Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5

JONATHANSTRAHAN

In the Australian winter of 1985 I wasstill at university, pursuing a fairly useless if interesting degree during theday while spending most of my waking hours engaged in an excited, breathlessand far more useful discovery of the science fiction field. It was during thattime that I encountered my first best of the year anthology, a sprawlingselection of stories that the editor opened with a careful assessment of howthings were going wrong in SF, or might be. A boonof some kind, he reported, was possibly coming to anend and there was real fear that bad times might be coming: sales wereunreliable, advances were headed south and, in all likelihood, the publishingworld would end quite soon.

Gardner Dozois, for it was he writing in the first of his The Years Best Science Fiction series (now in itstwenty-eighth year), followed that assessment with two dozen storiesfromestablished writers like Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson,alongside an incredible array of writers Id never heard of like Connie Willis,Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinsonwhich rather seemed to makethose gloomy assessments irrelevant. How could a field that was producingstories like Cicada Queen, Hardfought, Carrion Comfort and Black Air beanything other than healthy?

I could appreciate then, as I do now, that he was talkingabout the health of the publishing industry as it was experienced by writers , rather than the state of the art of SF andfantasy writing as it was experienced by readers ,but I still did wonder at the time how the caution of the introductionreconciled with the optimism of the story selection.

I was confronted with this myself when, unexpectedly, in thesummer of 1997I found myself drafting an introduction to TheYears Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy with my co-editorJeremy G. Byrne and falling into exactly the same kind of assessment, talkingabout the publishing business rather than the art. Ive now sat down on sixteenseparate occasions, both by myself and with others, and I still struggle tobalance the urge to talk about the state of the publishing business rather thanfocus on the year in short fiction, probably because of a simple butfundamental problem: the year in short fiction is barely done and in many waysis too close to meaningfully assess, even as I attempt to do just that.

It would be easy to describe the rather shaky state that SFand fantasy finds itself in as the first decade of the twenty-first centurydraws to a close as uneasy. Advances are down, sales(especially for short fiction) are down, the midlist (where many fine writersmade their livings) is almost completely a thing of the past, booksellers arein trouble and short fiction outlets of all kinds seem to be strugglingfinancially.

As has been the case in the past, large publishersconsolidated, reducing staff and focusing on new opportunities. Random Housemerged Ballantine and Bantam Dell, HarperCollins rebranded Eos and Voyager,HarperCollins sold its new Angry Robot imprint, as did Games Workshop itsSolaris Books imprint. The major North American book chains struggled, withreports popping up throughout the year of both Borders and Barnes & Noblebeing in various kinds of financial trouble. And magazine Realmsof Fantasy , having closed and been rescued in 2009, was sold and rescuedagain late in 2010.

This was also the year when eBook publishing really tookoff. Early in the year publishers publicly slugged it out with Amazon overeBook pricing, but that was quickly swept aside when Apple released its iPad inApril. Apple sold three million devices in less than three months, and went onto sell more than eight million during the year. Those eight million new, veryhigh profile e-readers were soon joined by new, cheaper iterations of theKindle, the Nook and others. E-readers seemed to become a desirable thing toown, the next it gadget, and eBook sales increased accordingly, with somepublishers saying as years end approached that eBooks accounted for as much astwenty percent of sales.

That was reflected in the decision by mass market publisherDorchester to move from traditionally printed books to digital-only editions inAugust. Perhaps more interesting for SF and fantasy, though, was thecomparatively quiet announcement that same month that Gollancz, one of the mostrespected and important SF imprints in the field, had quietly appointed itsfirst digital publisher. There have been some whispers as to what this mightmean for the future, and its something I for one will be watching with greatinterest.

But what of the art of short SFand fantasy? How is that doing? I can imagine youasking. Well, as Ive been saying for close to a decade now, it has becomealmost impossible to keep track of all of the original short fiction publishedeach year. I dont have the February issue of Locus tohand, but when I last looked theyd reported close to 3,500 new stories hadbeen published in their most recent year of accounting, and Ive long felt thatunderestimated numbers by a factor of four or five. New stories were publishedin anthologies, collections, magazines (whether printed on paper or presentedwith pixels) and pamphlets; they came from publishers of all sizes, and theycame every single day. One publisher even launched a service that, rathermind-bogglingly, offered a new story every working day (thats 220 per year, ormore than the combined output of Asimovs , Analog , F&SF , Realms of Fantasy and Interzone ).Years best editors whimpered.

While in recent years anthologies seemed to be providingmost of our best short fiction, this year the field seemed to level out with awide variety of venues producing some excellent work, but no single sourcereally dominating. Unlike 2009, though, I probably found more stories I likedin magazines with almost two-thirds of the contents of this book coming fromone periodical or another, and just a third coming from the pages ofanthologies.

We are early enough in the digital era that we still findourselves bound, it seems, to discuss whether magazines appear in print oronline. This isnt a particularly useful distinction given that at the end ofthe day a magazine is a magazine and an issue is an issue. That said, themajority of the stories from magazines that I liked came from online sources.Last year Tor.com had a particularly strong year,but this year it was Subterranean that dominated.Editor Bill Schafer produced a terrific mix of fantasy, oddball SF and otherstuff, including major stories by Rachel Swirsky, Peter S. Beagle, K. J.Parker, Hannu Rajaniemi and many more. He also reprinted excellent longnovellas originally published in book form from the likes of Lucius Shepard andTed Chiang. It was, on balance, the best single source of top notch fiction in2010. Veteran Strange Horizons , which picked up itsfirst World Fantasy Award in October, also had a very strong year with finestories from the likes of John Kessel, Lavie Tidhar, Sandra McDonald, MeghanMcCarron and Theodora Goss. Comparative newcomer Apex SF hadwhat was probably its best year yet, publishing some good work including twomarvelous fantasies by Ian Tregillis and Theodora Goss. Clarkesworld ,which after Tor.com , was easily the best onlinemagazine of 2009, justifiably picked up the Hugo in August and had anotherstrong (if slightly less dominant) year publishing excellent work by PeterWatts, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Catherynne M. Valente and others. Newcomer Lightspeed , under the able editorship of John JosephAdams, also began to find its feet across its first half-dozen issues,publishing a terrific story by Genevieve Valentine, and some fine work by TedKosmatka, Carol Emshwiller and others.