The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  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 magazine 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).

  Two very promising new fiction semiprozines debuted in 2004, one American and one British, Argosy and Postscripts respectively. Argosy, one of the handsomest and most expensive-looking semiprozines ever published—with a gorgeous cover by the Dillons, perhaps the most prestigious artists ever to produce a semiprozine cover—came out in a package of two shrink-wrapped volumes in a slipcase, each package containing a “regular” issue of the magazine and a separately bound novella. The buzz about Argosy was immediate, widespread, and intense, probably the most buzz any semiprozine launch had garnered in the industry since the launch of Century, and it seemed clearly headed for success—but then it hit a roadblock. The chain bookstores objected to its unusual format, supposedly because they didn’t know how to shelve it (the same thing that killed the Tor Doubles in the eighties), and refused to carry it. Intense warfare broke out behind the scenes between Argosy’s publisher and the chains. By the time the second edition came out (in two different versions, a “connoisseur edition” with the slipcase and the novella, and a “proletariat” edition consisting of just the “regular” magazine), editor Lou Anders had left Argosy to launch the new Pyr SF line for Prometheus Books, and the third issue did not come out as scheduled; as months went by without it, the future of the magazine began to look questionable. Toward the end of the year, an announcement was made that the third issue of Argosy was about to ship—although by press time we hadn’t seen it yet. The announcement was also unclear about whether Argosy would be continuing after that, or who the editor would be if it did (Anders presumably bought the stuff for the third issue). In the two issues it managed in 2004, Argosy published good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jeffery Ford, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Mike Resnick, and others. The British Postscripts, although still a good-looking magazine, is nowhere nearly as upscale or ambitious in its packaging as Argosy, which is probably a good thing, as it may increase its chances of survival. It publishes a mix of SF, slipstream, soft horror, and even some mystery, and in the two issues it produced this year produced good stuff by Peter F. Hamilton, Brian Stableford, Eric Brown, Jack Dann, Jay Lake, Jeff VanderMeer, and others. Let’s hope that Postscripts can stay afloat in the treacherous seas of the semiprozine market, because, produced as it is by two of the sharpest people in the business, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, its potential is enormous.

  I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market anymore, so I’ll limit myself to saying that among the most prominent magazines there, as far as I can tell at a distance, seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, and Talebones, and that a new horror magazine edited by Marvin Kaye, H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, was launched this year and managed two issues, publishing interesting stories by Holly Phillips, Tim Pratt, and Michael Jasper; Weird Tales provided intriguing stories by Tanith Lee, Charles Harness, and Ian Watson.

  There are only a few survivors left in the critical magazine market (most new critical magazines that start up these days do so in e-magazine form, not in print formats, a trend I expect to see continue), but those still left standing are solid and reliable. If you can only afford one magazine in this category, then the one to get, as always, is Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews for anyone intere
sted in science fiction, particularly valuable for writers and would-be writers; new editor Jennifer A. Hall left this year, with former editor Charles N. Brown coming out of semi-retirement to replace her. After a couple of shaky years, when it was missing issues, new(ish) editor John Douglas has returned Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle) to being a solid, interesting, reliably published newsmagazine again. Another reliably published magazine, one that has reliably kept its publication schedule for more than a decade now (something of a miracle in the semiprozine world!) is David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine, The New York Review of Science Fiction, probably the most accessible and entertaining to read of the critical magazines, some of which can get formidably abstract and scholarly. The people who put out The Third Alternative were publishing a short-fiction review magazine called The Fix, but I didn’t see any issues this year (which, of course, considering it’s published on the other side of the Atlantic, doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t still doing it).

  I suspect that the destiny of most print semiprozines is to eventually become online e-magazines, just as print fanzines have largely been replaced by the blog. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them while they’re here, though!

  (Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $60 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $36 per year, make checks payable to “Dragon Press,” 12 issues; Postscripts, PS Publishing, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, England, UK, published quarterly, £30 to £50, outside the UK; Argosy Magazine, Coppervale International, P.O. Box 1421, Taylor, AZ, 85939, $49.95 for a six-issue subscription; Interzone, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, $36 for a six-issue subscription, make checks payable to “TTA Press”; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK, $36 for a six-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; The Fix: The Review of Short Fiction, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. B6 2LB, England, UK, $36 for a six-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; Talebones, A Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, $20 for four issues; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $22 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine , 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $24.00 Canadian for a four-issue subscription; Jupiter, Ian Redman, 23 College Green, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 4JR, UK, £9 for a four-issue subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $50 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars”; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland; $25 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One”; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude. The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, Chronicle—all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988, all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, although you can get a group subscription to four DNA fiction magazines for $60 a year, with Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $15 for a four-issue subscription; Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn New York 11230-6011, $15 for a four-issue subscription, checks payable to LRC Publications; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Avenue, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060, $16 for four issues; Say … , The Fortress of Worlds, P.O. Box 1304, Lexington, KY 40588-1304. $10 for two issues in the U.S and Canada; Alchemy, Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238, $7 for an issue; Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, Conical Hats Press, 622 West Cottom Avenue, New Albany, IN 47150-5011, $12 for a three-issue subscription; Flytrap, Tropism Press, P.O. Box 13322, Berkeley, CA 94712-4222, $16 for four issues, checks to Heather Shaw; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 127, Belmont, Western Australia, 6984, $35 for a one-year subscription; Hadrosaur Tales, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194, $16.50 for a three-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Hadrosaur Productions”; Electric Velocipede, $15 for a four-issue subscription—it seems like you can only order this online, so for more subscription information, check their website at www.members.aol.com/evzine/index. html; Space and Time: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction Space and Time, 138 West 70th Street (4B), New York, NY 10023-4468, $10 for a one-year (two-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, $15 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription, Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, 132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill, MD 21050, $27 for six issues; H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Wildside Press LLC, P.O. Box 301, Holicong, PA 18928-0301, four issues for $19.95.)

  It wasn’t a bad year overall for original anthologies, with one major SF and one major fantasy anthology; as for the rest of year’s anthologies, most of them may have contained only a few really good stories apiece, but there were a lot of them published, especially in SF, an encouraging sign.

  The best original SF anthology of the year was undoubtedly Between Planets (SFBC), edited by Robert Silverberg, a collection of six original novellas, only available as a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. The best stories here are those by Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, and James Patrick Kelly, but nothing in the anthology is less than good, and I would expect to see most of these novellas (the others are by Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, and Silverberg himself) turn up on one Best Stories of the Year list or another. (As an old dinosaur, solidly retro and uncool in his tastes, it struck me as a nice change to see an anthology that featured nothing but solid, center-core SF instead of the trendy genrebending and mixing that many of the year’s other anthologies attempted to one extent or another.)

  It’s harder to come up with a clear follow-up candidate for best original SF anthology, although all the anthologies I’m about to mention are worth reading. Synergy SF: New Science Fiction (Five Star), edited by George Zebrowski, and Microcosms (DAW), edited by Gregory Benford, are both anthologies that have spent several years on the shelf in publishing limbo before finally being published (since 1996 in Synergy’s case!), and it shows to some extent. Still, Synergy SF features an excellent novelette by Eleanor Arnason and good work by Charles L. Harness, Damien Broderick, Jan Lars Jensen, and others, and Microcosms features a first-rate novelette by Pamela Sargent, as well as good work by Tom Purdom, Stephen Baxter, Jack McDevitt, and others. The best story in Space Stations (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, is by newcomer Brendan DuBois, but the anthology also features strong work by James Cobb, Pamela Sargent, Jean Rabe, Julie E. Czerneda, Jack Williamson, Gregory Benford, and others, and at mass-market prices is a good value for your money. Much the same could be said, although it’s not quite as strong overall, for Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Sol Space (Baen), edited by TKF Weisskopf, which featured good work by Allen M. Steele, Jack McDevitt, James P. Hogan, Wes Spencer, Gregory Benford, and others, as well as a posthumous story by Charles Sheffield. A mixed fantasy and SF (mostly fantasy) anthology about dogs, Sirius, The Dog Star (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter, was weaker than either of the last two books named, but still had interesting work by Tanya Huff, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michelle West, and others. Visions of Liberty (Baen), edited by Mark Tier and Martin H. Greenberg, was a bit too didactically libertarian for my taste, although your mileage
may vary. A few years back, I criticized the “black SF” anthology Dark Matter for not having much actual science fiction in it, but that’s a charge that can’t be laid against So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (Arsenal Pulp Press), edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan; although it contains some fantasy and some fabulism (mostly flavored with Caribbean folklore), So Long Been Dreaming also features some strong science fiction, just as promised, and, what’s more, SF infused with a cultural perspective rarer than it should be in the genre. The standout story here is by Vandana Singh, but there’s also powerful work by Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston, Karin Lowachee, Greg van Eekhout, devorah major, Tobias S. Buckell, and others.

  Some of the most interesting anthologies of the year were Alternate History anthologies, most of which mixed Alternate History with fantasy (in fact, Alternate History Fantasy seems to be emerging as a subsubgenre of late) and/or fabulism/slipstream/Magic Realism/whatever we’re calling it this year. The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age (Tor), edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle, features one SF story (appropriately enough, a time-travel story by the late Poul Anderson; I’ve seen the Gene Wolfe story here listed as an SF story too, but although it’s true that it’s also a time-travel story, it also features the literal physical existence of gods and man-eating giants, which stretches the definition a bit), and one nearly impossible-to-categorize story (by Gregory Feeley), with the rest falling pretty solidly into the Alternate History Fantasy camp. Overall, it’s a strong anthology, with the best stories being the aforementioned stories by Anderson, Wolfe, and Feeley, although the book also has good work by Lois Tilton, Brenda Clough, Judith Tarr, and Turtledove himself. A similar mix of Alternate History, fantasy, and hard-to-classify stuff characterizes Conqueror Fantastic (DAW), edited by Pamela Sargent; the best work here is probably by Sargent herself (one of the fantasies) and James Morrow (one of the unclassifiables), but the anthology also features good work by Kij Johnson, Jack Dann, Stephen Dedman, the late George Alec Effinger, and others. ReVisions (DAW), edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel, sticks a little more closely to core Alternate History; although some of the Alternate History scenarios featured are pretty unlikely, none stretch as far as giants or centaurs or ghosts. Best stuff here is by Geoffrey A. Landis and Kage Baker, along with entertaining stories by Laura Anne Gilman, John G. Mc-Daid, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross, the editors themselves, and others. All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (Wheatland Press), edited by Jay Lake and David Moles, is not so much a sober Alternate History anthology (the cover makes this clear, if the title doesn’t) as an attempt to create a collection of stories infused with a sort of playful retropulp sensibility in worlds where zeppelins continued to fulfill a major role in international affairs after World War II. Some of the authors included play this fairly straight, speculating on social/economic factors that might have helped the zeppelin endure, while others push it well beyond “plausible” to a heightened deliberate absurdity, including tales of zeppelin-borne civilizations that must remain forever aloft and stories that feature living mile-long zeppelins that darken the skies in great herds over the American plains. Fortunately, few of the stories take themselves too seriously, and the anthology is a lot of fun in a sly, sardonic way; the best stories here are by David D. Levine and Benjamin Rosenbaum, but there’s also good work by James L. Cambias, James Van Pelt, Paul Berger, Tobias S. Buckell, and others, plus a classic reprint by Howard Waldrop. (There were several other zeppelin stories published here and there this year, including a long one in SCI FICTION by Gary W. Shockley, although whether they were originally intended for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories and were rejected or missed the deadline or whether it’s just “zeppelin time” this year, as last year seemed to be “dragon time,” is difficult to say.)