The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
SUMMATION: 1985
Lucius Shepard
THE JAGUAR HUNTER
Michael Swanwick and William Gibson
DOGFIGHT
Frederik Pohl
FERMI AND FROST
Bruce Sterling
GREEN DAYS IN BRUNEI
John Crowley
SNOW
Orson Scott Card
THE FRINGE
Karen Joy Fowler
THE LAKE WAS FULL OF ARTIFICIAL THINGS
Robert Silverberg
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
James Patrick Kelly
SOLSTICE
Avram Davidson
DUKE PASQUALE’S RING
Joe Haldeman
MORE THAN THE SUM OF HIS PARTS
Nancy Kress
OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS
Walter Jon Williams
SIDE EFFECTS
James Tiptree, Jr.
THE ONLY NEAT THING TO DO
Bruce Sterling
DINNER IN AUDOGHAST
George R. R. Martin
UNDER SIEGE
Howard Waldrop
FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL
Lucius Shepard
A SPANISH LESSON
Pat Cadigan
ROADSIDE RESCUE
James P. Blaylock
PAPER DRAGONS
R. A. Lafferty
MAGAZINE SECTION
Lewis Shiner
THE WAR AT HOME
S.C. Sykes
ROCKABYE BABY
Kim Stanley Robinson
GREEN MARS
Honorable Mentions: 1985
Books by Gardner Dozois
Copyright Acknowledgements
Copyright
FOR
The Loud Philadelphians
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support:
Susan Casper, Virginia Kidd, Ellen Datlow, Sheila Williams, Shawna McCarthy, Jack Dann, Tim Sullivan, Gregory Frost, Michael Swanwick, Edward Ferman, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, David Hartwell, Patrick Delahunt, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, Pat Lo Brutto, Pat Cadigan, Shelley Frier, Lou Aronica, Lucius Shepard, Richard Grant, Martha Millard, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Joann Hill, and special thanks to my own editor, Jim Frenkel.
Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose newszine Locus (P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661; subscription rate: $31 for 12 issues by First Class Mail) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose newszine Science Fiction Chronicle (P.O. Box 4175, New York, N.Y. 10163-4175; subscription rate: $21 for one year) was also used as a reference source throughout.
INTRODUCTION
Summation: 1985
1985 was another good year for sales in SF, although some industry insiders are already saying that the record number of SF books published this year—1,322, according to the newszine Locus—will inevitably glut the market, causing a serious sales-slump somewhere down the road. Be that as it may, there were a lot of SF books published in 1985, and many of them sold very well indeed. Bluejay Books and Tor continued to expand, with Bluejay initiating a line of mystery novels, and Tor starting a new horror line. Baen Books completed its first full year of operation, as did Warner’s somewhat-disappointing Questar line. Bantam created a much-publicized new line, Bantam Spectra, publishing a combination of hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market editions. Ace and DAW announced plans for new hardcover lines. Arbor House had a strong first list in hardcover, and the first few titles appeared in the new Donald I. Fine hardcover line. Although 1984 had been dominated creatively by the new Ace Special line, there was, somewhat disappointingly, only one follow-up new Ace Special title released this year, although the regular Ace/Berkley lines released their usual flood of titles.
Many of the changes above had been set in motion in 1984. What changes there were that were unique to 1985 were also, unfortunately, usually negative, and sometimes tragic. Judy-Lynn del Rey, publisher and founder of Del Rey Books, suffered a stroke in October, lingered in a coma for several months, and died in early 1986. For several years, Del Rey Books has been the genre’s most commercially-successful SF line, annually dominating nationwide best-seller lists, and much—if not most—of that success was due to Judy-Lynn’s business acumen and marketing and packaging skills. With Judy-Lynn gone, major changes are obviously—inevitably—ahead for the Del Rey SF line, but as yet, no one can predict just what those changes will be.
Poor health has also forced changes—fortunately, somewhat less drastic ones—at DAW Books. Serious illness during 1985 forced publisher and founding editor Donald A. Wollheim into semiretirement. His daughter, Betsy Wollheim, took over as president and editor-in-chief; later, Sheila Gilbert moved from New American Library, where she had worked as editor for fourteen years, to DAW, where she became senior editor under Betsy Wollheim.
Also on the dark side of change, death claimed many other major SF personalities this year, including famous SF writers Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Herbert, and L. Ron Hubbard, SF artist Jack Gaughan, and editor and agent Robert P. Mills, among—unfortunately—many, many others.
Not all changes were negative, though. Shawna McCarthy left her job as editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to become senior editor at Bantam. Melissa Singer moved from Berkley to Tor, where she is editing their new horror line. John Silbersack became the new SF editor at NAL. And, at year’s end, Beth Meacham was promoted to editor-in-chief at Tor.
New writers generated much of the excitement again this year. Of the thirty-one writers represented on this year’s Final Nebula Ballot, only seven of them were writing before 1970, and only four of those were writing before 1960. This, too, is change.
* * *
Change was also in the air this year in the SF magazine market, with new magazines appearing or announced, others changing format and emphasis, some disappearing, and others changing editors.
Sales seemed to be generally down across the board for SF magazines this year (Omni’s sales were up, but Omni is not an Sf magazine, per se; rather it is a slick science-popularization magazine that regularly publishes SF stories as a small but significant proportion of its editorial mix), especially newsstand sales; newsstand sales for the digest-sized SF magazines, which seem to be losing the competition for newsstand rack display space to the recent glut of new large-format magazines, were particularly hard-hit.
However, the general decline in sales didn’t seem to discourage the publishers of several new SF magazines from throwing their hats into the ring. Stardate, an already-extant Star Trek gaming magazine, acquired David Bischoff as editor and Ted White as editorial director, and began changing their editorial mix to accommodate some non-gaming oriented general SF—the present mix seems to be about one third SF, one third Star Trek gaming articles, and one third media-oriented articles; Stardate is bi-monthly at the moment, but has announced plans to go monthly in 1986. Night Cry, which started out in 1984 as an anthology magazine reprinting stories from its sister publication The Twilight Zone Magazine, also changed
emphasis considerably in 1985, publishing a much higher percentage of original fiction and becoming, under editor Alan Rodgers, a lively little magazine in its own right; Night Cry is currently a quarterly magazine, and, oddly, has no subscription list, being available on the newsstand only.
Of the new magazines announced in 1984, the most upscale was the proposed L. Ron Hubbard’s To The Stars Science Fiction Magazine, envisioned as large-format slick magazine, with Terry Carr as fiction editor. Unfortunately, distribution and printing problems caused the first issue to be repeatedly postponed and pushed back throughout 1985. As of press time, it had also been postponed several times in early 1986. What effect, if any, the death of L. Ron Hubbard, mentioned above, will have on the magazine’s future is unknown. The British SF magazine Interzone survived another year, and even showed some signs of growth, going to full-color covers in 1985, for instance. There were no issues of the resurrected Weird Tales published in 1985, and that magazine can probably pretty safely be considered to be dead (again). Founding editor T.E.D. Klein left The Twilight Zone Magazine in mid-1985, and was replaced as editor by Michael Blaine. Blaine has promised substantial changes in TZ, and has already completely redesigned the magazine’s interior—it will be very interesting to see in what direction the magazine moves under his hand. Long-time Amazing editor George Scithers was dismissed in early 1986 by Amazing’s owners, TSR Hobbies. Henceforth, the magazine will be edited out of TSR headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; the new Amazing editor will be Patrick L. Price, currently fiction editor of TSR’s gaming magazine, The Dragon—it is yet to be seen what effect this changeover will have on the quality of the magazine’s fiction, or whether Amazing can be brought out of its current disasterous circulation slump. And, as mentioned above, longtime editor Shawna McCarthy left Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and was replaced as editor by Gardner Dozois. Although I (to move away from the coy use of third person here) took over in May, all 1985 issues of IAsfm were edited by Shawna McCarthy, with fiction purchased by me not beginning to appear in the magazine until the January 1986 issue.
This last-named change does pose certain problems for the compiling of this Summation. Even though no material purchased by me appeared in calendar 1985, as IAsfm editor I could be said to have a vested interest in the magazine’s success—so that anything negative I said about another SF magazine (particularly another digest-sized magazine, my direct competition), could be perceived as sour-grapes or, worse, an attempt to make my own magazine look good by tearing down the competition.
Aware of this constraint, I’ve decided that nobody can complain if I only say positive things about the competition … and so I’ve limited my comments on the individual magazines this year to a listing of some of the worthwhile authors published by each.
Omni published first-rate fiction this year by Howard Waldrop, Michael Swanwick, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, John Crowley, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, George R. R. Martin, Greg Bear, and others, and dominated the final Nebula Award ballot in the short-fiction category. Omni’s fiction editor is Ellen Datlow.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published first-rate material this year by Lucius Shepard, James Tiptree, Jr., Orson Scott Card, Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, Jim Aikin, Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Lisa Tuttle, Gregory Benford, and others. F&SF’s longtime editor is Edward Ferman.
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine featured first-rate fiction by Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, Lewis Shiner, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Murphy, George R. R. Martin, Lisa Goldstein, Roger Zelazny, Frederik Pohl, Stephen Gallagher, Rudy Rucker, Michael Bishop, and others. Five out of six of the Nebula finalists in the novella category were from IAsfm. The editor who purchased this material was Shawna McCarthy.
Analog featured good work by S.C. Sykes, Charles L. Harness, Harry Turtledove (Eric G. Iverson), George R. R. Martin, Eric Vinicoff, Charles Sheffield, Phyllis Eisenstein, and others. Analog’s long-time editor is Stanley Schmidt.
Amazing featured good work by Avram Davidson, Michael Swanwick, Harry Turtledove, R.A. Lafferty, John Barnes, and others.
The Twilight Zone Magazine published interesting work by John Alfred Taylor, Lisa Tuttle, Oliver Lowenbruck, Charles L. Grant, Charles Baxter, and others.
Interzone featured good work by Scott Bradfield, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Ian Watson, Alex Stewart, and others. Interzone is edited by Simon Ounsley and David Pringle.
As usual in recent years, short SF also continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries. Playboy (fiction editor, Alice K. Turner), and Penthouse (fiction editor, Kathy Green) continue to use SF with some regularity, for instance, and Playboy in particular ran quite a bit of SF in 1985—it is interesting to note that an unprecedented two stories from Playboy made it on to the Nebula final ballot this year.
(Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, CT, 06753, annual subscription—twelve issues—$19.50; Amazing, TSR, Inc., P.O. Box 72089, Chicago, IL, 60690, annual subscription, $9.00 for six issues; Interzone, 124 Osborne Road, Brighton, BN1 6LU, England, $13.00 for an airmail one year—four issues—subscription)
The semiprozine scene was rather dismal this year, although it was brightened by the appearance of Pat Cadigan and Arnie Fenner’s Shayol 7, the announced last issue (alas) of this award-winning semiprozine. Shayol 7 contained first-rate fiction by Steven Utley, Leigh Kennedy, Michael Bishop, Howard Waldrop, and others, and was easily the best semiprozine of 1985, especially as there was no issue of Whispers published this year. (There is no point in running a subscription address for a magazine which is ceasing publication, but you might be able to purchase copies of Shayol 7 itself from the editors at: 9402 West 82nd Terrace, Overland Park, KS, 66204.) No issues of the promising new semiprozine The Last Wave appeared this year, although there is some hope that it will be revived in the future. Weirdbook, Fantasy Book, and the British Fantasy Tales all produced issues, but I find it difficult to work up a great deal of enthusiasm for them; they are all earnest magazines, produced with a great deal of loving care, but most of the fiction they publish is, by professional standards, unexciting. (Subscription addresses: Fantasy Book, P.O. Box 60126, Pasadena, California 91106, $12 for 4 issues; Weirdbook, Box 149, Amherst Branch, Buffalo, New York 14226-0149, 7 issues for $22.50; Fantasy Tales, Stephen Jones, 130 Park View, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 6JU, England, Great Britain, $11 for 3 issues.)
* * *
All in all, 1985 was not a top-notch year for original anthologies, although a few good ones did appear. Even Terry Carr’s Universe 15 (Doubleday) was notably weaker than the past several volumes have been, although it still contained an excellent story by Lucius Shepard, and good work by Avram Davidson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a few others; compared to Universe 14 and Universe 13, though, this one is mildly disappointing. Byron Preiss’s The Planets (Bantam Spectra) is undoubtedly the most handsome anthology of the year, a beautifully illustrated, coffee-table hardcover, and many of the non-fiction articles are fascinating, particularly a wild speculative piece by Gregory Benford—unfortunately the fiction that makes up the rest of the book is not all that exciting; it’s pretty weak, in fact, and even the best pieces here don’t come up to the standards of really first-rank work. Many of the year’s other anthologies are similarly bland, although most of them do contain at least one or two good stories. (At today’s book prices, though, you have to wonder if one or two good stories per volume is really enough for your money.…) This category would include Janet Morris’s Afterwar (Baen); Terry Windling’s Faery (Ace); Betsy Mitchell’s Alien Stars (Baen); Susan Shwartz’s Moonsinger’s Friends (Bluejay); and Betsy Mitchell’s After the Flames (Baen); the Armstrong story in Afterwar and the Haldeman novella in Alien Stars are particularly worth checking out. Also pretty bland, in spite of the hype that surrounded its pub
lication, is Algis Budrys’s L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of The Future (Bridge), the Hubbard story-contest anthology. It may well be true, as the flap copy asserts, that some of the writers herein will be Big Name Professionals in the Future (keep your eye on Karen Joy Fowler in particular, for instance) but the problem is that the work they produced for this specific anthology is not particulary good; the various Clarion anthologies also always suffered from this identical problem. You can read Writers of the Future for the interest of observing new talent in the developmental stage, but don’t read it expecting excellence—only David Zindell comes anywhere even remotely close; almost everything else is journeyman work; no less than that, but certainly no more.
The best anthology of the year—and undoubtedly the best fantasy anthology of the year—is probably Robin McKinley’s Imaginary Lands (Ace), a quirky and excellent High Fantasy anthology that contains really topnotch stories by James P. Blaylock and Peter Dickinson, as well as good work by Jane Yolen, Joan D. Vinge, Patricia McKillip, McKinley herself, and others; a very pleasant surprise. Certainly, 1985’s other fantasy anthologies could have used some of the imagination and willingness to take risks with offbeat material that went into the making of Imaginary Lands. Most of them are sword-and-sorceryish “Shared World” anthologies, a sub-genre I am already getting a little tired of (with a lot more of them on the way next year)—Andre Norton and Robert Adams’s Magic in Ithkar (Tor), Will Shetterly and Emma Bull’s Liavek (Ace), and Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey’s Thieves’ World 7 (Ace), all of them with several sequels already in the pipeline. Of these, Liavek has perhaps the highest number of intelligent touches, and a couple of interesting stories.
Charles L. Grant’s Shadows 8 (Doubleday) and Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers V were, unsurprisingly, the year’s best horror anthologies, both solid efforts by veteran horror anthologists—check out particularly the Dann, Tem, Webb, and Yarbro stories in the Grant, and the Willis, Drake, and Tern stories in the Schiff. Grant’s Night Visions 2 (Dark Harvest) is also interesting, but not quite as interesting as last year’s Night Visions 1. The format remains the same: each volume features only three authors—in this case, Joseph Payne Brennan, David Morrell, and Karl Edward Wagner—but presents us with several different stories by each of them, thus giving us a good sampling of each individual author’s range. Unfortunately, this worked slightly better when the versatile and chameleonic Tanith Lee was one of the authors involved—without her, Night Visions 2 overall is slightly more uniform in tone than was Night Visions 1. This is still an intriguing idea, though, and an anthology well worth your money. Grant’s Greystone Bay (Tor), is a “shared world” horror anthology, which is at least a change of pace; it’s uneven in quality, as is Grant’s mixed reprint/original anthology Midnight (Tor), but both books have good stories in them.