The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

Young Adult fantasy and SF lines also keep proliferating. Wizards of the Coast is launching a new YA fantasy line called Mirrorstone; Penguin is launching Razorbill; Abram’s Books for Young Readers is bringing us Amulet; Bloomsbury USA is launching Bloomsbury Paperbacks; and Houghton Mifflin is starting Graphia.

  (In other editorial news, Jennifer Hershey has moved to Random House, where she’s become editorial director, and Sharyn November has been promoted to editorial director of Firebird Books, although she will still continue as senior editor of Viking Children ’s/Puffin Books.)

  The year 2004 also saw the opening of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington, the first major museum devoted to science fiction in the entire world.

  The major, wide-sweeping changes in the nature of publishing itself that have been hanging over the horizon for quite a while now seemed to inch a bit closer to reality this year as well. For a number of years, the more wide-eyed and enthusiastic cyberoptimists have been predicting industrywide changes driven by such technological innovations as “smart paper,” better and cheaper e-books, and instant “print on demand” printing of books in bookstores. In fact, these changes have been predicted for so long that they have become a joke to some Luddite critics. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still coming, although everything takes a lot longer to actually come into widespread social use than the visionaries initially predicted. Not too many years back, when Amazon.com had yet to run into the black, critics were laughing at it and other online booksellers, saying they were a fad that would never last, but today the online booksellers are an established and rapidly expanding part of the book industry. Penguin Group USA has even started selling all of its titles directly to customers via its own Web sites. The commercial potential of e-books was widely dismissed after the dot.com bubble burst, but there are signs that this industry may be reviving as well; certainly the e-book-selling site Fictionwise, which the more cynical industry insiders were predicting wouldn’t last a year, still seems to be going strong. Sales of electronic subscriptions and downloads for PDA through sites like PeanutPress are increasing as well.

  The future may take longer to arrive than you think that it will, but sooner or later it gets here, notwithstanding.

  In 2004 circulation continued declining slowly for most in the ailing magazine market—throughout the entire magazine industry, in fact, way outside of genre boundaries—but at least, as of press time, we hadn’t lost any major markets, knock wood (although it looked for a minute, however, as if we were going to; see below). Some new magazines were even started, although many of them immediately ran into difficulties of their own. (See the summations for the Twenty-First, Twentieth, Nineteenth, and Eighteenth annual collections for more about the technical reasons behind the decline in circulation and how it has affected nearly every magazine in the country, not just genre titles; I get tired of rehashing the same material, especially as, judging by the questions I get asked at conventions and online forums, nobody is listening anyway.)

  Asimov’s Science Fiction registered an 8.9 percent loss in overall circulation in 2004, gaining 995 in new subscriptions, from 22,933 to 23,933 (miniscule, but a gain nevertheless), but losing 3,732 in newsstand sales, dropping from 7,668 to 3,936, and sell-through dropped from 60 percent to 34 percent. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered an 18 percent loss in overall circulation in 2004, losing 3,899 in subscriptions, from 31,715 to 27,816, while newsstand sales declined by 3,427, falling from 8,883 to 5,456, and sell-through dropped from a record 61 percent to 50 percent. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 11.8 percent loss in overall circulation, losing 1,529 in subscriptions, from 16,562 to 15,033, while newsstand sales declined by 995, from 4,881 to 3,886, and sell-through fell from 44 percent to 40 percent. No current circulation figures were available for Realms of Fantasy by press time, but their 2003 figures shows them dropping from 20,541 in 2002 to 18,337 in 2003 in subscriptions, but rising from 5,472 to 8,995 in newsstand sales for an overall gain of 5.1 percent.

  Nobody likes to see these kinds of figures, but they don’t necessarily, mean that the genre magazines are doomed; there’s a lot of built-in margin, including the fact that digest-sized magazines are so cheap to produce that you don’t have to sell many of them to break even. Nevertheless, these kinds of losses can’t go on indefinitely without leading sooner or later to disaster. The next couple of years will be critical for the genre magazines, which must somehow not only stop their slow decline but also turn it around and rebuild circulation if they are to survive. That’s why I’m urging all readers to take the time to subscribe to one of the genre magazines if they like having a lot of short SF and fantasy out there to read every year. It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines because you can now do it electronically online with the click of a few buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. Don’t procrastinate—just put this book down right now and go to your computer and do it!

  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/index.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 (ww.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 an
d 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).