Summation: 2001

Right here in this space last year I talked about how we were unlikely to do any better a job forecasting what’s ahead of us in the twenty-first century then prognosticators at the beginning of the twentieth century did peering ahead at what lay in store for them, and made a (safely generalized) prediction of my own: unprecedented and unanticipated horrors and wonders both lay ahead for us. The “unprecedented horrors” part has come true with startling speed, with the atrocities of the 9/11 attacks rocking the world just a couple of months after the book hit the bookstore shelves. And it’s not impossible that there may be worse horrors yet to come. But the unprecedented and unanticipated (unpredictable, really, in the literal sense) wonders are out there too, waiting for us in the years ahead. Actually, we already live surrounded by wonders that would have dropped the jaw of anybody from the ‘50s, or even the ’70s, and that would have seemed like supernatural miracles and unbelievable marvels to anybody from earlier periods; wonders large and small that affect almost every aspect of our lives … but they’ve become commonplace enough that we don’t notice them anymore. When the wonders that lie ahead—and I firmly believe they are out there—come along, we’ll soon ignore them and take them for granted, too. But next time things look dark, next time you’re shaken by a new tally to add to the “new horrors” category, next time somebody tells you that we’ve made no social progress in the last fifty years and things are worse now than they’ve ever been (another lie—I remember the ’50s, let alone more distant and even worse periods, and in spite of all the very real problems we still have to deal with today, today is better in almost every respect—I certainly wouldn’t swap today for yesterday, and think that most people who did so would find themselves incomparably worse-off than they are here in the twenty-first century), just remember that those peering into the onrushing twentieth century from the lip of the nineteenth could no more predict the unprecedented progress and the good things that the new century would bring than they could predict the tragedies and horrors—and that we can’t either, except to make a fairly confident assertion that there will indeed be both.

For those of you who just peeked into the book to check: No, science fiction isn’t dead yet.

Actually, other than the nationwide trauma and upheavals caused by the 9/11 attacks, it was another pretty quiet and stable year, on the genre level of publishing at least, although events like the reorganization of Amazon.com probably affected publishing in ways that are not yet clear. There weren’t too many big stories in 2001, as far as direct changes to the genre publishing world are concerned. One story was the demise of the much-hyped and much-talked-about iPublish, AOL-Time Warner’s e-publishing subsidiary, which failed miserably after spending spectacular amounts of money, leading neo-Luddites to dance around in joy and declare that that was the end of the e-book, whose commercial viability had thereby been disproved forever (except, of course, that it means nothing of the sort, as time will no doubt demonstrate; neither e-books nor Print-On-Demand books are going away, and sooner or later somebody will learn how to make money effectively selling them). Another big story was that Betsy Mitchell, editor-in-chief of Aspect, Warner Books’s SF and Fantasy imprint, left to become editor-in-chief of Del Rey Books.

Most of the real action this year, though, for better or worse (actually, for better and worse), was elsewhere.

2001 was another generally bad year in the magazine market, although we only lost one magazine this year, Aboriginal SF, as opposed to two in 2000, and there were even one or two minorly encouraging signs, with the circulation of Absolute Magnitude, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Weird Tales creeping up a bit—although overall sales were down at several others.

Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 2.9 increase in overall circulation in 2001, reversing several years of decline; actually, subscription sales continued to dwindle, with Asimov’s losing 2,000 more subscribers in 2001, but newsstand sales were up more by more than 3,000 since last year. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 9.7% loss in overall circulation in 2001, 4,459 in subscriptions, although newsstand sales dropped by only 200. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered an 11.6% loss in overall circulation, more than 3,000 in subscriptions, but only 188 in newsstand sales. Realms of Fantasy registered a 13.6 loss in overall circulation (on the heels of last year’s 12.1% loss), losing over 1,500 in subscriptions, and over 3,000 in newsstand sales. As they have for several years now, Interzone held steady at a circulation of about 4,000 copies, more or less evenly split between subscriptions and newsstand sales.

The new Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF ought by rights to be listed in the semiprozine section, judging it by its circulation rate, but it’s such a thoroughly professional magazine, and such a high-quality one at that, that I’m going to list it here with the professional magazines anyway, and let the irate letters fly as they may. Spectrum SF managed only two issues this year—they need to work on their reliability of publication—but the quality of the fiction published was very high, including strong work by Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, David Redd, Charles Stross, and others, and they deserve your support.

PS Publishing (www.editorial-services.co.uk/pspublishing), a British small-press, brought out another sequence of novellas, in individual chapbook form, edited by Peter Crowther; this year’s crop was perhaps slightly less impressive overall than last year’s, but featured an excellent novella by Ken MacLeod, The Human Front, as well as other good stuff, such as A Writer’s Life, by Eric Brown, and Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds.

Every year I have to address the question in the summation of why magazine circulation has been declining over the past several years, a question also raised on many of the convention panels that I do, and a question I do get tired of answering, since I go over it here every year, and nobody ever seems to pay any attention to what I say, so I have to repeat it all again the following year. Everyone seems to love to blame the decline in circulation of the magazines on the content, almost as if it’s punishment for sin, an idea that’s often widened beyond the magazines themselves as indication that science fiction as a genre is dying. And yet, there are technical behind-the-scenes reasons for the decline in circulation of most magazines during the last four or five years that have nothing to do with the content of the magazines, and that affect magazines way outside of genre boundaries, not just SF magazines.

Most of these reasons have to do with the chaos in the domestic distribution network over the last few years, where distributors collapsed and absorbed each other with lightning speed, until where you once had more than three hundred such distributors, as recently as 1996, today you have so few that they can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand. This throws the whole physical way that magazines reach newsstands into total disarray, and creates a situation where there are so few distributors that they can afford to be picky and only carry the very top-selling magazines, not wanting to be bothered with the others. The large-scale collapse of the stamp-sheet industry in the last few years, which has cut way into the business that used to be generated by cut-rate stamp-sheet subscription sellers such as Publisher’s Clearing House, hasn’t helped either (although that may be a blessing in disguise, since those kind of subscriptions looked good on paper, seeming to swell your circulation figures, but usually cost more to fulfill than the revenue they actually bring in).

But all this has nothing to do with the health of the genre as a whole, or whether science fiction is “dying.” The mystery magazines, for instance, which started with subscription figures many times higher than any science fiction magazine has ever reached, have suffered similarly drastic falls in circulation over the same period of time, for the same reasons—and yet nobody assumes that this means that the mystery genre is dying. Even huge-circulation magazines far outside of the fiction magazine niche, magazines with circulations far higher than anything ever reached by any sort of genre magazine, such as Playboy, have also taken severe hits to their circulation, bad enough for them to be admitting that they need to “cut corners” financially in order to survive. Should we assume that this is because of the content, because the photos of naked women are not as good as they used to be, or that nobody likes to buy skin magazines anymore? And yet, the assumption in the field is always that circulation in genre magazines has been dwindling because the editors are doing something wrong, buying the wrong sorts of stories, stories that people don’t like, or that SF just isn’t as good as it used to be, or that people don’t want to read science fiction anymore, or that people are too busy surfing the internet or playing computer games to read anything anymore, or that the genre is “dying” or “graying”—and none of the other factors are even taken into account. (On an internet bulletin board, there’s been a long discussion going on in recent weeks about how the circulations of SF magazines are declining not because of these technical issues—which they know nothing about—but because the stories that we publish are “too smart” and “too hard,” and that the way for us to survive is to dumb down our fiction and make it as much like a written version of a Star Trek episode as we possibly can—although why we would want to bother to survive if we did that is a question that is rarely addressed.)

It sometimes seems to me that a certain very vocal segment of the SF audience has a real death wish, that they take gloomy pleasure in claiming that the death of the genre is at hand, that even while shaking their heads and tut-tuting, they are actually looking forward to SF’s demise with something like anticipation and relish. Certainly it seems to be an article of faith among some that the genre is dying, that it’s best days are behind it, that nobody wants to read it anymore, that nothing good is published anymore anyway—and no matter how much factual evidence you provide to the contrary, no matter how many books come out every year or how well they sell, no matter how many really good books and stories come out every year, they cling to their faith and refuse to examine that evidence; they seem to have an emotional investment in the idea that the field is doomed.

The fact that magazine circulation has been dwindling is one of the major bits of ammunition for the SF-is-dying camp—but even there, the situation is not quite as clear-cut as they make it sound. Science Fiction Age, for instance, wasn’t killed because it was unprofitable—it was killed because it wasn’t as profitable as its owners figured a professional wrestling magazine would be, if they took the money they’d been investing in Science Fiction Age and sunk it into a wrestling magazine instead. Personal issues were as much involved as finical issues in the death of Aboriginal SF as well. And, as I’ve pointed out before, these circulation figures may not be as bad as they look, particularly for the digest magazines, which have the traditional advantage that has kept them alive for decades—they are very very cheap to produce, so you really don’t need to sell very many of them to remain profitable.

If the slide in circulation continues long enough, of course, it must eventually kill the magazines, since if you can’t counterbalance the inevitable attrition of your subscriber base due to death and circumstance, then sooner or later you’re left with no subscribers at all, or at least not enough to keep the magazine in the black, no matter how cheap they are to produce. The genre magazines haven’t reached such a point yet, though. The fact that newsstand sales have risen slightly for some magazines is encouraging. And magazines such as Asimov’s and Analog (I can’t speak for other magazines, but this is probably true of F&SF as well) are getting a steady trickle of new subscribers in through internet sites such as Peanut Press and Fictionwise, which sell electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, a market which can only grow in future years. We’ve also had some success in using the internet as a marketing tool, to get around the newsstand bottleneck and reach new subscribers who might otherwise never see the magazine at all. And we’re now getting in foreign subscribers through internet sites as well, a market that was rarely tapped by us before due to the extreme difficulties involved in subscribing from overseas by snail mail.

I think the use of internet web-sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions is going to be increasingly important, and so 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/. Interzone’s site is at www.sfsite.com/interzone/. Realms of Fantasy doesn’t have a web-site per se, although content from it can be found on www.scifi.now.com. The amount of activity varies widely from site to site, but the important thing about all of the sites is that you can subscribe to the magazines there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post-office required. And you can subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible to do. The abovementioned “electronic subscriptions” to several of these magazines, including Asimov’s, Analog , and F&SF, are available at Peanut Press and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com).

So things are serious, yes—but whether they are grave remains still to be seen. A lot will depend on whether people who enjoy short SF get out there and subscribe or not—or at least pick the magazines off the newsstands, or download them to their PDAs—and if those wider audiences out there who probably have never even heard of any of the magazines can indeed be tapped.

(Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030—$38.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033—$39.97 for annual subscription in US; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323—$39.97 for annual subscription in US; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom—$60.00 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.; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, PO Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR, United Kingdom, $24.53 for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum Publishing.” PS Publishing, 98 High Ash Drive, Leeds L517 8RE, England, UK—$17 each for The Human Front, by Ken MacLeod, Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds, and A Writer’s Life, by Eric Brown. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various web sites.)

It was another fluid year in the young and still-growing field of “online electronic publishing,” with perhaps more encouraging signs than discouraging ones for a change (although how long some of those encouraging signs will remain encouraging is, of course, quite a different matter; things change so quickly in this area that half the sites I mention could be gone by the time you actually read this).

The big story here this year was probably the solid success of SCI FICTION (www.scifi.com/scifiction/), a fiction site within the larger umbrella of The Sci-Fi Channel site, founded last year, and edited by Ellen Datlow, the former fiction editor of Omni, as well as of the now-defunct web sites Omni Online and Event Horizon. In the two years that SCI FICTION has been up and running, Datlow has managed to make it not only by far the most reliable place on the internet to find good, professional-level, high-quality fantasy and science fiction short work, but a major player in the field, worthy of being weighed against any other market, print or online. SCI FICTION this year published excellent fiction by Ian R. MacLeod, Michael Cassutt, Simon Ings, Leigh Kennedy, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, Michael Swanwick, Susan Palwick, Paul Di Filippo, and others.

Although SCI FICTION is no doubt your best bet on the internet for good short fiction, particularly good science fiction (horror, slipstream, and fantasy are much easier to find online than good original short SF, for the most part), there are other promising new sites as well. Last year, we reported on the stillbirth of a proposed new site called The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net), to be edited by SF writer Eileen Gunn—fortunately, reports of its death turned out to be (for the moment, at least) greatly exaggerated, as a grant from an unnamed benefactor has enabled Gunn to get several “issues” of the e-magazine up on the Internet after all. The Infinite Matrix is a jazzy and eclectic site, with all sorts of cool postmodern bells and whistles: a weblog from Bruce Sterling, a daily feature by Terry Bisson, a series of quirky vingetttes from Richard Kadrey and Michael Swanwick, reviews by John Clute, novel extracts from Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and so forth, and although I think that they should leave all that in place, I think the site could also use more actual, honest-to-gosh, stand-alone short stories as well, meat and potatoes to go with the jazzy postmodern gravy. They did publish high professional-level stories this year by Simon Ings and the late Avram Davidson, and it’ll be interesting to see what Gunn can come up with in the months to come. A new site called The Spook (www.thespook.com/) is also running professional-level fiction, although most of it is horror and slipstream, not SF. Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) is another worthwhile site—although not at the same level of professional quality as SCI FICTION or The Infinite Matrix. It published a number of good stories last year by people such as Benjamin Rosenbaum, Michael J. Jasper, Kim Gryer, Cecilia Tan, and others, although for my money it leans more toward fantasy and mild horror than I’d like, with SF of a relatively soft variety (you probably aren’t going to see much hard SF or space adventures or stuff set in the far-future here; on the other hand, it’s nice to see a site that leans more toward fantasy, and even light fantasy, than toward horror or slipstream, the internet default settings for fiction). Perhaps a step below Strange Horizons in the quality of the fiction so far is a brand-new e-magazine called Future Orbits (www.futureorbits.com), which gets a big gold star from me because they’re concentrating on publishing only science fiction, an internet rarity (they’re still a bit uneven in quality at the moment—although they did publish interesting work by R. Neube, Richard Parks, Keith Brooke, K. D. Wentworth, and others). Future Orbits will very probably improve with age, and I wish them well, as we could use more SF-oriented fiction sites online. Another new site, Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), also publishes some original fiction, including a good story by Neal Barrett, Jr., although much of its content is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, interviews, and so forth.

Below this point, the brute fact is that there’s little short original science fiction of reasonable quality to be found on the internet. It’s not at all hard to find good short reprint SF stories elsewhere on the internet, however, and in fact some sites are bringing back into wide availability (assuming you have a computer and an internet connection, of course) good work that’s been unavailable to the average reader for years, if not decades. One of the best and seemingly most successful of these sites, still seeming to flourish after the much-publicized death of the somewhat similar iPublish site, is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com). Although they’ve recently started offering downloads of original stories, mostly a half-dozen or so by Kage Baker at this point, Fictionwise is not really an “electronic magazine” at all, but rather a place to buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer, probably the best place on the internet to do this, as far as accessing good science fiction is concerned. For a small fee, you can not only tap into a very large selection of individual “reprint” stories here, you can also buy “fiction bundles,” which amount to electronic collections. Almost all of the stuff available here is of high professional quality and is by some of the best writers in the business (you can also buy downloads of novels here, and, something nearer to my heart, subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here). Another similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), a place where you can buy downloadable e-books of various lengths by top authors and also access online for free a large and interesting array of critical material, including movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, a regular column by Howard Waldrop, and other stuff. There’s also some original never-before-published stuff to be purchased at ElectricStory that can only be accessed on the site, including a never-published-in-print collection of Howard Waldrop stories and novels by Lucius Shepard and Richard Wadholm. Similar for-a-small-fee access to both original and reprint SF stories is offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (www.tale.com/genres.htm) and Alexandria Digital Literature (www.alexlit.com) as well. One of the best sites on the Internet to read reprint stories for free (although you have to read them on the screen) is the British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good quality reprint stories, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Aurealis, and others, will 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.

Finding stories to read, though, is not all that the SF community finds to do on the web, by any means. General interest sites that don’t publish fiction but do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds are among the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, and are probably my most frequent daily stops while surfing around. Among the best of these sites are 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 a significant percentage of all the SF/Fantasy print magazines in existence, including Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone , and the whole DNA Publishing group (Absolute Magnitude, Pirate Writings, Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, Dreams of Decadence); Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newssmagazine Locus, a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, extensive data-base archives, and lists of links to other sites of interest (Mark Kelly has given up his short fiction-review column in favor of devoting more time to editing the site in general, but has brought in new reviewers such as Nick Gevers and Richard Horton as partial compensation); Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw/), more media-and-gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but also features news and book reviews every issue, as well as providing a home for columns by such shrewd and knowledgeable genre insiders as John Clute and Michael Cassut; and SFF NET (www.sff.net), a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” a link to the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, and a link to the research data and reading-lists available on the Science Fiction Writers of America page (which can also be accessed directly at www.sfwa.org/); the above-mentioned Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com), which provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION and for Science Fiction Weekly, and to the bi-monthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; audio-plays can also be accessed at Audible (www.audible.com) and at Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com); multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his fanzine Ansible (www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/), which provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, is well worth checking out on a regular basis.

Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com/chat/) every other Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST; regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (www.cybling.com/); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (www.talkcity.com/). Many bulletin board services, such as Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate, the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on sff.net, and probably on other BBSs as well.

As a lover of short fiction, two sites that I particularly value and visit very frequently are Tangent Online (www.sfsite.com/tangent/), which survived a rocky start early last year to transform itself into perhaps the most valuable SF-oriented review site on the internet, and Best SF (www.bestsf.net/), which makes less of an attempt to be systematic than Tangent Online (which makes an insanely difficult attempt to review everything), but whose reviews are often equally insightful and useful, if not more so. These two sites are just about the only two places on the entire Internet where you can find regular reviews of SF short fiction and the SF magazines, and they’re both pearls beyond price. Another review site, more media-oriented than the above two, although they do regularly review novels as well, is SFRevu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu). Speculations (www.speculations.com) is a long-running (by internet standards) site which dispenses writing advice, but you’ll have to subscribe to the site online if you want to access it.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in this market in coming years. As you can see, e-magazines are proliferating at a rapid rate, and some pundits are already saying that they’re the future of the genre short story and will be around long after the print magazines have died, but, as has always been true of print semiprozines and even commercially backed SF magazines, the question is, how long are any of them going to last? In spite of much lower production costs and overheads, a significant bonus (although the money to pay for the stories still has to come from somewhere, even ignoring staff costs), e-zines to date are just as vulnerable to cancellation due to economic factors as the print magazines are; patrons can change their mind or get tired of digging into their pockets, and sponsored sites are vulnerable to the whim of the sponsor, who can pull the plug any time they decide they’re not getting their money’s worth in one sort of coin or another (publicity, prestige, etc.), just as the publishers of print magazines can decide at any time that they’re not getting enough money back to make the expenditure worthwhile. The big question in this market is, as it has been for several years, how can you reliably make money “publishing” fiction online? Until someone figures a way to “publish” an e-magazine and make a good steady profit from it, so that it’s not vulnerable to the whim of a patron or sponser, I don’t believe that e-magazines will really come into their own as “the future of genre short fiction.” Until then, e-magazines aren’t any more secure than print magazines, even with the very real advantages that they enjoy.

It was not a particularly good year in the print semiprozine market. After returning miraculously from a four year absence with an issue in late 1999 and another in mid-2000, nothing was heard from the prominent fiction semiprozine Century in 2001—not surprisingly, following the tragic death of the magazine’s coeditor, Jenna Felice, in early 2001. The most recent word, however, is that editor Rob Killheffer does plan to continue the magazine, and promises new issues of Century in 2002. Much of the print fiction semiprozine market was in disarray in 2001, in fact. The long-running Australian fiction semiprozine Eidolon seems to have vanished altogether, although in 2000 a plan was being discussed to revive it online as an online-only “electronic magazine”; so far this doesn’t seem to have happened, although their website (www.eidolon.com) is still there, there doesn’t seem to be much new content on it. Another distinguished and long-running Australian fiction semiprozine, Aurealis, published a final double-issue in 2001 (which we didn’t see; we’ll have to consider the stuff from it for next year) under longtime editors Stephen Higgins and Dirk Strasser, who then sold the magazine and stepped down; Aurealis supposedly will continue, but under the editorship of a new editor, Keith Stevenson. Two newer Australian print fiction semiprozines, Altair and Orb, suspended publication and went on, perhaps, permanent “hiatus,” never a good sign in the semiprozine market; although the editors usually promise that “They’ll be back some day,” the hard fact is that they seldom are. So the Australian fiction semiprozine scene, which seemed to be booming only a few years back, has been left in ruins. Promising American fiction semiprozine Terra Incognita also went “on hiatus” this year. And although I believe they’re still supposed to be in existence, I didn’t see an issue of Tales of the Unanticipated or of Irish semiprozine Albedo One this year either.

Of the surviving fiction magazines, the titles consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications—Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, Science Fiction Chronicle, the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; and Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures —seem to be doing pretty well overall, with some gains in circulation for Absolute Magnitude, Weird Tales, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, although the DNA group lost one magazine this year, Aboriginal Science Fiction, which died after a final issue in 2001. Some of the DNA magazines are still having trouble maintaining their announced publishing schedules, with Absolute Magnitude only publishing three issues and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination only managing two, but Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, and Science Fiction Chronicle each published all the issues they were supposed to this year, a big improvement over last year.

Other hearty survivors included the long-running Canadian semiprozine On Spec, the lively mixed horror/SF semiprozine Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, and the leading British semiprozine, The Third Alternative. On Spec has seemed sunk in the doldrums to me in recent years, with its fiction largely gray and uninteresting, but it seems to have turned the corner in the last year or two, and has been publishing some more interesting stuff, including, this year, interesting stories by James Van Pelt, Steve Mohn, Vera Nazarian, and others; On Spec also published all four promised issues in 2001 (although the Winter 2001 issue arrived late enough that we’ll have to consider the contents for next year). Talebones remains vigorous and fun to read, and seems to me to be leaning a bit away from horror toward fantasy and even science fiction, which to my taste is all to the good; they only published three issues this year, but featured some strong stuff by Ken Scholes, Steve Mohan, Jr., James Van Pelt, and others. The slick, glossy, and handsome The Third Alternative publishes little science fiction, leaning heavily toward slipstream, literary surrealism, and soft horror instead, but the literary quality of their stories, whatever pigeonhole you find for them, is very high, thoroughly professional; they managed three issues as well this year, and published thoroughly professional-level work by Alexander Glass, Simon Ings, Danith Mc-Pherson, the ubiquitous James Van Pelt, and others.

A relative newcomer, Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society managed two issues this year, featuring good work by G. David Nordley, Jack McDevitt, and others; I’m pleased to see that they have given up on (or at least loosened up on considerably) their too-limiting policy of only publishing stories about moon colonization, and it’s good to see a semiprozine that concentrates on core science fiction rather than horror or slipstream. Artemis’s biggest challenge is going to be to shake the widely held opinion that it’s only Analog-lite and forge a new identity for itself. Another interesting newcomer, worlds apart from Artemis in editorial personality, is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which leans heavily toward the slipstream /literary surrealism end of the spectrum, but which is often entertaining and freshly written, and often features stories of that sort from well-known SF professionals.

Black Gate, a slick large-format fantasy magazine that supposedly concentrates on “Sword & Sorcery” and “High Fantasy,” managed two thick issues this year, an encouraging sign, as last year it was rumored to be in trouble, which it apparently has survived.

I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market enough any more to make even a partial survey worthwhile, but as far as I can tell, the most prominent magazines there seem to be are Talebones and the highly respected Cemetery Dance.

Little has changed, as usual, in the critical magazine market. Your best bets, and by far the most reliably published, are the two “newszines,” Charles N. Brown’s Locus (which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this year) and Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle (which, after an erratic period, has reestablished a reliable publishing schedule as part of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing Group), and David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine The New York Review of Science Fiction. Lawrence Person’s more freewheeling and playful Nova Express managed only one issue this year, although it was fun to read. A new magazine that reviews short fiction, The Fix, brought to you by the same folks who put out The Third Alternative, was announced this year, and could be a very welcome addition to this market, but we haven’t seen it yet.

(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661-$56.00 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—$32.00 per year, 12 issues; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231—$12 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6—$18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia—$43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars”; Eidolon, the Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6906—$45 (Australian) for a 4-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair, Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction, PO Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia—$36 for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland—$34 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, Science Fiction 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 all five DNA fiction magazines for $70 a year, with Science Fiction Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Century , Century Publishing, P.O. Box 150510, Brooklyn, NY 11215-0510—$20 for a four-issue subscription; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812—$15 for four issues; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408—$15 for a four-issue subscription; Space and Time, 138 W. 70th Street (4B), New York, NY 10023-4468—$10.00 for a 2-issue subscription (one year)—$20.00 for a 4-issue subscription (two years); Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn NY 11230-6011—$15 for a four-issue subscription, checks payable to LRC Publications; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092—$18 for four issues; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK—$22 for a four-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $25.95 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB #132, Brooklyn, NY 11217—$12 for four issues, all checks payable to Gavin Grant. Many of these magazines can also be ordered online, at their web-sites; see the online section, above, for URLs.)

 

2001 proved itself to be an even weaker year for original anthologies than 2000 had been. There were a couple of anthologies with first-rate material in them, but nothing that clearly stepped forward to unequivocally seize the title of “Year’s Best Anthology,” as has been the case in other years. In fact, I’d gladly give that title to Futures (Warner Aspect), edited by Peter Crowther, which was stronger than either of the anthologies I’m about to consider as the year’s best choices, but as the novellas it contains were all published as individual chapbooks in Britain in 2000, and the anthology as a whole was itself published before in Britain last year, I finally decided it belonged in the reprint anthology section (you can read more about it there).

Discounting Futures, the best of the remaining lot, by a good margin, were probably Starlight 3 (Tor), edited by Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (Roc), edited by Al Sarrantonio, although both books were uneven, with as many mediocre-to-poor stories as good ones.

Starlight 3 struck me as the weakest of the three Starlight volumes (although it still featured much worthwhile material), and had the drawback—for me, anyway, with my own particular bias toward science fiction—of featuring more fantasy and horror stories than science fiction stories, and what science fiction stories there were seemed weaker in literary quality than the fantasy stories. The best story here is clearly Ted Chiang’s horrific “Hell Is the Absence of God,” followed by Susan Palwick’s equally emotionally grueling “Gestella,” and Maureen F. McHugh’s “Interview: On Any Given Day,” the only science fiction story to make it into the top slice. A step below these would be Andy Duncan’s “Senator Bilbo” and Colin Greenland’s “Wings.” The anthology also features interesting stories by Stephen Baxer, Terry Bisson, D. G. Compton, Susanna Clarke, Cory Doctorow, Alex Irvine, and others. Not a bad value overall, for the cover price, but not as substantial as the previous volumes had been, either.

Redshift is a pretty good anthology overall, too, but it shoots itself in the foot with its annoyingly shrill and overheated self-hype, which bills it as this century’s Dangerous Visions, an anthology so revolutionary that it’s going to change the future direction of science fiction forever (and trots out once again the tired old line about how these stories would have been too “dangerous” for the timid genre magazine market; simply not true, as far as I can tell, although a few of them may have been rejected by science fiction magazines not because they are so “dangerous,” but because they’re not science fiction). Well, even allowing for the changed social context of the times, which makes the appearance of a true Dangerous Visions-like volume much more difficult, if not impossible, Redshift is no Dangerous Visions; it can’t even claim clear title to being the best anthology of the year, and there have certainly been original anthologies in the last few years (such as Greg Bear’s New Legends anthology, for instance) that were not only better in terms of overall literary quality, but which were more significant indicators of what may be to come for science fiction. And for a cutting-edge science fiction anthology, one that’s supposed to point the way to the genre’s future, Redshift sure contains a lot of mediocre horror stories. Redshift is such a large anthology, though, that by even discounting a good half of it (which you can), you’re still left with some pretty solid and worthwhile material. The best story here is clearly Dan Simmons’s “On K2 with Kanakaredes,” followed by Neal Barrett, Jr.’s surreal “Rhido Wars” (beneath the bizarre surface of which I believe I can discern a-told-by-implication and nearly subliminal actual science fiction story), and James Patrick Kelly’s “Unique Visitors.” A step below these would be Harry Turtledove’s “Black Tulip,” a perfectly fine mainstream story about soldiers on different sides of the Afghan/Russian wars that is cheapened by the addition of an unnecessary and intrusive fantastic element; and Elizabeth Hand’s “Cleopatra Brimstone,” an exquisitely written story about a young girl struggling to come to some psychological accommodation with having been raped, which is also marred by the inclusion of a (rather silly) fantastic element and a well-worn horror-cliche ending that may make you regret the time you put into reading the story’s very well-crafted 20,000 words. Redshift also contains good material by Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, Gene Wolfe, Stephen Baxter, Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley, and others. On the whole, then, a pretty good reading value for the money, even if it doesn’t come anywhere near to living up to its own self-hype, and even if a good half of the selections are mediocre-to-bad; there’s still a lot of good material left over.

After this point, you pretty quickly run out of options for other really worthwhile original anthologies. The best of what’s left is probably Bones of the World: Tales from Time’s End (sff.net), this year’s assembled-online “sff.net” anthology (volume IV in the “Darkfire” anthology series) edited by Bruce Holland Rogers. Bones of the World may be the best of these volumes yet in terms of overall quality, although there’s no real standout story able to compete on the same level with the year’s other superior stuff; the best story here is probably Daniel Abraham’s “A Good Move in Design Space,” followed by James Van Pelt’s “The Last Age Should Show Your Heart” and M. Shayne Bell’s “Ragnarok of the Post Humans: Final Transmissions, Sam 43 Unit 763,” although there is also worthwhile material here by Lois Tilton, David Ira Cleary, Jerry Oltion, Brian Plante, and others. (You won’t find this one in stores, so mail-order from: SFF Net, 3300 Big Horn Trail, Piano, TX 75075—$14.95 for Bones of the World: Tales from Time’s End; the book can also be ordered online at sff.net, and back titles in the Darkfire series can be ordered either by mail or online).

After this point, it’s mostly minor anthologies that may well be worth their (usually relatively low) cover price to you in terms of entertainment value, but for the most part contain at best only competent, second-rank work, stuff that may be entertaining but will be largely forgotten by this time next year: Silicon Dreams (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff; Past Imperfect (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff; and The Mutant Files (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers. And, as usual, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XVII (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys, presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.

There was actually a shared-world anthology this year that was a better value for your money: The Man-Kzin Wars IX (Baen), edited by Larry Niven, one of the best volumes of this long-running series in some while, featuring four strong novellas, including Poul Anderson’s last science fiction novella, “Pele,” Hal Colebatch’s “The Sergeant’s Honor,” and Niven’s own “Fly-By-Night.”

Once again, there was no big standout original anthology in fantasy this year, although a new volume of Robert Silverberg’s bestselling fantasy anthology, Legends, has been promised for next year or the year after. What original fantasy anthologies there were this year were the usual pack of pleasant but minor theme anthologies, which you may or may not find worth the cover price, including: Creature Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Denise Little; Assassins Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter; Out of Avalon (Roc), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Robertson; Oceans of Magic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brian M. Thomson; Villians Victorious (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers; A Constellation of Cats (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Denise Little; and Historical Hauntings (DAW), edited by Jean Rabe.

From what I could tell, the big original horror anthologies of the year seemed to be Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Horror Writing (Overlook Press), edited by Stephen Pagel and Nicola Griffith; Night Visions 10 (Subterranean Press), edited by Richard Chizmar; and The Museum of Horrors (Leisure Books), edited by Dennis Etchison. On a less ambitious note, I also spotted Single White Vampire Seeks Same (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koran, no doubt there were others I didn’t spot.

Not a lot to look forward to in the original anthology market next year, except Peter Crowther’s Mars anthology, perhaps (or perhaps not) a new anthology edited by Greg Benford, and perhaps (or perhaps not) a follow-up to Robert Silverberg’s Legends. Let’s hope that there are also some (nice) surprises that we haven’t yet heard of.

 

In spite of persistent (almost gloomily relishing) talk in some circles about how SF is clearly “dying,” the novel market seemed fairly robust again this year, both in terms of how many titles were released and how well they tended to do commercially (sales slowed across the entire publishing industry in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, but picked up toward the end of the year); and in terms of the artistic merit of the books that were published, there were a lot of strong novels published this year, as last year—probably more than any one reader is going to have time to read, in fact, unless they devote themselves to doing little else but reading. (The related fantasy genre did even better commercially, thanks in large part to reissues of J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling books, and the issuing of numerous associational books, most of which sold astronomically in advance of the release of the movie versions of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and even more astronomically afterward.)

According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,158 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint, published in 2001, up by 12% from 2000’s total of 1,927—and no doubt there were many Print-On-Demand books in the recent flood of such titles that were overlooked and not even reflected in this total. Original books were up by 18% to 1,210 from last year’s total of 1,027; reprint books were up by 5% to 948 titles over last year’s total of 900, a new record. The number of new SF novels was up slightly, with 251 new titles published as opposed to 230 novels published in 2000. The number of new fantasy novels was also up, to 282, as opposed to 258 novels published in 2000. Horror, another genre that had been pronounced “dead” by pundits a few years ago, made significant gains in 2001, with 151 novels published, as opposed to 80 novels in 2000 (and that’s not even counting “media tie-in” books with horror elements, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel novelizations).

For some perspective on the “SF is dying” theory (almost more of an article of faith than a “theory” in some circles, seemingly impervious to factual rebuttal), keep in mind that, like last year, the number of original mass-market paperbacks published this year, 347 (up 7% from 2000), is alone higher than the total number of original genre books, of any sort, published in 1972, which was 225. Nor do I see any indication of overall decline in literary quality, or the percentage of worthwhile books still getting into print—rather the opposite, in fact.

As usual, I don’t have time to read many novels, with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths; I have read a few novels this year, I usually find time to squeeze a few in, but few enough that I probably shouldn’t endorse anything personally without having read a lot more of the rest of the competitors out there. So instead I’ll limit myself to mentioning novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2001 include: Nekropolis (Eos), Maureen F. McHugh; Passage (Bantam), Connie Willis; The Secret of Life (Tor), Paul McAuley; Whole Wide World (Tor), Paul McAuley; The Other Wind (Harcourt), Ursula K. Le Guin; Metaplanetary (Eos), Tony Daniel; Probability Sun (Tor), Nancy Kress; Fallen Dragon (Warner Aspect), Peter F. Hamilton; Declare (Morrow), Tim Powers; Mother of Kings (Tor), Poul Anderson; Ares Express (Earthlight), Ian McDonald; Chasm- City (Ace), Alastair Reynolds; American Gods (Morrow), Neil Gaiman; Cosmonaut Keep (Tor), Ken MacLeod; The Graveyard Game (Harcourt), Kage Baker; Ship of Fools (Ace), Richard Paul Russo; The Spheres of Heaven (Baen), Charles Sheffield; Shadow of the Hegemon (Tor), Orson Scott Card; The Chronoliths (Tor), Robert Charles Wilson; Return to the Whorl (Tor), Gene Wolfe; Manifold: Origin (Del Rey), Stephen Baxter; Manifold: Space (Del Rey), Stephen Baxter; The Cassandra Complex (Tor), Brian Stableford; Deepsix (Eos), Jack McDevitt; Empty Cities of the Full Moon (Ace), Howard V. Hendrix; The King of Dreams (Eos), Robert Silverberg; The Hauntings of Hood Canal (St. Martin’s), Jack Cady; The Wooden Sea (Tor), Jonathan Carroll; Angel of Destruction (Roc), Susan R. Matthews; The Pickup Artist (Tor), Terry Bisson; Kingdom of Cages (Warner Aspect), Sarah Zettel; The Merchants of Souls (Tor), John Barnes; Defender (DAW), C.J. Cherryh; Limit of Vision (Tor), Linda Nagata; Thief of Time (HarperColllins), Terry Prachett; The Treachery of Kings (Bantam Spectra), Neal Barrett, Jr.; The One Kingdom (Eos), Sean Russell; Terraforming Earth (Tor), Jack Williamson; Malestrom (Tor), Peter Watts; Bold as Love (Gollancz), Gwyneth Jones; Going, Going, Gone (Grove Atlantic), Jack Womack; The Curse of Chalion (Eos), Lois McMaster Bujold; A Paradigm of Earth (Tor), Candas Jane Dorsey; Children of Hope (Ace), David Feintuch; Angel of Destruction (Roc), Susan R. Matthews; Eyes of the Calculor (Tor), Sean McMullen; The Onion Girl (Tor), Charles de Lint; Otherland: Sea of Silver Light (DAW), Tad Williams; The Beyond (Eos), Robin Hobb; Child of Venus (Eos), Pamela Sargent; The Shadows of God (Del Rey), J. Gregory Keyes; Past the Size of Dreaming (Ace), Nina Kiriki Hoffman; and Black House (Random House), Stephen King and Peter Straub.

It didn’t seem to be a bad year for first novels, although none of them were quite as prominent as last year’s first-novel leader, Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space. The three first novels that seemed to attract the most attention this year (although, of course, this is a subjective call, based largely on the number of reviews they drew, and how positive the reviews were) were The Ghost Sister (Bantam Spectra), by Liz Williams; The Ill-Made Mute (Warner Aspect), by Cecelia Dart-Thornton; and Ill-Met by Moonlight (Ace), by Sarah A. Hoyt. Other first novels included: Illumination (Tor), by Terry McGarry; Archangel Protocol (Roc), by Lyda Morehouse; Alien Taste (Roc), by Wen Spencer; Swim the Moon (Tor), by Paul Brandon; The Love-Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jane Alison; The Eyre Affair (Viking), by Jasper Fforde; Divine Intervention (Ace), by Ken Wharton; Inca (Forge), by Suzanne Alles Blom; Kushiel’s Dart (Tor), by Jacqueline Carey; Eccentric Circles (Ace), by Rebecca Lickiss; Enemy Glory (Tor), by Karen Michalson; Children of the Shaman (Orbit), by Jessica Rydill; and Dance of Knives (Tor), by Donna McMahon. And of course, all publishers who are willing to take a chance publishing first novels should be commended, since it’s a chance that must be taken by someone if the field itself is going to survive and evolve. Tor, Roc, and Ace seem to have published a lot of first novels in particular this year. (This year, most of the first novels were by women; last year, most of the first novels were by men. What does this mean? I don’t have a clue!)

Tor and Eos obviously had very strong years, with Tor in particular coming close to dominating the list in science fiction as far as number of titles is concerned (it wasn’t as one-sided in fantasy), although Ace, Del Rey, and Roc also had pretty good years as well. Although it’s largely a subjective judgement, it seems to me that this novel list is at least as substantial as last year’s crop. Looking over the lists, it seems clear that once again the majority of novels here are center-core science-fiction, in spite of the usual complaints about how SF is being “forced off the bookstore shelves” by fantasy; even omitting the fantasy novels and the borderline genre-straddling work from the list, you’re still left with the McHugh, the two Baxter novels, the Daniel, the two McAuley novels, the MacLeod novel, the Stableford, the Kress, the McDonald, the Reynolds, the Hamilton, the Wilson, the Cherryh, the Baker, the McDevitt, the Nagata, the Wolfe, the Sheffield, and half-a-dozen others (or more) as clearly and unmistakably science fiction, many of them “hard science fiction” as well. So much for being forced off the shelves!

It’s been a good couple of years for the reissuing of long-out-of-print classic novels, helping to alleviate a problem (books going out-of-print and never coming back into it) that had grown to crisis proportions by the mid-’90s. The SF Masterworks and the Fantasy Masterworks reprint series, from English publisher Millennium, brought forth another slew of classic reprints this year (of particular note, although they’re all worth having, are Jack Vance’s Emphyrio, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Fritz Lelber’s The First Book of Lankhmar and The Second Book of Lankhmar, and Jack Finney’s Time and Again), and in these days of online internet bookstores, where it’s no more difficult to order something from amazon.co.uk as it is from amazon.com, and doesn’t take significantly longer for you to receive your book, there’s no reason why you can’t order them to fill long-unfillable slots in your basic SF and fantasy libraries; in fact, that’s just what you should do, before these titles become unavailable again. On this side of the Atlantic, the year’s classic reprints included: Keith Roberts’s Pavane (Del Rey Impact); Edgar Pangborn’s West of the Sun (Old Earth Books); Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (Stealth Press); Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master; and Entities: Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (NESFA Press). Print-On-Demand publishers are also having a big impact on making classic work available to readers again. Wildside Press (www.wildside.com) seems so far to be the most SF-oriented of these publishers; check their site for lists of what’s currently available. Another such site to check is Big Engine (www.bigengine.com), as well as internet sites such as Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com), Ereads (www.ereads.com) and others where you can buy novels, both original and reprint, in the form of electronic “downloads” for your PDA or home computer. A new, never-before-published-and-unavailable-in-other-forms novel by Lucius Shepard, Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, was available from ElectricStory and Fictionwise this year, for instance. Another new Lucius Shepard novel, Valentine, was available this year from a more traditional small press, Four Walls, Eight Windows.

It’s probably futile to try to guess which of these novels are going to win the year’s major awards, especially as SFWA’s bizarre and increasingly dysfunctional “rolling eligibility” rule meant that only one novel from 2001 (Passage, by Connie Willis) made it on to the ballot for an award to be given out in 2002. It’s hard to call a clear favorite for the Hugo as well, although Passage, Le Guin’s The Other Wind, Wolfe’s Return to the Whorl, Daniel’s Metaplanetary, Reynold’s Chasm City, McHugh’s Nekropolis, and Williamson’s Terraforming Earth all have a chance to be in the hunt (as do others, though, so it’s still probably anybody’s game).

Borderline or associational novels by SF writers this year included Lust (HarperCollins), an erotic fantasy by Geoff Ryman, and Hardcase (St. Martin’s Minotaur), a hardboiled detective novel by Dan Simmons.

 

It was perhaps a bit weaker year for short-story collections overall than last year, but there were still some strong collections to be found. The year’s best collections included: Tales From Earthsea (Harcourt), by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (Tor), by Vernor Vinge; Jubilee (Voyager Australia), by Jack Dann; The Other Nineteenth Century (Tor), by Avram Davidson; Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (Golden Gryphon), by Geoffrey A. Landis; Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon (Golden Gryphon), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Strange Trades (Golden Gryphon), by Paul Di Filippo; Supertoys Last All Summer Long (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Brian W. Aldiss; Quartet (NESFA Press), by George R. R. Martin; and Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press), by Kelly Link.

Other good collections included: Skin Folk (Warner Aspect), by Nalo Hopkinson; Claremont Tales (Golden Gryphon), by Richard A. Lupoff; Futureland (Warner Aspect); Darkness Divided (Stealth), by John Shirley; Redgunk Tales: Apocalypse and Kudzu from Redgunk, Mississippi (Invisible Cities Press), by William R. Eakin; City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (Cosmos Books), by Jeff VanderMeer; Meet Me in the Moon Room: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Ray Vukcevich; and Bad Timing and Other Stories (Big Engine), by Molly Brown.

The year also featured strong retrospective collections such as The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (Tor), by Arthur C. Clarke; Coup de Grace and Other Stories (The Vance Integral Edition), by Jack Vance; Agent of Vega and Other Stories (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; Trigger and Friends (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; The Hub: Dangerous Territory (Baen), by James H. Schmitz; The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume One, Immodest Proposals (NESFA Press), by William Tenn; The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume Two, Here Comes Civilization (NESFA Press), by William Tenn; The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective (Morpheus International), by Harlan Ellison; The Jaguar Hunter (Four Walls, Eight Windows), by Lucius Shepard; 50 in 50 (Tor), by Harry Harrison; The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings (Night Shade Books), by Manly Wade Wellman; Fearful Rock and Other Dangerous Locales (Night Shade Books), by Manly Wade Wellman; The Complete Short Stories (Flamingo), by J. G. Ballard; and From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown (NESFA Press), by Fredric Brown.

Noted without comment: Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (NESFA Press), by Gardner Dozois.

It’s worth noting that several of the year’s collections contained never-before-published material. For instance, Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea featured three excellent original fantasy stories, and Vinge’s The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge showcased a strong original science fiction novella.

It’s encouraging to see regular trade publishers such as Tor, Baen, and Warner Aspect publishing more collections these days, but, of course, as has been true for over a decade now, small press publishers remain vital to the publication of genre short story collections. Golden Gryphon Press is becoming particularly important in getting the work of new and relatively new writers out before the public, as was Arkham House before it in the days when the late Jim Turner was editing it, while NESFA Press continues to provide invaluable service by publishing retrospective collections of past masters, returning volumes of long out-of-print work to easy availability. Even smaller small presses, such as Small Beer Press, Invisible Cities Press, and others, are concentrating on authors whose work is too quirky and offbeat to attract even the more traditional small press outfits, and, since bookstore sales—even in specialty stores—are usually not an option, are doing much of their selling by mail-order over the Internet—something that I think we’re going to see a lot more of as time goes by.

“Electronic collections” continue to be available for downloading online at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory. (iPublish, a site where such collections were available, died this year, as mentioned above—but no doubt other such sites will be coming along to replace it.) Print On Demand (POD) publishers continue to supply short story collections as well, but its a difficult market to track, and it’s often hard to say what’s available where. Your best bet is probably to go online and check out what’s listed on POD sites—the biggest and most SF-ORIENTED POD publisher so far seems to be Wildside Press (www.wildsidepress.com), although there are other POD publishers such as Xlibris, Subterranean Press, and Alexandria Digital Library, as well.

As very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain superstore, that means that mail-order is still your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, MA 01701-0809—$30 for Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois, by Gardner Dozois; $29 for The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume One, Immodest Proposals, by William Tenn; $29 for The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn: Volume Two, Here Comes Civilization, by William Tenn; $25 for Quartet , by George R. R. Martin; $29 for The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, by Fredric Brown (plus $2.50 shipping in all cases). Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802—$24.95 for Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, by Geoffrey A. Landis; $24.95 for Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo; $24.95 for Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; $23.95 for Claremont Tales, by Richard A. Lupoff. The Vance Integral Edition, 4100-10 Red Wood Road, PMB 338, Oakland, CA 94619-2363—$27 for Coup de Grace, by Jack Vance. Morpheus International, 9250 Wilshire Blvd., STE LL 15, Beverly Hills, CA 90212—$34.95 hardcover, $24.95 trade paperback for The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective, by Harlan Ellison. Night Shade Books, 563 Scott #304, San Francisco, CA 94117—$35 for The Devil Is Not Mocked, by Manly Wade Wellman; $35 for Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales, by Manly Wade Wellman. Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB #132, Brooklyn, NY 11217—$16 for Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link; $16 for Meet Me in the Moon Room: Stories, by Ray Vukcovich. Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519; Stealth Press, 128 E. Grant St., Lancaster, PA 17602-2854—$24.95 for Darkness Divided, by John Shirley. Big Engine Co. Ltd., Box 185, Abingdon OX14 1GR, UK—$12.97 for Bad Timing and Other Stories, by Molly Brown; Invisible Cities Press, 50 State Street, Montpelier VT 05602—$14.95 for Redgunk Tales: Apocalypse and Kudzu from Redgunk, Mississippi, by William R. Eakin.

 

The reprint anthology market this year was actually stronger than the original anthology market, pound for pound, with more worthwhile material for your money.

As usual, the most reliable bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards Showcase 2001 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by Robert Silverberg, and another volume in The SFWA Grand Master series, this one The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 3 (Tor), edited by Frederik Pohl, featuring work by Damon Knight, Lester Del Rey, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, and Pohl himself.

Starting in 2002, science fiction will be covered by three “Best of the Year” anthology series (something that hasn’t been true since the days in the late ’80s when Terry Carr, Donald Wollheim, and I all had competing volumes on the shelves at the same time): the one you are holding in your hand, (The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, now up to its nineteenth annual volume), the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its seventh annual volume, and a new science fiction “Best of the Year” series, Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, added to the mix in early 2002. Once again, there were two “Best of the Year” anthologies covering horror in 2001: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Caroll & Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume Twelve, and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Fourteenth Annual Collection. For perhaps the first time ever, fantasy is being covered by three “Best of the Year” anthologies, by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, by the Year’s Best Fantasy (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, now up to its second annual volume, and by a brand-new “Best of the Year” series covering fantasy, Fantasy: The Best of 2001 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, also added to the mix in early 2002.

Turning from series to stand-alone books, especially those dealing with contemporary material rather than retrospective look-backs, the best reprint SF anthology of the year by far is Futures (Warner Aspect), edited by Peter Crowther. The anthology consists of four novellas that were published as individual chapbooks in Britain by PS Publishing in 2000, and the anthology as a whole has had a British edition as well, or I would probably have listed it as the best original SF anthology of the year, since most of the material here is probably being seen for the first time by the American audience, at least. Literary quality here is very high—the best of the four novellas are probably “Tendeleo’s Story,” by Ian McDonald (this year’s Sturgeon Award winner) and “Watching Trees Grow,” by Peter F. Hamilton, but the other two novellas, by Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter, are excellent as well, and also stand head-and-shoulders above almost all the other novellas published in 2000; taken together, the impact of the four novellas is staggering, and the overall quality of the book is a significant accomplishment on Crowther’s part; if you want to see what’s going on on the much-discussed cutting edge of SF, you need to buy this book. You also ought to check out a small-press item of real worth, The Ant-Men of Tibet and Other Stories (Big Engine), edited by David Pringle, made up of stories drawn from moderately recent issues of Interzone which Pringle also edits. Although some of Interzone’s best writers, and some of the key players in twenty-first-century SF, are here, people such as Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, Chris Beckett, Keith Brooke, and Peter T. Garratt, are not represented by their best stories, or even by their best stories from recent issues of Interzone: a bit of a disappointment. Still, there’s nothing bad here, the bulk of the fiction is high quality, in fact, if not quite up to the very high standards of the author’s own personal bests, and this anthology does an admirable job of providing a valuable and intriguing perspective on what SF looks like from the British side of the Atlantic—something absolutely necessary these days, when so many of the best writers are British, if you’re going to understand where SF itself is going to be going in the next few years. (Big Engine Co. Ltd., Box 185, Abingdon OX14 1GR, UK—$11.53 for The Ant-Men of Tibet and Other Stories, edited by David Pringle.)

No doubt standing in the twenty-first century at last makes it an irresistible temptation to cast a reflective and summing eye back over the twentieth century just past. There were many excellent retrospective overview reprint SF anthologies this year, most of them huge volumes that provide good value for your dollar. Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (Ace), edited by Orson Scott Card, provides Card’s subjective take on the best SF of the twentieth century—which, of course, immediately began to be argued with by other critics as soon as the book appeared, who preferred their own subjective take on the matter instead. I’m no exception. I’d quibble with most of Card’s list, in fact, which, for the most part, strike me as neither “masterpieces” or “the best science fiction of the century”—or even as the best work of the authors represented. And, as always, I disagree with many of the opinions and conclusions offered in Card’s editorial front-matter. Nevertheless, if there’s little here that’s really “the best,” by my own subjective taste, anyway, there’s little or nothing that’s bad, either, most of the contents certainly falling into the “good” or even “superior” (if not quite absolute best) end of the scale. So all that will matter to the great majority of readers is that they’re getting a great deal of solid-to-superior work by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, John Crowley, Terry Bisson, Brian W. Aldiss, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Michael Swanwick, William Gibson, Joe Haldeman, and many others, for a not-unreasonable price for the length of the book they get, and that makes this a worthwhile buy. However, much the rest of us might quibble with the selection of one story over another.

Much the same sort of thing could be said about The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century (Del Rey), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. Let’s say up front that there’s almost nothing in this big volume that isn’t worth reading, which makes it a very worthwhile purchase for the average reader, too, in terms of reading-value received for money spent. With that out of the way, let’s get to the quibbles! As Turtledove is probably the most famous and successful of living writers of alternate history, you’d think that his selections would be right on target—he ought to know alternate history when he sees it, if anyone does!—but the biggest complaint one can make about this anthology is that many of the stories aren’t really alternate history at all, as I understand the sub-genre. Anyway, most are time-travel stories, or even straightforward SF with no time-travel or alternate history element in them whatsoever. For instance, although an excellent story, what’s Allen Steele’s “The Death of Captain Future” doing here? And Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” strikes me as a time-travel story rather than an alternate history story, although admittedly there’s some degree of subjectivity in the call one way or the other. I could also question the suitability of Poul Anderson’s “Eutopia.” Even with those stories that undeniably are alternate history, it’s possible to question some of Turtledove’s choices. It’s impossible to argue with classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” William Sanders’s “The Undiscovered,” or Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee,” which undeniably belong here, but Gregory Benford’s “Manassas, Again” is far from Benford’s strongest alternate history story (I might have suggested Benford’s “We Could Do Worse”), and I myself would have picked Turtledove’s own “The Last Article” over his “Islands in the Sea.” And nothing by Howard Waldrop, the writer who has probably been the best-known for alternate history stuff in the past few decades, second only to Turtledove himself? Nothing by L. Sprague De Camp? (When his “Aristotle and the Gun” is one of the foundation stones of the whole form?) Nothing by Keith Roberts? Or Robert Silverberg? What about Ian R. MacLeod’s magnificent “The Summer Isles?” Or one of the numerous “Alternate Space Program” stories by Stephen Baxter? Quibble, quibble, quibble—but if you’re going to claim that an anthology contains “The Best of the Twentieth Century” in some particular form, you invite an unusual degree of scrutiny.

Of course, as with the Card anthology, few ordinary readers are going to give a rat’s ass about any of this. All they’ll care about is that they’ll get a lot of good reading for their buck—and by that standard, this is certainly one of the best anthologies of the year.

And the same kind of remarks could be made about The Best Military Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century (Del Rey), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg. Some of the selections are spot-on (Joe Haldeman’s “Hero,” Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety,” Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Superiority,” Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon”), while others seem oddly inappropriate, as though they’d wandered in from some other anthology altogether (Gregory Benford’s “To the Storming Gulf”—I would have used his “Warstory” instead—or Anne Mc-Caffery’s “Dragonrider,” or Walter Jon Williams’s “Wolf Time”—which is a spy-with-superpowers story, not a military story per se—or even Turtledove’s own “The Last Article,” turning up at last, although my own opinion is that it would have fit more comfortably into the previous anthology). Oddly, considering that his reputation is primarily as an alternate history writer, Turtledove seems to do a somewhat better job overall of assembling a reasonable list of classic military SF than he did of assembling a list of classic alternate history stories—although aficionados of the form might wonder what happened to some of the heavy hitters of the sub-genre who are not present, such as Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Feintuch, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, or David Weber.

And again, most readers will not give a rat’s ass about any of this—nor could it be argued, should they, if their main priority is getting a lot of good stories to read for a reasonable price, by which standard this anthology is also well worth having, no matter how loudly critics carp.

A thematic overview of a different sort, A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women (Warner Aspect), edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams, offers an array of feminist science fiction from the past few decades, including classics like Connie Willis’s own “Even the Queen,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” and Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” among other good stuff—although Ursula K. Guin’s wonderful novella “A Woman’s Liberation” is worth the price of the book alone.

Two other big retrospective overview anthologies, noted without comment are Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (St. Martin’s), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Supermen: Tales of the Postmodern Future (St. Martin’s), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Also of interest this year is Science Fiction 101 (ibooks), edited by Robert Silverberg, a retitled reissue of Silverberg’s 1987 anthology Worlds of Wonder. This is one of the best teaching anthologies ever compiled, as Silverberg analyzes each story and gives his shrewd opinions as to why the story works, and what it shows us about the larger nature of science fiction itself. All that aside, the anthology is a superior reprint anthology considered just as an anthology, a collection of stories to be read, containing Jack Vance’s “The New Prime,” Alfred Besters “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain,” Brian W. Aldiss’s “Hothouse,” and nine other classics.

Also noted without comment: Genometry (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Space Soldiers (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; and Isaac Asimov’s Father’s Day (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

There didn’t seem to be many reprint fantasy anthologies again this year, although there were two big retrospectives that were a good value for your money. The best of these probably was The Mammoth Book of Fantasy (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, which does a good job of bringing us classic fantasy stories by Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merrit, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Micheal Moorcock, and others, as well as good work by relatively newer authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, James Blaylock, and others. The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, is not quite as good a buy, being more specialized and working over ground Ashley has already worked in two other huge volumes, but is still worthwhile, featuring good work by the usual suspects—Esther Friesner, Tom Holt, Avram Davidson, Craig Shaw Gardner, Fredric Brown—as well as work from authors you don’t often see in anthologies of comic fantasy, such as Damon Runyon, John Cleese, and Connie Booth.

Noted without comment is Isaac Asimov’s Halloween (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

If there were a lot of reprint horror anthologies this year, other than the Stephen Jones “Best” anthology and Datlow’s half of the Datlow/ Windling, I didn’t spot many of them—but then again, I wasn’t trying very hard, either. One I did spot was The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories Wratten by Woman (Carroll and Graf), edited by Stephen Jones.

 

It was another moderately unexciting year in the SF-and-Fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, although there was still some worthwhile material.

For the average reader, the most interesting volume would probably be Deep Future (Gollancz), a collection of speculations about both near-future and further-out scientific possibilities by Stephen Baxter, one of the most popular and acclaimed of all the “new” British hard-science writers, sometimes spoken of as a logical heir to the mantle of Arthur C. Clarke. Baxter had a similar volume out this year as well, from a smaller press, Omegatropic: Non-fiction & Fiction (British Science Fiction Association), a collection of essays (plus a couple of framing short stories) dealing with the way scientific themes have been dealt with in science fiction; the emphasis here more on the “fiction” in science fiction than was true in Deep Future, where it’s mostly the other way around. Along the same lines, Which Way To The Future? (Tor), is a collection of Stanley Schmidt’s editorials on a wide range of topics from Analog; True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (Tor), by Vernor Vinge, edited by Jim Frenkel, is a mixed fiction/nonfiction collection that reprints Vinge’s famous novella “True Names,” and accompanies it with a selection of essays about cyberspace, and especially the impact that Vinge’s pioneering novella had on science fictional thinking about cyberspace; and The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies (Forge), by Damien Broderick, offers speculations and warnings about the wave of Future Shock that may be about to swallow us all. Another book that may be of interest to casual readers, although as different as can be imagined in tone from the edgy, technology-heavy volumes above, is Meditations on Middle-Earth (St. Martin’s), edited by Karen Haber, a collection of personal appreciations of J. R. R. Tolkein’s work rather than of scholarly critical pieces per se—among the more interesting and insightful appreciations here are those by Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Swanwick.

Most of the rest of the year’s SF-and-Fantasy oriented nonfiction will be primarily of interest to scholars and specialists, including The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool University Press), by Mike Ashley; Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820-1950 (The British Library), by Neil Wilson; Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction (Greenwood Press), by Gary Westfahl; and Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (Routledge), by Jack Zipes.

There were several books about individual writers or their works that might (or might not) be of interest to you, depending, I suppose, on what you think of the authors being showcased. They included The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (Nitrosyncretic Press), edited by William H. Patterson, Jr. & Andrew Thornton; The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee: Themes and Subtexts from Dionysos to the Immortal Gene (McFarland), by Mavis Haut; Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (Liverpool University Press), by S. T. Joshi; and Storyteller: The Official Orson Scott Card Bibliography and Guide (Overlook Connection Press), by Michael R. Collings. This year saw two book-length interviews with SF writers, fairly rare items: Being Gardner Dozois (Old Earth Books), by Michael Swanwick, and What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick (Overlook Press), edited by Gwen Lee & Doris Elaine Sauter. A memoir that functions as an interesting study of a whole historical period of the genre and of the featured players who peopled it is Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others (Arkham House), by E. Hoffmann Price.

The art book field was strong once again in 2001, especially notable for the many good retrospective art collections by top artists. For my money, the best of them, and a must for every lover of SF art, was The Art of Chesley Bonestell (Paper Tiger), Chesley Bonestell, compiled by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III. Bonestell was perhaps the ancestral SF artist, the artist upon whose bedrock-foundation vision the work of almost all subsequent SF artists has been based, especially in the area of “astronomical art” or “space art” … and he may still be the best such artist to have ever lived, rivaled only by the very best of today’s crop of space artists, such as Kim Poor and Ron Miller, who in a very real sense are Bonestell’s children. The best of Bonestell’s astronomical paintings are still capable of taking your breath away—and still make great covers for SF books and magazines, forty or fifty years later! Although Bonestell’s collection is my favorite, the year’s other art collections aren’t chopped liver either and provide excellent value for your money if you enjoy SF/Fantasy art. They include: Hardyware: The Art of David A. Hardy (Paper Tiger), David A. Hardy, compiled by Chris Morgan; The Art of Richard Powers (Paper Tiger), Richard Powers, compiled by Jane Frank; Ground Zero (Paper Tiger), Fred Gambino; Testament: The Life and Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), Frank Frazetta, compiled by Cathy and Arnie Fenner; Wings of Twilight: The Art of Michael Kaluta (NBM), Michael Kaluta; Offerings: The Art of Brom (Paper Tiger), Brom; and The Art of Stephen Youll: Paradox (Paper Tiger), Stephen Youll,

As you can see, although there are a few other players here, such as Underwood Books, the publisher who has been doing an extraordinary job of making SF/Fantasy art available to the average consumer is Paper Tiger, who published a flood of retrospective art collections in 2000 by artists such as Bob Eggleton, Frank Kelly Freas, Ron Walotsky, Chris Moore, Boris Vallejo, and others, and followed it this year with the torrent of books described above. There may have never been a time when it was easier to access the collected art of genre artists, and a good deal of the credit for that goes to the folks at Paper Tiger, who deserve a round of applause.

Good general overviews and/or illustrated retrospectives were provided this year by Fantasy of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History (Collector’s Press), by Randy Broecker; The Great American Paperback (Collectors Press), by Richard A. Lupoff; The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines (Chicago Review Press), by Peter Haining, and, as usual, by the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 8: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), by Kathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner.

An offbeat item is Dark Dreamers: Facing the Masters of Fear (CD Publications), a collection of photographs of top horror writers, with photos by Beth Gwinn and text by Stanley Wiater. Gwinn’s photographs are especially good and make me wonder when some savvy publisher is going to turn her extensive gallery of photographs of science fiction authors (Gwinn has been official Locus photographer for a number of years now) into a similar book covering the science fiction field (the last such book, The Faces of Science Fiction, is years out of date, and it’s about time that it’s replaced by a newer, more contemporary volume).

There were a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, although perhaps none quite as central as there have been in other years. Of interest for those struggling to comprehend the complexities of modern cosmology might be The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam), by Stephen Hawking (who should know, since he himself came up with large sections of modern-day cosmology!), and The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things (John Wiley & Sons), by Hannah Holmes. Maverick ideas, of the sort that may (or may not) someday become scientifically respectable (“continental drift” was once such a scoffed-at “maverick idea,” within my own lifetime), are examined intelligently in Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True (Princeton University Press), by Robert Ehrlich—who casts doubt on some of the crazier of these crazy ideas, while expressing surprising support for the theory of the “abiogenic origins” of coal and oil (which speculates that they are not composed of compressed plant matter, as we were taught in school), and even for the possibility of faster-than-light travel and time-travel. Dinosaur fans will want Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions (Columbia University Press), by Peter D. Ward; while those who aren’t already paranoid enough after the events of September 11th and its aftermath might want to look into Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (Atlantic Monthly Press); and those who enjoy SF’s depiction of aliens might be interested in taking a look into the minds of some for-real aliens, ones we share our planet with, as provided by Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (Owl Books), by Marc D. Hauser. A bit further away from the genre’s usual thematic material, but of keen interest to fans of secret history, are Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (Viking Press), by David Hockney, and Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press), by Philip Steadman. These books, which speculate on how Vermeer and other famous Old Masters might have been secretly using camera obscura and other hidden optical techniques to create their most celebrated paintings, are already inspiring science fiction stories (this year’s “Standing in His Light,” by Kage Baker, for instance), with, I’m certain, a good deal more to come.

 

This was actually a fairly good year for genre movies for a change, in the fantasy genre, anyway, with several films that proved to be both major-league crowd-pleasers and reasonably intelligent and worthwhile examples of the cinematic art.

The major event of the year, of course, was the release of the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated first installment (there will be two more movies to follow, released approximately a year apart, although they were all filmed at once) of the new film version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring—which immediately displaced Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which had been the major event of the year up until the release of The Lord of the Rings about a month later. Almost as soon as Lord of the Rings hit the theaters, internet letter columns and bulletin boards began filling up with screeds from disgruntled Tolkien fans who had long lists of complaints about changes that had been made from the print version, some of them mind-bogglingly trivial (can you say, Get a life? I knew you could!). That kind of reaction was easy enough to predict, and, in fact, I predicted it here last year. Somewhat more surprising was the fact that the vast majority of Tolkien fans not only forgave the film and its transgressions (and, yes, changes from the books there were in plenty … although the spirit of the books was pretty well maintained) but embraced it wholeheartedly. Also surprising (to me) was how many people who had never read Tolkien’s trilogy in their lives (and perhaps had never even heard of it) also responded enthusiastically to the movie, which ended up drawing large audiences from beyond the core demographic of stone Tolkien fans.

The bottom line is that The Fellowship of the Rings is a good movie, easily holding the attention of even people who couldn’t have cared less about hobbits (and may never even have heard of them) when they walked into the theater over the course of a nearly three-hour film. Like the internet nit-pickers, I have a long list of quibbles of my own (mainly that the studio suits, panicking over the long running-time of the movie, forced director Peter Jackson to cut too many of the character-building scenes that ought to have been there, scenes filmed but left on the cutting-room floor; I’m already looking forward to a Director’s Cut DVD that restores them), but most of them really don’t matter. In spite of the compromises in plot necessitated by keeping the film under three hours running time, in spite of the beloved characters and scenes that inevitably had to be lost, The Fellowship of the Ring is an honest, intelligent, good-faith attempt to film a book that many had thought was unfilmable—furthermore, it’s an affectionate rendering of the material, one clearly made by people who respected and valued the source material, and that shows through plainly in the resultant film; in spite of the (relatively—you do have to amortize it over three movies, after all) big budget, this is in many ways a labor of love, free of many of the typical cowardly Hollywood compromises, a brainy art-house film made on a blockbuster spectacular scale, with big-budget production values and small-movie heart. The cast is almost uniformly good, newcomers and old pros alike, with Ian Holm especially good as Bilbo, and Ian McKellen (about whose casting I had some grave reservations) absolutely spectacular as Gandalf, a role which won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination this year. It’s certainly the best film version of Tolkien’s trilogy that we’re going to get in our lifetimes.

Although not in the same league as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone also came out a lot better than I thought it was going to. I feared that the heavy-handed Chris Columbus, one of my least-favorite directors, was going to fuck the movie up, totally—but instead he did a reasonably good job of translating this beloved book to the screen, giving us his best movie by far. Rather than the Gremlins-like atrocity I feared, Harry Potter is a faithful (perhaps too faithful!), stylish, and reasonably intelligent version of the novel, absolutely stunning visually, and stuffed with sumptuous set-dressing and costuming (it’s certainly one of the handsomest movies of the year), with a wonderful cast of great British character actors—among whom Robbie Coltrane is marvelous as Hagrid; his performance alone is worth the price of the movie—in more-than-able support of some fine new child performers who tackle the roles of Harry and his friends. The problem with the movie is that it is oddly stiff in some ways, lacking tension, building neither suspense nor momentum as it goes along, so that by the protracted “action climax,” I was sneaking peeks at my watch instead of sitting on the edge of my seat. Strangely, for a movie about a school for magicians, the film lacks magic somehow. It’ll also be totally predictable for any adult genre fan, of course—but in a way, none of these quibbles really matter here. Although it’s a reasonably painless, and even enjoyable, experience for adults to sit through, the audience the movie is aimed at isn’t adults—it’s kids. And with that audience, the movie clearly and undeniably hit a bullseye. Kids loved it. Many children in the audience were already nagging to see it again before the credits had even stopped rolling, and, last I heard, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had settled into the record book as the second-highest-grossing movie of all time.

A sleeper hit that actually rivaled Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in box-office sales was the computer-animated movie Shrek, which was good enough to be talked about by many as being in the same league as enduring children’s classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and Toy Story. Somewhat to my own surprise, since I came to it with low expectations, Shrek turned out to be fresh, smart, darkly satiric (someone involved in this movie really dislikes the Disney conglomerate, and many of the best jokes are at Disney’s expense), and very funny (if deliberately vulgar, with a startling number of gross-out scenes and fart jokes—which the kids love, of course—for a kid’s movie). Fans of the original children’s book tend not to like it, saying that it’s been changed out of recognition in the film version, but since I never read the original, this wasn’t a problem for me—and I greatly appreciated what was on the screen for passing the parent’s/grandparent’s test with flying colors: still being reasonably entertaining and watchable-without-severe-pain when your children or grandchildren insist on watching it for the fourth time in a row. In fact, I think the adults enjoy it as much or more as the kids do, clicking into a whole range of satiric cultural jokes and nuances that are invisible to the under-five set, who are enjoying it on a completely different level: this is also a hallmark of a great kid’s movie, and I think it’s possible that Shrek will stand the test of time and prove itself to be just that. The voice characterizations are quite good, especially those by Michael Myers, Eddie Murphy, and John Lithgow, and the completely computer-generated animation, although uneven, is overall pretty good, ranging from startlingly good to passable, but rarely falling below passable. (There were several other completely computer-generated animated movies this year, including Final Fantasy, that went for a less cartoonish, more photo-realistic look; the whole field of computer-created graphics and animation is moving with almost unsettling speed, and clearly can only become more widespread and prominent as the century progresses.)

Another computer-generated animated kid’s movie was Monsters. Inc., from the same people who brought us Toy Story, Toy Story II, and A Bug’s Life, but had the misfortune to come out in the same year as Harry Potter and Shrek, and so probably didn’t have the impact that it might otherwise have had. It was by no means a failure commercially, but it did tend to be overshadowed by the other movies, and might have stood out more and been talked-about more in a different year—too bad, because, although not as good as Pixar’s Toy Story, it was also an offbeat, intelligent, witty, and imaginative movie, with good voice characterizations by John Goodman and Billy Crystal. Another enjoyable and hugely successful kid’s movie this year (although, as I can testify from personal experience, nowhere near as pleasant for an adult to sit through four times in a row as Shrek) was Spy Kids, a lush (and deliberately silly) James Bond fantasy with the heroic superspy roles being played by kids, who have to rescue their hapless former-superspy parents from captivity. Atlantis, a more traditional Disney animated film, with more-traditional Disney aesthetics, seems to have sunk without raising much of a ripple, which perhaps should ring a warning bell for the makers of such movies that the tastes of the audience are changing—but which probably won’t, as Disney is already in the process of churning out a ton of sequels to past hits.

Other fantasy movies this year (a few with some SF elements), all pretty high on the “Feh!” scale (with some making it all the way up into “Jesus, I can’t believe they made this!” territory) included the truly abominable Cats and Dogs, the disappointing sequel The Mummy Returns (with Brandon Fraser still working hard at being affable, but with even less to work with this time around), three deliberately anachronistic knights-in-armor movies, A Knight’s Tale, Black Knight, and Just Visiting (all of which plowed in one way or another much the same ground that Monty Python had plowed more effectively, with more humor, decades before), and two big-budget film versions of computer games, Laura Croft: Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which were box-office smashes, visually splendid, and, not surprisingly, almost totally calorie-free (to say nothing of the fact that a brain is not at all required to enjoy them, and is, in fact, rather a downcheck if you do bring one into the theater with you by mistake).

Things were far less bright on the science fiction side of the scale, as far as SF/Fantasy films were concerned. In the last couple of years, Hollywood has shown that it can make entertaining, reasonably intelligent, worthwhile fantasy movies—the jury is still out, however, as to whether it can make entertaining, reasonably intelligent, worthwhile science fiction movies; so far the evidence is not encouraging, and this year’s crop of SF movies didn’t do a lot to tip the scale in a positive direction.

The best and most-talked about SF movie of the year, AI, directed by Stephen Speilberg, from a concept left uncompleted at his death by the late Stanley Kubrick, still didn’t seem to arouse even a fraction of the enthusiasm stirred up by a movie like The Fellowship of the Rings, and although it was far from unsuccessful at the box-office, it wasn’t the carrying-all-before-it smash that had been anticipated. There’s much style and intelligence here, some good acting and striking production values, and even plenty of unusually sophisticated genre concepts, but somehow it just didn’t congeal, and with its uneasy mix of different—and clashing—aesthetic styles, failed in the final analysis to satisfy either fans of Stephen Speilberg or Stanley Kubrick, or most SF fans either. The year’s other interesting SF movie, K-Pax, was an earnest, moderately subtle, well-meaning attempt to make a quiet, “intelligent” SF film without the usual cutting-edge special effects and slam-bang things-blowing-up adventure stuff, graced by strong performances by Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, and probably went over a lot better outside the genre, to audiences to whom all of the intellectual content wasn’t already extremely familiar.

After this point, things go downhill fast. Planet of the Apes managed to be inferior in most significant respects to the nineteen movies of the same name, of which it is a remake. Yes, it looks great, almost a given with a movie directed by Tim Burton, it has the usual quirky and striking Burton visuals, and the set-dressing, the costuming, and the special effects are far better than in the old version. The plot is a total hash, though, making even less sense than the 1968 version, and managing to muddle the waters enough so that it doesn’t even carry the satiric impact of the old movie, which at the time was powerfully effective, at least to people outside the genre (experienced genre readers had seen it all before, of course, and were not remotely surprised by the “surprise ending” that blew non-genre audiences away). When your spanking-new huge-budget film has less rigor, intellectual appeal, and gravitas than an old Charlton Heston-finds-yet-another-excuse-to-gethis-shirt-torn-off sci-fi adventure flick from the ’60s, you know you’ve done something wrong. Paying a little less attention to the visuals and a little more to the writing might have helped. Ghosts of Mars followed much the same kind of storyline as last year’s sleeper hit, Pitch Black, but didn’t do it as well. Osmosis Jones and Evolution were SF slob comedies, with Evolution, the moderately better of the two, coming across as a sort-of Men In Black-lite, if you can imagine that; both movies seem to have tanked, apparently appealing neither to the SF audience or the slob comedy audience.

I’m sure that there was the usual parade of horror films, from supernatural movies to serial-killer stuff, but I no longer care enough to bring myself to go see any of them, so you’re on your own.

Way out, off the furthest useful edge of definition, as far as what can be called an SF movie is concerned, is a smart little independent movie called The Dish—which really isn’t SF, in fact, but, with its focus on Australian contributions to the American space program of the ’60s, will probably be of interest to many SF fans.

Next year seems set to be “The Year Of The Sequels,” with the new Lord of the Rings movie, the new Harry Potter movie, the new Star Wars movie (after the general reaction of disappointment on the part of many Star Wars fans toward the last movie, The Phantom Menace , it’ll be interesting to see how many times Lucas can continue to go to the well after this if the general reaction to this sequel is similar), a new Star Trek movie, a new Matrix movie, and so on.

It was pretty much a case of same-old, same-old as far as SF and Fantasy on television this year—some formerly successful shows still successful, some shows holding their ground, some losing it.

The big news here was probably the introduction of the new Star Trek show, a “prequel” to the former shows, called Enterprise, which on the whole seems to be going over fairly well with the fans, although it’s yet to generate any real heat. I myself find it much more watchable than the awful Star Trek: Voyager although it has yet to develop a strong emotional architecture, like the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic of the original Star Trek, on which to hang the plots. Without that, most of the shows I’ve seen seem to lack drama and impact, no matter what sort of foreground action and huggermugger is gong on; still, in it’s early days Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance, didn’t really begin to improve in quality until it had been on the air for two or three years, and we should probably give Enterprise the benefit of the doubt, and see if it improves as well. The other top SF show of the moment, Farscape, seems to be holding its ground, but still doesn’t seem to have built enough of an audience to qualify it as a cult show phenomenon, as Babylon 5 before it had been.

In these days of dozens of cable channels, whose availability varies sharply from region to region, and in an age where reruns of current shows run on different channels concurrently with new episodes, it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether a particular show is still “on the air” or not. Star Trek: Voyager, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Third Rock From the Sun finally did die last year, and apparently they’re finally putting The X-Files out of it’s misery in 2002, after a year of messy death-agonies and dropping ratings. The slyly satiric postmodern vampire show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, survived a change of networks and the (temporary) death of its eponymous main character to establish itself firmly on a new network instead, with Buffy safely returned from the grave, and continues to draw a startlingly intellectual, high-end audience; you’d be surprised if you knew the names of some of the erudite postmodern intellectuals who make sure that they rush home every Tuesday night to catch the new Buffy. The Buffy spin-off Angel also seems to continue to be successful, in spite of the flight of its mother show to a different network. Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed, similar supernatural-oriented shows, also seem to still be doing well, although they lack Buffy’s sophistication of material, as well as Buffy’s dark edge (which can sometimes get very dark indeed).

Other shows haven’t been so lucky, and the word is that the plug is being pulled in 2002 on shows such as Stargate: SG-1, Roswell, and Futurama—too bad in the case of Futurama at least, which was funny and sometimes surprisingly sophisticated in the SF concepts it played with. I believe that Gene Roddenbery’s Andromeda is still with us, as are South Park and The Simpsons. Not sure about Lexx, but don’t really care.

As far as I can tell, the only new genre show that established itself as a solid hit this year was Smallville, a revisionist take on Superman’s boyhood, with the “romance/soap opera” factor cranked way up.

As was true last year, two special presentations deserve mention: a miniseries version of Mervin Peake’s Gormanghast, which seemed to delight true Peake fans, while baffling those not familiar with his work, and a sequel to last year’s Walking With Dinosaurs, called Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, which demonstrated again, if any more proof was needed, just how fast computer-generated CGI effects are evolving, as they were considerably better in this year’s show than they were in last year’s.

 

The 59th World Science Fiction Convention, the Millennium Philcon, was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from August 30-September 3, 2001, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,600. The 2001 Hugo Awards, presented at the Millennium Philcon, were: Best Novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J. K. Rowling; Best Novella, “The Ultimate Earth,” by Jack Williamson; Best Novelette, “Millennium Babies,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Best Short Story, “Different Kinds of Darkness,” by David Langford; Best Related Book, Greetings from Earth: the Art of Bob Eggleton, by Bob Eggleton; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Teddy Harvia; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Kristine Smith; and the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award to Olaf Stapledon.

The 2000 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on April 28, 2001, were: Best Novel, Darwin’s Radio, by Greg Bear; Best Novella, “Goddesses,” by Linda Nagata; Best Novelette, “Daddy’s World,” by Walter Jon Williams; Best Short Story, “macs,” by Terry Bisson; Best Script, Galaxy Quest, by David Howard and Robert Gordon; plus an Author Emeritus award to Robert Sheckley, the Ray Bradbury Award to radio program 2000x, and the Grand Master Award to Philip Jose Farmer.

The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Seventh Annual World Fantasy Convention in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on November 1-4, 2001, were: Best Novel, Declare, by Tim Powers and Galveston, by Sean Stewart (tie); Best Novella, “The Man on the Ceiling,” Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem; Best Short Fiction, “The Pottawatomie Giant,” by Andy Duncan; Best Collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, by Andy Duncan; Best Anthology, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R. Thomas; Best Artist, Shaun Tan; Special Award (Professional), to Tom Shippey for J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Bill Sheehan for At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub; plus the Life Achievement Award to Philip Jose Farmer and Frank Frazetta.

The 2001 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet in Seattle, Washington on May 26, 2001, were: Best Novel, The Traveling Vampire Show, by Richard Laymon; Best First Novel, The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club, by Brian A. Hopkins; Best Collection, Magic Terror: Seven Tales, by Peter Straub; Best Long Fiction, “The Man on the Ceiling,” by Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem; Best Short Story, “Gone,” by Jack Ketchum; Non-Fiction, On Writing, by Stephen King; Best Anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling; Best Screenplay, Shadow of the Vampire, by Steven Katz; Best Work for Young Readers, The Power of Un, by Nancy Etchemendy; Best Illustrated Narrative, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore; Poetry Collection, A Student of Hell, by Tom Piccirilli; Best Other Media, Chiaroscuro (web-site), a Specialty Press Award to William K. Schafer for Subterranean Press; the Trustees Hammer Award to Nancy Etchemendy; and the Richard Laymon Award to Judi Rohrig & Kathy Ptacek; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Nigel Kneale.

The 2000 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Genesis , by Poul Anderson.

The 2000 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by Tendeleo’s Story, by Ian McDonald.

The 2000 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith.

The 2000 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Perdido Street Station , by China Mieville.

The 2000 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Wild Life, by Molly Gloss.

 

Dead in 2001 or early 2002 were: Poul Anderson, 74, one of the most acclaimed and prolific of SF writers, and one of the dominant figures in post-War science fiction (along with colleagues Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke), winner of seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and SFWA’S Grandmaster Award, author of over 120 books, including Brain Wave, The Enemy Stars, The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions, Guardians of Time, The Night Face, Tau Zero, Genesis, and many others; Milton A. Rothman, 81, nuclear physicist, writer, and longtime fan, cofounder of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society; Sir Fred Hoyle, 86, astrophysicist and writer (coiner, ironically enough, of the now universally accepted term “the Big Bang”—in description of a cosmological theory he strongly disagreed with!), author of the SF books The Black Cloud, Ossian’s Ride, and October the First Is Too Late; Jack C. Haldeman II, 60, writer, biological researcher, medical technologist, longtime fan, elder brother of SF writer Joe Haldeman, chairman of the 1974 Worldcon, author of numerous short stories and nine novels, including Vector Analysis, High Steel (with Jack Dann), There Is No Darkness (with Joe Haldeman), and The Fall of Winter—a close personal friend for over thirty years; R. Chetwynd-Hayes, 81, horror and fantasy writer, author of over 200 stories and a dozen books, including the collections The Monster Club and Tales from the Hidden World, and the novels, The Grange, The Haunted Grange, and The Psychic Detective; Evelyn E. Smith, 77, science fiction and mystery writer, author of numerous stories in the ‘50s and ’60s as well as mystery novels and the SF novels The Perfect Planet, Unpopular Planet, and The Copy Shop; Robert H. Rimmer, 84, author of the bestselling The Harrad Experiment, as well as the SF novels, The Zolotov Affair, Love Me Tomorrow, and The Resurrection of Ann Hutchinson; Tove Jansson, 86, Finnish fantasy writer and artist, author of the popular and long-running “Moomin” series about a race of troll-like creatures; Keith Allen Daniels, 45, one of the most prominent of science fiction poets, author of the poetry collections What Rough Book, Satan Is a Mathematician, and Shimmarle and Other Poems; Villy Sorensen, 72, Danish fantasy writer and philosopher; Ken Kesey, 66, famous political activist, counterculture guru (founder of “the Merry Pranksters”), and bestselling author whose best-known novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had a stylistic impact on many developing writers of the ‘60s, including science fiction writers, also the author of Sometimes a Great Notion and several children’s fantasy novels; Dorothy Dunnett, 78, historical novelist and mystery writer whose historicals were influential on several later fantasy writers, author of The Game of Kings, Checkmate, Niccolo Rising, King Hereafter, and many others; Dr. John C. Lilly, 86, controversial scientists whose theories about human consciousness and (especially) the possibility of communications between humans and animals inspired much subsequent science fiction, including the movie Altered States and almost all of the “talking dolphin” stories ever written; Gray Morrow, 67, comic-book artist and SF illustrator, longtime artist of the Tarzan comic strip as well as many book covers, some of whose work was collected this year in Gray Morrow: Visionary; Josh Kirby, 72, one of the most prominent of British genre artists, identified in recent years with his long series of covers for Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels; Cele Goldsmith Lalli, 68, former editor of Amazing and Fantastic magazines from 1958 to 1965 (later longtime editor of Modern Brides magazine), where she proved herself one of the most important and influential editors of the pre-new-wave period, coaxing Fritz Leiber back from retirement and buying first stories from later famous new writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad, Neal Barrett, Jr., and Keith Laumer; Cathleen Jordan, 60, longtime editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, who worked with many SF writers when they were wearing their mystery-writer hats—a colleague of mine for more than fifteen years; Fred Marcellino, 61, SF cover artist; Ray Walston, 86, film actor, probably best-known to genre audiences for his starring role in the ’50s television SF sitcom My Favorite Martian, and for his brilliant performance as the Devil in Damn Yankees; Theodore Gottlieb, 94, who, as “Brother Theodore,” performed as a dark comedian and horror-show host for many years, as well as editing the anthology Brother Theodore’s Chamber of Horrors with Marvin Kaye; Terry Hughes, 51, longtime fan and fanzine editor; Jack Harness, 67, longtime fan and fan writer; Morton Klass, 73, brother of SF writer Philip Klass; Alfred R. Williams, 73, father of SF editor and anthologist Sheila Williams; and Whitney Louise Rogers, 5, granddaughter of R. Reginald.