In spite of panic so intense in the publishing world that it was reminiscent of the emotion that caused stockbrokers to throw themselves from windows during the Stock Market Crash of 1929, panic that caused massive editorial layoffs in late 2008 and early 2009 as publishers rushed to reduce expenses in anticipation of the hard times and low sales ahead, the number of books sold in 2009 turned out to be—not so bad.
According to Nielsen BookScan, overall unit sales through December 20, 2009 came in at 724 million, a drop of only 3 percent compared to the same period in 2008. Much of that drop came in adult nonfiction, which suffered the biggest decline by category, down 7 percent from the previous year. Sales of adult fiction hardcover books, however, actually rose by 3 percent, while sales of adult fiction trade paperbacks grew by 2 percent over the prior year.
So rather than crashing disastrously during the Great Recession, sales of fiction books actually went up.
Furthermore, of three thousand adults questioned in an online poll, three quarters of them said that they would sacrifice holidays, dining out, going to the movies, and even shopping sprees before they would stop buying books.
This shouldn’t really come as a big surprise—historically, books, magazines, and movies do well during recessions, as hard economic times make people search for cheap entertainment to distract themselves from their financial woes.
The questions that are probably going to dominate the publishing world during the next few years are: Where are you going to buy your books? And what form are you going to buy them in?
Pressure from online booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and from the rising tide of digital sales that may become a flood now that portable text readers are increasingly available have already had a dramatic effect on where you can buy your books. Just as the rise of chain bookstores put many independent bookstores out of business, now business forces are reshaping the chains themselves. The bookstore chain Borders teetered on the brink of bankruptcy toward the end of 2008, and although it managed to avoid that in 2009, Borders UK ceased operation and closed all of its stores, and Borders will soon close two hundred Waldenbooks outlets, while rival bookstore chain Barnes & Noble is closing all of its remaining B. Dalton stores.
This is not the end of the brick-and-mortar bookstore by any means—the chains will still have plenty of “superstores” left, where sales have generally been pretty good, perhaps because of the larger selection of stock available there. And there are even a few independent bookstores left here and there. But it does mean that the era where almost every shopping mall had a small chain bookstore is probably over.
Print books are not going to disappear either—in fact, there were probably more of them published in 2009 than ever before. But the e-book market, which up until now has simmered in the background for several years, not really considered to be a major factor, is probably about to explode, which could bring major changes to the publishing world. The introduction of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007, the first portable text reader, turned the heat up under the e-book market, and now, with the introduction of competing text-reading devices such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iPad and the founding of several other “online bookstores” where products for them can be purchased, that market is really starting to come to the boil. In fact, much of 2009 was taken up with price wars over the pricing both of print books and of e-books, with Amazon clashing with other industry giants such as publisher Macmillan and discount superstore chain Walmart, each player trying to bring enough pressure to bear on its adversary to force concessions; the struggle between Amazon and Macmillan over e-book pricing—Amazon wanting to keep them priced low to encourage sales of the Kindle, Macmillan wanting them priced higher to increase profits—has been particularly bitter and intense, with Amazon recently succumbing to Macmillan’s demands. (The war over the Google Settlement, concerning which books will be available for online accessing via Google, which involved a class-action suit by the Authors Guild and the controversial settlement that everyone has been wrangling bitterly about ever since, also continued to rage throughout 2009 and into 2010, but that will probably be of interest to very few readers who are not themselves writers.)
Within the genre publishing world, things were relatively quiet after the turmoil of layoffs and cutbacks at the beginning of 2009 (although there were further big cuts at Penguin UK in August). Most of the major restructuring was at Random House, and could be seen as the working-out of consequences from corporate mergers from a couple of years back rather than as a response to the economic downturn per se. Random House has restructured into three adult trade groups, Crown Trade Group, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and Random House Publishing Group. Random House Publishing Group includes, among others, Ballantine, Bantam, Delacorte, Dell, The Dial Press, and Villard Books, which puts both Random House SF imprints, Del Rey and Spectra, under Ballantine. Party line is that the two imprints will be kept separate, for now anyway. Games Workshop’s publishing arm, BL Publishing, sold their Solaris Books imprint to Rebellion. Wildside Press, Prime, and Juno split up early in the year; Juno ended up as a co-published imprint of Pocket Books, Cosmos Books died, and Prime went back to solo operations. HarperCollins started a new SF imprint, Angry Robot. Harlequin started a new YA fantasy line, Harlequin Teen.
Both within and outside the genre, though, evolutionary forces are at work that could change everything, and I suspect that the publishing world is going to look very different ten years from now than it does today.
The good news in the still-troubled magazine market is that things could have been a lot worse. All of the print magazines survived the year, something which looked a bit chancy at the beginning of 2009 (when, in order to survive, both F&SF and Asimov’s were forced to economize by changing either their publication schedules or their trim size). One, Realms of Fantasy, actually returned from the dead under new ownership after being cancelled. And there were even one or two other mildly positive notes: for one thing, the decline in circulation, drastic to very drastic for most magazines only a few years back, seems to have stabilized at a much slower rate of decline, with most magazines more or less staying even, with only miniscule losses in circulation; for another, electronic subscriptions for reading devices such as the Kindle are starting to have an effect, still relatively minor at the moment, but at least increasing the circulation figures, trending in the right direction, something that hasn’t happened in a while.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, celebrating its sixtieth year, published a lot of good fantasy this year, but not much SF. Good stories by Geoff Ryman, Albert E. Cowdrey, Rand B. Lee, Ellen Kushner, Sean McMullen, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Elizabeth Hand, Charles Oberndorf, and others appeared in F&SF in 2009. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 3.4 percent loss in overall circulation, from 16,044 to 15,491, with subscriptions dropping from 12,374 to 12,045, and newsstand sales dropping from 3,670 to 3,446; sell-through rose from 36 to 37 percent. Gordon Van Gelder is in his thirteenth year as editor, and ninth year as owner and publisher.
Asimov’s Science Fiction was almost the reverse of F&SF, publishing a lot of good SF, but not as much good fantasy. Good stories by Mary Rosenblum, Damien Broderick, Robert Reed, Nancy Kress, Tom Purdom, James Patrick Kelly, Ian Creasey, and others appeared in Asimov’s in 2009. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered only a 2.4 percent loss in overall circulation, from 17,102 to 16,696, not bad when compared to past losses, which rose as high as 23 percent in 2005. Subscriptions dropped almost unnoticeably from 13,842 to 13,731, although newsstand sales dropped a bit more substantially, from 3,260 to 2,965; sell-through stayed steady at 31 percent. Although no hard figures are as yet available, the rumor is that overall circulation actually increased this year when you factor in the addition of “about three thousand” in digital subscriptions sold through the Kindle, Fictionwise, and other providers. Sheila Williams completed her fifth year as Asimov’s editor.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact had an above-average year, publishing good work by James Van Pelt, Steven Gould, Harry Turtledove, Don D’Ammassa, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael F. Flynn, and others. Analog Science Fiction and Fact registered only a 2.2 percent loss in overall circulation, from 25,999 to 25,418, with subscriptions dropping from 21,880 to 21,636, and newsstand sales dropping from 4,119 to 3,782; sell-through remained steady at 34 percent. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there since 1978.
Interzone also had an above-average year, publishing strong work by Dominic Green, Bruce Sterling, Sarah L. Edwards, Jason Sanford, and others. By the definition of Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Interzone doesn’t really qualify as a “professional magazine” because of its low rates and circulation, but as it’s thoroughly professional in the caliber of writers that it attracts and in the quality of the fiction it produces, just about everybody considers it to be a professional magazine anyway. Circulation there seems to have held steady, in the three thousand copy range. The ever-shifting editorial staff included in 2009 publisher Andy Cox, assisted by Andy Hedgecock, Jetse de Vries, and David Mathew. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static.
The British magazine Postscripts, another professional-level publication in spite of low circulation figures, reinvented itself as an anthology this year, so we’ll cover it there, below. (I’ll list the subscription information up here, though, for lack of anywhere else to put it, and, because, unlike most other anthology series, you can subscribe to Postscripts.)
Publisher Sovereign Media announced that they were pulling the plug on Realms of Fantasy early in 2009, and what was ostensibly the magazine’s last issue appeared in April. That looked like the end of the line for Realms of Fantasy, but then the magazine was bought by Warren Lapine of Tir Na Nog Press, who started it up again. Three issues of the resurrected magazine appeared throughout the rest of the year, for an overall total of five. Shawna McCarthy, who has been the editor since the founding of the magazine in 1994, was retained as editor, and the resurrected version of the magazine looks and reads much like the old version, and features the same sort of fiction. Realms of Fantasy published good work this year by Ian Creasey, Jay Lake, Richard Parks, Cat Rambo, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others.
Weird Tales had a rocky year due to the reorganization of publisher Wildside Press in response to the recession, and only managed two 2009 issues; nevertheless, there’s an energy and drive here that hints to me that this intelligently edited horror/fantasy magazine will survive. At the beginning of 2010, Ann VanderMeer was promoted from fiction editor to editor in chief, and Mary Robinette Kowal and Paula Guran joined the staff as art director and nonfiction editor, respectively. Their circulation seems to be somewhere in the five thousand copy range, and again many critics seem to consider them a professional magazine in spite of that. Interesting stories by Jeffrey Ford, Richard Howard, Hunter Eden, Michael Swanwick, Robert Davies, and others appeared there this year.
If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, with just the click of a few buttons, nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com) and Amazon (www.amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible.
So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s Science Fiction’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do, and there’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$32.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $42.97 overseas. Analog Science Fiction and Fact’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$32.97 for annual subscription in the U.S. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is Fantasy & Science Fiction, P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030—annual subscriptions cost $34.97 in the U.S. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambridge CB6 2LB, England—$68.51 each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced-rate dual-subscription offer of $127.23 for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.” Postscripts, at http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/acatalog/PS_Subscriptions.html, has a variety of subscription options, including 50 Pounds Sterling for a one-year unsigned hardcover (two issue) subscription, or 100 Pounds Sterling for a one-year signed traycased subscription. Realms of Fantasy offers yearly subscription in the U.S. for $19.99, or overseas for $29.99; write to Tir Na Nog Press, Realms of Fantasy, P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703, call 1-877-318-3269, or subscribe online at www.realmsoffantasymag.com. Weird Tales offers a few different subscription options, including a one-year, four-issue subscription for $20 in the U.S.; contact them at Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive #234, Rockville, MD 20850, or online at weirdtales.net/wordpress.
The print fiction semiprozine market, subject to the same pressures in terms of rising postage rates and production costs as the professional magazines are, continues to contract. Aeon, Talebones, Paradox, Fictitious Force, Farrago’s Wainscot, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror all died this year, and Zahir is transitioning from a print format to an electronic-only online format, something that Subterranean, Fantasy Magazine, and Apex Magazine did the year before. (I suspect that this will eventually be the fate of most print fiction semiprozines—they’ll transition into all-electronic formats, or they’ll die.)
Of the other surviving print fiction semiprozines, Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, managed two issues in 2009, one a double-issue, publishing worthwhile material by Merrie Haskell, Mercurio D. Rivera, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. The Canadian On Spec, one of the longest-running of all the fiction semiprozines, edited by a collective under general editor Diane Walton, once again kept reliably to its publishing schedule in 2009, and featured interesting stories by Tony Pi and Jack Skillingstead, among others. Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff under editor in chief Robbie Matthews, managed five of its scheduled six issues this year, publishing good stuff by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo, Brian Stableford, Jason K. Chapman, Caroline M. Yoachim, and others.
I saw two issues of Australian magazine Aurealis, edited by Stuart Mayne, in 2009, although they were both dated 2008. A small British SF magazine edited by Ian Redman, Jupiter, managed all four of its scheduled issues in 2009; I like the fact that it’s all-SF, but the quality of its fiction needs to come up. A Canadian magazine, edited by Karl Johanson, Neo-Opsis, ostensibly quarterly, produced three issues in 2009; the same comment made about Jupiter would apply equally well to them. Long-running Space and Time produced four issues, as did fantasy magazine Tales of the Talisman; there were two issues apiece produced by fantasy magazine Shimmer, the Irish Albedo One, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and Not One of Us, and as far as I can tell there was only one 2009 issue of sword & sorcery magazine Black Gate, as well as the slipstreamish Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, New Genre, and Sybil’s Garage. I saw no copy of Tales of the Unanticipated or Aoife’s Kiss this year.
Most of the print critical magazine market is gone. One of the hearty survivors, and always your best bet for value, is the newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, a twenty-eight-time Hugo-winner which for more than forty years has been an indispensible source of news, information, and reviews; co-founder, publisher, and longtime editor Charles N. Brown died this year, but Locus continues under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Amelia Beamer, and many others. Another hearty perennial, one of the last men standing in this field, is the eclectic critical magazine The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and a staff of associate editors, which publishes a variety of eclectic and sometimes quirky critical essays on a wide range of topics.
Most of the other surviving print critical magazines are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader. The most accessible of these is probably the long-running British critical zine The Science Fiction Foundation.
Subscription addresses follow:
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA, 94661, or online at https://secure.locusmag.com/About/Subscribe.html—$68 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues. The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, or online at http://www.nyrsf.com/subscribe-today.html—$40 per year, 12 issues, make checks payable to “Dragon Press.” The Science Fiction Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, or online at http://www.sf-foundation.org/joining.html—$39 for a three-issue subscription in the U.S. Aurealis, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia, or online at www.aurealis.com.au—$59.75 (AUD) for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, checks should be made out to “Chimaera Publications” in Australian dollars. On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, or online at www.onspec.ca—$25 for one year. Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, Canada, V8Z 4G5, or online at http://www.neo-opsis.ca/Subscriptions.htm—$25 (Canadian) for a three-issue subscription. Albedo One, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, County Dublin, Ireland or online at http://www.albedo1.com/html/albedo_1_subscriptions.html—$39.50 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One.” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 or online at http://smallbeerpress.com/shopping/subscriptions/—$20 for four issues. Electric Velocipede at http://www.nightshadebooks.com/cart.php?m=product_detail?&p=143 offers a two-issue annual subscription for $25. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has a six-issue subscription rate of $69 (AUD), visit them online at www.andromedaspaceways.com. Zahir is transitioning to an all-electronic format, see www.zahirtales.com for further information. Tales of the Talisman, Hadrosaur Productions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194 or online at http://www.hadrosaur.com/order.html—$24 for a four-issue subscription. Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, or online at http://www.blackgate.com/black-gate-subscriptions/; there are multiple subscription options, including downloadable PDF versions for $4.95 apiece or $29.95 for a one-year (four issue) subscription. Jupiter, at 19 Bedford Road, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, offers four issues for 10 Pounds Sterling. Greatest Uncommon Denominator, GUD Publishing, P.O. Box 1537, Laconia, NH 03247, or online at http://www.gudmagazine.com/subs/subscribe.php—$22 for 2 issues. Sybil’s Garage, Senses Five Press, 76 India Street, Apt A8, Brooklyn NY11222-1657, or online at http://www.sensesfive.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=9—$29.95 for four issues (2 years). Shimmer, P.O. Box 58591, Salt Lake City, UT 84158-0591, or online at http://www.shimmerzine.com/purchase/subscribe/—$22.00 for a four-issue subscription.
The online world of electronic magazines seemed to have more energy and momentum this year than most of the print world, and probably published more good fiction than all but perhaps the top three or four print fiction magazines. Not that it was all good—Jim Baen’s Universe is scheduled to die after the April 2010 issue, and Shiny and Lone Star Stories are both already dead. On the other hand, Apex Magazine came back from the dead, Tor.com, Subterranean Press, Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Clarkesworld Magazine, Abyss & Apex, and Fantasy Magazine still seem to be going strong, and a promising new ezine, Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, will be starting up in 2010.
Jim Baen’s Universe (www.baensuniverse.com), once the Great White Hope of the online fiction-magazine world, is in its fourth year, and it will unfortunately be its last, since it’s been announced that the ezine will shut down after its April 2010 issue, a major loss for the field, and one that will be advanced as an argument against the long-term viability of ezines—if an ezine paying top-of-the field prices, attracting the biggest name authors, and getting major publicity and visibility can’t attract enough paying readers to stay alive, who can? Jim Baen’s Universe published only one really major story in 2009, a complex time-travel piece by John Barnes, but there was lots of other good work, both SF and fantasy, by David Gerrold, Jay Lake, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Naomi Kritzer, Lezli Robyn, Graham Edwards, John Lambshead, Gary Kloster, and others. Its editors were Mike Resnick and Eric Flint.
With Jim Baen’s Universe on the way out, the most important remaining site is probably Tor.com (www.tor.com). I once said that what we really needed was a Boing Boing that published science fiction as well, a place cool and eclectic enough to draw the Internet-savvy audience as well as the SF audience, and Tor.com, a Web site that regularly publishes SF, fantasy, and slipstream, as well as articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, and commentary, may fit that bill. Tor.com had another strong year in 2009, publishing a wide range of different kinds of stories (although they tend to lean a bit toward slipstream and steampunk) by Jo Walton, Harry Turtledove, Damien Broderick, Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, Kij Johnson, Ken Scholes, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, Rachel Swirsky, and others.
The long-running ezine Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, ran good work, a mixture of SF, fantasy, and slipstream, by Lavie Tidhar, Sandra McDonald, Elliott Bangs, Benjamin Crowell, Tim Pratt, Jennifer Linnaea, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Rachel Manija Brown, Cat Rambo, Leonard Richardson, and others.
Clarkesworld Magazine (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, ran good stuff this year, much of it SF, some fantasy or slipstream, by Kij Johnson, Gord Sellar, Jason K. Chapman, Lavie Tidhar, Sarah Monette, Tobias S. Buckell, Cat Rambo, and others.
Abyss & Apex (www.abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, which seems to run more SF than many of the other sites, had good stuff by Samantha Henderson, Karl Bunker, Marie Brennan, Christopher Green, Paul Carlson, Ruth Nestvold, Richard A. Lovett, Bud Sparhawk, and others.
Apex Magazine (www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online), edited by Jason Sizemore, featured good work, most of it fantasy or slipstream, by Theodora Goss, Ekaterina Sedia, Gord Sellar, Peter M. Ball, Aliette de Bodard, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and others.
Fantasy Magazine (www.fantasy-magazine.com), published by Sean Wallace and edited by Cat Rambo, had good work (almost all of it fantasy or slipstream, unsurprisingly enough, although there was one strong SF story by Lavie Tidhar) by Nancy Kress, Tanith Lee, Patricia Russo, Ruth Nestvold, Jay Lake, John Mantooth, and others.
Other than the stories selected by me for the issue I guest-edited, which I won’t mention, Subterranean (http://subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, had lots of good work, some of it first-rate, by Alexander C. Irvine, Garth Nix, Tim Pratt, James P. Blaylock, Kim Newman, Kris Nelscott, Lewis Shiner, and others.
The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos (www.cosmosmagazine.com) runs a story per issue, usually SF, selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick, and also puts new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their Web site. They had a strong story by Karl Bunker this year, as well as interesting stuff by Craig DeLancey, Greg Mellor, Stuart Gibbon, V.G. Kemerer, and others.
The flamboyantly titled Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, had good work by Peter S. Beagle, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ian Creasey, Tim Pratt, Aliette de Bodard, Eugie Foster, Tony Pi, and others, including a number of stories, both reprint and original, by Card. Although they publish both SF and fantasy (rarely slipstream), they tend to lean toward fantasy, which tends to be of generally higher quality than their SF.
Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet and a large group of other editors that includes Elizabeth Bear and John Bowker, published good stuff by Steven Mohan, Jr., Swapna Kishore, and others.
A new ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, had a strong year, featuring good work by Aliette de Bodard, Rachel Swirsky, Ian McHugh, Richard Parks, Sarah L. Edwards, K.D. Wentworth, and others.
Shadow Unit (www.shadowunit.org) is a Web site devoted to publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, something I find unexciting, but which has strongly impressed other critics, and which has drawn top people such as Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Emma Bull, and others.
A mix of science fact articles and fiction is available from the ezine Futurismic (http://futurismic.com) and from Escape Velocity (www.escapevelocitymagazine.com).
Book View Café (www.bookviewcafe.com) is a consortium of over twenty professional authors, including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Anne Gilman, Sarah Zettel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a new Web site where work by them—mostly reprints, and some novel excerpts—is made available for free.
Another new fantasy-oriented site, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly (www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com), started up this year, as did an SF site selling downloads and PDFs (a model which didn’t work for Aeon), M-Brane SF (http://mbranesf.blogspot.com).
Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, and most of the stories are slipstream or literary surrealism. Sites that feature those, as well as fantasy (and, occasionally, some SF) include Rudy Rucker’s Flurb (www.flurb.net), RevolutionSF (www.revolutionsf.com), CoyoteWild (www.coyotewildmag.com), Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com), and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).
However, original fiction isn’t all that can be found on the Internet—there are a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy stories out there too, usually available for free. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Jim Baen’s Universe, and so on, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue.” Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/), and a large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk) and the Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible.
An even greater range of reprint stories becomes available, though, if you’re willing to pay a small fee for them. Perhaps the best and the longest-established place to find such material is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA, Kindle, or home computer; in addition to individual stories, you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections; as well as a selection of novels in several different genres—you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), where in addition to the fiction for sale, you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.
Finding fiction to read, though, is not the only reason for SF fans to go on the Internet. There are also many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is easily Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, where you can access an incredible amount of information—including book reviews, critical lists, obituaries, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards—it’s rare when I don’t find myself accessing Locus Online several times a day. Other major general-interest sites include SF Site (www.sfsite.com), SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), io9 (http://io9.com), Green Man Review (http://greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld.com (www.sffworld.com), SFReader.com (www.sfreader.com), SFWatcher.com (www.sfwatcher.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com). One of the best of the general-interest sites, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, has unfortunately died. Another, Science Fiction Weekly, first merged with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a new site called Sci Fi Wire, and then transformed to Syfy (www.syfy.com) when its parent channel changed its name from the Sci Fi Channel to Syfy as well, dropping all its columnists and book reviews along the way to concentrate exclusively on media news and reviews—and thus making itself largely uninteresting to me. A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk). Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus, but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf.net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent (www.tangentonline.com), which had gone on a long hiatus but returned to active status in 2009—ironically, just as its rival The Fix, launched by a former Tangent staffer, seems to have gone inactive. Other sites of interest include: SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Ansible (http://news.ansible.co.uk/), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; and a number of sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed: Audible.com (www.audible.com), Escape Pod (http://escapepod.org), StarShipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com), and PodCastle (http://podcastle.org).
The much-heralded “New Golden Age” of original anthologies may have reached its high-water mark in 2008, and even receded a bit. There were still plenty of anthologies out, especially from small presses and books available as downloads online, but several of the most prominent high-end original series, upon which many hopes were pinned, have died. Of the three much-talked-about original anthology series launched in 2007, Fast Forward, edited by Lou Anders, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann, and Eclipse, edited by Jonathan Strahan, only Eclipse survives at the end of the year. A shame, for both other series had a lot to recommend them.
The fact is, although many good individual stories were published, it was something of a lackluster year for original anthologies as a whole, with no clear-cut standouts. In terms of literary quality, judging the stories as stories, without taking genre classification into consideration, the strongest of the year’s anthologies was clearly Eclipse Three (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan—I personally found it somewhat disappointing, though, that there was relatively little science fiction here, most of the contents being fantasy or slipstream. Best stories in Eclipse Three were by Maureen F. McHugh and Nicola Griffith although there was also good stuff of various sorts by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Daniel Abraham, Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, and others. The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3 (Solaris), edited by George Mann, was mostly SF, and featured strong work by Paul Cornell, Warren Hammond, Alastair Reynolds, John Meaney, and others. There were two anthologies from DAW Books this year which are a cut above the usual DAW anthology product: a strong steampunk/alternate history anthology, Other Earths (DAW), edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake, which featured a standout story by Robert Charles Wilson, and good work by Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, Liz Williams, and others; and We Think, Therefore We Are (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther. We Think, Therefore We Are wasn’t as strong as past Crowther anthologies such as Moon Shots have been, but still featured interesting stuff by Chris Roberson, Keith Brooke, Patrick O’Leary, Robert Reed, and others.
A cut below this level, the strongest story in Federations (Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams, an anthology of stories inspired by Star Trek (which looked for work that “builds on those same tropes and traditions”), was by John C. Wright, but there was also good work by Mary Rosenblum, Allen Steele, Yoon Ha Lee, and others, as well as good reprint stories by Alastair Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, and others. Clockwork Phoenix 2, edited by Mike Allen, was mostly fantasy instead of science fiction, unlike the original volume, but had worthwhile stuff by Tanith Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ann Leckie, and others. Mike Ashley’s anthology with the somewhat overheated title of The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF: The 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction was mostly a reprint anthology, with strong reprints by Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, Terry Bisson, Geoffrey A. Landis, Alastair Reynolds, James Blish, and others, but did find room for intriguing original stuff by Robert Reed, Eric Brown, Adam Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, and others.
One of the year’s best anthologies was published by an ultra-small press in Australia, and is going to be very difficult for most readers to find. Neverthless, X6 (Coeur de Lion), a collection of six novellas edited by Keith Stevenson, features two of the best stories of the year—an evocative reinvention of the selkie legend by Margo Lanagan and a brutal, hard-hitting examination of a disintegrating future Australia by Paul Haines—as well as good work by Terry Dowling and Cat Sparks. Not quite as successful as X6, but still featuring some substantial work, is another novella collection from another small press, Panverse One: Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Panverse Press), edited by Dario Ciriello. The best story here is probably an atmospheric fantasy by Alan Smale, centering on a strange space-time discontinuity that opens up around Emily Brontë of Wuthering Heights fame, but there is also good work by Jason K. Chapman and Andrew Tisbert. I had high hopes for another ultra-small press anthology, When It Changed (Comma Press), edited by Geoff Ryman, which had an intriguing premise and a good roster of authors, but somehow the final product was mildly disappointing, although there were strong stories there by Adam Roberts, Ryman himself, and others. Another ultra-small press produced the anthology Footsteps (Hadley Rille Books), edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, a somewhat lackluster volume of Moon landing–related stories, although there was solid work there by James Van Pelt, Brenda Cooper, and others.
We’re supposed to consider the British publication Postscripts (PS Publishing) to be an anthology now rather than a magazine, so this seems like the appropriate place to take a look at it. They managed three issues this year, one of them a double issue: Postscripts 18: This Is the Summer of Love, Postscripts 19: Enemy of the Good, and Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein, all edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers. These three volumes maintain a reasonably high level of literary accomplishment, although none of them matches 2008’s Postscripts 15; there’s good work in the three volumes by Chris Roberson, Lisa Tuttle, Daniel Abraham, Paul Park, M.K. Hobson, Matthew Hughes, Marly Youmans, and others.
Pleasant but minor science fiction anthologies included Intelligent Design (DAW Books), edited by Denise Little, Gamer Fantastic (DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, and a mixed SF and fantasy anthology, Warrior Wisewoman 2 (Norilana), edited by Roby James.
Noted without comment is The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.
The best original fantasy anthology of the year (although it contains a couple of SF stories) may have been Firebirds Soaring (Firebird), edited by Sharyn November, which featured excellent work by Jo Walton, Margo Lanagan, Chris Roberson, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Ellen Klages, Louise Marley, and others. Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (Viking), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling, is aimed at a younger audience than most of their other collections of fairy tale retellings have been—best story here is by Kelly Link, although there’s also entertaining work by Peter S. Beagle, Garth Nix, Delia Sherman, Jane Yolen, and others.
Pleasant but minor original fantasy anthologies included Swordplay (DAW Books), edited by Denise Little; The Trouble with Heroes (DAW Books), edited by Denise Little; Lace and Blade 2 (Norilana Books), edited by Deborah J. Ross; Ages of Wonder (DAW Books), edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Rob St. Martin; Strip Mauled (Baen Books), edited by Esther M. Friesner; Witch Way to the Mall (Baen Books), edited by Esther M. Friesner; Terribly Twisted Tales (DAW Books), edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg; Under the Rose (Norilana Books), edited by Dave Hutchinson; and Crime Spells (DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman. There was also another installment in a long-running fantasy anthology series, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Swords and Sorceress XXIV (Norilana Books), edited by Elisabeth Waters.
Noted without comment are Songs of the Dying Earth (Subterranean Press/HarperCollins UK), an anthology of new fantasy stories inspired by the work of Jack Vance, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and The Dragon Book (Ace Books) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
The year’s best original horror anthologies (although both have fantasy stories and even SF stories in them) were Lovecraft Unbound (Dark Horse Comics), a mixed original (mostly) and reprint anthology, and Poe (Solaris), an all-original, both edited by Ellen Datlow, and both collecting stories “inspired” by the work of their respective authors (H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, naturally). The best story in Lovecraft Unbound happens to be the only SF story, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, but the book also has strong original work by Laird Barron, William Browning Spencer, Lavie Tidhar, Holly Philips, Richard Bowes, Marc Laidlaw, and others, and good reprint stuff by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Michael Chabon, and others. Poe features good work by Suzy McKee Charnas, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, Sharyn McCrumb, Glen Hirshberg, Laird Barron, Gregory Frost, Kim Newman, and others. Tesseracts Thirteen (Hades/EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy), edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell, functioned as a dedicated horror anthology this year. Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary (Tor Books), edited by Carol Serling, is self-explanatory. There were also a number of large retrospective reprint horror anthologies, discussed below.
Slipstream anthologies included: Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (Small Beer Press), edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak; Conjunctions: 52, Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism (Bard College), edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson; and an anthology of flash fiction, Last Drink Bird Head (Ministry of Whimsy), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer.
Shared world anthologies included Wild Cards: Suicide Kings (Tor Books), edited by George R.R. Martin; Man-Kzin Wars XII (Baen Books), created by Larry Niven; Changing the World: All New Tales of Valdemar (DAW Books), edited by Mercedes Lackey; New Ceres Nights (Twelfth Planet Press), edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wesely; Grants Pass (Morrigan Books), edited by Jennifer Brozek and Amanda Pillar; and The Grantville Gazette V (Baen Books), edited by Eric Flint.
A long-running series featuring novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, changed editors this year, as the late Algis Budrys handed the torch to K.D. Wentworth, who continued the series with L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXV (Galaxy Press).
A relatively new phenomenon is paranormal romance anthologies. They included Strange Brew (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by P.N. Elrod, and a bunch of anthologies with no editor listed: Mean Streets (Roc), Must Love Hellhounds (Berkley Books), and Never After (Jove).
As in 2008, there were a lot of stories about robots this year, roughly divided into stories about robots working out compassionate relationships with humans and robots creating their own societies, loosely modeled on human culture, after all the humans are dead. As has been the case for a couple of years now, there were a number of stories that featured flying sailing ships (shades of Peter Pan!) and/or zeppelins. There were lots of steampunk stories, in both print and electronic venues, and, in spite of the death of dedicated alternate history magazine Paradox, still many alternate history stories as well. (Judging whether a given story is steampunk or alternate history is sometimes a judgment call, as by definition all steampunk is also alternate history, but you can usually tell where the strongest emphasis lies.) There weren’t as many zombie stories as last year, although there was another dedicated zombie anthology, so perhaps they will rest quietly in their graves for a bit. Lots of vampire stories, it almost goes without saying.
SF continued to appear in places well outside accepted genre boundaries, from science magazines Cosmos, Nature, and New Scientist to The New Yorker.
Finding individual pricings for all of the items from small presses mentioned in this summation has become too time-intensive, and since several of the same small presses publish anthologies, novels, and short-story collections, it seems silly to repeat addresses for them in section after section. Therefore, I’m going to attempt to list here, in one place, all the addresses for small presses that have books mentioned here or there in this summation, whether from the anthology section, the novel section, or the short-story collection section, and, where known, their Web site addresses. That should make it easy enough for the reader to look up the individual price of any book mentioned that isn’t from a regular trade publisher; such books are less likely to be found in your average bookstore, or even in a chain superstore, and so will probably have to be mail-ordered. Many publishers seem to sell only online, through their Web sites, and some will only accept payment through PayPal. Many books, even from some of the smaller presses, are also available through Amazon.com.
Addresses: PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire, HU18 1PG, England; www.pspublishing.co.uk. Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802; www.goldengryphon.com. NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0809; www.nesfa.org. Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519; www.subterraneanpress.com. Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951; www.oldearthbooks.com. Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107; www.tachyonpublications.com. Night Shade Books, 1470 NW Saltzman Road, Portland, OR 97229; www.nightshadebooks.com. Five Star, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901; www.galegroup.com/fivestar. NewCon Press, www.newconpress.co.uk. Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St. #306, Easthampton, MA 01027; www.smallbeerpress.com. Locus Press, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661; www.locusmag.com. Crescent Books, Mercat Press Ltd., 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, EH3 7AL, Scotland. Wildside Press/Borgo Press, P.O. Box 301, Holicong, PA 18928-0301; www.wildsidepress.com. Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc./Tesseract Books, P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada; www.edgewebsite.com. Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787; www.aqueductpress.com. Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109, New York, NY 10003. Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092; www.fairwoodpress.com. Ben-Bella Books, 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 508, Dallas, TX 75206; www.benbellabooks.com. Darkside Press, Darkside Press & Midnight House, 107 E. Green St., Gallup, NM 87301; www.darkmidhouse.com. Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48073-1239; www.haffnerpress.com. North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701; www.northatlanticbooks.com. Prime Books, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH, 44735; www.prime-books.com. MonkeyBrain Books, 11204 Crossland Drive, Austin, TX 78726; www.monkeybrainbooks.com. Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, Order Dept., 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon NH 03766-1405; www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/. Agog! Press, P.O. Box U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Austrailia. Wheatland Press, P. O. Box 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070; www.wheatlandpress.com. MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia; www.tabula-rasa.info/ MirrorDanse. Arsenal Pulp Press, 103-1014 Homer Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 2W9, Canada; www.arsenalpulp.com. DreamHaven Books, 2301 East 38th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55406; www.dreamhavenbooks.com. Elder Signs Press/Dimensions Books, www.dimensionsbooks.com. Chaosium, Chaosium Inc., 22568 Mission Boulevard #423, Hayward, CA 94541-5116; www.chaosium.com. Spire Books, P.O. Box 3005, Radford, VA 24143. SCIFI, Inc., P.O. Box 8442, Van Nuys, CA 91409-8442. Omnidawn Publishing, 1632 Elm Avenue, Richmond, California 94805-1614; www.omnidawn.com. CSFG, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, www.csfg.org.au. Hadley Rille Books, P.O. Box 25466, Overland Park, KS 66225; www.hadleyrillebooks.com. ISFiC Press, 707 Sapling Lane, Deerfield, IL 60015-3969; www.isficpress.com. Suddenly Press, c/o Brian Youmans, 49 Magnolia Street, Arlington, MA 02474; www.suddenlypress.com. Sandstone Press, P.O. Box 5725, One High St., Dingwall, Ross-shire, IV15 9WJ, Scotland; www.sandstonepress.com. Tropism Press, 1034 McKinley Ave., Oakland, CA 94610; www.tropismpress.com. SF Poetry Association, www.sfpoetry.com. DH Press, www.diamondbookdistributors.com. Kurodahan Press, c/o Intercom, Ltd., 3-9-10-403 Tenjin, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka, 810-0001 Japan; www.kurodahan.com. Ramble House, 443 Gladstone Blvd., Shreveport, LA 71104; www.ramblehouse.com. Interstitial Arts Foundation, P.O. Box 35862, Boston, MA, 02135; www.interstitialarts.org. Raw Dog Screaming, www.rawdogscreaming.com. Three Legged Fox Books, 98 Hythe Road, Brighton, BN1 6JS, UK; www.threeleggedfox.co.uk. Norilana Books, P.O. Box 2188, Winnetka, CA 91396; www.norilana.com. Coeur de Lion, 56 Serpentine Road, Kirrawee NSW 2232, Australia; www.coeurdelion.com.au. PARSEC, www.parsecink.org. Robert J. Sawyer Books, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, ON, L3R 4T8, Canada; www.sfwriter.com/rjsbooks.htm. Rackstraw Press, http://rackstrawpress.nfshost.com. Candlewick, www.candlewick.com. Zubaan, 128 B, First Floor, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110019, India; www.zubaanbooks.com. Utter Tower, www.threeleggedfox.co.uk. Spilt Milk Press, P.O. Box 266, Bettendorf, IA 52722; www.electricvelocipede.com. Paper Golem, www.papergolem.com. Galaxy Press, 7051 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 200, Hollywood, CA 90028; www.galaxypress.com. Twelfth Planet Press, P.O. Box 3027, Yokine, WA, 6060, Australia; http://twelfthplanetpress.wordpress.com. Senses Five Press, www.sensesfive.com. Elastic Press, 85 Gertrude Road, Norwich, NR3 4SG, UK; www.elasticpress.com. Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave., Maple Shade, NJ 08052; www.lethepressbooks.com. Two Cranes Press, www.twocranespress.com. Wordcraft of Oregon, P.O. Box 3235, La Grande, OR 97850; www.wordcraftoforegon.com.
In spite of the recession, there were still a huge number of novels published in the SF/fantasy genres during the year—more than ever before, in fact, and it looks likely that there’ll be even more next year.
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were a record 2,901 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2009, up 2 percent from 2,843 titles in 2008. Sixty-seven percent of those were new titles, not reprints. (It’s worth noting that this total doesn’t count novels offered as downloads on the Internet or on Kindle, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, or most Print on Demand books—all of which would swell the total by hundreds if counted.) Paranormal romances remained strong, with 339 titles this year as opposed to 328 in 2008; one of the paranormal romance writers, Stephanie Meyer, edged out J. K. Rowling in sales, and others such as Charlaine Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher, and Diana Gabaldon are among the bestselling writers in America. The number of new SF novels was down slightly, by 7 percent, to 232 as opposed to 2008’s total of 249 (still far larger than the field was even a few years back, and more novels than any one person is going to have a chance to read in the course of a year). The number of new fantasy novels was up by 30 percent, to 572 titles as opposed to 2008’s total of 439. Horror novels were up to 251 titles as opposed to 2008’s total of 175, the biggest gain since the Big Horror Boom busted; in 2002, for instance, there were only 112 horror titles published.
As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning the novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2009. These include:
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (Tor Books), by Robert Charles Wilson; Steal Across the Sky (Tor Books), by Nancy Kress; Drood (Little, Brown and Company), by Dan Simmons; The Empress of Mars (Tor Books), by Kage Baker; The Caryatids (Del Rey/Ballantine Books), by Bruce Sterling; This Is Not a Game (Orbit), by Walter Jon Williams; House of Suns (Ace Science Fiction), by Alastair Reynolds; The Revolution Business (Tor Fantasy), by Charles Stross; Gardens of the Sun (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; The High City (Forge), by Cecelia Holland; Ark (Gollancz), by Stephen Baxter; The Sunless Countries (Tor Books), by Karl Schroeder; Transition (Orbit Books), by Iain M. Banks; Galileo’s Dream (HarperVoyager), by Kim Stanley Robinson; Mind Over Ship (Tor Books), by David Marusek; Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz), by Adam Roberts; The Devil’s Alphabet (Del Rey), by Daryl Gregory; Boneshaker (Tor Books), by Cherie Priest; The City & The City (Del Rey), by China Mieville; Coyote Horizon (Ace), by Allen Steele; Regenesis (DAW Books), by C. J. Cherryh; Conspirator (DAW Books), by C. J. Cherryh; The Walls of the Universe (Tor Science Fiction), by Paul Melko; Avilion (Gollancz), by Robert Holdstock; The Magicians (Viking Press), by Lev Grossman; Chasing the Dragon (Pyr), by Justina Robson; The Steel Remains (Ballantine Books), by Richard K. Morgan; The Price of Spring (Tor Fantasy), by Daniel Abraham; The Red Tree (Roc Trade), by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Green (Tor Books), by Jay Lake; The Knights of the Cornerstone (Ace Books), by James P. Blaylock; Buyout (Del Rey), by Alexander Irvine; Palimpset (Bantam Spectra), by Catherynne M. Valente; Hope’s Folly (Bantam), by Linnea Sinclair; End of the Century (Pyr), by Chris Roberson; Duplicate Effort (Roc Books), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Diving into the Wreck (Pyr), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Turn Coat (Roc), by Jim Butcher; Corambis (Ace Books), by Sarah Monette; The Sharing Knife (Eos), by Lois McMaster Bujold; Buyout (Del Rey), by Alexander Irvine; Storm from the Shadows (Baen Books), by David Weber; Escape from Hell (Tor Books), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Heroes of the Valley (Hyperion), by Jonathan Stroud; Bone Crossed (Ace), Patricia Briggs; Unseen Academicals (Harper), by Terry Pratchett; and Under the Dome (Scribner), by Stephen King.
Small presses once published mostly collections and anthologies, but these days they’re active in the novel market as well. Novels issued by small presses this year, some of them among the year’s best, included: The Empress of Mars (Subterranean Press), by Kage Baker; The Hotel Under the Sand (Tachyon Publications), by Kage Baker; Lifelode (NESFA Press), by Jo Walton; The Shadow Pavillion (Night Shade Books), by Liz Williams; Madness of Flowers: A Novel of the City Imperishable (Night Shade Books), by Jay Lake; The Proteus Sails Again (Subterranean Press), by Thomas M. Disch; and Those Who Went Remain There Still (Subterranean Press), by Cherie Priest.
The year’s first novels included: The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books), by Paolo Bacigalupi; The Manual of Detection (Penguin Group), by Jedediah Berry; Lamentation (Tor Books), by Ken Scholes; Harbinger (Fairwood Press), by Jack Skillingstead; Prospero Lost (Tor Books), by L. Jagi Lamplighter; Total Oblivion, More or Less (Ballantine Spectra), by Alan DeNiro; and The Adamantine Palace (Gollancz), by Stephen Deas. Of these, The Windup Girl got by far the best notices, with several critics calling it not only the best first novel of the year but the best science fiction novel of the year, period.
Associational novels by people connected with the science fiction and fantasy fields included: Four Freedoms (HarperCollins), by John Crowley; The Dead Man’s Brother (Hard Case Crime), by Roger Zelazny; Mariposa (Vanguard Press), by Greg Bear; The Asylum Prophecies (Leisure Books), by Daniel Keyes; and Chronic City (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem. Ventures into the genre, or at least the ambiguous fringes of it, by well-known mainstream authors, included: Inherent Vice (Penguin Press), by Thomas Pynchon; The Year of the Flood (Doubleday), by Margaret Atwood; and Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner), by Audrey Niffenegger. A surprise bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Books), by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, has already spawned several sequels, and may launch a whole new subgenre, the literary classic/horror mash-up.
There were again some good individual novellas published as chapbooks, although perhaps nothing that really stood out. Subterranean Press published The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker; The God Engines, by John Scalzi; Seven for a Secret, by Elizabeth Bear; and Alpha and Omega, by Patricia Briggs. PS Publishing brought out Starfall, by Stephen Baxter; Ars Memoriae, by Beth Bernobich; The Night Cache, by Andy Duncan; and Gilbert and Edgar on Mars, by Eric Brown. NewCon Press brought out The Push, by David Hutchinson, and Starship Fall, by Eric Brown. MonkeyBrain Books published Death of a Starship, by Jay Lake. Hadley Rille Books published The Priestess and the Slave, by Jenny Blackford.
Novel omnibuses this year included: The Books of the Wars (Baen Books), by Mark Geston; Divisions (Orb), by Ken MacLeod; Exile and Glory (Baen Books), by Jerry Pournelle; Fires of Freedom (Baen Books), by Jerry Pournelle; Triplanetary (Cosmos Books), by E.E. Smith; This Fortress World (Fantastic Books), by James Gunn; and VALIS and Later Novels (Library of America), by Philip K. Dick, as well as many omnibus novel volumes published by the Science Fiction Book Club. (Omnibuses that contain both short stories and novels can be found listed in the short story section.)
A lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Not even counting Print on Demand books from places such as Wildside Press, the reprints issued by the Science Fiction Book Club, and the availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads from Internet sources such as Fictionwise, that makes this the best time in decades to pick up reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels. Here are some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably difficult to impossible:
Tor Books reissued The Currents of Space, by Isaac Asimov. Orb Books reissued The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov; Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, by Frederik Pohl; Flashforward, by Robert J. Sawyer; Bone Dance, by Emma Bull; and Dying Inside and A Time of Changes, both by Robert Silverberg. Baen Books reissued The Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein; Rx for Chaos, by Christopher Anvil; and A Sense of Infinity, by Howard L. Myers. Pyr reissued Desolation Road, by Ian McDonald. Orbit reissued Against a Dark Background, by Iain M. Banks; and The Naked God and The Neutronium Alchemist, both by Peter F. Hamilton. Cosmos reissued The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt; and The 13th Immortal, by Robert Silverberg. Ace reissued Ariel, by Steven R. Boyett. Paizo Publishing reissued Robots Have No Tails, by Henry Kuttner; and The Sword of Rhiannon, by Leigh Brackett. Fantastic Books reissued Pennterra, by Judith Moffett; and The Dreaming and The Judas Mandala, both by Damien Broderick. New York Review Books Classics reissued Inverted World, by Christopher Priest; and The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham. Crippen & Landru reissued A Little Intelligence, by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett. Wyrm Publishers reissued Shriek: An Afterword, by Jeff VanderMeer. Hippocampus Press reissued The Hound Hunters, by Adam Niswander. Penguin Group reissued The Prisoner, by Thomas M. Disch. Monkey-Brain Books reissued Two Hawks from Earth, by Philip José Farmer.
As has been true for several years now, this was a good year for short story collections, and it was a particularly good year for career-spanning retrospective collections. The year’s best nonretrospective collection may have been Cyberabad Days (Pyr), by Ian McDonald, although it was given a run for its money by Wireless (Ace), by Charles Stross, and two collections by Greg Egan, Oceanic (Gollancz) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (Subterranean Press). Also first-rate were We Never Talk About My Brother (Tachyon Publications), by Peter S. Beagle; The Buonarotti Quartet (Aqueduct Press), by Gwyneth Jones; Thousandth Night/Minla’s Flowers (Subterranean Press), by Alastair Reynolds; The Radio Magician and Other Stories (Fairwood Press), by James Van Pelt; Are You There and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press), by Jack Skillingstead; Vacancy & Ariel (Subterranean Press), by Lucius Shepard; and Uncle Bones (Fantastic Books), by Damien Broderick. Also good are Everland and Other Stories (PS Publishing), by Paul Witcover; A is for Alien (Subterranean Press), by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Collected Stories (Subterranean Press), by Lewis Shiner; Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks (Golden Gryphon Press), by Michael D. Resnick; Tides from the New Worlds (Wyrm Publishing), by Tobias S. Buckell; Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press), by Cat Rambo; A Book of Endings (Twelfth Planet Press), by Deborah Biancotti; and We’ll Always Have Paris (William Morrow), by Ray Bradbury.
Strong as this year was in collections, it was even stronger for big retrospective career-spanning collections. There was a bumper crop of them, including: The Best of Gene Wolfe (Tor Books), by Gene Wolfe; Wild Thyme, Green Magic (Subterranean Press), by Jack Vance; Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four (Subterranean Press), by Robert Silverberg; The Best of Michael Moorcock (Tachyon Publications), by Michael Moorcock; The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard (W. W. Norton & Company), by J.G. Ballard; The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume One: Threshold (NESFA Press), by Roger Zelazny; The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Two: Power & Light (NESFA Press), by Roger Zelazny; The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain (NESFA Press), by Roger Zelazny; The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon (NESFA Press), by Roger Zelazny; The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume 1: Call Me Joe (NESFA Press), by Poul Anderson; The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness (NESFA Press), by Poul Anderson; Rise of the Terran Empire (Baen Books), by Poul Anderson; Selected Short Stories of Lester del Rey, Volume I: War and Space (NESFA Press), by Lester del Rey; Magic Mirrors (NESFA Press), by John Bellairs; The Shadow on the Doorstep (ISFiC Press), by James P. Blaylock; The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (Prime Books), by Clark Ashton Smith; The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume 1: The Variable Man and Other Stories (Prime Books), by Philip K. Dick; The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume 2: Breakfast at Twilight and Other Stories (Prime Books), by Philip K. Dick; Mysteries of the Worm (Chaosium), by Robert Bloch; and Slow Sculpture, Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books), by Theodore Sturgeon.
It should be clear from these lists that there would essentially be no such things as genre short-story collections without the small presses; with the occasional exception of a collection from a trade publisher like Tor or Baen or Ace, most collections these days are done by small press publishers. As you can see, Subterranean and NESFA Press have become particularly important in this area in recent years.
It should also be pointed out that a wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory; the Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.
There were a good number of big retrospective reprint anthologies this year, particularly in horror. Among the nonretrospectives, the crop of “Best of the Year” anthologies were, as usual, probably your best bet for your money. This crop has been winnowed a bit, and also rearranged, from its peak a couple of years back, but there are still a lot of them. Science fiction was covered by two and a half anthologies (actually, technically, by two anthologies and by two separate half anthologies): the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection from St. Martin’s Griffin, edited by Gardner Dozois; Year’s Best SF 14 (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer; and by the science fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan (the “half-a-book,” although, of course, in practice it won’t divide this neatly). Rich Horton’s Science Fiction: The Best of the Year series is on hiatus, and will be reinvented in 2010 as The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2010, which will dedicate half the book to SF coverage and half to fantasy. There will also be two new series in 2010, one by Ellen Datlow and one by Rich Horton, covering the online world specifically. The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de-facto “Best of the Year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (Roc), edited by Ellen Datlow. In 2010, there’ll be a new series covering the Hugo winners, edited by Mary Robinette Kowal. The long-running Datlow, Link & Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series died early in 2009, after twenty-one years of publication. Datlow immediately went on to start up a new horror series, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume One (Night Shade Books); the Kelly Link & Gavin Grant fantasy half has yet to find a new home. There were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the new Datlow book, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Carroll & Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, up to its twentieth volume. Horror: The Best of the Year (Prime Books), edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace, seems to be at least on hiatus, if not gone. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy is still around, but it has changed form and transmogrified in its ninth volume from a print publication issued by Tachyon to a version available as a download or a Print on Demand title from Tor.com. Since the Link/Gavin half of the old Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror is gone, and Rich Horton’s fantasy series will be merged with his science fiction Best in 2010, that left fantasy being covered by only two and a half anthologies in 2009, the Hartwell/Cramer, the Best American Fantasy (Prime), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and by the fantasy half of The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 3 (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan. There was also The 2009 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association/Prime), edited by Drew Morse, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year.
Perhaps the best reading bargain among the year’s stand-alone reprint anthologies is The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Tachyon Publications), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, a retrospective ranging across the magazine’s sixty-year history, and containing classic stories by Alfred Bester, Daniel Keyes, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Damon Knight, Peter S. Beagle, Ted Chiang, and others. Another of the year’s prominent reprint anthologies is The Secret History of Science Fiction (Tachyon Publications), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel; you don’t have to agree with the polemical agenda being promulgated here—which I have my doubts about—to realize that you’re getting a great bunch of reprint stories for your money, with a list split between SF writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Maureen F. McHugh, Gene Wolfe, and Kessel and Kelly themselves, and writers usually more identified as “mainstream,” such as Michael Chabon, George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, and Margaret Atwood. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Mystery and the Imagination Detailing the Adventures of the World’s Most Famous Detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, is a mixed reprint (mostly) and original cross-genre anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches by various hands, some of them by SF/fantasy writers and some by writers known better for their work in the mystery genre; there’s reprint work here by Neil Gaiman, Stephen Baxter, Laurie R. King, Sharyn McCrumb, Tanith Lee, Stephen King, Peter Tremayne, Vonda N. McIntyre, Chris Roberson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael Moorcock, and others, and good original work by Naomi Novik and others.
Lots of fang-flashing vampire stories were reprinted this year, perhaps not surprisingly considering the commercial success of Twilight both on the page and on the screen. One such reprint (mostly) anthology was By Blood We Live (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, which featured strong reprints by Garth Nix, Tad Williams, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, and others, and an original novella by John Langan. By Blood We Live and the Otto Penzler anthology mentioned below bring 121 vampire stories back into print between them, with only one overlap! There have been a lot of vampire stories in recent years. The ranks of that other ever-popular monster, the zombie, were a bit thin this year, but there was a dedicated zombie anthology, The Dead That Walk: Flesh-Eating Stories (Ulysses Press), edited by Stephen Jones, which has reprints from Joe Hill, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and others. Will they ever catch up to the number of vampire stories published? Probably not, since vampire stories had a head start and show no sign of slowing down, but zombie stories are giving it their best shot.
Big retrospective reprint anthologies this year included American Fantastic Tales, Volume One: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Library of America), edited by Peter Straub; American Fantastic Tales, Volume Two: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (Library of America), edited by Peter Straub; and The Vampire Archives, The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published (Vintage), edited by Otto Penzler.
A perspective on SF from other parts of the world is given by The Apex Book of World SF (Apex Books), edited by Lavie Tidhar; Philippine Speculative Fiction IV (Kestrel IMC), edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar; and A Mosque Among the Stars (ZC Books—also available on Kindle), edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and Ahmed A. Khan.
There were several strong autobiographical, semiautobiographical, and biographical books out in 2009, and they were probably your best bet for enjoyable reading in the nonfiction category. Most entertaining of these was probably This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”) (Subterranean Press), by Jack Vance, a wry autobiography, but the collection of semiautobiographical essays by Robert Silverberg, Other Spaces, Other Times (Nonstop Press), is also great reading.
Intriguing books about writers or their work this year included a critical study of the curious career of Hope Mirrlees, Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (Temporary Culture), by Michael Swanwick; an annotated bibliography of the career of Tim Powers, Powers: Secret Histories (PS Publishing), by John Berlyne; Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Lisa Rogak; On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Farah Mendlesohn; Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable (McFarland), edited by William J. Burling; The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson (Citadel Press), edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve; The Wizard Knight Companion (Sirius Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi; and The Authorized Ender Companion (Tor Books), by Orson Scott Card and Jake Black.
Books of essays and reviews by writers included: Starcombing (Cosmos Books), by David Langford, undoubtedly the funniest of the lot; Cheek by Jowl (Aqueduct Press), by Ursula K. Le Guin; Canary Fever: Reviews (Beccon Publications), by John Clute; Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics (Aqueduct Press), by Gwyneth Jones; and The Fantastic Horizon (Borgo Press), by Darrell Schweitzer.
Most of the rest of the year’s nonfiction books were more academically oriented. They included: Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature (Borgo Press), by Damien Broderick; The Science Fiction Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell), by Keith M. Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas; The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Routledge), edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint; Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (Routledge), edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint; A Guide to Fantasy Literature (Crickhollow Books), by Philip Martin; A Short History of Fantasy (Middlesex University Press), by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James; 100 Must-Read Fantasy Novels (A&C Black), by Nick Rennison and Stephen E. Andrews; Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume One (Greenwood Press), edited by Robin Anne Reid; Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume Two: Entries (Greenwood Press), edited by Robin Anne Reid; The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (McFarland), by Farah Mendlesohn; Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville; and The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Wesleyan University Press), by Nicholas Ruddick. A book of writing advice is Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer (Tachyon Press), by Jeff VanderMeer.
It was a pretty good year in the art book market. Artist retrospectives included From the Pen of Paul: The Fantastic Images of Frank R. Paul (Shasta-Phoenix), by Frank R. Paul; Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist (Andrews McMeel), by James Gurney, which doubles as a how-to book; Norman Saunders (Illustrated Press), by David Saunders; Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess (Dark Horse Comics), by Charles Vess; Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures (Illustrated Press), by Daniel Zimmer and David J. Hornung; and Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons (Fantagraphics Books), by Gahan Wilson.
Collections of work by various artists included Spectrum 16: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, the latest in a long-running “Best of the Year” series for fantastic art; Imaginaire I: Magic Realism 2008–2009 (Fantasmus-Art), edited by Claus Brusen; The Future of Fantasy Art (Collins Design), edited by Aly Fell and Duddlebug; Exposé 7 (Ballistic), a compilation of digital art, edited by Daniel Wade and Paul Hellard; and Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King (Centipede Press), edited by George Beahm.
Reference books/histories included Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary (McFarland & Company), by Jane Frank, and Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History (Collins Design), by Steve Holland.
It’s hard to make a case for The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2: From the Bastille to Baghdad (Harper), by Larry Gonick, the last volume of his famous Cartoon History of the Universe series, as a genre-related nonfiction book of interest, except perhaps that most fans are interested in history and its interface with technology, but it’s such a wonderful book that I’m going to mention it anyway. The Cartoon History series may be one of the best attempts ever to tell genuine and in fact quite erudite and well-researched history in an easily accessible and understandable format, and is very funny to boot (the extensive bibliographies in the back of every book also make it a valuable reference source in itself). If you’ve missed these, you’ve been cheating yourself out of a great reading experience. It’s a bit easier to justify a mention of The Age of Wonder, How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon Books), by Richard Holmes, which explores the lives of Victorian scientists and their often complex relationships with poets, artists, and other philosophers of their time. Even easier to justify is The Day We Found the Universe (Pantheon Books), by Marcia Bartusiak, which examines the roots of cosmology and the origin of our modern view of the universe.
As has been true for most of a decade now, genre movies dominated the film industry this year, doing huge box-office business—one of them is now the bestselling movie of all time.
According to Box Office Mojo (www.boxofficemojo.com), eight out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (the two exceptions were The Hangover, a slob comedy, and The Blind Side, a sports drama). By my count, and arbitrarily omitting horror movies, thirty-eight out of the hundred top-earning movies were genre films—if you count Inglourious Basterds as an alternate history movie, as some critics have argued, and Sherlock Holmes as a steampunk movie (it certainly has some minor fantastic elements), then the total rises to forty out of the top-earning movies being genre movies, as long as your definition of “genre” is wide enough to include fantasy movies and animated films.
That’s not really so different from last year, or the year before that. What makes this year somewhat unusual is that there were several actual SF films, as opposed to fantasy films (last year, there were almost no SF films at all, and none among the top ten), with a couple of them among the top-ten grossers. Also unusual, there were no superhero movies among the top ten; the nearest one was X-Men Origins: Wolverine in eleventh place; the much-heralded Watchmen finished disappointingly in thirtieth place.
The two-billion-pound gorilla in the room, of course, was Avatar, which so far has earned $598,453,037 domestically, plus $1,446,989,293 in foreign grosses, bringing its worldwide total to an incredible $2,045,442,330 (and that doesn’t even count future income from DVD sales, action figures, and the inevitable computer game). All of which makes Avatar the highest-grossing film of all time (although it’s worth keeping in mind that it was also the most expensive movie to make of all time, with a production budget rumored to be somewhere in the $500 million range).
As a piece of filmmaking, it’s a breathtaking technical achievement, one of those movies, like 2001 in its day and Star Wars in its day, that pushes the edge of the envelope and hugely broadens what is possible to show on the screen. Visually, it’s absolutely stunning. As a movie, a piece of storytelling, it’s less impressive, with its bad dialogue, cardboard characters, weak science, heavy-handed New Age polemics, and clichéd plot-elements making it mediocre at best, although director James Cameron does keep it moving along at a brisk action-movie pace throughout.
None of that matters. Nobody really cares. It’s the biggest spectacle you can get on the screen at the moment for the price of a ticket, and (visually at least) a movie experience unlike any other—and that’s what’s bringing them through the door. On that level, Avatar totally deserves its success.
Although the most common critical reaction is to compare Avatar to Disney’s Pocahontas, and snide critics have taken to calling it “Dancing with Smurfs,” as a science fiction story it most resembles a mash-up of Poul Anderson’s “Call Me Joe,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World Is Forest,” and Alan Dean Foster’s Midworld, which at least makes it a legitimate science fiction film (it has weak science, of course, rather blatantly signaled by the fact that the wonder mineral they’re searching for is called “unobtainium”—but so do many print SF stories and novels that are accepted by all as a legitimate part of the genre), which makes it by far the most successful SF movie since Star Wars. After years of all the top-grossing genre films being fantasy, at least three of the top-ten box-office champs this year were science fiction, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. One or two of them even got some degree of critical respect, although there was no real critical darling among the year’s genre films, critics dividing in opinion on almost all of them.
In at second place, earning a still-staggering $835,274,255 worldwide, is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, another SF film (bad SF, perhaps junk SF, with science even weaker and more dubious than that in Avatar, but still SF, nevertheless—hey, it’s got robots in it, doesn’t it?). SF also shows up in seventh place with Star Trek, the movie that not only rebooted the franchise but resurrected it from its grave by delivering $385,494,555 worldwide, and being enough of a success financially (and even, grudgingly, critically to some extent) that a sequel is already in production. Star Trek is a fast-paced movie with a high bit rate and lots of jump cuts, as almost all movies that sell successfully to post-MTV generations are, lots of CGI spectacle splashed across the screen, a plot that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense on most levels, and the requisite dubious technobabble science. It does contain the year’s most audacious film moment, however, when they wipe out fifty years of series history in a stroke, consigning the six previous movies and the five previous TV series to the black hole of things that never happened, leaving themselves a blank slate upon which they can write anything they’d like, the freedom to do whatever they want with subsequent movies, safe to ignore the constraints of the previously existing canon.
The rest of the year’s SF movies didn’t do quite as well financially. Neither Terminator Salvation, finishing in twenty-third place, or Angels & Demons, finishing in twenty-second, were quite the blowout blockbusters that their producers probably hoped they’d be, both losing money domestically, although making up for it with foreign revenues. District 9 placed a respectable twenty-seventh on the top-grossing list, pretty good considering that it only cost $30 million to make, cheap by today’s standards, but earned $204,837,324 worldwide. It was also one of the most critically respected genre movies of the year, being nominated along with Avatar for the Best Picture Oscar, although a few reviewers complained that it was too much like the old movie Alien Nation, or that the way the refugee aliens were treated in the film was too obviously a metaphor for apartheid (unlike any other genre movie I can think of, District 9 takes place in South Africa). Another critically well-reviewed movie was Moon, a psychological drama taking place on a mining station on the Moon, although almost nobody went to see it; it slipped through town almost subliminally, in a limited release, and didn’t place at all on the extended list of the 150 top-earning movies of the year. For what it’s worth, both District 9 and Moon are a lot closer to being valid SF than junk SF with bad science like Transformers or Avatar.
The bleak after-the-holocaust movie The Road also got a pretty fair amount of critical respect, but just managed to squeeze onto the top-sellers list in 148th place, which must have been disappointing to the producers considering how massive their advertising/publicity push was. People generally don’t want bleak, hopeless, and depressing during a major recession, although the disaster movie 2012 did pretty well at the box office, placing fifteenth on the list—although it had the advantage of lots of spectacular special-effects shots of skyscrapers collapsing and tsunamis swamping the Himalayas, which The Road did not. The Time-Traveler’s Wife, finishing at only fifty-fourth place may also have been a disappointment, considering that the novel had been a major bestseller.
Fantasy didn’t do quite as well on the list as it has in years past, but was represented in third place by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in fourth place by romantic vampire soap opera The Twilight Saga: New Moon (which I’m arbitrarily consigning to fantasy rather than horror, because it wasn’t particularly scary), and later on down the list by Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Where the Wild Things Are, Race to Witch Mountain, The Lovely Bones (making a disappointing showing for the new Peter Jackson movie in seventy-sixth place; of course, at the time I’m writing these words, it’s only been in general release for a month or so, so it may do better later on), and Jim Carrey’s latest ill-advised attempt to make a slob comedy out of a beloved literary classic, A Christmas Carol. Right at the end of the year, the new Terry Gilliam movie came out, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but I haven’t yet had a chance to see it.
Animated films had three finishers in the top ten, the charming (and also well-reviewed) Up, at fifth place, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel in at ninth place, and Monsters vs. Aliens in tenth place; further down the list were Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline, The Princess and the Frog, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Astro Boy, and the edgy not-really-for-children post-apocalyptic 9. Coraline, taken from a Neil Gaiman novel, probably got the most critical respect of any of the animated films, other than Up.
It was a weak year for superhero movies, which up until now had dominated for several years. As mentioned, X-Men Origins: Wolverine underperformed, making it only to thirteenth place on the top-sellers list. The disappointment of the year, though, may have been Watchmen; some critics praised it, and some fans of the Watchmen graphic novels were enthusiastic about it, but for the most part, audiences stayed away, and it only made it to thirtieth place on the top-sellers list, earning $185,253,487 but costing $130 million to make. It was also bleak and depressing, and opinion was sharply divided on whether or not it was boring, and also on whether or not it was adequately faithful to the original source material.
In some ways, the highest profit margin of the year, proportionately speaking, may have been earned by horror movie Paranormal Activity, which pulled in a relatively modest $142,390,115 worldwide, but cost only an astonishing $15,000 to make; most big-budget Hollywood movies probably spend more than that buying doughnuts for the crew. I’m sure the film industry is saying, “Send us a few more like that!”
In spite of worries about the recession keeping people home in 2009, this wasn’t the case. People need cheap entertainment during bleak economic times, and just as happened during the Great Depression, there were more people going to the movies, not less.
Next year looks like it’s going to be Sequel Land, with a follow-up to Star Trek, probably a sequel to Avatar (although that might take a couple of years to make), possibly sequels to 2012 and Transformers, a lavish new version of The Wolfman—obviously part of an effort to make werewolves the New Vampires, a “reimagining” of Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton, and, of course, the new Harry Potter movie. On the horizon are possible versions of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, John Wyndham’s Chocky, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. How many of these will ever actually make it to the screen remains to be seen.
After the turbulence of 2007–2008, when the Writers Guild of America strike played hob with television programming, causing even many of the highest-rated shows to go on hiatus, 2009 was a relatively quiet year, although in some ways a glum one, during which TV shows fell like wheat before a scythe. Shows that died in 2009 or early 2010 included the once-hot Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; cult favorite Pushing Daisies; Stargate Atlantis; Defying Gravity; the American version of Life on Mars; Kings; Reaper; Eli Stone; the new version of the old show Knight Rider; Kyle XY; Eastwick, the series version of The Witches of Eastwick; the BBC’s Robin Hood; Saving Grace, the cop-talks-to-an-angel show; Merlin; and Eleventh Hour. The most keenly felt loss for some fans was probably Dollhouse, the new series by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Josh Whedon, upon which a lot of hopes had been pinned. As planned, Battlestar Galactica, another keenly missed show, ended its run, disappointing many of its fans with its series finale. Heroes, once a ratings powerhouse, has been hanging on by its superpowered fingernails for some time now, and may well have been cancelled by the time you read these words. New show FlashForward, based on an SF novel by Robert J. Sawyer, and V, a new version of another old show, seem to be hanging on rather precariously as well, struggling in the ratings, although they both did well enough to survive their freshman seasons.
A “reimagining” of the old show The Prisoner as a miniseries doesn’t seem to have particularly impressed anyone, in spite of a distinguished cast. Nor did Alice, a “reimagining” of Alice in Wonderland by the same people who reimagined The Wizard of Oz as Tin Man, a “darker” and seedier version of the children’s classic, perhaps a preemptive strike on the upcoming Tim Burton movie reimagining of the same material. (I find it interesting that the very first thing that these “reimaginings” do is to change the little girl protagonists to attractive and sexually nubile young women.)
Not everything was bleak in TV Land, though. Lost returned for its announced final season, and the series opener was excellent, although everyone is wondering if the show can possibly tie up its enormous number of loose ends in the amount of time they have left. X-Files lookalike Fringe seems to be a hit, as is True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris. New show Caprica, the “prequel” to Battlestar Galactica, is getting good notices, although its ratings are still a bit low, and a new series has moved into the Stargate neighborhood for its crack at the brass ring, Stargate Universe. Spy semi-spoof with fantastic elements, Chuck, still on the air, has been joined by a similar new show, Human Target. New show The Vampire Diaries seems to be aiming for the same romantic soap opera with vampires territory as True Blood. Doctor Who is coming back with a new doctor in the role, after racking up some of the best ratings in its history. Primeval was canceled, but then renewed after the BBC changed its mind. It looks like Torchwood may be coming back, at least there are rumors to that effect, even though things were wrapped up fairly decisively in a TV movie; there are also rumors of an upcoming American version of Torchwood, which will probably suck. The long-running Smallville has been renewed (its strategy of bringing in most of the members of the Justice League of America as guest stars seems to be working), as have Eureka, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, Medium, Sanctuary, and Legend of the Seeker.
Coming up: miniseries versions of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones from HBO and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars from AMC.
The 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Anticipation, was held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, from August 6–August 10, 2009. The 2009 Hugo Awards, presented at Anticipation, were: Best Novel, The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman; Best Novella, “The Erdmann Nexus,” by Nancy Kress; Best Novelette, “Shoggoths in Bloom,” by Elizabeth Bear; Best Short Story, “Exhalation,” by Ted Chiang; Best Related Book, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998–2008, by John Scalzi; Best Editor, Long Form, David G. Hartwell; Best Editor, Short Form, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Donato Giancola; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), WALL-E; Best Semiprozine, Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Stephen H. Segal; Best Fanzine, Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma; Best Fan Writer, Cheryl Morgan; Best Fan Artist, Frank Wu; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to David Anthony Durham.
The 2008 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, California on April 25, 2009, were: Best Novel, Powers, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Best Novella, “The Spacetime Pool,” by Catherine Asaro; Best Novelette, “Pride and Prometheus,” by John Kessel; Best Short Story, “Trophy Wives,” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; Best Script, WALL-E, by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, and Peter Docter; the Andre Norton Award to Flora’s Dare, by Ysabeau S. Wilce; plus the Ray Bradbury Award to Joss Whedon; the Solstice Award to Kate Wilhelm, A.J. Budrys, and Martin H. Greenberg; the Author Emeritus Award to M.J. Engh; and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award to Harry Harrison.
The 2009 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California on October 29–November 1, 2009, during the World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, The Shadow Year, by Jeffrey Ford, and Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan (tie); Best Novella, “If Angels Fight,” by Richard Bowes; Best Short Story, “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” by Kij Johnson; Best Collection, The Drowned Life, by Jeffrey Ford; Best Anthology, Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia; Best Artist, Shaun Tan; Special Award (Professional), to Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Michael Walsh, for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books; plus the Life Achievement Award to Ellen Asher and Jane Yolen.
The 2008 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Burbank Marriott Hotel near Los Angeles, California on June 13, 2009, were: Best Novel, Duma Key, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, The Gentling Box, by Lisa Mannetti; Best Long Fiction, Miranda, by John R. Little; Best Short Fiction, “The Lost,” by Sarah Langan; Best Fiction Collection, Just After Sunset, by Stephen King; Best Anthology, Unspeakable Horror, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder; Best Nonfiction, A Hallowe’en Anthology, by Lisa Morton; Best Poetry Collection, The Nightmare Collection, by Bruce Boston; plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to F. Paul Wilson and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
The 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was awarded to Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, and Songs of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod (tie).
The 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story,” by James Alan Gardner.
The 2009 Philip K. Dick Award went to Emissaries from the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro, and Terminal Mind, by David Walton (tie).
The 2009 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod.
The 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness, and Filter House, by Nisi Shawl (tie).
The 2009 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to A. Merritt.
Dead in 2009 or early 2010 were:
PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER, 91, multiple Hugo winner, a SFWA Grand Master, and a winner of the World Fantasy Award: Life Achievement, the author of a huge number of books, including the Riverworld, World of Tiers, and Dayworld series, and many others, whose best-known book was probably the Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go; J.G. BALLARD, 78, widely acclaimed outside the genre for his autobiographical World War II novel, Empire of the Sun, which was filmed by Stephen Spielberg, best known inside the genre as one of the ancestral figures in the British New Wave of the sixties, author of many groundbreaking short stories, some of the best of which were collected in Vermilion Sands and The Voices of Time, as well as novels such as The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Concrete Island, and many others; CHARLES N. BROWN, 72, a long-time fan and one-time nuclear engineer who was one of the co-founders of Locus, which under his multi-decade direction as editor and publisher became the most important and prominent news magazine in the history of SF, and earned the magazine twenty-nine Hugo Awards, also a tireless promoter of SF from thousands of convention panels, and a personal friend; DAVID EDDINGS, 77, prominent fantasy author best known for the novels of the Belgariad series, as well as for books in the Malloreon series, the Dreamers series, and others; ROBERT HOLDSTOCK, 61, acclaimed British fantasy writer, author of Mythago Wood, thought to be one of the classic post-Tolkein fantasy novels by many critics, as well as six sequels and a number of stand-alone novels; PHILIP KLASS, 89, who wrote SF as WILLIAM TENN, and whose classic stories, most published in the fifties, included “Bernie the Faust,” “Venus and the Seven Sexes,” “The Liberation of Earth,” and many others, as well as the novel Of Men and Monsters; KAGE BAKER, 57, prolific author of the extensive linked series of novels and stories about the time-travelling agents of the Company, one of the most popular series in recent SF, just as Baker may have been one of the most significant talents to enter the field during the last ten years, a friend; PHYLLIS GOTLIEB, 83, pioneering Canadian SF author, sometimes known as “the mother of Canadian science fiction,” Aurora Award-winning author of many stories collected in Son of the Morning and Other Stories and Blue Apes as well as novels such as Sunburst; HARRY C. CROSBY, Jr., 84, who wrote more than a hundred SF stories, mostly for Astounding/Analog, and several novels, under the name CHRISTOPHER ANVIL; LOUISE COOPER, 57, SF/fantasy writer, author of the Time Master trilogy, The Shadow Star trilogy, The King’s Demon, and others; THOMAS DEITZ, 57, author of sixteen fantasy novels, including Windmaster’s Bane and Bloodwinter; KEN RAND, 62, author of Phoenix, The Golems of Laramie County, A Cold Day in Hell, and other novels; RICHARD GORDON, 62, Scottish author who wrote SF novels as STUART GORDON author of books such as One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes, and Time Story; JOHN KENNEDY, 63, SF writer, ex-husband of SF writer Leigh Kennedy; JENNIFER SWIFT, 54, SF writer whose work appeared in Asimov’s, Amazing, F&SF, Interzone, and elsewhere; JANET FOX, 68, writer and editor, who also edited the monthly market report, Scavenger’s Newsletter; TAKUMI SHIBANO, 83, translator and novelist, longtime Japanese fan, sometimes spoken of as “the father of Japanese fandom”; KAORU KURIMOTO, 56, Japanese fantasy and anime author; EDWARD UPWARD, 105, distinguished British author whose works included the fantasy stories collected in The Mortmere Stories; JOHN ATKINS, 92, British author who occasionally wrote fantasy and SF; JOHN A. KEEL, 79, paranormal author and UFOologist best known for The Mothman Prophecies; MILORAD PAVIC, 80, Serbian novelist, many of whose novels had surreal fantastic elements; ED VALIGURSKY, 82, famous SF cover artist, whose covers graced many of the classics of the field; DEAN ELLIS, 89, another famous and pioneering SF cover artist; DON IVAN PUNCHATZ, 73, prominent artist and illustrator; ILENE MEYER, 69, SF/fantasy artist who did covers for books by Jack Vance, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and others; DAVE SIMONS, 54, comics artist; KNOX BURGER, 87, editor and agent, who published early works by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ray Bradbury, and John Wyndham as fiction editor of Collier’s magazine, edited SF for Dell and Fawcett, and later became a prominent literary agent; ALFRED A. KNOPF, 90, publisher and co-founder of Atheneum; ROBERT A. COLLINS, 80, scholar, founder of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, editor of Fantasy Review, and co-editor of Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review Annual; MARK OWINGS, 64, bibliographer and longtime fan, a founder of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, who worked with the late Jack Chalker to produce The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers; I.F. CLARKE, 91, British bibliographer and literary scholar, compiler of the classic study of future-war fiction, Voices Prophesying War; DONALD M. GRANT, 82, winner of three World Fantasy Awards, including the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, founder of Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc; BARBARA BOVA, literary agent, wife of SF writer Ben Bova; DON CONGDON, 91, agent and anthologist, longtime agent for writers such as Ray Bradbury and Henry Kuttner; ROBERT LOUIT, 64, French SF editor, critic, and translator; DAVE ARNESON, 61, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons; WALTER CRONKITE, 92, perhaps the best-known television broadcaster and anchor man of the twentieth century, who had no direct genre connection, but was known to every genre fan, if for nothing else, for his coverage of the Moon landing in 1969; ANDY HALLETT, 33, actor, best known to genre audiences for his role as the singing green demon Lorne on the television vampire show Angel; DAVID CARRADINE, 72, actor, best known to genre audiences for his role as wandering monk and martial arts expert Cain in the sixties’ TV show, Kung Fu, also known for the title role in the Kill Bill movies and as the ghoulishly jovial host of Wild West Tech; MICHAEL JACKSON, 50, worldwide celebrity and performer, best known to genre audiences for his role in The Wiz, the seventies’ remake of The Wizard of Oz, and for the song “Thriller,” which referenced horror movie clichés and featured a voiceover cameo by Vincent Price; FARRAH FAWCETT, 62, actor, best known to genre audience for roles in Logan’s Run and Saturn 3, and as one of television’s original Charlie’s Angels; NATASHA RICHARDSON, 46, actor, best known to genre audiences as the star of the movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale; MARY TRAVERS, 72, member of the famous folk-music trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, whose closest approach to genre was probably their fantasy song about “Puff, the Magic Dragon”; HENRY GIBSON, 73, movie and television actor; PERNELL ROBERTS, 81, television actor, best known for his roles in Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D., but who had genre-related roles in The Wild Wild West, Night Gallery, and The Six Million Dollar Man; RON SILVER, 62, actor, best known to genre audiences for his role in Timecop; MICKEY CARROLL, 89, whose role as a Munchkin in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz generated an entire subsequent career for him; KARL MALDEN, 97, a film actor for whom it’s hard to think of a really prominent genre connection (although he did do a few low-budget disaster movies like Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Meteor), but whose name and face will be familiar to most readers, and whose most famous movies included On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire; GALE STORM, 87, television actress with even less of a genre connection than Karl Malden, but who will be familiar to those of us old enough to have watched TV in the fifties from shows such as My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show; ELEANOR FRAZETTA, 74, wife of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta; DAVID GAIMAN, 75, father of SF writer Neil Gaiman; MARIAN BAILEY, 84, mother of SF writer Robin Bailey; JOHN IAN REYNOLDS, 66, father of SF writer Alastair Reynolds; and EMILY KATE BETHKE, 28, daughter of SF writer Bruce Bethke.