainly use a real success story—I must add, though, even at the price of irking Scott again, that his denials have done nothing to stop genre insiders from continuing to speculate along the same lines. I hope that it is true that Science Fiction Age is a resounding success, though, since it’s becoming clear that artistically Science Fiction Age is the most important new magazine to have been launched since the start-up of Asimov’s Science Fiction back in 1977. When Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow both launched, I actually preferred the fiction that Tomorrow was publishing, but the quality of the fiction in Tomorrow has stayed the same, or perhaps even worsened a bit, while that in Science Fiction Age has clearly improved during the same period, so that now I think that Science Fiction Age is inarguably pulling ahead of Tomorrow in terms of yearly overall literary quality. The general consensus of the field seems to be agreeing with this assessment—a story from Science Fiction Age has already won that magazine its first Nebula Award, stories from it have been on the final Hugo ballot, and a story from it is on this year’s final ballot for the Nebula Award as I type this.

  This is not to say that Tomorrow is a bad magazine, by any means; although its circulation, about three thousand copies, is minuscule compared to that of Science Fiction Age, it remains a thoroughly professional magazine in every way except circulation (to be fair, Science Fiction Age, which is backed by a publishing company, obviously has much greater financial resources—and access to distribution channels—than Tomorrow, which is run out of editor Algis Budrys’s living room), has kept to its schedule faithfully (something magazines with greater resources sometimes don’t manage to do), and continues to publish good fiction. Perhaps it’s fairer to say that although the average Science Fiction Age story and the average Tomorrow story are not that dissimilar in quality, Science Fiction Age has to date managed to publish more stories of a more exceptional quality, stories that stand out a bit above the general level of the rest of the stories the magazine published that year. Perhaps this is in part because Tomorrow chooses to publish lots of short-short stories per issue—a mistake that Pulphouse and Galaxy were also making—and it’s much rarer to come across a short-short story of exceptional quality (a really good short-short is perhaps the hardest thing in the business to write) than it is to find a longer story that works at a similar level of excellence. Science Fiction Age has been concentrating on longer stories, even recently adding a section printed on nonslick paper that enables it to publish novellas, and I think that this has helped to give it a slight overall edge over Tomorrow.

  In 1994, Science Fiction Age launched a companion magazine, Realms of Fantasy, a slick, large-size, full-color magazine devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction, edited by veteran magazine editor Shawna McCarthy. The magazine completed its first full year in 1995, and although it has yet to produce anything really exceptional, Realms of Fantasy did improve dramatically in quality this year, as I predicted it would, as McCarthy began to hit her editorial stride, and will probably continue to improve. The first professional magazine devoted entirely to fantasy to be launched for a number of years, Realms of Fantasy is looking increasingly important as fantasy anthology series such as Xanadu die, and fantasy magazines such as Worlds of Fantasy and Horror falter. Realms of Fantasy has already achieved a much higher level of consistent literary quality than the usually disappointing Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, the field’s other major fantasy magazine, and has already placed a story on this year’s final Nebula Award ballot, an unusual accomplishment for a magazine slightly more than a year old.

  As usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Mondo 2000 to Cricket to VB Tech. Playboy in particular, under fiction editor Alice K. Turner, continues to run a relatively large amount of SF. Promised for next year is a so-called Playboy rival, a competing men’s slick magazine called Rage, which is scheduled to use short SF from writers such as Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury.

  (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find
on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796, $29.90 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined October/November double issue, in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines Fiction Group, P.O. Box 5130, Harlan, IA 51593-5130, $33.97 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined October/November double issue; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $52 for an airmail one-year—twelve issues—subscription; Analog, Dell Magazines Fiction Group, P.O. Box 5133, Harlan, IA 51593-5133, $33.97 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined double issue; Tomorrow, The Unifont Company, Box 6038 Evanston, IL 60204, $20 for a one-year (six issues) subscription; Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Terminus Publishing Company, 123 Crooked Lane, King of Prussia, PA 19406-2570, $16 for four issues in U.S.)