On the surface, 1998 was a relatively quiet year, although just below that surface, major changes swum like monstrous fish, changes that could affect the entire publishing world and make it a radically different place in 2008 than it is today.
It was in general a prosperous year, with the major chain bookstores reporting record earnings, and the relatively new area of online bookselling proving itself to be a serious money-maker, with online services such as Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com bringing in serious bucks, and a great potential for growth still ahead in those areas. A good solid percentage of the money earned this year was earned by science fiction books, which I think pretty much serves to dismiss fears, discussed here last year, that the Death of Science Fiction as a publishing category is imminent. At this point, momentum and inertia alone would carry SF publishing into the next century, even if not another SF book ever sold a copy again—and, indeed, schedules into the first and second year of the new century have already been announced.
But all indications are that SF (even solid core SF, leaving the much dreaded media novels out of the equation altogether) is selling better than ever here at the brink of the new millennium. The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for more than a decade now did not happen in 1998; in fact, the overall totals for books published seemed to be on the rise again, after a couple of years of mild decline (although the ways in which SF books get published continue to change and evolve, with mass-market titles declining and the number of books that are published instead as hardcovers or trade paperbacks on the rise). There were some fairly hefty cutbacks in 1997, and some failing or faltering lines, but they were more than made up for this year in numbers of books released by the founding of major and ambitious new science fiction lines by Avon Eos and Simon & Schuster UK.
The field seems to be in good shape artistically and creatively, too; yes, the majority of the stuff available on the bookstore shelves at any given time is crap, but this has always been true, whatever decade you’re talking about, whether it’s the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, or the ’90s. Look beyond the crap, and you’ll find an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors (from several different generations, stretching all the way from Golden Age giants of the ’30s and ’40s to the kid who made his first sale yesterday) producing an amazingly varied spectrum of first-rate work, from High Fantasy to the hardest of Hard Science Fiction—including a lot of material that could not have been published at all twenty years ago. There are still people around, some of them quite vocal, who will complain at length about how nobody’s writing anything good anymore in the field, not like they did in the old days, but look closely and you’ll find that
most of those same people don’t read any new science fiction, and haven’t for years. Those of us who do read lots of new science fiction know better. When people are looking back nostalgically to the Golden Age twenty years from now, this, the present, this period we’re in right now, is what they’ll be looking at.
Like last year, there was little activity in the traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs in 1998, with the only really significant change being that Shelley Shapiro was named Editorial Director of Del Rey Books, moving up from her former position as Executive Editor. Most of the other changes this year took place a lot farther up the food-chain, in the rarified corporate realms where the very top suits dwell. The giant German publishing conglomerate Bertelsmann, owner of Bantam Doubleday Dell, bought Random House, which includes under its corporate umbrella houses such as Del Rey, Ballantine, Knopf, and dozens of other imprints. Later in the year, Bertelsmann bought a 50 percent stake in barnesandnoble.com, the online arm of Barnes & Noble and direct head-to-head competitor with Amazon.com for the increasingly profitable online bookselling market. Viacom sold off all but the consumer division of Simon & Schuster to Pearson, the owner of Penguin and Putnam. In England, the Orion Publishing Group bought Cassell, which resulted in the merger of SF lines Gollancz and Millennium, with future SF books being published as Gollancz hardcovers and Millennium paperbacks; Jo Fletcher of Gollancz and Simon Spanton of Millennium will be the acquiring editors (with Caroline Oakley, in charge of Orion paperbacks, continuing to edit some authors)—they will report directly to Malcolm Edwards, himself a former SF editor (as is Anthony Cheetham, the head of Orion). And, late in the year, Barnes & Noble, the largest of the chain bookstores, bought Ingram, the largest book distributor. Since Ingram had been the major distributor for Amazon.com as well as for the remaining independent bookstores, news of the purchase sent shockwaves through the entire publishing industry, with the executive director of the Author’s Guild, Paul Aiken, saying (as quoted in Locus), “The Godzilla of publishing is wedding the King Kong of distribution … If I were an independent bookseller, I would be scared to death by this.” Other experts downplayed this implication, suggesting that business would carry on more or less as always despite the sale.
It may take a while for the effects of these changes to surface, but some of them—especially those things concerned with the online bookselling market—may be affecting the industry well into the next century.
And there are other potential changes just down the road, things that could radically alter the nature of the publishing world as we know it. The field of electronic books, e-books, is just now taking its first faltering baby steps, with Tor announcing this year that they plan to offer about 100 books as e-text for the Rocket eBook via direct downloading from barnesandnoble.com; Tor has already licensed electronic versions of new and reprint titles to digital publisher Peanut Press for the 3Com PalmPilot, which are downloadable from the net (Peanut Press has a Web store at www.peanut-press.com that offers versions of books from a number of publishers that can be downloaded into the 3Com PalmPilot). Other “electronic book” systems are in development, including Millennium Reader, EveryBook, and SoftBook. I have a feeling that this market may turn out to be
very significant indeed before we’re too many years into the new century—taken to an extreme, it could change the face of publishing itself.
Another development that could change the face of publishing forever is print-on-demand technology. Working models of such a system were demonstrated at this year’s ABA. If it works as well as it’s said to work, you may soon be able to walk into a bookstore that has such a system installed, and ask for, say, a copy of The Sun Also Rises, or any other book the system has on file, and it will print one out for you on the spot, indistinguishable from a regular trade product. The implications of such a system are staggering — only one such implication is that it would solve at a stroke the problem of the vanishing backlist that has plagued SF publishing throughout the last several decades, since the old mail-order backlist system more or less disappeared at the end of the ’70s: if you decide that you like Poul Anderson, and you want to read some of his old stuff, like The High Crusade or The Enemy Stars, instead of waiting years for a reissue or haunting used bookstores trying to find those titles, you just go to the print-on-demand machine and have it whomp up some copies of them for you on the spot. (Other implications, already beginning to occur to some writers and agents, affect current understanding of out-of-print and rights reversions issues; if your book is always available on a print-on-demand system, how can it ever be said to have gone out of print? And how can you ever get the rights to that book reverted to you in order to be sold again? A supposed one-time sale of a book could become a de facto to the end of time sale, unless contractual limitations are applied to the situation somehow.) Print-on-demand, if it works as well as its promoters claim it will, would also change the face of publishing by eliminating the need for huge warehouses to store large numbers of physical copies of books, eliminate the need for fleets of trucks to ship the physical copies around, and, perhaps most significant, eliminate at another stroke a great deal of the waste and inefficiency built into today’s system (including the returns system that has been a crushing Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the back of the publishing industry for most of the second half of the twentieth century), saving immense amounts in paper and production costs; you would print exactly as many copies of a book as customers wanted to buy, with no need to produce five copies to sell one. Postulate a print-on-demand system able to print books downloaded directly from the Internet, and the need for many of the world’s bookstores disappears as well (I think there will always be some bookstores, places for people to browse and schmooze, although there probably wouldn’t need to be as many of them in any given location).
This all sounds like utopian, pie-in-the-sky daydreaming, but it may not be as far off as you think. Similar technologies are already in place in many CD stores, where you can create your own CDs, mixing and matching songs as you like. Along the same lines, someday you may be able to go into a bookstore with a print-on-demand system and create your own anthology, drawing on a database of the year’s stories (perhaps many of them published electronically online), selecting whatever stories you’d like for it, making anthologists like me obsolete.
I suppose it’s inevitable to be thinking about the future, here at the end of the twentieth century, with a new century and a new millennium looming just ahead of us. (Yes, I know that the new millennium doesn’t really start in 2000, starting
instead in 2001, so don’t bother to write letters to me indignantly pointing this out. That’s a lost cause anyway, I’m afraid—for all except a handful of stubborn purists, the new millennium will start in 2000, which is when the vast majority of the population will celebrate the change … and I must admit that even though I know better, I’ll probably feel a certain emotional frisson the first time I write “2000” as the year date on a check, after having spent a lifetime writing 19__-something instead!)
For most of my life, the year 2000 was THE FUTURE, the time when the majority of science fiction stories were set, unimaginably distant. Now THE FUTURE is suddenly just a few months away, sweeping relentlessly down on us. It’s tempting to try to peek into the future, to predict what’s to come, as I was just doing above, but I know better than that. Just as SF writers peering at 2000 from the 1950s could have no real understanding of what 2000 would really be like, just as people peering into the oncoming new century from the end of the nineteenth century couldn’t possibly have imagined the horrors and wonders and vast social changes that awaited humanity in the twentieth century, so we ourselves, almost by definition, lack the imagination and the foresight to see the as-yet unimaginable changes that lie ahead of us in the twenty-first century and beyond, things that would seem just as bizarre and impossible to us as the atomic bomb or a laptop computer, or a microchip, or penicillin, or the death camp at Dachau, or organ-transplant surgery, or a female Senator, or racially mixed schools, or Hustler magazine, or the Space Shuttle, or the Internet, or the ability to see into our own bodies with fiber-optic cameras, or the ability to speak to someone on the other side of the world would have seemed to somebody back in 1898.
The future is always fundamentally unpredictable and unknowable. And in that lies perhaps our greatest hope.
It was another rocky year in the magazine market, although, for the first time in several years, there were a few upbeat notes, with Amazing Stories reborn and the circulation of a few of the magazines even beginning to creep up a bit for a change.
Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact both changed their “trim size” in mid-1998, going to a new format that added a little over an inch in height and about a quarter-inch in width to each issue (leaving The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as the only true digest-size magazine in the genre), and, as hoped, it seems to have helped with newsstand sales. Asimov’s lost about 2,000 in subscriptions but more than doubled their newsstand sales, from 5,040 to 11,982, for an 11% gain in overall circulation. Analog gained about 383 in subscriptions and another 5,902 in newsstand sales, for an 11.8% gain in overall circulation; both magazines also improved their “sell-through” rate, from 29% to 52% for Asimov’s, and from 32% to 51% for Analog. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 4,393 in subscriptions and another 495 in newsstand sales, for a 12.3% loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,740 in subscriptions and about another 4,462 in newsstand sales, for a 21.3% loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy gained about 517 in subscriptions and about another 209 in newsstand sales, for a 1.6% gain in overall circulation.
The magazine business is a strange one, and some of these figures probably look worse than they actually are. The fact is that many of these magazines, even the ones with declining circulations, may have actually increased their profitability in the last couple of years by various strategies, including adjusting their “draw” (sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine’s efficiency, and thereby lowering costs—and so increasing profitability), instituting cost-saving procedures in printing and physical production, and working out better targeting of “direct-mail” outlets (bookstores—where SF magazines usually sell well) as opposed to scattershot mass markets (magazine racks in supermarkets—where SF magazines usually don’t sell well). Also, a lot of the subscriptions that have been lost by various magazines in recent years are Publishers Clearing House—style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, lost when many of the stamp-sheet places dropped most genre magazines awhile back; stamp-sheet subscriptions can swell your circulation rate, and make it look as though you’re doing great, but since they cost more to fulfill than they actually bring in in revenue, they can be dangerous—they’re part of the reason the print Omni went under, despite an annual circulation of 700,000—and an argument can be made that the genre magazines are better off without them. Although the magazine field did suffer a postage increase in early 1999, it also got a break in that paper costs, projected to rise, not only held steady but actually declined somewhat in 1998. And, of course, one of the traditional advantages that has always helped the digest magazines to survive is that they’re so cheap to produce in the first place that you don’t have to sell very many of them to make a profit (this is still true of the now slightly larger Asimov’s and Analog, where, owing to changes in production methods and the economies that result from the parent company, Penny Press, having lots of other magazines—mostly crossword magazines—that print at the same size, the larger trim size is not significantly more expensive to produce than the old digest-size editions were).
So, my cautious prediction—knock wood—is that it looks like most of the genre magazines will survive into the next century.
At the same time, it would be prudent not to underestimate the problems facing the magazine market. The dramatic contraction of the domestic distribution network that has been taking place in the last few years, with bigger distributors abruptly swallowing up the small independent distributors (one of the major reasons for precipitous circulation drops in almost all magazines, not just genre ones) continues — in 1996, there were 300 wholesale distributors; in 1999 that total is down to five, and the odds are good that it will be down to four before the year is over. There are so few distributors left that it’s a buyer’s market, and the surviving distributors often charge much higher fees for carrying titles or ask for greatly increased “discounts” and “cash incentives” for carrying them—because they can, basically. All of this makes it hard for low-circulation magazines without a company with deep pockets behind them (most SF magazines, basically) to get out on the newsstands effectively, and eats ever more deeply into their profit margin even when they can. Some distributors also set “subscription caps,” refusing even to handle magazines with a circulation below a certain set figure, usually a higher
circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. With so few distributors, fewer and fewer “sales-points” (individual newsstands) get serviced, because distributors now have such large areas to cover that they don’t find it worthwhile to send trucks a long way to service a sales-point that may sell only a few magazines per month, so newsstands may not be able to get copies of genre magazines even if they want them; the loss of those one or two magazine sales per month may be negligible to big-circulation magazines like Cosmo or Playboy, but they can add up vitally for a science fiction magazine. Many newsstand managers have also become much more selective about which magazines they’ll display, reducing the numbers of titles they’ll put on their shelves, in some cases by as much as half; newsstands now will sometimes refuse to display magazines that fall below a certain circulation figure—again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines.
The net result of all this is that it’s a lot harder for genre magazines to get out on as many newsstands as they used to, and—with distributors demanding ever more—a lot harder to make a profit than it used to be, even if you do get out there. As I said above, the magazine field has evolved strategies for coping with this situation, and profitability actually seems to be up at many of the magazines, even those with declining circulations, but it’s not difficult to envision a hardening economic situation that would drive genre magazines off the newsstands altogether, or at least make it so expensive for them to be there that it’s not worth it.
This scenario is why I think it’s important for the genre magazines to try to find ways to get around the potential newsstand bottleneck, to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the newsstand. Most SF magazines have always been subscription-driven, anyway. Being frozen out of the newsstands would hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers, casual newsstand browsers who might, with luck, eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new suscribers, a magazine’s circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a certain percentage of the old subscribers.
Which brings us to one of the other hopeful notes struck in the magazine market in 1998: the use of the Internet as a method to do an end-run around traditional distribution channels, potentially enabling the magazines to avoid the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. Early in 1998, Internet Web sites went up for both Asimov’s and Analog (Asimov’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog’s is at http://www.analogsf.com, both sites sponsored by SF Site) and, after a full year of operation, the results are encouraging—not only is a small but steady flow of new subscriptions coming through these Web sites every month, but, even more significant, many of them are from heretofore untapped new audiences, particularly from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems (Asimov’s, for instance, has already picked up new subscribers from Australia, Great Britain, Russia, France, Ireland, Italy, and even the United Arab Emirites,
and Analog has attracted subscribers from a similar range of countries); the availability of subscribing electronically online, with just the click of a few buttons required rather than a trip to the post office or at least a mailbox, is also proving attractive to domestic customers as well. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now has a working Internet Web site as well (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/), as do magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and Weird Tales (see below for more information), and it is to be hoped that this is an area that will continue to grow, helping the beleaguered genre magazines to survive into the next century.
One of the year’s other big stories in the professional magazine market was the rebirth of Amazing Stories, reported to have died back in 1994. As it has done several times in its seventy-year-plus existence, Amazing Stories rose from the grave one more time in 1998, after memorial services had been read for it and the mourners were already home from the wake. This time, Amazing Stories was resurrected in a full-size, full-color format by Wizards of the Coast Inc., who recently bought TSR Inc., Amazing’s former owner; the editor is Kim Mohan, who was the editor of Amazing Stories in its last incarnation. The new version features media fiction as well as more traditional science fiction; the first issue, debuted at the 1998 Worldcon, had a painting of the Starship Enterprise on the cover, and in its first three issues to date, the magazine has featured several Star Trek stories, a Babylon 5 story, a Star* Drive
story, and other media-and-gaming related stuff, including nonfiction media and gaming columns. On the other hand, the magazine has also featured some good to excellent non-media-oriented core science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Eliot Fintushel, Uncle River, Orson Scott Card, and others, and has featured science columns by people such as Ben Bova and Gregory Benford, as well as book reviews. All of this gives the new Amazing Stories a curiously schizophrenic nature, split down the middle between two different kinds of beasts, fish on this side of the line, fowl on the other, and I wonder how the audience is going to react to this—how either of the potential audiences are going to react to this. Are the media fans who pick up the magazine looking for a good Star Trek story going to like the mainline science fiction stories that make up much of the magazine’s contents? Is the media stuff going to appeal to the regular SF fans, or turn them off and drive them away from the magazine? Clearly the idea is that Amazing Stories will draw support from both audiences, but I can’t help wondering if the magazine can long survive being half one thing and half another, if one kind of thing must not eventually drive the other kind of thing out of the magazine. Which audience might drive out the other will ultimately be determined by which sort of fans are actually buying the magazine. (And since Wizards of the Coast clearly thinks that it’s the media fans who are going to end up paying the bills, would it be unreasonable to wonder if the media fans won’t end up demanding that they get rid of all the other crap and replace it with more media fiction instead?) This is an experiment well worth keeping an eye on; if it works the way the Powers That Be behind the magazine obviously hope it will, then the new Amazing Stories may help print science fiction tap into whole new and largely untouched audiences. At the very worst, ignoring the whole media-fiction controversy, Amazing Stories will be very welcome as a
new high-end market in a genre that needs all the markets it can get, and signs are that it may well prove to be a respectable player in the short-fiction market in the years to come.
story, and other media-and-gaming related stuff, including nonfiction media and gaming columns. On the other hand, the magazine has also featured some good to excellent non-media-oriented core science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Eliot Fintushel, Uncle River, Orson Scott Card, and others, and has featured science columns by people such as Ben Bova and Gregory Benford, as well as book reviews. All of this gives the new Amazing Stories a curiously schizophrenic nature, split down the middle between two different kinds of beasts, fish on this side of the line, fowl on the other, and I wonder how the audience is going to react to this—how either of the potential audiences are going to react to this. Are the media fans who pick up the magazine looking for a good Star Trek story going to like the mainline science fiction stories that make up much of the magazine’s contents? Is the media stuff going to appeal to the regular SF fans, or turn them off and drive them away from the magazine? Clearly the idea is that Amazing Stories will draw support from both audiences, but I can’t help wondering if the magazine can long survive being half one thing and half another, if one kind of thing must not eventually drive the other kind of thing out of the magazine. Which audience might drive out the other will ultimately be determined by which sort of fans are actually buying the magazine. (And since Wizards of the Coast clearly thinks that it’s the media fans who are going to end up paying the bills, would it be unreasonable to wonder if the media fans won’t end up demanding that they get rid of all the other crap and replace it with more media fiction instead?) This is an experiment well worth keeping an eye on; if it works the way the Powers That Be behind the magazine obviously hope it will, then the new Amazing Stories may help print science fiction tap into whole new and largely untouched audiences. At the very worst, ignoring the whole media-fiction controversy, Amazing Stories will be very welcome as a
new high-end market in a genre that needs all the markets it can get, and signs are that it may well prove to be a respectable player in the short-fiction market in the years to come.Most of the news about Asimov’s and Analog was covered above. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction completed its second full year under new editor Gordon Van Gelder, and although the game of “guess which stories were bought by Gordon and which were inventory left behind by former editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch” still goes on, the Rusch inventory must surely be growing rather thin by now, and chances are from here on in that something that appears in the magazine was bought by Gordon. Although the magazine’s circulation declined to a record low, F&SF is a magazine blessed with a very low operating overhead (basically, it’s run out of the living rooms of people such as Ed Ferman and Gordon, with no office rents to pay and only minimum staff costs), and it’s a pretty good bet that F&SF is still quite profitable even at its present circulation. New science columnists Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty have come in to supplement Gregory Benford, and the book reviews seem to rotate on an irregular basis between Robert K.J. Killheffer, Michelle West, Elizabeth Hand, and Douglas E. Winter, with a review column by Charles De Lint also in most issues, and occasionally a review column by Gordon himself. Paul Di Fillipo’s occasional “Plumage From Pegasus” column is a hoot, often at least as inventive and imaginative as the stories themselves (my favorite this year was the slyly amusing “Next Big Thing” column). As mentioned above, F&SF has a new Internet Web site (http: www.sfsite.com/fsf/), one of a cluster of genre-magazine sites on the SF Site’s new page, Fictionhome (see below).
The British magazine Interzone completed its eighth full year as a monthly publication. Circulation remained more or less steady this year, as it has for several years now, with a subscriber base of about 2,000 and newsstand/bookstore sales of another 2,000. Every year, year in and year out, Interzone publishes some of the best fiction to be found in the entire magazine market, and really deserves to be read much more widely than it is. The magazine has been almost impossible to find on newsstands in the United States, even in SF specialty bookstores, but it has recently been redesigned to a slightly smaller format that brings it more in line with other U.S. magazines such as Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy, and has engaged a new U.S. distributor. Maybe those changes, with luck, will mean that this excellent magazine will be easier to find on this side of the Atlantic in 1999. Interzone does have a Web site (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/inter-zon.htm), although there’s not a lot of content there—you can subscribe to the magazine there, though, which is what counts.
Science Fiction Age successfully completed its sixth full year of publication. Although the overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped again in 1998, following drops in 1997 and 1996, the magazine has several things going for it to offset these losses—for one thing, they attract a lot of paid advertisements, far more than any other magazine in the field (with the possible exception of their sister magazine, Realms of Fantasy); for another, as part of a parent company, Sovereign Media, that also runs four other magazines, with a fifth on the way, they can take advantage of “economy of scale” savings in printing and publishing costs, and the
large number of magazines gives them all a bigger “footprint” on the newsstand (i.e., the amount of rack space devoted to all of the Sovereign Media magazines helps to insure that there’s a place there for Science Fiction Age). Despite record low circulation figures, Science Fiction Age’s publisher states that 1998 was the magazine’s most profitable year yet. Artistically, Science Fiction Age had another strong year; for the last couple of years, in fact, Science Fiction Age has been one of the most reliable sources for good fiction, particularly for good solid core science fiction, in the entire magazine market. Oddly, Science Fiction Age does not have a Web site, although you’d think that their connections with the media world, particularly the Sci-Fi Channel (which has an extensive Web site of its own) would make that a natural.
Realms of Fantasy is a companion magazine to Science Fiction Age, very similar to it in format (a slick, large-size, full-color magazine with lots of ads), except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction. They completed their fourth full year of publication in 1998. In the last few years, under the editorship of veteran magazine editor Shawna McCarthy, Realms of Fantasy has established itself as by far the best of the all-fantasy magazines, with the best of the stories from it only rivaled for sophistication and eclecticism by the best of the fantasy stories published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. (The other two fantasy magazines, the much longer established Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine—in its tenth year of publication in 1998—and Weird Tales are much more erratic and undependable in literary quality and consistency.) Realms of Fantasy also does not have a Web site.
As usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from The New Yorker to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to Playboy.
(Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT, 06796, annual subscription—$33.97 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033—$33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323—$33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60.00 for an airmail one year—twelve issues—subscription. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various Web sites.)
With all of the problems—especially rising production costs—threatening the magazine market (and perhaps ultimately all of publishing in general), many cyber-geeks have been insisting for the last few years that the future of fiction publishing, especially short-fiction publishing, lies in the online world, where “online electronic magazines” can be “published” without having to worry about escalating paper and production costs, and can be “delivered” right into the homes of the consumers without having to use outdated physical distribution systems as middlemen.
What nobody has yet figured out is how you can reliably make money doing this, and therein lies the rub.
To date, although the promise of “online electronic publication” remains large, it also largely remains a promise that is as yet unfulfilled. So far, in fact, the track
record for such “electronic magazines” or “e-zines” is not very good. In the last few years, magazines such as Omni and Tomorrow have fled the troubled print magazine world for the supposed refuge of electronic publishing, but, in those cases, the refuge proved to be illusionary. Omni abandoned their print edition and instead established the Omni Online Internet Web site, but that died early in 1998 after a couple of years of operation (although it’s hard to say whether it died because it wasn’t bringing in enough money or, as some of the people involved with running the site insist, because the top brass at General Media lost interest in supporting it after the death of publisher Kathy Keeton, who had been the real driving force behind Omni’s migration into the online world). Tomorrow magazine also abandoned its print edition and reinvented itself as an Internet e-zine called Tomorrow SF. Last year, I reported that Tomorrow SF was in the process of carrying out an interesting experiment, where, after “publishing” the first three online issues of Tomorrow SF for free, they had begun charging a “subscription fee” for access to the Web site, hoping that the audience would have been hooked enough by the free samples that they would continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. Unfortunately, this experiment seems to have been a failure, which may raise doubts about the viability of the whole “e-zine” concept, since Tomorrow SF abruptly gave up its e-zine format in mid-1998. The Tomorrow SF site still exists (http://www.tomorrowsf.com), but it has switched over to being an archive site for reprint stories by editor Algis Budrys, rather than an ongoing “magazine” that publishes new stories by other hands.
The blunt fact is that there are not really that many good, professional-level science fiction stories being published online at the moment (at least original stories, stories that are making their initial “appearance” online; there are a fairly large number of good reprint stories archived here and there around the Internet, on one site or another). Cyber-optimists insist that this will soon change dramatically—and they may even be right.
At the moment, though, most publishers seem to be using their Web sites for pushing a physical product, selling subscriptions to print magazines and advertising forthcoming books, rather than using them as places to print original fiction online in electronic format. There are exceptions, though.
When the plug was pulled on Omni Online, the indomitable Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of Omni Online and, before that, longtime fiction editor of the print Omni, got together with Robert K. J. Killheffer, former editor of Century magazine, and a few other people, and launched a new Internet Web site and e-zine, Event Horizon (http://www.eventhorizon.com/eventhorizon), which started operation in mid-1998, and which has already become, as was Omni Online before it, perhaps your best bet for finding good professional-quality original science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories published in electronic format on the Internet. Since going up, Event Horizon has published good work by Howard Waldrop (a story which is reprinted in this anthology for the first time ever in print format, having “appeared” before that only as phosphor dots on a screen), Terry Dowling, Kelly Link, K. W. Jeter, Michaela Roessner, and others, reprints by Robert Silverberg, Carter Scholz, and Pat Cadigan, and “round-robin” stories (written by four authors in collaboration, each writing a section in term) by authors such as Gwyneth Jones, Susan
Casper, Scott Baker, Garry Kilworth, and others. Event Horizon also features reviews and other nonfiction pieces, regular columns by Barry N. Malzberg and Lucius Shepard, and hosts regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or “chats” with various prominent authors every Thursday night.
Another interesting experiment, with the jury still out on this one, is taking place at Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of a story for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account online and then clicking a few buttons; the fees are small, less than fifty cents per story in most cases. I think that this concept actually has a chance of working, although it would probably work better if they had some Bigger Name authors involved with the project, the kind of authors with lots of intensely loyal fans who might be willing and eager to pay a few cents to get an advance look at a story by their favorite author. This is another experiment that’s worth keeping a close eye on, and one whose success or failure could have large implications for the future of SF-oriented e-zines on the Internet.
A promising new SF-oriented e-zine is Dark Planet (http://www.sfsite.com/darkplanet/), which, in addition to reviews and other features, has published some professional-level work by Kelly Link, Gary A. Braunbeck, Ardath Mayhar, and others. Longer-established sites that are worth watching, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven and they are often not SF-oriented, include InterText (http://www.intertext.com/), and E-Scape (http://www.interink.com/escape.html). If none of these sites has satisfied your lust for e-zines, you can find lots of other genre “electronic magazines” by accessing http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/literature/genres/Science_Fiction_and_Fantasy/Magazines/, but be warned—much of the stuff you’ll find on these sites is awful, no better than slush-pile quality (there’s an unbelievable amount of it out there, too; you could wade through these sites for a solid year and still have oceans of it left to go by the time you gave up). Links to e-magazines and related sites of interest can also be found at sites such as Locus Online, SF Site, Science Fiction Weekly, and SFF.NET (see below).
After this point, original science fiction stories of professional quality become harder to find, rather scarce on the ground, in fact. Many of the remaining SF-ORIENTED sites are associated with existent print magazines—Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.eidolon.net/); Aurealis (http://www.aurealis.hl.net/) Asimov’s Science Fiction (http://www.asimovs.com/); Analog Science Fiction and Fact (http://www.analogsf.com/); The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (http: www.sfsite.com/fsf/); Interzone (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm); Transversions (http://www.salmar.com/transversions/); Terra Incognita (http://www.voicenet.com/~incognit/); On Spec (http://wwv.icomm.ca/onspec/); Talebones (http://www.nventure.com/talebones/)—and although many of them have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, few of them publish original online-only fiction with any regularity; most don’t publish it at all, in fact. Magazines like Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and others, regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, and occasionally
a chunk from an upcoming novel will appear somewhere, but complete original stories are rarer (I’ve run one online original, by Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick, on the Asimov’s site, and would like to do more of this, but finding the money to finance it is not easy). Eidolon Online published a good original story last year, which appeared in our Fifteenth Annual Collection, but don’t seem to have done much along those lines since. Talebones seems to have published some original stories online (it’s sometimes hard to tell, as attribution is often nonexistent) by Terry McGarry, Mary Soon Lee, Uncle River, Darell Schweitzer, and others. A good general site where you can be pretty sure of finding something of quality to read is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a very extensive selection of reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, critical essays, and so forth—as far as I can tell, though, there are few if any original online—only stories published here, although they do publish novel extracts from upcoming novels.
Fiction is not the only SF-oriented stuff of interest to check out on the Internet, however. Some of the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, and some of the sites that I visit the most frequently, are the general-interest sites that, while they don’t publish fiction, do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. One of the most substantial of these sites is SF Site (www.sfsite.com/), which over the last year has turned itself into one of the most important genre-related sites on the whole Web. Their home page 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; in addition, starting with Asimov’s and Analog early in 1998, they’ve become the host site for the Web pages of a significant percentage of all the SF/fantasy print magazines in existence, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the recently assembled DNA Publishing group (see below) of Absolute Magnitude, Pirate Writings, Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, and Dreams of Decadence (which can be accessed directly at http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm). In early 1999, they also instituted a section called Fictionhome (http://www.sfsite.com/fiction/fichome.htm), where reviews of and links to all of the above magazines can be found, and which also plays host to the electronic version of Tangent called Tangent Online, one of the few places online where you can read regularly scheduled reviews of short fiction, and to the online version of Science Fiction Chronicle. Another general-interest site that’s one of my most frequent destinations while net-surfing is Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus; Locus Online is a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, where it sometimes shows up weeks before it even makes it into the print Locus, but I must admit that to a large extent I read the site for the online version of Mark Kelly’s short fiction-review column, the other place on the net where you can find regularly appearing reviews of SF and fantasy short fiction; there are also book reviews, critical lists, database archives, links to other sites of interest, and the like here. Another valuable general-interest site, one that’s been around long enough to be almost venerable by the mayfly standards of the Internet, is Science
Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifiweekly.com), which is somewhat more media-and-gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but which does feature book reviews every issue, of both new releases and classic reprints, and also features an erudite, opinionated, and occasionally fiercely controversial column by John Clute, perhaps SF’s premiere critic. A new entry in this category is SFRevu (http: www.sfrew.com//members.aol.com/sfrevu/), another site full of book and media reviews, and other genre-related information. SFF NET (http//www.sff.net) is a huge site that functions as a home away from home for many writers, featuring dozens of home pages for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web Page at http://www.sfwa.org/. Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are now 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 (http://www.scifi.com/chat/—there’s also an enormous amount of SF-media-related stuff available here) every other Tuesday night at 9:00 P.M. EST, interviews conducted by Ellen Datlow every Thursday night at 9:00 P.M. EST on the Event Horizon site (http://www.even-thorizon.com/eventhorizon/), regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (http://www.cybling.com/), and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (http://www.talkcity.com/). Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GEnie, Delphi (which also now has a Web site, http://www0.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans (with GEnie having perhaps the largest and most active such community). Most of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate, as does SFF NET—the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I’m most familiar, and one which gives you the opportunity to schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, starts every Wednesday at about 10:00 P.M. EST.
Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New York Review of Science Fiction (http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb/nyrsf.html), Nova Express (http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), and SF Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), although most of these sites are not particularly active ones. And for a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the online version of his fanzine Ansible (http://wwwdcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/).
There may not be a lot of original SF being published on the Net as yet, but the whole SF community on the Web is growing so fast, and is not only becoming larger but, perhaps more importantly, becoming more intensely interconnected, with links being forged from site to site, that it’s an area well worth keeping an eye on. I suspect that it’s an area that will become more and more important as we penetrate ever deeper into the new century ahead.
It was a year of big changes in the semiprozine market, some of them potentially quite positive, others, alas, not so positive.
The big story in the semiprozine market for 1998 was the consolidation of several struggling fiction semiprozines under the same roof. Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications (previously the publisher of Absolute Magnitude) bought up several competing magazines this year, ending up with six of them: Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction; Aboriginal Science Fiction; Weird Tales (back to its old title again after several issues in exile as Worlds of Fantasy and Horror); the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; and the new Australian magazine Altair (see below)—Warren became owner of all of these but Aboriginal Science Fiction, which he is managing; the current editors of all the magazines continue to provide the editorial content for a fee or a percentage, and DNA Publications handles the production, circulation, and the business end. The hope is that this move will enable DNA Publications to take advantage of the economies of scale and an increased “footprint” on the newsstand—the same strategy employed by Sovereign Media—as well as generating savings by streamlining the whole operation and making it more efficient. This could well work, as long as Warren hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew and becomes overextended and swamped—if he can handle the workload, this could be a big boost to all of the above magazines, some of which have been struggling in the marketplace and could frankly use a boost. So this could turn out to be one of the most positive developments in the semiprozine market in some years. (Warren’s other challenge will be to stabilize publication schedules, if he can — most of the above magazines only produced two issues apiece this year instead of following their announced publication schedules, a chronic problem throughout all of the semiprozine market—and to try to produce a more reliable level of quality in the fiction published by those magazines; at the moment, quality is all over the place, from very good to at-best mediocre.) As mentioned above, the Web site for all of the DNA Publications magazines is http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm.
Much of the rest of the news in this market is not so positive — some of it is downright bad, in fact.
The eccentric and eclectic fiction semiprozine Crank! officially died this year, after publishing one last issue, as editor Bryan Cholfin announced that he was giving up the magazine so that he could concentrate on his publishing career; Cholfin is now working for Gordon Van Gelder at St. Martin’s Press. With the death of Century —and, with no new issue in more than three years, I do consider it to be dead, in spite of occasional protests to the contrary, especially as editor Robert K. J. Killheffer has moved on to other projects—both of the most ambitious and literarily sophisticated American fiction semiprozines of the ’90s are gone, a dispiriting track record for such magazines. With Crank! and Century dead, the most ambitious of the remaining American fiction semiprozines, and the one which is probably producing the highest percentage of high-end professional-level work, is newcomer Terra Incognita, which this year published an excellent story by Liz Williams, as well as good work by Kandis Elliot, John C. Waugh, Judy Klass, and others—the only problem is, they only managed to publish one out of
their scheduled four issues this year, just like last year; they’ll have to work hard on their reliability if they want to be the Contender that they potentially could be in this market; otherwise, they chance following Century into oblivion down the same old drain. The longer-established Tales of the Unanticipated, although not quite up to the same level of accomplishment, did publish some intriguing stuff this year by Eleanor Arnason, Lyda Morehouse, Sue Isle, Martha A. Hood, and others. Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, although officially a horror semiprozine, seems to be adding a lot more science fiction and fantasy to its editorial mix these days (making it more attractive to me, anyway), and remains a lively and promising little magazine, definitely one to watch. Space & Time has been more uneven, but seems to be getting national distribution on some newsstands these days, and so may become more of a player in this market. If there were any issues of Non-Stop, Xizquil, Argonaut Science Fiction, Next Phase, Plot Magazine, or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, I didn’t see them; I suspect at least some of these magazines are dead.
A new SF fiction semiprozine called Age of Wonder published its first issue in early 1998 and died before the middle of the year, perhaps a new record even in the semiprozine market, where magazines often come and go with the speed of mayflies. The lead story from that first (and only) issue, by Gregory Benford, appeared later in the year under a different title in Science Fiction Age.
Turning to our neighbor to the north, there are two Canadian fiction semiprozines, the long-established On Spec, one of the longest-running of all the fiction semiprozines, and a promising newcomer called TransVersions. On Spec has seemed a bit sunk in the doldrums for the last few years, with most of the fiction in it gray, oversolemn, and not particularly entertaining, publishing little good core science fiction, except for near-future dystopias (the magazine in general seems to take itself too seriously, as witness its annoying new slogan “more than just science fiction”—to which I must admit my immediate grumpy reaction was “some science fiction every once in a while would be nice, though”). Still, On Spec is one of the most reliably published of all the fiction semiprozines, and has published a lot of worthwhile stuff over the years, so we shouldn’t give up on it; the magazine is set to go to a single editor instead of the “collective” that has been editing it (I don’t believe that a committee is any better at selecting fiction than it is at any other task), which may perhaps perk up the fiction. TransVersions is also uneven, with some stuff at a decent professional level, and some not, but it seems to have more of a sense of fun about it than On Spec has had recently, and is livelier and less pretentious.
Turning our eyes overseas, two of the three longest-established fiction semiprozines (the other one is On Spec) are published in Australia: Aurealis and Eidolon. Although both magazines had their usual difficulty sticking to their quarterly publication schedule, they also published a fair amount of good professional-level fiction, by writers such as Terry Dowling, Simon Brown, Russell Blackford, and others in Aurealis (the Double Issue of Aurealis, Aurealis 20/21, also functions as an Alternate History anthology, about possible alternate futures of Australia), and writers such as William Dowding, Leanne Frahm, Sean Williams, and Simon Brown, and others in Eidolon; Eidolon is also home to perhaps the most technically
difficult and formidable science column in the industry, likely over the head of even most Analog readers, by Greg Egan (the sort of column where the text says, “Therefore, we can see that” and then goes on to a solid page or two of equations) as well as a less-demanding new column by Howard Waldrop. Perhaps because of the “boom” that seems to be taking place in the Australian science fiction world, the Australian stuff seems to be more vigorous and substantial than a lot of the other material available elsewhere in the semiprozine market. Another new magazine joined the roster of Australian semiprozines this year, the promising newcomer Altair, which published two digest-size issues (the same format as Aurealis and Eidolon) this year out of a scheduled four, and which is soon going to be available in a full-size semiannual “American edition” from DNA Publications. The fiction in Altair is also uneven, as it is in most semiprozines, but they did feature some good professional-level work by Stephen Dedman, Ian Watson, Ben Jeapes, and others; they also publish a fair amount of nonfiction, but I think they could lose most of it without losing anything of real value (especially the beginner-level How to Write articles) and have more room for fiction. (Altair has a Web site at http://www.sfsite.com/altair/, and I suspect they’ll soon be accessible at the DNA Publications site as well.)
Another promising newcomer, a full-size, full-color British magazine called Odyssey, published five issues this year, and seemed to be struggling to establish an identity for itself; torn between being a science fiction magazine, a horror/ fantasy magazine, and a media/gaming-oriented magazine, it managed to be sort of all and none of the above at the same time. The fiction was wildly uneven, ranging from ameuter-level stuff to good professional-level work by Ian Watson, Peter T. Garratt, Charles Stross, Ben Jeapes, Constance Ash, Mary Gentle, and others. My advice would be to concentrate more on the fiction, especially good solid core science fiction, and let some of the other stuff go. The covers here were often quite attractive, among the most striking in the industry, but the interior layout is often of the “hip” sort that makes it difficult to read the text, and something has to be done about that—this problem actually seemed to be getting worse rather than better in later issues, culminating in issue 6, where printing stories like Charles Stross’s “Extracts from the Club Diary” in light type over gray pages already printed with an illustration made large parts of the story almost impossible to read. A little less coolness and a little more legibility, please! Despite such problems, this is a promising magazine, and could be very good indeed if it manages to shape itself up. Most of the other British fiction semiprozines lean heavily toward “slipstream” and literary surrealism of various sorts; the most prominent of these at the moment seem to be The Third Alternative and the long-established Back Brain Recluse. I think there might have been an issue of Irish semiprozine Albedo 1 this year, but, if so, I missed it.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, but there the most prominent magazines seem to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance, and perhaps Talebones.
Turning to the critical magazines, as always, Charles N. Brown’s Locus and Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle, remain your best bets among that subclass of semiprozines
known as “newszines,” and are your best resources if you’re looking for publishing news or an overview of what’s happening in the genre. The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, completed its tenth full year of publication, once again not only publishing its scheduled twelve issues but publishing them all on time—in the entire semiprozine market, fiction and nonfiction, this is a trick that only Locus and The New York Review of Science Fiction seem to know how to do; most other magazines count themselves lucky if they can manage to bring out half their scheduled issues. As always, the magazine was full of tasty and informative stuff, articles and reviews that ran the gamut from fascinating to infuriating (sometimes both at once), and eclectic little gems such as “Read This” lists by various well-known authors. Other intriguing critical stuff can be found in Steve Brown’s Science Fiction Eye and in Lawrence Person’s Nova Express—when you can find them; actually, this was a red-letter year for Nova Express, which managed two issues in the same year, something of a record. There were big changes in the offing this year for David A. Truesdale’s Tangent, which for several years now has performed an invaluable service by providing a place where interested readers can find reviews of most of the year’s short fiction, something that can be found almost nowhere else in the field, except for Mark Kelly’s short fiction review column in Locus. In late 1997 and early 1998, however, there were signs that Tangent was becoming bogged down, and they began delaying and missing issues (my own feeling was that Truesdale was making the magazine too complicated, taking on too many new columns and features, more every issue, it seemed; the basic task they had to do—covering the year’s short fiction—was huge and complex enough by itself without having to deal with all of that other stuff as well). Only one issue of Tangent came out in 1998, a “Special Double Collector’s Issue” released in time for the Baltimore Worldcon, and it was immediately evident that most of the reviews in the issue were of stuff from the previous year; clearly, Tangent was falling behind, and rumors began to circulate that the magazine would soon disappear and be heard from no more. Instead, I’m very pleased to say, it metamorphosed rather than died, and can now be found in a new form as Tangent Online (http://www.sfslte.com/tangent/index.htm), part of SF Site’s short-fiction-oriented new site, Fictionhome, and where, liberated from the constraints of printing, production, and distribution, it has already “published” four issues in electronic online format, with a return to something like its old vigor (although there are still too many columns and features, in my opinion, even in the online version; the other stuff we can get elsewhere—Tangent should stick to reviewing stories). Since the loss of Tangent would be a major blow to the field, we should all breathe a sigh of relief. An as-yet unanswered question is, What will be the fate of the print version of Tangent? Supposedly it will continue, as a semiannual supplement to the online version—but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to see the print version fade and Tangent Online become the “real” version instead. Speculations, which features writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market news, remains a useful resource for young or would-be authors.
(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc.,
P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $53.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202-0056, $25.00 for 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; Science Fiction Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $12.50 for one year; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Tangent, 5779 Norfleet, Ray-town, MO 64133, $20 for one year, four issues; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite #109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $19.00 for four issues; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; Odyssey, Partizan Press 816-818 London Road, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 3NH, United Kingdom, $35 for a five-issue subscription, $75 for a twelve-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 four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair, Alternate Airings of Speculative Fiction, PO Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia, $36 for a four-issue subscription; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield Sl 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; REM, REM Publications, 19 Sandringham Road, Willesden, London NW2 5EP, United Kingdom, £7.50 for four issues; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, DNA Publications, PW Subscriptions, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142, $15 for one year (four issues) Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, P.O Box 13, Greenfield, MA 01302, four issues for $14, all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; TransVersions, Paper Orchid Press, 216 Woodfield Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 2W7, four-issue subscription, $20 Can. or U.S.; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 SE 250th PI. #104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237.)
It was a fairly weak year for original anthologies, with a few moderately bright spots.
Starlight 2 (Tor), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was probably the best original science fiction anthology published this year in the United States, but the competition it had to overcome to claim the title this year was even weaker than the competition the original Starlight 1 had to overcome back in 1996. Starlight 2 is still a superior anthology, containing two of the year’s best stories, by Robert Charles Wilson and Ted Chiang, and good, quirky, ambitious work by several
other authors, but it is by no means as strong overall as Starlight I was, and doesn’t seem to be generating the same kind of critical buzz, either.
As mentioned, my favorites in Starlight 2 were Ted Chiang’s complex and subtle novella “Story of Your Life” and Robert Charles Wilson’s clever metaphysical reductio ad absurdum “Divided by Infinity.” A step below those was Ellen Kushner’s “The Death of the Duke,” an elegant fantasy story strongly reminiscent in mood of later-period Le Guin (a high compliment as far as I’m concerned), Geoffrey A. Landis’s bitter “Snow,” David Langford’s somewhat less bitter but more complicated take on similar territory, “A Game of Consequences,” and Esther M. Friesner’s unflinchingly brutal “Brown Dust,” definitely not an example of Friesner in her more characteristic Funny Stuff or Sentimental modes (considered in light of Roger Zelazny’s well-known dictum that a short story should be the last chapter of a novel you don’t actually write, it struck me as interesting that Friesner’s “Brown Dust” reads more like the first chapter of a novel she didn’t actually write; it wouldn’t be hard for her to go on from here and actually write such a novel either, in spite of what happens to her protagonist in the course of the story).
A step below these were several stories I didn’t have a strong reaction to one way or the other, competent but not (to me, anyway) exciting, including Susanna Clarke’s kidnapped-by-faeries fantasy, “Mrs Mabb,” Martha Soukup’s better-watch-out-what-you-wish-for story on the borderline of science fiction, “The House of Expectations,” and M. Shayne Bell’s entertaining but somewhat unlikely time-travel story (I can’t really believe that the minor change he posits would have the wide-sweeping effect he claims it would have), “Lock Down.” Everything else in the book struck me as flawed to one degree or another. Raphael Carter’s “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” has some very intriguing ideas, but, as fiction presented in the form of an academic paper, it is also as dry as the form it is mimicking. Carter Scholz’s surrealistic “The Amount to Carry” is vividly and lyrically written, but probably a good deal too long; toward the end, it began to seem dull rather than nightmarish, and I doubt I would have finished it if I hadn’t been paid to do so; it also breaks no new ground for Scholz, being the sort of territory he’s covered several times in the past. Angelica Gorodischer’s “The End of a Dynasty,” elegantly translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, has some amusing touches, but again seems ultimately uninvolving and overly stylized to me. I responded least well to Jonathan Lethem’s “Access Fantasy,” which in spite of its pose of hip modernism comes across (to me, anyway) as recycled Galaxy-era satire, starting out in a traffic jam on the highway that’s been locked in place so long that whole families have been living in their cars for decades, raising their children there, and going on to become a killer satire of the advertising industry.
Overall, a fair number of the stories here seem dry and abstract to me; not only is there not much color, action, or (with a few significant exceptions) sense-of-wonder stuff here, but there’s really not a lot of genuine emotion of any sort generated by most of the stories. Highly intelligent, but cool and somewhat remote. I suppose that “dry” is as good an overall characterizing adjective as any for this volume.
The Chiang novella and the Robert Charles Wilson story, though, are among the best stories of the year, and, along with the Friesner, the Landis, the Kushner,
and a few others, definitely make this anthology worth the price of admission, even as an expensive hardcover, even if it’s not as memorable overall as the original Starlight 1 had been. With these two volumes, Starlight has firmly established itself as one of the most important anthology series of recent years, and it is to be hoped that it will continue for many years to come.
A worthwhile follow-up candidate for the title of best original SF anthology of the year, behind Starlight 2, is harder to find, although I guess I would have to vote for Lord of the Fantastic (Avon Eos), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, the Roger Zelazny tribute anthology, even though it contains almost as much fantasy as it does science fiction, and some of the best stories in it are reprints, having appeared previously in Science Fiction Age and Asimov’s Science Fiction.
The contents of the anthology break down roughly into two parts: those stories that really have nothing in particular to do with Roger Zelazny or his work, and that could have appeared with equal justification in any other market (several of these authors claim “inspiration” by Zelazny as a rationale for their inclusion here, but that inspiration often doesn’t show up on the page to any noticeable degree), and those that either use Zelazny characters and settings or attempt to do a pastiche or homage to his characteristic and highly individual writing style, even when, as in Walter Jon Williams’s “Lethe,” they don’t use any actual thematic material from Zelazny’s published work (as a subset of this category, there are also several stories that use the author himself as a character, embroiling him with time-travelers or aliens, a type of story familiar from the earlier Jack Williamson and Ray Bradbury tribute anthologies, and from the Isaac Asimov memorial anthology; the most ingenious story of this type is Robert Silverberg’s “Call Me Titan,” which also does a moderately good job of pastiching Zelazny’s exuberant style); both categories can then be broken down further into successful and less successful stories, with good and bad stuff in both.
It’s an uneven anthology, with a lot of weak material in it—although only one story, Jennifer Roberson’s “Mad Jack,” was bad enough to make me throw the book across the room in disgust—but also with good to excellent work by William Browning Spencer, William Sanders, John Varley, and Neil Gaiman, solid entertaining work by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jack Williamson, Pati Nagle, Steven Brust, John J. Miller, Jane Lindskold, Jack C. Haldeman II, and others, plus the above-mentioned reprints by Robert Silverberg, Walter Jon Williams, and Gregory Benford, all of high quality, and all of which will still count toward the strength of the volume as far as the average reader is concerned.
It was interesting to me that so many of the authors who did use characters or settings from Zelazny’s work chose fantasy rather than science fiction, and that much of their inspiration was drawn from Zelazny’s later work rather than from his earlier, more famous stuff—there is nothing here that draws on Lord of Light or the Amber novels, for instance, but there are several stories that seem to have been inspired by Zelazny’s late fantasy A Night in the Lonesome October, and at least one that draws its inspiration from Zelazny’s Flying Dutchman fantasy, And Only I Am Escaped to Tell Thee, although that produces one of the book’s strongest stories, the Varley (which is, however, a story that doesn’t really seem to owe that much stylistically or conceptually to Zelazny, once given the basic theme, and
could have appeared anywhere without the Zelazny connection being particularly noticeable). Steven Brust does draw on the background of an alien-dominated Earth from This Immortal, a background rich enough to support a dozen more stories, and I can see that this one might even have been a story Zelazny himself might have chosen to tell (although if he did, certainly he would have found a way to tell it that didn’t bog the story down in technical poker terms to such a degree that the narrator has to call a halt to the narration to explain them every couple of paragraphs!), and Nina Kiriki Hoffman draws on Isle of the Dead, but I would like to have seen more such use made of Zelazny’s colorful worlds and characters, especially the science fictional ones; with such material to draw on, it seems a shame to settle for standard bland contemporary-fantasy backgrounds, as several authors do. Some authors reflect Zelazny’s fondness for playing mix-and-match with elements from different mythological systems, although only Silverberg and William Sanders really do this well, and only Sanders succeeds at catching a bit of the flavor of caustic humor and deliberate playful anachronism that usually characterized Zelazny’s own ventures into this area. Of all the book’s authors, only William Browning Spencer and Neil Gaiman come close to catching the flavor of high-spirited, rapid-fire, pyrotechnic outrageousness that characterized early Zelazny at his best, and only Neil Gaiman really plays with the language in anything like the exuberant, freewheeling, risk-taking way that Zelazny played with it in his prime.
At a rather modest (by today’s standards) cover price of $14.00, Lord of the Fantastic is a fairly good reading bargain, and will certainly be worth the money to most readers.
Another of 1998’s few worthwhile anthologies was Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Original Gay and Lesbian Writing (Overlook), edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, although this was not as strong an anthology overall as 1997’s Bending the Landscape: Fantasy. The anthology contains a lot of minor material, and even most of the good stories here provide either a strong SF element or a strong gay element, but rarely integrate both elements in a balanced way in a single story. In some of the stories, such as Keith Hartman’s “Sex, Guns, and Baptists,” both elements are superficial and arbitrary, since there’s no intrinsic reason why the story (a familiar one about a private investigator spying on an illicit couple in a hotel-room tryst, and the consequences that arise when his emotionally unstable client finds out what’s going on inside) needed to be told about a gay couple in the first place, and the very minimal SF elements present, like the PI’s “fiber-optic snake,” are window-dressing, so that there was no compelling reason for this story to be either about gay people or a science fiction story. To show that SF and gay themes can be combined in such a way that each is dependent on the other, and the synthesis gives the author a way to say something about society that otherwise could not easily be said, one only needs to point to Greg Egan’s “Cocoon” (only the first such example to come to mind), but there is little here that successfully integrates the anthology’s two elements in an organic way. There are excellent stories here by Ellen Klages (the most successful of the book’s authors in providing a story where both the SF element and the gay element are integral to the plot) and Jim Grimsley (whose story is the most emotionally powerful in
the book—but also has so little to do with homosexuality that the gay element is almost subliminal), as well as good work by Rebecca Ore, Nancy Kress, Mark W. Tiedemann, L. Timmel Duchamp, Charles Sheffield, and others—but at $26.95, it’s rather steeply priced for what you get, and some readers may be disappointed. (The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., Lewis Hollow Road, Woodstock, New York 12498—$26.95 for Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction.)
Also interesting, if not quite in the same weight class as the anthologies above, is the mixed original-and-reprint anthology More Amazing Stories (Tor), edited by Kim Mohan. As I read this book, I found myself wondering how best to describe the flavor of the “typical Amazing story”; there is such a flavor, I think, but articulating it precisely is difficult. The typical Amazing story is less rigorous than an Analog story, less literarily intense than an Asimov’s story … which ought to make it roughly the same as an F&SF story, but that’s not quite it either; there are noticeable differences in flavor between the usual Amazing story and the usual F&SF story as well, although the stuff in Amazing is perhaps somewhat closer to F&SF material in feel than it is to either Analog or Asimov’s.
About the closest I can come to it is that many of the stories in Amazing mix science fiction and fantasy in the same story, producing stories that can either be looked at as hybrids of SF and fantasy (if you’re feeling charitable) or nonrigorous SF that doesn’t concern itself much with scientific plausibility or social consistency (if you’re not). The best story by a good margin in the anthology, for instance, Ursula K. Le Guin’s reprint story “Unchosen Love,” is a ghost story that takes place in a science fiction milieu. The best of the original stories here, Eleanor Arnason’s “The Gauze Banner,” is a “translation” into English of a consciously crafted bit of mythology, featuring gods with vast supernatural powers, created by an alien living in another science fiction milieu (and who probably doesn’t believe in the actual existence of the gods he’s describing either). SF, or fantasy? Or a bit of both? The life-transforming “miracles” for sale in Nancy Springer’s “The Time of Her Life” are couched superficially in terms of technology, and yet that technology is never really explained or rationalized and makes little real sense either in itself or as part of a society, and the shopkeepers who proffer it are called “angels.” Along the same lines, not even a token scientific double-talk explanation of the machine that keeps a mother’s baby in some sort of suspension, waking it for an hour every few years, is ever offered in Marti McKenna’s “Perchance to Dream,” and little time is wasted wondering about what the overall effect on society such technology would be; it’s merely an enabling device to allow the mother to grow old while her baby stays forever young, and a magic spell would have done the job just as effectively, if not more so. And so it goes with story after story here, many of which are presented as science fiction, and couched in SF’s terminology, but where the fantastic element is so unexamined and unexplained, and exists in such isolation from the rest of the society, that the story might just as well be fantasy.
It strikes me that the closest relative to “the typical Amazing story,” with its SF furniture and fantasy aesthetic, is probably not to be found in print literature at all, but rather in television—it’s very close to the mix used in television’s The Twilight Zone, where the premises could shock or amuse, but very rarely stood up
under any sort of closer examination. Like The Twilight Zone, sometimes the results are very entertaining; sometimes they’re just annoying.
The original stories here are, for the most part, solid and entertaining but not particularly memorable or first-rate; the best of the lot is the Arnason, with good work also being done by S. N. Dyer, L. A. Taylor, Don Webb, and others, but the anthology as a whole is strengthened by the presence of some good reprint work, including the above-mentioned Le Guin story and reprint stories by Howard Waldrop, Gregory Benford, James Alan Gardner, and Philip K. Dick, and is further bolstered by an interesting article about the work of Philip K. Dick by Robert Silverberg, so the package as a whole does deliver value for your money, although at a somewhat steep cover price of $24.95, it’s probably a marginal buy; it would be a better deal if it was being offered as a cheaper trade paperback or mass-market.
An unusual item is Dreaming Down-Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, a huge mixed anthology of Australian science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “magic realism” (by which the editors seem to mean literary surrealism of various sorts), which may well be the best overall anthology of the year, pound for pound, although few American readers will have seen it, and it’s so inclusive across so many genre lines that it’s hard to know where to categorize it. In the United States, the different genres represented in Dreaming Down-Under are to a large extent kept discrete; you may see a couple of them represented in the same magazine or anthology, but rarely all of them. This mixing of different genres in one literary package seems to be characteristic of Australia, though—the new Australian Best of the Year anthology series edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne is set up that way, and you’ll find a similar mix of genres in most issues of Australian semiprozines such as Eidelon and Aurealis. (For what it’s worth, the cover copy here refers to this mix as “wild-side fiction,” listing its elements as “fantasy, horror, magic realism, cyberpunk and science fiction”; interesting that those last two seem to be considered to be separate subgenres!) For someone accustomed to American practice, it may seem as though there are really several different books here in one package, and, in fact, it would be easy enough to carve Dreaming Down-Under up into separate volumes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (which would still leave a few literary “unclassifiables” left over!) … and I wonder if indeed this won’t be its fate when the American publishing industry finally comes to grips with the problem of an American edition (or editions). Still, having so many different genres represented in one volume does give you a one-stop overview across the entire spectrum of the booming Australian publishing scene, and the anthology is worthwhile for that alone, as well as serving as an introduction to a great many writers of whom most of the American audience will not have heard before.
For me, the most effective stories here were usually the ones that had the most local color, the ones that, if science fiction, dealt the most centrally with the special problems and characteristics of Australian society and culture, or, if fantasy, the ones that centered around aboriginal mythology or the (sometimes hybrid) folkways developed by the Europeans after settlement; the further away from Australian settings, themes, and concerns the stories got, the weaker they became generally. There is a fair amount of weak material here: there’s too much second-generation
cyberpunk, which is beginning to feel a bit tired fifteen years after Neuromancer, the horror is mild by contemporary American standards, and some of the stories are minor enough that it seems likely that they were used only because of a (perhaps misplaced) desire to be as inclusive as possible across the wide spectrum of currently active Australian writers (although, in this context, the absence of Greg Egan, probably Australia’s hottest genre writer of the ’90s, may be remarked upon by some)—but the book is so huge that a strong still-larger-than-normal-size anthology could still be put together out of what’s left. Dreaming Down-Under contains excellent science fiction by Chris Lawson, Cherry Wilder, Damien Broderick, Terry Dowling, David J. Lake, Sean Williams, Dirk Strasser, and others, good fantasy by Stephen Dedman, Lucy Sussex, Simon Brown, Jane Routley, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, Kelly Greenwood, and others, and good horror by Wynne Whiteford, Sara Douglas, Ian Nichols, Paul Brandon, and others. The most frustrating item here is part of a science fiction novella by the late George Turner, left unfinished when he died; what there is of it here is first-rate work (if the rest of the story lived up to the promise of what’s on the page here, it probably would have been the best story in the book, and one of the best of the year). It’s a tragedy that Turner was unable to complete it, but I wonder if it was really a good idea to include an unfinished novella in the anthology, although no doubt Turner completists will be glad to have it; the casual reader, though, is likely to find it just frustrating.
On the whole, then, this is an anthology that’s well worth the money, both in itself and as a window on a whole fascinating world of science fiction and fantasy that’s developed in parallel to but distinct from American genre work and even British genre work, a world produced by convergent evolution, in some ways familiar, and yet also various and strange.
Alternate Generals (Baen), edited by Harry Turtledove, is both more substantial and less flamboyant than most of the long string of Alternate History anthologies edited in recent years by Mike Resnick, for both better and worse; there are no really first-rate stories here, as occasionally did crop up as the high points of the Resnick Alternate anthologies (Maureen McHugh’s “The Lincoln Train,” for instance, or Pat Cadigan’s “Dispatches from the Revolution”), but if the highs are not as high, the lows are not as low, either. You get far fewer of the kind of stories that postulate the wildly improbable if not impossible (and often downright silly) scenarios (“Suppose Mother Teresa formed an outlaw gang during the Depression with Einstein and Albert Schweitzer!”, “Suppose Buddy Holly became president of the United States!”) that often filled the Resnick anthologies, stories that, in the more extreme cases, strike me as being just fantasy stories with all-star celebrity casts rather than valid science fiction at all (the same way I feel about Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne’s “Alternate History” stories that have been running for years in Interzone). Not surprisingly, considering that Harry Turtledove is the editor, the stories here are less frothy and “playful” and more stick-to-your-ribs substantial, with less emphasis on the self-consciously “outrageous” juxtaposition of wild and crazy images and much more emphasis on historical scenarios that, although often unlikely, actually could happen—which, in my opinion, is where the interest of most good Alternate History stories lies: seeing how radical a change
in subsequent history you can produce by altering only one or two historical parameters, things that might actually have happened but which (in this universe) did not. The trick is to do that without spinning away into anything-can-happen-What-if Napoleon-had-a-B-52-at-Waterloo? fantasies, which for serious Alternate History writers is the equivalent of the hard science writers’s famous complaint about “playing with the net down.”
The authors here do a pretty good job of pulling off that trick, on the whole, walking the line between “imaginative” and “impossible.” The overall mood of the anthology is serious, if not somber (in a few cases, almost a bit stodgy), and many of the alternate history scenarios are ingenious, and elegantly minimalist, producing substantial ultimate changes from small changes in initial conditions. “Substantial,” in fact, is a good overall word to describe this particular book. It helps to be a history buff if you’re really going to appreciate Alternate Genera/s—and, in fact, it helps to be a military history buff; if you’re not, you may have difficulty here and there figuring out how and why things have changed from the actual history of our world; you may not even know what the actual events were in the first place, which diminishes the impact of seeing them cleverly changed, always a fundamental problem for Alternate History; without hitting the reference books, for instance, I find that I have no idea what the “real history” events are that are being altered in a story such as Elizabeth Moon’s otherwise-rousing chase-and-battle-at-sea story “Tradition,” and I doubt that many other readers will, either. There are a few other stories that suffer from this syndrome as well. The best stories here are William Sanders’s vivid “Billy Mitchell’s Overt Act” and Lois Tilton’s ingenious “The Craft of War,” but the book also features, yes, substantial work by Esther M. Friesner, David Weber, R. M. Meluch, Lillian Stewart Carl, S. M. Stirling, Turtledove himself, and others. At a cover price of $5.99, it’s a solid reading value.
Interestingly, perhaps out of a fear that there aren’t that many military history buffs out there after all, the publisher has done its best with its packaging and its cover copy to make this look like one of the Resnick-style wild-and-crazy juxtapositions kind of anthologies, instead of what it actually is. The cover painting, for instance, features a Roman soldier riding in a World War II-style tank, and the back-cover copy burbles “At Gaugemela the Macedonians had Alexander and the Persians had—Darius … . But what if the Persians had—Erwin Rommel. Or what if George S. Patton had commanded Southern forces at Bull Run, and Lincoln had become a Confederate prisoner?”—au scenarios which, as far as I can tell, do not occur in any of the stories in the book. I’m not sure of the wisdom of trying to fool the reading public into thinking they’re buying one kind of thing when actually they’re getting quite a different kind of thing altogether (if Baen wanted a Resnick-style alternate history anthology, why didn’t they hire Resnick to do one for them in the first place?), as though consumers who thought they were buying chocolate ice cream won’t notice they’re been given strawberry instead, but that’s pretty much what the packaging here attempts to do. Strange.
There was also an Alternate-History-of-Canada anthology this year, ArrowDreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas (Nuage Editions), edited by Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis, most of the contents of which were earnest but
rather dull, although there is interesting work here by Eric Choi, Derryl Murphy, Glenn Grant, and others. (Nuage Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3M 3S7—CDN $19.95 for ArrowDreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas.) (We somehow missed another original anthology of Canadian fiction, Tesseracts6 [Tesseract], edited by Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink, which we’ll have to save for next year.) The double issue of the Australian semiprozine Aurealis, Aurealis 20/21, also functions as an Alternate History anthology about the possible futures ahead for Australia, and is somewhat livelier and more entertaining than its Canadian counterpart, with good work by Simon Brown, Terry Dowling, Sue Isle, Russell Blackford, and others, although most of the scenarios here are not terribly likely either.
An even more specialized Alternate History item is Alternate Skiffy (Wildside Press), edited by Mike Resnick and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which I missed when it appeared late last year. As the title indicates, this anthology makes no bones about being frivolous, even unabashedly silly; in effect, it’s a sequence of in-jokes about science fiction fandom and prodom, with almost no chance of being appreciated by anyone who isn’t seriously involved in those worlds: fan fiction, in other words, although sometimes superior examples of same. The best stories here are David Langford’s droll and satirical “The Spear of the Sun” (which originally appeared in Interzone, and was reprinted in Asimov’s a few years back, while this anthology presumably languished on the shelf) and Frederik Pohl’s sly and ingenious “The Golden Years of Astounding,” which makes a surprisingly plausible case for what science fiction would have been like if John W. Campbell had been fired early on and Donald Wollheim put in charge of Astounding instead (although I doubt if even the formidable Wollheim would really have been capable of talking J. R. R. Tolkien into writing his magnum opus as a space opera, The Lord of Saturn’s Rings, rather than as a fantasy—it’s a good joke, though, the best in the book). There’s other good work here from Barry N. Malzberg, Gregory Feeley, Anthony R. Lewis, Greg Cox, and others. If you’re a science fiction fan (particularly a convention-attending fan) or professional, or at least are moderately familiar with the history of the genre, you may well get a few chuckles, and even a belly laugh or two, out of this material. If you’re not, I suspect that most of the stories might as well be written in Sanskrit, for all you’re going to be able to get out of them. (The Wildside Press, 522 Park Avenue, Berkeley Heights, NJ 07922—$9 for Alternate Skiffy.)
There was also a reprint anthology of Alternate History stories, Roads Not Taken (Del Rey), edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt.
Although it has the odd distinction of having the second silliest idea for a theme anthology of the year (Dangerous Vegetables edges it out by a hair), Alien Pets (DAW), edited by Denise Little, turns out to be a decent although unexciting and unexceptional anthology, perhaps even worth the money at a cover price of $5.99, one made up for the most part of pleasant but minor stories. After “pleasant but minor,” there really isn’t a whole lot left to say about the book, except to observe that the template of the Alien Pet story seems to have been set by Robert Heinlein all the way back in The Star Beast, where the protagonist’s alien pet actually turns
out to be a sentient being of one degree or another of importance in the galactic scheme of things; several stories here ring minor changes on this basic idea. There’s nothing even close to exceptional here, but the best work in the anthology is by Jack Williamson, Michelle West, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jane M. Lindskold, and Bruce Holland Rogers.
Oddball items included Clones and Clones (Norton), edited by Martha C. Nuss-baum and Cass R. Sunstein, a mixed fiction and (mostly) nonfiction anthology about, what else, clones (the nonfiction stuff is rather elementary for a genre audience, with the exception of one nice piece by Stephen Jay Gould, and the fiction is largely uninspired, with the exception of one decent story by Lisa Tuttle), and, even odder, an anthology called Lamps on the Brow (James Cahill Publishing), edited by James Cahill, which was published in a print run of only 200 copies by a small press; even after reading the introduction and such front matter as there is, I have no idea what the ostensible theme of this anthology is, what the criterion for inclusion was, or why it’s called Lamps on the Brow. The book contains an interesting “Introduction” about immortality by Ben Bova (various sorts of “immortality”—or at least of persistence after death—would be my guess as to a unifying theme here, if there is one, although it’s a stretch), reprint stories by A. E. van Vogt and Gregory Benford, and mostly minor original stories by Bruce Bethke, David Brin, Andre Norton, Mike Resnick and Josepha Sherman, Harry C. Stubbs (not, note, “Hal Clement”), Gene Wolfe, and Laura Resnick, the most substantial of which is probably the Stubbs, a standard Analog-type struggle-to-survive-on-a-hostile-world planet with some good detail, interesting because the protagonist does not survive. Another offbeat, hard-to-classify item is Leviathan 2 , The Legacy of Boccaccio (Ministry of Whimsy Press), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Rose Secrest, an anthology of “slipstream” stories that may be too far out on the edge for most genre readers, although it does contain interesting work by L. Timmel Duchamp, Stepan Chapman, and others. (Ministry of Whimsy Press, Post Office Box 4248, Tallahassee, Florida 32315—$10.99 for Leviathan 2, The Legacy of Boccacio.) Also unusual is Frontiers: On the Edge of the Empire, 3rd Encounters of Science Fiction & Fantasy (Simetria), edited by Maria Augusta and Antonio de Macedo, a book from the Portuguese Science Fiction Association, with stories by a mixed group of Portuguese and English authors, the stories presented in Portuguese on one side of the book, the same stories presented in English on the flip side.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XIV (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, presents, as usual, novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents. Much the same sort of thing could be said about Spec-Lit, Speculative Fiction No 2, edited by Phyllis Eisenstein, the second in a series of anthologies that collects student work from Eisenstein’s writing class at Columbia College in Chicago—most of the work here is at a competent professional level, and this time there is work by more experienced hands such as Valerie J. Freireich and Phyllis Eisenstein herself, as well as good reprints by George R. R. Martin and Alfred Bester. (For Spec-Lit, No 2, send $11.95 to Phyllis Eisenstein, Editor-in-Chief, Spec-Lit, Fiction Writing Department,
Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605-1996; make checks payable to Columbia College Chicago.)
Other original SF anthologies this year included the above-mentioned Dangerous Vegetables (Baen), “created by Keith Laumer,” edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Armageddon (Baen), edited by David Drake and Billie Sue Mosiman; The UFO Files (DAW), edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg; and The Conspiracy Files (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Scott H. Urban.
Shared-world anthologies this year included: More Than Honor (Baen), by David Weber, David Drake, and S. M. Stirling; Worlds of Honor (Baen), edited by David Weber; The Man-Kzin Wars VIII: Choosing Names (Baen), edited by Larry Niven; and Dragonlance: The Dragons of Chaos (TSR), edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
One of the big stories for next year will probably be the appearance of the science fiction version of Legends, new stories in a popular and long-running series by major authors called Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg. There’s also an as-yet untitled major new original anthology series that will be “like Full Spectrum,” edited by many of the same people who worked on Full Spectrum, in the works from Avon Eos; the first volume of that may appear next year, and is keenly anticipated. Another volume of Starlight is also in the works. There was still no sign of an edition of George Zebrowski’s long-delayed anthology series Synergy this year, or of a new edition of New Worlds, and, considering all the downsizing that has been going on at White Wolf, I think it’s fair to wonder if either of those anthology series is still viable; we’ll just have to wait and see.
In fantasy, the best original anthology of the year by far was Legends (Tor), edited by Robert Silverberg, an anthology of new stories set in various famous fantasy worlds. I was inclined to dislike Legends, turned off by the hype and hoopla about the record size of its advance (by far the largest ever paid for an anthology) and by the cynical “market savvy” of assembling a book composed only of best-selling authors—but I must admit that the finished book turns out to be a very substantial anthology, standing head and shoulders above the minor fantasy theme anthologies that make up the rest of this category, undoubtedly the best fantasy anthology of the year. The best story here is Ursula K. Le Guin’s exquisitely crafted novella “Dragonfly,” but the book also contains strong work by George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Terry Prachett, Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Anne McCaffrey, and others, all of which—since we’re talking about novellas here and this is a huge anthology—makes Legends one of the best reading bargains, value received for money paid, of the year.
(I’m bemused, though, by the fact that Anne McCaffery’s “Dragonrider” series and Robert Silverberg’s “Majipoor” series, both of which started out as science fiction series, have seemingly now become fantasy series instead by some discretely unspoken understanding. Some of the series represented here, such as Stephen King’s “Gunslinger” series—and, to a lesser extent, Orson Scott Card’s “Alvin Maker” series—had strong cross-genre elements in them from the start, but the “Dragonrider” stories started out in Analog, for God’s sake, as SF, competing for the Hugo with all the other SF stories, and the author herself denied indignantly for years the idea that they were fantasy rather than science fiction. To find these
series suddenly an unquestioned part of the fantasy genre instead, as if they’d always been there, is a bit unnerving, smacking of historical revisionism.)
Sirens and other Daemon Lovers (HarperPrism), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is also a fairly substantial anthology, although still considerably less so than Legends; a book of “erotic tales of magical, obsessional, and irresistible love,” it could be considered to be either a fantasy anthology or a horror anthology depending on how you wink at it (it struck me, arbitrarily, as being a shade more fantasy than horror, which is why I’m listing it here, although there is also a good deal of moderately grotesque horror in it as well). The erotic element in the stories here is strong and unambiguous, making it one of the most “adult” (i.e., dirtiest) books of the year, although the stories themselves sometimes give you the impression that they’ve been created as a vehicle for carrying the erotic scenes rather than because of any intrinsic story that the author really wanted to tell. There is good work here, though, by Tanith Lee, Pat Murphy, Michael Swanwick, Delia Sherman, Brian Stableford, Jane Yolen, Kelly Eskridge, and others.
“Pleasant but minor,” a phrase used to describe Alien Pets, above, could also be used to describe most of the rest of the year’s original fantasy anthologies (which, in some cases, were more minor than pleasant). Warrior Princesses (DAW), edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and Martin H. Greenberg, features interesting work by Jane Yolen, Bruce Holland Rogers, Megan Lindholm, Janet Berliner, Esther Friesner, and others. Olympus (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bruce D. Arthurs, features interesting work by Esther Friesner, Jane Yolen, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and others. Black Cats and Broken Mirrors (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, features interesting work by Bruce Holland Rogers, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Charles de Lint, Michelle West, Nancy Springer, and others. Battle Magic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, features interesting work by Lois Tilton, Ed Gorman, John De Chancie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Michelle West, Charles de Lint, and others. And Camelot Fantastic (DAW), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg, features interesting work by Ian McDowell, Brian Stableford, Nancy Springer, Mike Ashley, Rosemary Edghill, and others. Occasionally a story here thrusts itself up to a higher level than its fellows (“Thirteen Ways to Water,” by Bruce Holland Rogers in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors; “Strays,” by Megan Lindholm and “Becoming a Warrior” by Jane Yolen in Warrior Princesses; “The Miracle of Salamis,” by Lois Tilton in Battle Magic; and “The Feasting of the Hungry Man,” by Ian McDowell and “The Architect of Worlds,” by Brian Stableford in Camelot Fantastic), but for the most part the stories are pleasant but minor at best, just minor at worst.
The best of these overall, especially if you like Arthurian fantasy, is probably Camelot Fantastic, followed by Warrior Princesses.
Other original fantasy anthologies this year included Did You Say Chicks? (Baen), edited by Esther M. Friesner, On Crusade: More Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Aspect), edited by Katherine Kurtz, and Mob Magic (DAW), edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg.
I’m not following the horror field closely these days, but the most prominent original horror anthology of the year would seem to be Dark Terrors 4 (Gollancz),
edited by Stephen Jones, followed by Sirens and other Daemon Lovers, if you list it as a horror anthology instead of a fantasy anthology. (Dreaming Down-Under, which contains a lot of horror material, should probably be considered in here somewhere as well.) Other original horror anthologies this year included In the Shadow of the Gargoyle (Ace), edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche; Robert Bloch’s Psychos (Pocket), edited by Robert Bloch; Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg; Going Postal (Space & Time), edited by Gerard D. Houraner; and Hot Blood X (Pocket), edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.
As you can see, there were a lot of anthologies published this year, but only a few, such as Starlight 2 and Legends, of any real quality. As for the rest, although you may well find some of these books entertaining enough to be worth the money you spend on them, especially with the cheaper ones that are only $5.99 a shot, the money you’d need to buy all of them still adds up to a substantial amount. You could take that same amount of money and use it to buy subscriptions to several SF/fantasy magazines instead (if you don’t like Asimov’s, try Interzone and F&SF, or Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy), with a far greater assurance of actually getting your money’s worth of good stories during the course of the year—but, of course, since I’m a magazine editor myself, this suggestion can be dismissed as self-serving.
Despite several years of gloomy recessionary talk (and recent panicky chatter about the imminent Death of Science Fiction), the novel market appeared to be on the rebound in 1998 after two years of decline, with last year’s cutbacks at houses like HarperCollins being more than compensated for by the founding of major new SF lines at places such as Avon and Simon & Schuster UK. Although the ways in which science fiction typically gets published continue to alter—mass-market paperback originals, for instance, which once made up the bulk of the field, continued to dwindle, hitting a thirteen-year low in 1998, part of a trend away from mass-market that has persisted for the past several years, while the percentage of titles that are now being done in hardcover or trade paperback instead continued to grow, with original hardcover titles up 21% and original trade paperback titles up 23%—the overall totals of novels published not only held their own rather than slumping disastrously, as had been predicted, but showed some significant growth.
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,959 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint, published in 1998, up 8% from the total of 1,816 such books in 1997, an increase after two years of decline which comes close to reaching the record total of 1,990 in 1991. Original books were up to 1,122 titles, a strong 12% gain over last year’s total of 999. The number of new SF novels was up, with 242 novels published as opposed to 229 in 1997 (although still a bit down from the total of 253 in 1996), fantasy was up, with 233 novels published as opposed to 220 in 1997 (the highest total since 234 in 1994), and horror managed to halt and even turn around slightly the precipitous drops it’s been suffering since 1995, publishing 110 novels in 1998 as opposed to 106 in 1997 (still down considerably from its high of 193 titles in 1995, though). So,
1998 was not a record year, perhaps, but neither does it show anything like the kind of recessionary, total bust, through-the-floor disastrous crash in overall numbers that some of our gloomier pundits were forecasting. In fact, overall totals are trending up, not down, as we near the new century ahead.
As usual, I haven’t had time to read many novels this year, and so can contribute no really definitive overview, but of those I have seen, Mission Child, Maureen F. McHugh (Avon Eos), The Alien Years, Robert Silverberg (HarperPrism), Distraction, Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra), The Golden Globe, John Varley (Ace), Tea from an Empty Cup, Pat Cadigan (Tor), Kirinyaga (if considered as a novel rather than a collection, as Resnick insists it should be considered), Mike Resnick (Del Rev), Ports of Call, Jack Vance (Tor), and To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra), alone should be sufficient to indicate that 1998 was a fairly good year for novels.
Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1998 include: Starfarers, Poul Anderson (Tor); A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra); Cosm, Gregory Benford (Avon Eos); Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler (Seven Stories); Dinosaur Summer, Greg Bear (Warner Aspect); Maximum Light, Nancy Kress (Tor); Moonseed, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); Flanders, Patricia Anthony (Ace); Kirinya, Ian McDonald (Gollancz); Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor); Children of God, Mary Doria Russell (Villard); Child of the River, Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos); Deepdrive, Alexander Jablokov (Avon Eos); Proxies, Laura J. Mixon (Tor); Mockingbird, Sean Stewart (Ace); Earth Made of Glass, John Barnes (Tor) ; Vast, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Bloom, Wil McCarthy (Del Rey); The Children Star, Joan Slonczewski (Tor); Irrational Fears, William Browning Spencer (White Wolf); Inherit the Earth, Brian Stableford (Tor); Girl in Landscape, Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday Anchor); Prince of Dogs, Kate Elliot (DAW); The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod (Orbit); O Pioneer!, Frederik Pohl (Tor); Mother of Plenty, Colin Greenland (Avon); Dragon’s Winter, Elizabeth A. Lynn (Ace); Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan (Bantam Spectra); Inversions, lain M. Banks (Orbit); Playing God, Sarah Zettel (Warner); The Centurion’s Empire, Sean McMullen (Tor); Newton’s Cannon, J. Gregory Keyes (Del Rev); Six Moon Dance, Sheri S. Tepper (Avon Eos); Climb the Wind, Pamela Sargent (HarperPrism); The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen (Tor); Bag of Bones, Stephen King (Scribner); and Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee (Overlook). (The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., Lewis Hollow Road, Woodstock, New York 12498—$23.95 for Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee.)
Jack Vance’s Ports of Call is not as good as 1996’s The Night Lamp (Vance is never at his best when he succumbs to the picaresque plot, and here he’s so picaresque that there’s hardly any plot at all), but deserves a special mention anyway for the richness of imagination, imagery, and invention that he displays here, and for Vance’s deadpan humor and dour irony, something often overlooked and underrated by critics, although Ports of Call makes it clear that P. G. Wodehouse is one of Vance’s most important literary ancestors. I’d also like to single out for praise Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer for managing to do successfully what a number of other authors have tried and failed to do in recent years, writing a
Young Adult SF novel that manages to be good science fiction and entertaining enough to hold the interest of younger readers, all at the same time. The field desperately needs more such books, the ’90s equivalent of the so-called juvenile novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton that addicted whole generations of readers to science fiction in the ’50s and ’60s; if we had them, perhaps fewer young readers would be inclined to turn to Star Trek and Star Wars novels instead for the kind of fast, “fun” read they’re looking for. A few conscious attempts have been made in the last couple of years to duplicate the Heinlein-style “juvenile,” but they’ve mostly been faintly dull and weighted down with heavy indigestible lumps of stodgy libertarian polemic. Bear has avoided this trap and instead written a rousing, vivid story about a boy’s adventures with living dinosaurs that I certainly would have appreciated when I was fourteen. More power to him. (It would make a great movie, too, if anybody bothered to make good kid’s movies anymore.) Special mention should also be made of an odd item, Psychoshop (Vintage), an uncompleted novel by the late Alfred Bester that was finished by Roger Zelazny just before his own tragic death—alas, this is more of interest for nostalgic value than as a successful novel on its own terms, although flashes of the vivid prose styles of both authors do shine through here and there. Mention should also be made of an omnibus reissue of three classic novels of space travel, A. E. van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle, Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, and Poul Anderson’s The Enemy Stars, all packaged together in one book as Three in Space (White Wolf), edited by Jack Dann, Pamela Sargent, and George Zebrowski; get them while—fleetingly—they’re available again.
The first novels that seemed to attract the most attention and arouse the most heat this year were Halfway Human (Avon Eos), by Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect), by Nalo Hopkinson. Also getting a fair amount of comment were Dawn Song, Michael Marano (Tor); The Iron Bridge, David Morse (Harcourt Brace); Silk, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc); Green Rider, Kristen Britain (DAW); The Last Dragonlord, Joanne Bertin (Tor); and A Scientific Romance, Ronald Wright (Picador USA). Tor, Roc, Harcourt Brace, and Avon Eos all published several first novels this year, and are to be commended for it, as all publishers should be who are willing to publish first novels, taking a chance on unknown writers with no track record, a very risky proposition—it’s a chance that must be taken by someone, though, if the genre is going to continue to grow … or even to survive.
It seemed like a pretty good year for novels to me, even if I only actually got to read a handful of them. Avon Eos produced an impressive lineup in its first year of existence under the new imprint, and Tor, Bantam Spectra, and HarperPrism had strong years as well. As has been true more often than not in the last five or six years, there’s plenty of hardcore, sure-enough, pure-quill science fiction here, with perhaps the majority of titles fitting into that category—giving the lie to the tired old line about how nobody publishes “real” science fiction anymore; read the Sterling, the Varley, the Baxter, the McHugh, the Jablokov, the Anderson, the McDonald, the Stableford, the Cadigan, the Silverberg, or a dozen of the others, and then come back and tell me that—but there’s also plenty of fine fantasy of many different types, from George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings
to Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird, with plenty of room left over for harder-to-classify stuff that mixes several different genres, such as William Browning Spencer’s Irrational Fears, Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, or Patricia Anthony’s Flanders. In fact, it’s amazing just how wide the spectrum of first-rate work being produced today really is—chances are, no matter what your tastes are, from hard SF to high fantasy, you’ll find something you like out there somewhere.
As usual, predicting what’s going to take the major awards this year is a daunting task. Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog might have a shot at the Nebula Award, unless last year’s Hugo winner, Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace (still eligible for this year’s Nebulas under SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule) takes it away from her. It’s much too early to call the Hugo contest, I’m afraid, although the fact that the Worldcon is taking place in Australia this year may end up skewing the voting results to some degree.
A borderline novel by an SF writer (mainstream with a few touches that could be construed as mild fantastic elements) that may be of interest to some is 253 (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Geoff Ryman, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” that Ryman ran on his Web site, one of the most successful examples to date of electronically published fiction that utilizes “hypertext” features. The novel examines in fascinating detail 253 passengers who are taking a fateful seven-and-a-half-minute ride on a London Underground tube train. It has very little plot, instead devoting a page to a description of each of the characters (including internal thoughts, fears, and aspirations), each description exactly 253 words long—this sounds boring and awful, I know, but in practice it has a great fascination, simply because of Ryman’s huge abilities as an author and prose stylist. It’s probably better to read a section at a time rather than trying to read the “novel” in one sitting (this format supposedly worked better online, where you could jump from one character description to the other, and also read the hypertext footnotes, in any order you chose—but here, the very fact that it’s in print, pages bound in a book, imposes a certain structure on the text, like it or not). The character descriptions are fascinating, rich and detailed and vivid, and the book is often quite funny (particularly in the “hypertext” bits—mock advertisements, “reader satisfaction surveys,” and so forth—with which Ryman surrounds the character-description capsules), although there’s a pervasive underlying tang of bitterness and sorrowing compassion for the everyday tragedies of life. (Buried and rather lost in the midst of all this is the idea of Anne Frank as the modern-day incarnation of the Wandering Jew—something that immediately resonated with me and gave me the frisson of witnessing a new myth being created before my very eyes … or what might become a new myth if enough people read this book—probably, alas, a rather unlikely scenario.) All of this gave me a slight feeling of immense skills and talents being utilized to create something that is not quite worth the time and effort that went into it, like watching Michaelangelo make a Jello sculpture—nevertheless, although I wouldn’t want to see Ryman spend the rest of his career turning out this sort of thing, 253 is definitely worth the cover price, and I think I can safely say that you’re unlikely to come across anything else even remotely like it anywhere else this year. Another eccentric and highly eclectic performance, dancing on the borderline between horror, fantasy, and what almost might be
called “imaginary scholarship” is the posthumously published The Boss in the Wall , A Treatise on the House Devil (Tachyon Publications), by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis, a short novel completed by Grania Davis from rough drafts Avram Davidson left behind after his death; the plot here is rather sketchy, but the material dealt with in the book is rich and strange enough (and creepy enough), all served up with Davidson’s wonderfully flavorful and idiosyncratic prose, that few readers will feel that they haven’t gotten more than their money’s worth. (The Boss in the Wall, A Treatise on the House Devil—$12 from Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107.) Blue Light (Little, Brown), by Walter Mosley, represents the first foray into science fiction by this best-selling mystery writer, and although it was largely slammed by genre critics, may still be of interest to Mosley fans.
Associational novels by genre authors this year included a Gothic suspense novel by Kate Wilhelm, The Good Children (St. Martin’s), Philip Jose Farmer’s noir novel Nothing Burns in Hell (Forge), and mystery novels by Ron Goulart, Groucho Marx, Master Detective (St. Martin’s) and by James Sallis, Bluebottle (Walker).
It was a good year for collections, especially in the area of retrospective collections that return long-unavailable work by dead (and in danger of being unjustly forgotten) authors to print. The best of these retrospective collections, as well as being the best collection of the year and one of the best collections of the decade, was The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection (Tor), by Avram Davidson, edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, a well-named trove of long-out-of-print material by a man who was one of SF and fantasy’s best (and most underrated) writers. First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA Press), by Murray Leinster, edited by Joe Rico, An Ornament to His Profession (NESFA Press), by Charles L. Harness, The Perfect Host: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 5 (North Atlantic), by Theodore Sturgeon, Farwell to Lankhmar (White Wolf), by Fritz Leiber, and Collected Fictions (Viking), by Jorge Luis Borges also belong in the library of any serious student of the genre.
First-rate collections by more contemporary writers this year included Beaker’s Dozen, Nancy Kress (Tor); Luminous, Greg Egan (Millennium); The Invisible Country, Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos); Frankensteins and Foreign Devils, Walter Jon Williams (NESFA Press); The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, R. Garcia y Robertson (Golden Gryphon); Kirinyaga (if considered as a collection-where most commentators placed it—instead of a novel), Mike Resnick (Del Rey); A Second Chance at Eden, Peter F. Hamilton (Warner); Black Glass, Karen Joy Fowler (Holt); and Traces, by Stephen Baxter (Voyager). Other strong collections included: Last Summer at Mars Hill, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); Lost Pages, Paul Di Filippo (Four Walls Eight Windows); The Night We Buried Road Dog, Jack Cady (DreamHaven); Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman (Avon); One Day Closer to Death, Bradley Denton (St. Martin’s Press); Extremities, Kathe Koja (Four Walls Eight Windows); Weird Women, Wired Women, Kit Reed (Wesleyan); This Is the Year Zero, Andrew Weiner (Pottersfield Press); Moonlight and Vines , Charles de Lint (Tor); Reave the just and Other Tales, Stephen R. Donaldson
(Bantam Spectra); Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side, John Shirley (Zeising); Burning Sky, Rachel Pollack (Cambrian); and The Cleft and Other Odd Tales, Gahan Wilson (Tor).
It’s worth noting that just one story in the Hamilton collection, the title story, “A Second Chance at Eden,” is all by itself longer than many of the novels I remember from my childhood—well over 50,000 words long—and that it would have been in this collection if I could have found room for it, but that it was too long even for me to be able to handle, even with all the space I have to fill! The Hamilton collection is unusually hefty for a comtemporary collection, and thus a good reading bargain.
An unusual item is The Alchemy of Love (Triple Tree Publishing), by Elizabeth Engstrom and Alan M. Clark, an art book/collection, eight stories by Engstrom and eight pieces of art by Clark, with four stories by Engstrom based on Clark’s artwork, and four artworks by Clark based on Engstrom’s stories. (A similar gimmick is used in the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated—see below—in which stories by various authors are based on Clark’s artwork.)
Small presses like NESFA Press, DreamHaven, and Golden Gryphon Press remain important (with NESFA particularly vital for the retrospective collections full of older, long-out-of-print stuff), but it’s encouraging to see both middle-level trade publishers such as Four Walls Eight Windows and big commercial houses such as Tor, St. Martin’s, HarperPrism, Warner, Avon, Bantam Spectra, Del Rey, Holt, and Avon Eos taking a chance with short-story collections again, especially after so many years in the ’80s and early ’90s when they mostly did not.
(Very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail order is 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, Framingham, MA 01701-0203—$25 for First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster, by Murray Leinster, $25 for An Ornament to His Profession, by Charles L. Harness, and $23 for Frankensteins and Foreign Devils, by Walter Jon Williams; Golden Gryphon Press, 364 West Country Lane, Collins-ville, IL 62234—$22.95 for The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, by R. Garcia y Robertson; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701—$25 for The Perfect Host: Volume V: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, by Theodore Sturgeon; Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, 83 Leslie Road, East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada B2Z 1P8—$16.95 for This Is the Year Zero, by Andrew Weiner; University Press of New England/Wesleyan, 23 South Main St., Hanover, NH 03755—$16.95 plus $2.50 postage for Weird Women, Wired Women, by Kit Reed; Cambrian Publications, P.O. Box 112170, Campbell, CA 95011-2170—$34 for Burning Sky, by Rachel Pollack; TripleTree Publishing, P.O. Box 5684, Eugene, OR 97405—$49.95 plus $5.00 postage for The Alchemy of Love, by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom; DreamHaven Books, 912 West Lake St., Minneapolis, NM 55408—$27 for The Night We Buried Road Dog, by Jack Cady; Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shinglctown, CA 96088—$16.95 for Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side, by John Shiriey.)
There was some good solid stuff in the reprint anthology field this year, although perhaps no single especially impressive blockbuster volume, of the sort that has turned up occasionally in other years.
As usual, the best bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 32 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Jack Dann. Science fiction is now being covered by two “Best of the Year” anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year’s Best SF series (HarperPrism), edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its fourth annual volume. It would be inappropriate for me to review Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF, since it’s a direct competitor to this volume, and anything critical I might have to say about it could be seen as suspect and self-serving—but, in general, I think that the relatively small amount of overlap between my selections and Hartwell’s demonstrates that the field is wide enough for there to be more than one Best anthology every year, and that it’s probably a healthy thing for the genre for there to be more than one. Since no anthology can be big enough or comprehensive enough to include all the worthwhile SF of different varieties that comes out in the course of a year, having two volumes gives more authors a chance to be showcased every year, and the parallax provided by comparing Hartwell’s slant on what was the year’s best fiction to my own slant may be informative. A somewhat more specialized kind of Best of the Year anthology, running a year behind mine and Hartwell’s, and including fantasy, horror, and some harder-to-classify literary surrealism as well as science fiction, is a new series called The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (HarperCollins Australia Voyager), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne, now up to Volume Two. There were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror in 1998: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume 9, 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 Eleventh Annual Collection. Fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, a surprising lapse considering how popular fantasy is these days.
Turning to retrospective SF anthologies, books that provide a historical/critical overview of the evolution of the field, there was nothing as strong as last year’s A Science Fiction Century or the similarly titled A Century of Science Fiction 1950-1959, but solid value and some interesting insights on SF from outside the familiar American perspective are provided by The Road to Science Fiction Volume 5: The British Way (White Wolf) and The Road to Science Fiction Volume 6: Around the World (White Wolf), both edited by James Gunn. Noted without comment is The Good Old Stuff (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by Gardner Dozois, a retrospective overview of the evolution of “Adventure SF” from the ’40s to the ’70s.
There were also some good singleton reprint SF anthologies this year. In spite of its silly title, the best of these might be Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Edgewood Press), edited by Debbie Notkin and “the Secret Feminist Cabal,” being referred to informally by most commentators as “the Tiptree Award anthology”—appropriately enough, since it
assembles thirteen stories from among the winners and the stories “shortlisted” for the Tiptree Award (the award for the most effective “exploration of genre roles” in SF and fantasy) since its inception in 1991. It makes for an impressive list, including first-rate stories such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Forgiveness Day” and “The Matter of Seggri,” Eleanor Arnason’s “The Lovers,” R. Garcia y Robertson’s
“The Other Magpie,” Lisa Tuttle’s “Food Man,” Delia Sherman’s “Young Woman in a Garden,” Ian R. MacLeod’s “Grownups,” and a half-dozen others, almost all of which will make you think, often about things that don’t get thought about much. (Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238—$17 for a trade paperback, $38.50 for a hardcover edition for Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy.) The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (HarperPrism), edited by Alice K. Turner, turns out to be surprisingly substantial as well, though, and gives Flying Cups and Saucers a decent run for its money; in addition to the lighter satirical/comic stuff you might expect, the anthology also reprints some powerful and sobering tales such as Damon Knight’s “Masks,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” Joe Haldeman’s “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” Howard Waldrop’s “Heirs of the Perisphere,” Lucius Shepard’s “Fire Zone Emerald,” and many others (including, of course, the above-mentioned satirical/comic stuff, by an array of practiced hands from Vonnegut to Effinger to Bisson, which will increase the entertainment value of the book for most readers). Another solid grouping of stories is to be found in Future on Ice (Tor), edited by Orson Scott Card, the long-delayed sequel to 1991’s Future on Fire. (Ironically, considering the title, the book has been sitting around “on ice” for almost a decade, and it shows its age sometimes. Whether the storynotes are new or years old is hard to tell for sure from internal evidence; if they’re old, then they should have been replaced; if they’re new, however, then in them Card inadvertently paints a rather sad portrait of himself as a man clearly still deeply embroiled in fighting the Cyberpunk Wars of the mid-’80s, taking potshots at his enemies and obviously at times himself feeling the throbbing of old wounds—a display of passion and choler that looks rather quaint and dusty, like arguing over which end of the egg to break, here at the end of the ’90s, at a time when most young readers are probably not even aware that there were any Cyberpunk Wars, let alone who the participants were or what issues they were fighting over. It may be possible to argue with Card’s highly charged and deliberately provocative polemics in the front matter and storynotes here—and, indeed, I’ve heard many people, including some of the book’s authors, doing just that—but it’s hard to argue with the quality of most of the stories reprinted inside, including John Kessel’s “The Pure Product,” John Crowley’s “Snow,” Nancy Kress’s “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” Greg Bear’s “Blood music,” Lisa Goldstein’s “Tourists,” Walter Jon Williams’s “Dinosaurs,” Card’s own “The Fringe,” and almost a dozen others, all also of high quality. The Best of Crank! (Tor), edited by Bryan Cholfin, comes along, ironically, just as the idiosyncratic semiprozine from which its stories are drawn, Crank!, has been officially pronounced dead (see magazine section, above); this anthology gives a good representative cross section of the kind of thing for which the magazine was known, quirky, offbeat stories that often tried consciously (sometimes too hard) to avoid easy genre classification,
always ambitious, sometimes pretentious, often full of in-your-face Attitude—the best story here by far, and the best thing Crank! ever published, is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Matter of Seggri,” but the book also features good (and idiosyncratic) work by Eliot Fintushel, Jonathan Lethem, Lisa Tuttle, Michael Bishop, Gwyneth Jones, R. A. Lafferty, and others. Tales in Space (White Wolf), edited by Peter Crowther, provides a solid grouping of, well, tales in space, including first-rate work by Paul J. McAuley, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Varley, Brian W. Aldiss, and others. The Reel Stuff (DAW) edited by Brian Thomson and Martin H. Greenberg, provides an unusual twist, reprinting the original short stories from which SF movies and TV shows have later been made—not surprisingly, most of them were better in the original print versions than in their later film incarnations, including William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” George R. R. Martin’s “Sand-kings” and “Nightflyers,” John Varley’s “Air Raid,” and Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety” and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” all making for a worthwhile reading experience.
Noted without comment are Clones (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Immortals (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Nanotech (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, the Alternate History anthology Roads Not Taken (Del Rey), edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt, and Isaac Asimov’s Detectives (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.
There were also some good values in the reprint fantasy anthology market this year, a sort of anthology that has been thinly represented in recent times. Although it received scathing criticism from some critics for concentrating too much on American genre fantasy and not including enough European and academically oriented fantasy, I doubt that too many readers are going to be bothered by this to any significant degree when they dip into The Fantasy Hall of Fame (HarperPrism), edited by Robert Silverberg, and find it chock-full of stories by writers such as L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Bisson, Roger Zelazny, Avram Davidson, Ray Bradbury, and twenty-one other first-rate authors. I suppose that it is skewed heavily toward American genre fantasy, probably not a big surprise when you realize that it was largely selected by vote of the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I agree that a volume titled “The Fantasy Hall of Fame” probably should have made an effort to include different sorts of fantasy and cast its net further afield—the ordinary reader, though, who’s merely looking to find the most good reading for his money that he can, will probably not be all that concerned about such matters … and considered in that light, value received for money paid, this enormous anthology of mostly good-to-excellent stories for a cover price of $14 is one of the best reading bargains of the year. (This has been a good year for Silverberg the Fantasy Anthology editor, a hat he doesn’t often wear—he’s edited the best original fantasy anthology of the year and the best reprint fantasy anthology of the year; not too shabby!)
Other good fantasy reprint anthologies this year included two solid volumes of comic fantasy, a specialized subgenre even rarer than reprint fantasy anthologies in general—a big, well-named mostly reprint (with a few originals) volume called The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley,
featuring good work by Esther Friesner, Terry Prachett, Avram Davidson, Neil Gaiman, Terry Bisson, Jane Yolen, and many others, and The Flying Sorcerers (Ace), edited by Peter Haining, with good (and mostly older) reprint stories by P. G. Wodehouse, John Collier, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Angela Carter, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roald Dahl, Robert Bloch, Nelson Bond, and many others. Noted without comment is Isaac Asimov’s Camelot (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.
Reprint anthologies seem even rarer in horror, where most of the anthologies are originals. The best reprint horror anthology I saw this year—although, in fairness, I should say that I didn’t search assiduously for them—was Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL in Popular Culture (Golden Gryphon), edited by Jim Turner, a smart and solid anthology of Lovecraft-inspired work that gives some fresh, inventive, and eclectic twists to this familiar material, by writers such as Ian R. MacLeod, Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Stephen King, Steve Utley and Howard Waldrop, Harlan Ellison, Robert Charles Wilson, and others. Other reprint horror anthologies this year included: Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Denise Little, and Robert Weinberg; 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg; The Best of Cemetery Dance (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Richard Chizmar; Fields of Blood: Vampire Stories of the Heartland (Cumberland House), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg; and Streets of Blood: Vampire Stories from New York City (Cumberland House), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg. I’m not watching horror closely anymore, so no doubt there are some I’ve missed.
An offbeat small press item is Stranger Kaddish (Aardwolf Publishing), edited by Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth, a follow-up to last year’s Strange Kaddish, another anthology of Jewish science fiction featuring work by Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, and others. (Aardwolf Publishing, 45 Park Place South, suite 270, Morristown, NJ 07960—$12.95 for Stranger Kaddish.)
It was a relatively quiet year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, with nothing published anywhere near as substantial as last year’s mammoth The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The closest we came to this level of quality this year is The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive Illustrated Guide (Carlton), edited by David Pringle, which has plenty of useful and entertaining information, but lacks the scope, comprehensiveness, and heft of Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The critical book that aroused the most comment—and controversy—was undoubtedly Thomas M. Disch’s sharp-edged and deliberately provocative study of science fiction and popular culture, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of How Science Fiction Conquered the World (Free Press); I disagree with many if not most of Disch’s theoretical conclusions about the nature of and the future of SF, and he gets a fair number of his facts wrong, but Disch is so entertainingly bitchy, witty, and acid-tongued in many places here that it’s hard to deny the overall appeal of the book as mean-spirited fun, especially when he’s attacking bloated media darlings such as Whitley Streiber, upon whom
he performs a spectacular hatchet job. Drier, more academically oriented reference books included that invaluable research tool, Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards (Advent), by Howard DeVore, Science-Fiction: The Gemsback Years (Kent State), by Everett F. Bleiler, and the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (St. James), edited by David Pringle. Books about writers included The Tall Adventurer: The Works of E. C. Tubb (Beacon), by Sean Wallace and Philip Harbottle, Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House), edited by Peter Cannon, The Works of jack Williamson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (NESFA Press), by Richard A. Hauptmann, and British Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers Before World War I (Gale), edited by Darren Harris-Fain. Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers (Quarry Press), by Edo van Belkom, is a book of interviews with various Canadian writers, and Windows of the Imagination (Borgo), by Darrell Schweitzer, is a book of essays by a well-known genre critic.
There were also two books of reminiscences by writers this year: Lemady: Episodes of a Writer’s Life (Borgo), by Keith Roberts, and Writer at Large (Gryphon), by Richard A. Lupoff. The Roberts is particularly recommended as a vivid, if sometimes depressing, look at life in the publishing world by one of the most significant talents of the ’60s. (Borgo Press, PO Box 2845, San Bernardino, CA 92406-2845—$21 plus $3 shipping for Lemady: Episodes of a Writer’s Life, by Keith Roberts; Gryphon Publications, P.O. Box 209, Brooklyn NY 11228-0209—$15 for Writer at Large, by Richard A. Lupoff.) An interesting book of correspondence by two very dissimilar writers is Arthur C. Clarke and Lord Dunsany: A Correspondence (Anamensis Press).
The art book field also seemed weaker this year, or at least it didn’t come anywhere near producing anything as comprehensive and valuable as last year’s retrospective survey of science fiction art, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art. The closest approach in quality, and the art book to buy if you’re only going to buy one SF art book this year, is Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (Collectors Press), by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson, which not only features lots of beautiful reproductions of old pulp magazine covers, but an overview of the evolution of pulp magazines as well.
The latest edition of a sort of “Best of the Year” series that compiles the year’s fantastic art, Spectrum 5: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner, provides a valuable overview of what’s happening in the current SF and fantasy art scene. An overview of the career of an individual artist, one of the most famous in modern fantastic art, is to be found in Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, Frank Frazetta (Underwood), also edited by Arnie and Cathy Fenner. Similar retrospective overviews are offered by The Fantastic Art of Beksinski (Morpheus International) and H. R. Giger’s Retrospective 1964—1984 (Morpheus International), while Wayne Barlowe takes us on a harrowing journey through Hell in Barlowe’s Inferno (Morpheus International). Everyone who loved Brian Froud’s famous art book Faeries (as I did), will want his new cut through the same mythic material, Good Faeries/ Bad Faeries (Simon & Schuster), edited by Terri Windling, where half of the book is printed upside-down to distinguish the good faeries from the bad faeries; Froud’s
rendering here is as luminous and beautifully evocative as ever, but the book at times becomes much too twee: “the credit card faery lurks in cash dispensers …” Give me a break! The cuteness level here ought to have been turned down several notches, and will be too much for some readers, but the art is often stunning, which I suppose is the real selling point. Comics fans will probably want Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers (DC/Vertigo), by Dave McKean.
An offbeat item is Imagination Fully Dilated (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom (see also the original anthology section, above), an anthology of stories by writers such as Poppy Z. Brite, Lucy Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, and twenty-five others, all inspired by the horror art of Alan M. Clark, which is included as tipped-in color plates, so that the book functions either as a horror anthology or as an art book, depending on which factor you choose to emphasize.
There weren’t a lot of general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year. The strongest, and my personal favorite, was The Life of Birds (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, a fascinating and richly detailed examination of the lifeways and evolutionary strategies of birds, including behaviors much more alien than those exhibited by most SF writers’ aliens; SF writers, in fact, could do worse than to dip into this endlessly surprising book for inspiration. Another intriguing book, offering us the science fictional kick of suddenly reevaluating known facts from an entirely new perspective, is The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (Walker), by Tom Standage, which argues cogently that almost all of the culture- and mind-set-altering effects and social changes driven by the Internet today were anticipated in the Victorian Age by the introduction of the telegraph: “A world-wide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information.” As Standage points out, it even changed courtship patterns, with lovers meeting and marrying “online,” and spurred the development of cryptology, as businessmen tried to come up with codes to protect the privacy of information sent by telegraph, and other businessmen tried to crack those codes to gain a business advantage. (Standage also points out that the effect of this technology on the Victorians was perhaps even greater than the effect of the Internet on society today, since they went in one jump from a world where messages took months to cross the oceans to a world of instant communications where such messages could be received in minutes: “If any generation has the right to claim that it bore the full bewildering, world-shrinking brunt of such a revolution, it is not us—it is our nineteenth-century forebears.” The parallels for our own times are interesting, and instructive, as is the lesson in how a shift in perspective can change the emotional weight and shading we give to facts without actually changing any of the facts themselves. Also probably of interest to some genre fans, dealing as it does with perspectives of “deep time,” giving us a series of pictures of what portions of our world were like millions of years ago, and how they got to be the way they are today, is Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), by John McPhee, an omnibus collection of McPhee’s four earlier books on geology, rounded out by a new book about the
geology of the Great Plains. Most genre fans remain interested in space travel, of course, and so might be interested in a trade paperback reprint of A Man on the Moon (Penguin), by Andrew Chaikin, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the Apollo missions, or in Dragonfly, NASA and the Crisis aboard MIR (Harper Collins), by Bryan Burrough. Another object of interest to many genre fans is the dinosaur, which gets an interesting cultural examination in The Last Dinosaur Book by W. J. T. Mitchell (Univ. of Chicago Press). I can find no even remotely plausible genre-connection to justify mentioning one of my favorite nonfiction books this year, A Walk in the Woods (Broadway Books), by Bill Bryson, unless it’s that this hilarious account of two middle-aged, pudgy, out-of-shape, unathletic men with no previous camping experience or outdoorsmanlike expertise trying to cope with the rigors of walking the Appalachian Trail may remind many of us of ourselves—except that Bryson is probably funnier telling about it all than we would be.
There were a lot of genre movies out in 1998, including some box office blockbusters, some much-hyped immensely expensive films that “performed below expectations” (i.e., bombed out), some unmitigated stinkers, some movies that were actually pretty good, some that could have been better, and some movies where the thought that they were making a genre film probably never crossed the producers’ minds in the first place.
This could also be thought of as the Year of the Dueling Twin Movies, so that we had two Giant-Asteroids-Will-Slam-into-Earth-Unless-a-Desperate-Space-Mission-Can-Deflect-Them movies, two animated movies about cute talking bugs, two movies about “reality” actually being a show-business illusion, two big, glossy, gorgeously photographed After-Death Fantasy/angel movies, and so on. All of this, of course, is sheer coincidence, nothing more. (Cough.)
The best genre movie I saw this year, and, agreeably, one of the box office champs as well, was The Truman Show. There are no surprises here for the experienced genre reader, of course—it’s pretty much Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of joint crossed with D. G. Compton’s The Unsleeping Eye, as far as content is concerned—but it’s rare to see relatively sophisticated genre concepts translated to the screen with this degree of style, intelligence, and grace, with little or no talking down or prechewing of the material, a movie in which the director (a foreigner, of course) actually trusts his audience to be intelligent enough to understand it. This is certainly the most successful translation of Philip K. Dick-like material to the screen since a couple of inspired bits from 1974’s Dark Star, and I think Dick would have liked it, even if he isn’t credited anywhere here. Even Jim Carrey is surprisingly effective, with his patented mugging-and-leering routine slipping out only once or twice when the director’s attention faltered. Visually, there are a couple of moments that are simply stunning: when the full moon suddenly turns into a searchlight, for instance, and begins sweeping over the town looking for the fugitive Carrey, or when Carrey’s sailboat, supposedly taking him out over the open ocean, runs into the sky at the horizon, getting its mast stuck in it, or even the quieter moment when one of the stars falls from the sky, and proves to be a spotlight labeled “Polaris” (or whatever it was)—pure cognitive
dissonance, of the sort that science fiction delivers best. Yes, I think Phil Dick would have liked this movie. (And to answer a question posed by TV Guide last year, “Would we actually watch The Truman Show?” — you bet your ass we would. That’s the scariest thing about it.)
Similar ground in some ways, although more openly satirical and Twilight Zone-ish, is covered in Pleasantville, an intelligent little comic nightmare about two ’90s teens getting stuck in the black-and-white, white-bread, keep-smiling-no-matter-what world of a 1950s TV sitcom, a good little movie unfairly overshadowed by the (mostly justified) attention given to The Truman Show.
Next we turn to the two Giant-Rocks-Bash-the-Earth movies. One of these, the second one out of the gate, Armageddon, was immensely successful at the box office, perhaps the highest-grossing movie of the year; the other one, the more self-consciously “serious” Deep Impact, didn’t do nearly as well. Although I wasn’t — ha ha — blown away by either of these movies, both of which contain immensely embarrassing scientific howlers and huge holes in the plot-logic, I must say that my own reaction supports that of the boxoffice. Deep Impact was weepy and New Agey, more of a soap opera than a disaster movie, with most of its special effects reserved for the very impressive — and frighteningly convincing — giant tsunami scenes at the end (one thing that annoyed me about this movie was that with days if not weeks of prior warning as to where the asteroid is going to hit, the government makes no effort to evacuate most of the population to higher ground, something that would have saved millions of lives, even if they had been forced to rough it in makeshift refugee camps in West Virginia; nor does the public react realistically, so you have scenes of crowds going about their business as usual in midtown Manhattan, strolling around as if nothing was happening, while the giant wave sweeps in on them). The special effects were worse in Armageddon, with the on-the-surface-of-the-“comet” scenes surprisingly poor, but the movie as a whole was considerably more vigorous and less self-important, loud, vulgar, fast-paced, full of MTV-style jump cuts and blaring rock music, with Bruce Willis doing an almost self-parodying turn as a crude, vulgar, cigar-chomping (but superhumanly competent) oil driller, supported by a cast of eccentric, crude, vulgar, two-fisted, hard-drinking, “colorful” roughnecks who might as well have stepped out of a Blackhawks or Sgt. Fury comic book. If Armageddon is junk — and it is — it’s at least robust and entertaining junk, a relief after the slow, syrupy, self-congratulatory pretentiousness of Deep Impact. My least favorite scene in Deep Impact is where the estranged daughter gives up any last chance of survival so that she can share a sensitive, reconciling, New Age hug with her father on the beach as the giant tsunami sweeps down on them. The hard-bitten, tough and competent, ass-kicking Survivor Types of Armageddon would sneer at this — and rightly so. (You actually could have made a better movie out of Deep Impact by dropping the Earth-based story line altogether and instead concentrating exclusively on the space-mission story line, the best part of the film, mostly because of Robert Duvall’s quiet, assured underplaying; less soap opera content that way, too.)
Reaction was mixed to the other big-budget, special effects-heavy spectaculars of the year, the kind of movies that have to earn big in order to earn back at all. Star Trek: Insurrection seemed to do okay, although not spectacularly, at the box
office, and audience reaction to it seemed similarly lukewarm, with nobody liking it as much as 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, and nobody loathing it as much as some of the franchise’s low spots, such as the William Shatner-directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; most people seemed to agree that it was like an average episode of the TV show writ large, no better and no worse. Perhaps not the reaction that was hoped for, but it certainly keeps the option of another Star Trek movie alive; I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one, at this point. Much the same thing — an episode of the TV show writ large — could be said of The X-Files movie, Fear the Future, which fared okay commercially. The immensely expensive Godzilla, on the other hand, one of the costliest movies ever made, was a major boxoffice disaster, a bomb of epic proportions — even the spin-off merchandising didn’t sell; my local supermarket still has a half-dozen containers of Godzilla ice cream in the freezer. This failure was richly deserved; the movie was just awful, with few if any redeeming virtues. The redesigned monster, trumpeted in advance as a triumph of the CGI art, was surprisingly fake-looking (and faintly silly-looking, too), and not particularly scary; the monster from the original Godzilla film actually had more gravitas and presence, even though I knew even as a little kid that it was just a guy in a rubber suit. Lost in Space also seems to have “performed below expectations,” although I don’t think it was as major a bomb as Godzilla. Lost in Space actually had the best special effects and the most handsome and lavish set-dressing of any movie this year, and a good cast that it largely wasted — too bad they hadn’t thought to put in a decent story and some good writing as well, while they were at it. The decision to do Lost in Space straight rather than camp (although Gary Oldman doing a shameless Jonathan Harris imitation throughout for his interpretation of Doctor Smith is an eyebrow-raiser) was probably the initial mistake here; for a slambang action-adventure space spectacular, the movie has surprisingly little sense of fun, and is downright brooding at times, although with little of substance to actually brood about, for the most part. (I find it interesting, culturally, that the producers felt it necessary to load a lot of sodden stuff about ’90s-style dysfunctional families, and a lot of New Age psychobabble, into even this brainless bit of fluff — it would have been a lot better off without it.) The movie ends with an obvious setup for a sequel, which, with luck, we’ll never actually get. (I’m struck, in passing, with wonder and bemusement at the immense amounts of money Hollywood spent bringing a long-dead and not-terribly-important-in-the-first-place science fiction TV show back to fitful life, probably more money than has been spent on all of print science fiction in the last ten years. If you add in the immense budget for Godzilla, more than the Gross National Product of some small countries, the money spent on these two cinematic turkeys would comfortably support print science fiction publishing through a good hefty percentage of the coming century. Am I alone in thinking that this money could be better spent than it’s being spent at present, for more worthwhile ends? Yes, I know that I am, pretty much, so don’t bother to answer.)
The Avengers sucked, completely lacking the mischievous flair and elan that made the original series such tongue-in-cheek wink-wink fun, and also bombed big at the box office; it was also perhaps the most critically savaged movie of the year, with almost nobody having anything good to say about it, a negative reaction
so ubiquitous that one could imagine fans of the old TV show who hadn’t agreed on anything else or even spoken in twenty years shaking hands and commiserating with each other about how awful it was. (The humiliating failure of movies such as Lost in Space and The Avengers won’t keep the movie industry from visiting more big-budget resurrections of long-dead TV series on us, though, of course; several more are already on the way, in fact, including The Wild, Wild West, The Mod Squad, and even, heaven help us, Hogan’s Heroes.) Dark City was a stylish and strikingly set-dressed exercise in future noir, although perhaps too obviously and heavily influenced by Bladerunner.
Sphere wasted an even better cast than Lost in Space, including Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson, in a movie that tried to be intellectually challenging, but somehow ended up rather muddled and emotionally flat instead. They’d have been better off, in my opinion, sticking with investigating the real-world consequences of the intriguing initial setup, a crashed spaceship found on the bottom of the ocean, rather than flying off into two-a-penny mysticism, where the special effects equivalent of a Magic Wishing Ball makes anything they dream about come true, thus enabling the director to devote the rest of the movie to investigating their fears in gooshy horror movie—style sequences where they’re assailed by various monsters from the id of their own conjuring (how come only subconscious fears are made real by the Magic Wishing Ball?, I kept asking myself. How come none of them dreams that Sharon Stone has jumped into the sack with them, or that they found the puppy they lost when they were six, or that their brother isn’t dead after all?). In the end, in spite of good intentions and some good efforts, Sphere is vaguely disappointing. (I haven’t read the Michael Crichton novel from which this is taken, so I don’t know how many of these tropes are drawn from the book, but the movie certainly tempts you to picture some executives sitting around somewhere and saying “Hey! Let’s cross The Abyss with Event Horizon! That ought to sell!”)
A Bug’s Life is the more successful and the more imaginative of the two talking bug movies (the best capsule description I’ve heard of it is Greg Feeley’s remark that it was “Seven Samurai with ants”), and was a huge hit at the box office. The other one, Antz, is more obviously satirical (as might be expected from a movie in which Woody Allen voices the lead ant) and less adventurous and colorful, and didn’t seem to have as much of an impact on the kids as A Bug’s Life did (although both movies are full of satiric humor that probably flies way over the heads of most of the target audience, A Bug’s Life depends less on this element than Antz does). What Dreams May Come is a gorgeously photographed but not terribly involving after-death fantasy, also bungful of New Age philosophy and jargon, as is City of Angels, a stylish but rather bleak romance between a mortal woman and an angel who must decide whether to give up his immortality to be with her. A retake on the Cinderella story, Ever After is more sentimental and less obviously satirical than The Princess Bride, say, but also has its revisionist moments; this seemed to be something of a sleeper hit. I’m sure that the producers of Sliding Doors didn’t think of themselves as making a genre film, but it’s hard to think of this film in any other terms: it follows the experiences of a young woman in two parallel worlds, one in which she did catch a subway train and one in which she
didn’t, cutting back and forth between the two realities, and even coyly hinting at the end that the experiences from one reality can leak into and color the other. It’s interesting that these concepts, once unquestionably science-fictional, are now so taken for granted and absorbed into the mainstream culture that people look at you in surprise when you suggest that Sliding Doors is a genre movie-although it is, by any fair standard, and a rather intelligent, quietly effective, and well-acted one, at that. (I’ll bet nobody thinks to nominate it for this year’s Hugo, though.) I could go on to make an argument that Shakespeare in Love appeals to the same audience that enjoys reading Alternate History stories, but trying to include it as a genre movie stretches the definition of an SF film beyond any useful limits, in my opinion, so I won’t bother.
I never managed to catch a small, independent film called Pi, which apparently deals with the Kabbalah and mathematical mysticism, but many of those who did were enthusiastic about it.
Still on the horizon: everyone’s waiting impatiently for the release of the new Star Wars movie, which will probably be the big story next year. Considering the wildly enthusiastic reaction even to the trailer for the movie, with audiences paying to get into theaters just to see the trailer, and then leaving before the actual film that was showing came on, it’s probably not too risky a prediction to forecast immense commercial success for it. Whether it’s artistically successful or not remains to be seen (although that trailer was pretty damn good, and made even cynics like myself look forward to seeing the film; some real expertise going on there, on the part of the trailer-makers).
Frankly, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to SF and fantasy on television this year. Several of the long-dominant genre shows have ended or are just about to end (or at least metamorphose), though, so obviously there will be some big changes next year. Babylon 5 concluded its initial five-year series this year, much to the dismay of the show’s unbelievably dedicated fans, although there’s a spin-off series in the works for next season. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is supposedly set to end this year too, which, if true, leaves the Star Trek empire with only the relatively unpopular (even with stone Star Trek fans) Star Trek: Voyager in place, the most attenuated that the Star Trek franchise has been in many years; it wouldn’t surprise me if a new show were in the works there, too, although no official announcement of such has been made that I know of. Cult favorite The X-Files is also making noises about be nearing the end of its run, although speculation is rife as to whether the show will actually end or will just continue with a different cast; it seems a pretty good bet that Mulder and Scully will be leaving, though, whether the show continues or not. Highlander finally died, and was replaced by a spin-off show, Highlander: The Raven, featuring Amanda, one of the female Immortals from the old series, although in practice the show actually turns out to be more like La Femme Nikita than, as speculated, like Xena: Warrior Princess; it still fits well into the category of what I once called “Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt” shows, though.
Leaving to one side those shows like Babylon 5 or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or The X-Files that have ended or are supposedly ending, the most popular genre
shows on television probably include Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Third Rock From the Sun — not all of these could fairly be fitted into the subgenre of “Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt” shows (I suppose we could refer to “Hercules” as a “Guys with Blow-Dried Hair Kick Butt” show, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it somehow), but, with the exception of Third Rock from the Sun, most of them seem to involve serious butt-kicking of one sort or another. Butt-kicking, then, is obviously the wave of the future for TV, especially when you consider nongenre shows such as Martial Law and Walker: Texas Ranger (to say nothing of the World Wrestling Federation, the Ultimate Fighting Challenge shows, and MTV’S Celebrity Deathmatch) that feature quite a bit of it. Maybe the Star Trek franchise should consider a “Star Trek Characters Kick Butt” show for its next series. Perhaps we could have WWF/Ultimate Fighting Challenge-style steel-cage deathmatch competitions between characters from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 … .
Minor new genre shows came and — in some cases — went throughout the year, but none of them so far seems to have made much of an impression on the viewing public. Mystery Science Theater 3000 just ended its long run, which is fine by me since I didn’t find it very interesting for its last year anyway. Some of the critical buzz about last year’s hot cult show, South Park, seems to have died away, perhaps because of overexposure — certainly you couldn’t go into a gift shop last year without falling over a stack of South Park T-shirts, Kenny dolls, and Cartman key chains; they even put out boxes of Cheesy Poofs. The show is still intermittently funny, and still uses a lot of genre tropes, but it’s beginning to grow repetitive, and I have a feeling its prime period of influence is already past.
I still think that, for the most part, you’d be better off turning the set off and reading a book instead.
The 56th World Science Fiction Convention, Bucconeer, was held in Baltimore, Maryland, from August 5 to 9, 1998, a month earlier than the traditional Labor Day date, and drew an estimated attendance of 5,474. The 1998 Hugo Awards, presented at Bucconeer, were: Best Novel, Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman; Best Novella, “ … Where Angels Fear To Tread,” by Allen Steele; Best Novelette, “We Will Drink a Fish Together … ,” by Bill Johnson; Best Short Story, “The 43 Antarean Dynasties,” by Mike Resnick; Best Related Book, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation, Contact; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Nicki and Richard Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Joe Mayhew; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Mary Doria Russell.
The 1997 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Hotel Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 2, 1998, were: Best Novel, The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda N. McIntyre; Best Novella, “Abandon in Place,” by Jerry Oltion; Best Novelette, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” by Nancy Kress; Best Short Story,
“Sister Emily’s Lightship”; plus an Author Emeritus award to Nelson S. Bond and the Grand Master award to Poul Anderson.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Fourth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Monterey, California, on November 1, 1998, were: Best Novel, The Physiognomy, by Jeffrey Ford; Best Novella, “Streetcar Dreams,” by Richard Bowes; Best Short Fiction, “Dust Motes,” by P. D. Cacek; Best Collection, The Throne of Bones, by Brian McNaughton; Best Anthology, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel; Best Artist, Alan Lee; Special Award (Professional), to John Clute and John Grant, for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Fedogan & Bremer, for book publishing; plus a Life Achievement Award to Edward L. Ferman and Andre Norton (tie).
The 1998 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the New York Marriott East Side in New York City on June 6, 1998, were: Best Novel, Children of the Dusk, by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge; Best First Novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis; Best Collection, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, by Karl Edward Wagner; Best Long Fiction, “The Big Blow,” by Joe R. Lansdale; Best Short Story, “Rat Food,” by Edo van Belkom and David Nickle; Nonfiction, Dark Thoughts: On Writing, by Stanley Wiater; a Specialty Press Award to Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance Publications; and the Hammer Award to Sheldon Jaffery, plus a Life Achievement Award to Jack Williamson and William Peter Blatty.
The 1997 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman.
The 1997 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “House of Dreams,” by Michael F. Flynn.
The 1997 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to The Troika, by Stepan Chapman, with a Special Citation to Acts of Conscience, by William Barton.
The 1997 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell.
The 1997 James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award was won by Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey and “Travels with the Snow Queen,” by Kelly Link (tie).
Dead in 1998 or early 1999 were: Jerome Bixby, 75, prolific short-story writer and screenwriter, author of the collection Space by the Tale, whose best-known story “It’s a Good Life” was made into one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes ever; Robert A. W. (“Doc”) Lowndes 81, veteran SF editor, writer, and member of the Futurians (the famous New York City fan group whose other members included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald Wollheim, and other notables), one-time editor of magazines such as Future Fiction, Original Science Fiction Stories, and Startling Mystery Stories; Paul Lehr, 68, acclaimed SF artist, at one time among the most celebrated and widely used cover artists in the SF publishing world; Naomi Mitchison, 101, writer, socialist, “freethinker,” and prominent feminist, probably best known to the genre for her historical fantasy The Corn King and the Spring Queen, also the author of books such as Solution Three, Not by Bread Alone, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman; Rachel Cosgrove Payes, 75, veteran
writer, author of Bridge to Yesterday; John W. Pritchard, 85, who wrote SF as “Ian Wallace,” author of novels such as Croyd, The Rape of the Sun, and Pan Sagittarius; T. A. Waters, 60, writer, actor, and stage magician, author of the SF novel The Probability Pad; Jo Clayton, 58, SF/fantasy writer, author of thirty-five books, including Diadem from the Stars and Moongather; Bob Kane, 83, comic-book artist, famous as the creator of Batman; Jean-Claude Forest, 68, French writer and artist, best known as the creator of the comic strip Barbarella, which was later adapted into a well-known SF movie; Eric Ambler, 89, best known for his spy novels such as The Mask of Dimitrios, author of the associational SF thriller The Dark Frontier; Allen Drury, 80, political novelist best known for Advise and Consent, also author of the near-future SF novel The Throne of Saturn; Lawrence Sanders, 78, thriller writer, best known for The First Deadly Sin and The Anderson Tapes, whose books included borderline SF novels The Sixth Commandment and The Tomorrow File; Brian Moore, 77, noted literary novelist best known to the genre audience for the screenplay for the near-future TV movie Catholics; Alain Doremieux, 64, leading French writer, editor, and translator; Shin’ichi Hoshi, 71, Japanese SF writer; Henrik Altov, 52, leading Russian SF writer; Sean A. Moore, 33, fantasy novelist and game designer; Robert Marasco, 62, playwright and novelist, author of the horror novel Burnt Offerings; Ernst Junger, 102, German writer; Peter Nilson, 60, Swedish astronomer and author; Jose Paulo Paes, 72, Brazilian critic, editor, and translator; Wayland Drew, 66, author of film novelizations and the SF trilogy “The Erthring Cycle”; Miichael D. Weaver, 36, SF/fantasy writer, author of Mercedes Nights and other novels; Ted Hughes, 68, Britain’s Poet Laureate, author of occasional SF poetry, as well as two Young Adult SF novels The Iron Man and The Iron Woman; Ian Gunn, 40, Australian fan artist and writer, winner of nine Ditmar Awards; Frank D. McSherry, Jr., 69, coeditor (with Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh) of more than thirty SF and fantasy anthologies; Alan D. Williams, 72, noted New York book editor, the editor on many of Stephen King’s most famous novels; Archie Goodwin, 60, leading comic-book editor; Lee Elias, 77, comics artist who drew the Jack Williamson-scripted comic strip Beyond Mars; John L. Millard, 80, longtime Canadian fan, chairman of the 1973 World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon; Aubery Vincent Clarke, 76, longtime British fan; John V. Baltadonis, longtime Philadelphia-area fan, one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society; T. Bruce Yerke, 75, longtime fan; Richard Wright, 55, longtime fan; Ardis Waters, 56, fan and writer, sister of writer Melisa Michaels; and Margaret Brady Martin, 80, mother of SF writer George R. R. Martin.