It was a fairly quiet and stable year for the science fiction publishing world, with the only big changes (most of them negative, alas) coming in the struggling short fiction market. None of the long-established SF lines were lost, and there were no huge mergers of the sort that can have disastrous consequences for the publishing houses being absorbed. In 2004, we saw five new SF imprints and five young adult fantasy or SF imprints launched. While we seem to be over that growth spurt for the moment (no new imprints launched in 2005), most of the new imprints started in 2004 seem to have had successful initial seasons. Prometheus Books’s new SF/fantasy imprint, Pyr, published fourteen books, and Phobos Books’s new Phobos Impact imprint published four.
Once again, to the regret of some, SF didn’t die—in fact, it seems to be doing pretty well. Many titles sold substantial numbers (although, admittedly, few of them sold well enough to get anywhere near the top of the fantasy food chain occupied by blockbusters such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and George R. R. Martin’s A Feast of Crows), and though the field didn’t expand again this year, as it had in 2004, it didn’t significantly contract, either. Most of the changes in the publishing scene were relatively minor: Fitzhenry & White-side purchased Red Deer Press, which includes the Robert J. Sawyer Books SF imprint; Meisha Merlin went through an internal reorganization and switched distributors, as did ibooks (which seems to have survived both the tragic death of founder Byron Preiss and the departure early in 2006 of editor in chief Howard Zimmerman, who is starting his own book packaging company, Z File Inc.), and Bloomsbury acquired Walker. Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press closed down after several years.
There were major shakeups at Del Rey at the beginning of 2005, which have some industry insiders worried about the status of Del Rey as a distinctive imprint at Random House: Publishing director Anthony Ziccardi left for a job as deputy director at Pocket Books; editor Chris Schluep moved to Ballantine; senior editor Steve Saffel was fired, as was publicist Colleen Lindsay; Shelly Shapiro announced she would be stepping down as editorial director in order to begin working as an editor-at-large from home; and Scott Shannon joined Random House as vice president and deputy publisher of Del Rey, moving from Pocket Books, where he had been vice president and associate publisher. Earlier in 2005, Jim Minz had moved to Del Rey from Tor. In other editorial news, Juliet Ulman was promoted to senior editor at Bantam Spectra, Cindy Hwang has been promoted to executive editor at Penguin, Michelle Frey was promoted to executive editor at Knopf and Crown, and Jean Feiwel has been named senior vice president and publisher of a new children’s unit at Holtzbrinck.
The future that’s been predicted by cyberoptimists for years now, where computer technology brings about sweeping changes in the way that books get published and in the nature of books themselves, crept a bit closer to reality. Major publishers such as Random House, HarperCollins, and Holtzbrinck are investigating ways to provide their backlists and new books in a variety of electronic formats, hoping to avoid the problems that the music industry ran into with on-line music piracy. The e-book may not be quite as dead as many have thought. (See also the story about the “Amazon Shorts” program, below.)
The big story in the short fiction market this year, unfortunately negative, was the cancellation of the electronic magazines SCI FICTION and The Infinite Matrix (see below for more on this). Even as new magazines rush into publication, the traditional print magazines continue to struggle with declining circulation.
Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a dismaying 23 percent loss in overall circulation in 2005, with subscriptions dropping from 23,933 to 18,050, and newsstand sales dropping from 3,936 to 3,397; sell-through dropped from 34 percent to 29 percent. Sheila Williams completed her first year as new Asimov’s editor this year. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered an 8.2 percent loss in overall circulation in 2005, much less than last year’s 18 percent drop, losing 3,899 in subscriptions, with subscriptions dropping from 27,816 to 25,933, while newsstand sales dropped from 5,456 to 4,614; sell-through dropped from 50 percent to 30 percent. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, although still lower in overall circulation than Asimov’s and Analog, was at least able to put the brakes on a swiftly dropping circulation this year in a way that the other magazines have not been able to do (as Charles Brown of Locus says, “Flat is the new up!”), registering only a 1 percent drop in overall circulation, with subscriptions dropping from 15,033 to 14,918, while newsstand sales declined from 3,886 to 3,822; sell-through actually increased, from 40 percent to 44 percent. Circulation figures for 2005 are not yet available for Realms of Fantasy, but their 2004 figures show them registering a 2.7 percent loss in overall circulation from 2003, with subscriptions dropping from 18,337 to 17,191, but newsstand sales rising from 8,995 to 9,398, the second year in a row of gains in newsstand sales; sell-through also increased, from 14 percent to 20 percent.
Interzone, which had seemed just about down for the count only a couple of years ago, returned to full vigor in 2005 under new editor Andy Cox, who completed his first full year, publishing six issues, including Interzone’s two hundredth issue. The quality of the fiction has been high, including work from both old Interzone regulars such as Dominic Green and new Interzone stalwarts such as Jason Stoddard. The magazine switched to high gloss full-color partway through the year (from stapled to perfect-bound), making it a more handsome magazine than it’s been at any time in its long lifetime.
Amazing published two issues and then announced early in 2005 that it was going “on hiatus,” for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. Nothing has subsequently been heard from them, and I suspect, knowing the history of the magazine market, that this is probably the last we’ll see of Amazing in this particular incarnation.
The British Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther with an assist by Nicholas Gevers, one of two high-end magazines that debuted in 2004, solidly established itself throughout 2005 as a thoroughly professional magazine in every way except circulation.
In fact, it published several of the year’s best stories in several different genres—it features a mix of science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, horror, mystery, and even some mainstream fiction—by writers such as Alastair Reynolds, Gene Wolfe, Chris Roberson, Joe Hill, Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, Jack Dann, Adam Roberts, and others. I consider it to be the most promising new magazine of the twenty-first century to date. Argosy, the other high-end launch of 2004 (and the one, in fact, that drew most of the buzz at the time), now being edited by publisher James Owen after several changes in editorial personnel. It spent most of the last two years struggling with distribution problems with the chain bookstores and managed only one issue this year, early in 2005; two more are promised for next year. Let’s hope that Owen can work through their difficulties and get this magazine back on its feet.
While the traditional professional magazines struggled, new magazines optimistically threw themselves into the fray (most of them are discussed in the semi-prozine section below). One that also promises to operate on a high professional level is Subterranean, edited by Subterranean Press editor William Schafer, a mixed SF/horror magazine stuffed with big names such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Joe R. Landsdale, Jack McDevitt, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Since I didn’t actually see them until pretty late in the year, I’m going to hold consideration of stuff from Subterranean over for next year’s book, but this could well become a very important market in years to come.
Another market operating on a professional level launched this year, a cross between a magazine and an anthology, InterNova, the Magazine of International Science Fiction, edited by Ronald M. Hahn, Olaf G. Hilscher, and Michael K. Iwoleit. This publication performs the very valuable service of bringing stories by SF writers from all over the world to the English-speaking market. The first issue featured good work by Vandana Singh, Eric Brown, Aleksandar Ziljak, Lino Aldani, and others.
SF stories continued to pop up in unlikely places this year, including a series of short-shorts by many of the field’s big-name authors in nearly every issue of the science magazine Nature, and a series of shorts by authors such as Joe Haldeman, Charles Stross, Gregory Benford, Paul Di Filippo, and others appearing in the newly launched Australian science magazine Cosmos. Amazon.com also launched a program called “Amazon Shorts,” where you can purchase individual stories over the Internet. There were stories available in several different genres, including excellent SF stories by Michael Swanwick, Mary Rosenblum, Allen Steele, Walter Jon Williams, James Morrow, Terry Bisson, Lucius Shepard, and others. SF even penetrated into the usually impregnable bastion of The Best American Short Stories this year, the latest issue of which featured several stories that had originally been published in the genre.
It wasn’t an entirely downbeat year in the magazine market (Interzone pulled itself back from the brink of extinction, Realms of Fantasy went up in newsstand sales, F&SF at least didn’t continue to slide at the rate that it had been sliding, even if it didn’t go up), but it’s hard to be too optimistic in the face of these circulation figures either. These magazines shouldn’t be counted out yet; one of their advantages, especially for the more-or-less digest-sized titles, is that they’re cheap to produce, meaning you don’t need to sell a lot of them in order to make a profit—still, you have to sell some of them, and the fact that circulation is continuing to slide, especially
with Asimov’s and Analog, is worrisome. Fiction magazines face a large number of problems in today’s newsstand market (there really isn’t any place for them, since they don’t really fit into any of the established display niches), and there may be only a few years left to rebuild circulation for most of the professional SF magazines, if they’re going to survive.
If they don’t survive, my fear is that we’ll end up more or less where the horror genre ended up after the collapse of the Big Horror Boom of the ’80s: a lot of stories being published in semiprozines and in electronic magazines, but no decent-paying professional markets left, so it not only becomes harder for readers to find stories (there no longer being a central source that everybody knows they should check), it becomes harder for writers to make any kind of money by writing them. The reader savvy enough to know where to look for stories may not even notice any difference. There’ll still be plenty of SF stories out there to be read, but it makes things even harder for the writers, in an area where many of them already write short fiction against their own economic best interests—which may eventually discourage some writers from even bothering to try.
That’s why I’m urging everybody who reads these words, if you like there being a lot of short SF and fantasy out there where it can be easily found, to take the time to subscribe to one of the genre magazines. It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines since you can now do it electronically on-line with the click of a few buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. In the Internet age, you can also subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible. Internet sites such as Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), sell electronic downloadable versions of many of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvy set. Therefore, I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf. Interzone can be subscribed to on-line at www.ttapress.com/onlinestorel.html. Postscripts can be subscribed to on-line at www.pspublishing.co.uk/postscripts.asp. Subterranean can be subscribed to on-line at www.subterraneanpress.com. InterNova, the Magazine of International Science Fiction, can be subscribed to at www.inter.nova-sf.de.
And here are the subscription addresses for more traditional mail subscriptions for the professional magazines.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, annual subscription—$44.89 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$43.90 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$43.90 for annual subscription in U.S.; Postscripts, PS Publishing, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, England, UK, published quarterly, £30 to £50 outside the UK; Interzone, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, $36 for a six-issue subscription, make checks payable to “TTA Press”; Argosy Magazine, Coppervale International, P.O. Box 1421, Taylor, AZ, 85939, $49.95 for a six-issue subscription; Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703, $16.95
for an annual subscription in the U.S.; Subterranean, Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519, four-issue subscription (U.S.), $22, four-issue subscription (int’l), $36.
Subscribe now, however you do it, if you want to help ensure the survival of the print SF/fantasy magazines as we know them.
Let’s now turn to the Internet scene, which is always a place of rapid change. That was especially true this year, and not always for the better. The most downbeat story in the whole short fiction market this year, in fact, on-line or off, was the death of Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION (www.scifi.com/scifiction), which was killed by shortsighted corporate bean counters at The Sci Fi Channel after six years of stellar performance. Under Datlow’s editorship, SCI FICTION had become the most important and universally recognized place on the Internet to reliably find SF, fantasy, and horror of high professional quality, and its loss is a blow to the entire genre. Although it’s not much consolation, at least it went out on a high note, publishing good stories this year by Vonda N. McIntyre, Howard Waldrop, Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold, Lucius Shepard, A. M. Dellamonica, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear, Jeffrey Ford, Bruce McAllister, and others. Eileen Gunn’s The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) also threw in the towel after a couple of years of trying to make bricks without straw once their funding dried up, although they still managed to publish a lot of interesting material during the year, including an excellent story by Cory Doctorow; stories by Robert Sheckley, Rudy Rucker, Nisi Shawl, and others; regular columns by Howard Waldrop and David Langford, and even a whole novel by Richard Kadrey.
With these leaders gone, the question in the on-line market now becomes, is there any other Internet fiction site that will be able to step up to the plate and take SCI FICTION’s place as the site to look at first when you want to find good SF and fantasy on-line? If so, my money’s on Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), which still publishes too much slipstream, fantasy, and soft horror for my taste, but which also published some of the year’s best SF stories this year by David Moles, Liz Williams, and Elizabeth Bear, as well as good stuff in various genres by Theodora Goss, Jason Stoddard, Anil Menon, Marguerite Reed, and others. Another candidate might be new electronic magazine Aeon, available for download through subscription (see their Web site at www.aeonmagazine.com for subscription information), which published good stuff this year by Joe Hill, Howard V. Hendrix, Carrie Richerson, Jay Lake, and others. Oceans of the Mind, also available by electronic subscription (see their Web site at www.trantorpublications.com/oceans.htm for subscription information), bucks the trend dominant elsewhere on-line by publishing mostly core science fiction, which is a welcome change in a market where the default position seems to be to publish slipstream and horror instead. The fiction here seemed somewhat weaker than it has been in other years, but they still managed to do worthwhile fiction by John Alfred Taylor, David Drake, Ryck Neube, Cherith Baldry, and others. A big factor in this market next year may be two flashy new electronic magazines, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Card, which debuted late in the
year, and is available for download through subscription, and Jim Baen’s Universe (subtitled A Three-Ring Circus of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fact), edited by Eric Flint (www.baensuniverse.com), which will start up in early 2006, and also will be available for download through subscription; see their respective Web sites for subscription information.
There’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy stories to be found out there on the Internet. Sites where reprint stories can be accessed for free include the British Infinity Plus (www.infinityplus.co.uk), which has a wide selection of good quality reprint stories, in addition to biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays. Strange Horizons, SCI FICTION, and The Infinite Matrix; (SCI FICTION in particular, while it stays up, anyway) has a substantial archive of “classic reprints.” Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, also have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and some of them regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues.
If you’re willing to pay a small fee, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. Perhaps the best such site is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA 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, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), where, in addition to the downloadable stuff (both stories and novels) you can buy, you can also access for free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material. Access for a small fee to both original and reprint SF stories is also offered by Alexandria Digital Literature (http://alexlit.com).
There are other reasons to go Web-surfing, though, other than finding fiction to read. There are many general interest sites that publish lots of interviews, critical articles, reviews, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The site I check most frequently, nearly every day, and perhaps the most valuable genre-oriented site on the entire Internet, is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the on-line version of the newsmagazine Locus. Not only is this often the first place in the genre to find fast-breaking news, you can also access an incredible amount of information, including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, 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. Other essential sites include: Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw), more media-and-gaming oriented than Locus Online, but still featuring news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassutt, and Wil McCarthy; Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com), one of the few places on the Internet to access a lot of short fiction reviews; Best SF (www.bestsf.net), another great review site, and one of the other few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues; SFRevu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), a review site that specializes in media and novel reviews; the SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews, but also serves as host site for the Web pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Interzone; SFF NET (www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, plus sites for genre-oriented “live chats”; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), where SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed; The Internet Review of Science Fiction (www.irosf.com), which features both short fiction reviews and novel reviews, as well as critical articles; and Lost Pages (http://lostpages.net), which features some fiction as well as the critical stuff. Multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s on-line version of his funny and iconoclastic fanzine Ansible is available at http://news.ansible.co.uk, and Speculations (www.speculations.com) a long-running site that dispenses writing advice, and writing-oriented news and gossip (although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site).
If you can’t find a site, Google for it; things change fast in the Internet world.
It was another chaotic year in the semiprozine market, with promising new magazines being born even as others seemed to be struggling.
Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications suffered another year of being unable to meet its announced publication schedules, with the exception of the newszine Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle); the DNA group also lost two of its magazines, Weird Tales and the speculative poetry magazine Mythic Delirium. Absolute Magnitude, the Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Fantastic, Stories of the Imagination managed only one issue apiece this year; Weird Tales, which had been the most reliably published of the DNA fiction magazines, and which also managed only one issue this year, was sold to Wildside Press, and will become a bimonthly publication under the editorship of George H. Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and Wildside’s editor John Betancourt. Wildside also published one issue this year of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror (which seems a bit redundant with Weird Tales added to the stable), and launched a slick new fantasy magazine, called, appropriately enough, Fantasy Magazine, edited by Sean Wallace. The premier issue featured strong work by Jeff Ford, Tim Pratt, Eugie Foster, and others.
Once again, I saw no issues this year of Century, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, Spectrum SF, Jupiter, or Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, and I’m beginning to think these magazines should be considered dead. There were supposedly three issues of Neo-Opsis this year, but I didn’t see them.
There were no issues of Eidolon in magazine format, but apparently there’s going to be an Eidolon anthology in 2006. I also didn’t see any issue of the other Australian semiprozine, Aurealis. I saw two issues of the Irish fiction semiprozine Albedo One this year, one of Tales of the Unanticipated, two of the sword and sorcery magazine Black Gate, one of newcomer Fictitious Force, and one of the long-running Space and Time.
There’s a whole block now of similar “slipstreamish” fiction semiprozines that produce a lot of enjoyable fiction every year, although you’ll rarely (if ever) find any core science fiction there (and only occasionally genre fantasy). Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the first of these and still the flagship of the slipstream movement, published three issues this year, and featured good work by Bruce McAllister, Eric Schaller, Richard Parks, John Waters, and others. Electric Velocipede also published three issues, and good work by Mark W. Tiedemann, Liz Williams, and others. Fly-trap (which was particularly strong this year, with stories by Theodora Goss, Jeff Ford, Jay Lake, and Sonya Taaffe). Say … and Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature managed one issue apiece. Talebones: The Magazine of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy, had two issues, with good stuff by Ken Scholes and James Van Pelt; and the Alternate History magazine Paradox managed two as well.
Turning now to the more vigorous of the fiction semiprozines, at least judging by how well they meet their production schedules. There were six issues of the Australian magazine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine; the scheduled four issues of the long-running Canadian magazine On Spec; three issues of a new fantasy magazine edited by David Lee Summers, the former editor of Hadrosaur Tales, called Tales of the Talisman; and the scheduled four issues of a new magazine called Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest. The leading British semiprozine, The Third Alternative, which usually keeps to schedule, published only two issues this year, but editor Andy Cox should be cut some slack, as he was also busy shepherding sister magazine Interzone through its first full year under his editorship. (The Third Alternative, which is going to concentrate more on horror now that Interzone is there to absorb the occasional SF story they used to run, is going to change its name to Black Static in 2006. Maybe not the best idea in the world, since they’ll lose all the reputation they’d built up as The Third Alternative, and maybe confuse some readers as well, but they didn’t ask me; we’ll see how it goes.) Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is very uneven in tone and quality from issue to issue—not surprising, as the magazine is edited by someone different every time—one of a group of rotating editors. This has never seemed like a good idea to me, as it makes it hard for a magazine to develop a distinctive editorial “voice” or personality. The best stuff from Andromeda Spaceways this year included stories by Stephen Dedman, Lou Antonellia, and Sandra McDonald. I continue to find most of the stuff in On Spec to be rather gray, although the covers were great, as usual. The best stuff there included stories by Leah Bobet, Jack Skillingstead, and E. Thomas. Nothing in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest is as yet running at a high professional level, but the magazine deserves encouragement simply for meeting its production schedule, not at all an easy thing to do, and there’s always room for improvement.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market anymore; as far as I can tell from a cursory look, the current horror magazines at the moment seem to include Cemetery
Dance, Black Static, Weird Tales, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, with horror also to be found in Talebones, Subterranean, Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and probably other places as well.
The critical magazine market has been whittled away, and now there are really only three of them left. As always, if you can only afford one magazine in this category, then the one to get is Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, edited by multiple Hugo winner Charles N. Brown, which remains, as it has for years, an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews for anyone interested in the science fiction field. Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), although not quite so vital as Locus, is also full of interesting information, and actually supplements it quite well; editor John Douglas was replaced by Ian Randall Strock, but the magazine has managed to stay on a reliable schedule after a couple of shaky years when it was missing issues. David G. Hartwell’s The New York Review of Science Fiction, perhaps the most reliably published magazine in the entire semiprozine field, having kept to its schedule like clockwork now for more than a decade, is more eclectic than the straight newsmagazines, publishing in-depth critical essays on a variety of academic and pop-culture subjects relating to science fiction now, as well as reading lists, letters, memoirs, and japes of various sorts.
And that’s really about all there is left. Everything above this level are heavy professional journals, probably more for the academic reader than the average citizen.
Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661—$60.00 for a one-year, first-class subscription, twelve issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570—$36.00 per year, make checks payable to “Dragon Press”, twelve issues; Black Static, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK—$36.00 for a six-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press” ; Talebones, a Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092—$20.00 for four issues; On Spec, the Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6—$22.00 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5—$24.00 Canadian for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland—$32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One” ; Absolute Magnitude, the Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Fantastic, Stories of the Imagination, Dreams of Decadence, Chronicle— all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988—all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, although you can get a group subscription to four DNA fiction magazines for $60 a year; with Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Tales of the Unanticipated, P.O. Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408—$28 for a four-issue subscription (three or four years’ worth) in the U.S.A, $31 in Canada, $34 overseas; Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn, NY 11230-6011—$15 for a four-issue subscription, checks payable to LRC Publications; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060—$16.00 for
four issues; Say … , The Fortress of Worlds, P.O. Box 1304, Lexington, KY 40588-1304—$10.00 for two issues in the U.S. and Canada; Full Unit Hookup: A Magazine of Exceptional Literature, Conical Hats Press, 622 West Cottom Avenue, New Albany, IN 47150-5011—$12.00 for a three-issue subscription; Flytrap, Tropism Press, P.O. Box 13322, Berkeley, CA 94712-4222—$16 for four issues, checks to Heather Shaw; Electric Velocipede, Spilt Milk Press, P.O. Box 663, Franklin Park, NJ 08823—http://www.electricvelocipede.com; $15 for a four-issue subscription; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 127, Belmont, Western Australia, 6984—www.andromedaspaceways.com; $35.00 for a one-year subscription; Tales of the Talisman, Hadrosaur Productions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194—$24.00 for a four-issue subscription; Space and Time, the Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction, Space and Time, 138 West 70th Street (4B), New York, NY 10023-4468—$10.00 for a one-year (two-issue) subscription; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174—$29.95 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box 22897, Brooklyn, New York 11202-2897—$15.00 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription, Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, 123-B Industry Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill, MD 21050—$27.00 for six issues; Fantasy Magazine, Wildside Press, Sean Wallace, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850—annual subscription (four issues) $20 in the U.S., $25 Canada and overseas; Weird Tales, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850—annual subscription (four issues) $24 in the U.S., H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850—annual subscription (four issues) $19.95 in the U.S.A.; Fictitious Force, Jonathan Laden, 1024 Hollywood Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20904—$16 for four issues; Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Apex Publications, 4629 Riverman Way, Lexington, KY 40515—$18.00 for a one-year, four-issue subscription.
There was no clearly dominant original anthology this year, in either SF or fantasy, although there were several pretty-good-overall anthologies that featured a few major stories apiece.
The front runners for the title of best original SF anthology of the year, although none of them could claim a clear-cut victory, were probably Constellations (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther, Down These Dark Spaceways (SFBC), edited by Mike Resnick, and Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (Crescent); edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson. Constellations contained more weak stories than Crowther’s other recent anthologies, Moon Shots and Mars Probes, and featured too many fantasy stories for my taste—but it also included some of the year’s best SF stories, by Alastair Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones, and Paul McAuley, other good SF stories by Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, and others, as well as quirky fantasy/slipstream stuff by Ian McDonald and Adam Roberts, and at least one straight mainstream story. Down These Dark Spaceways, an SF Book Club original, proved remarkably solid in spite of what seemed an unpromising premise (the hackneyed old “hard-boiled detective stories recast as SF” motif). It featured two of the year’s best novellas, by David Gerrold and Robert Reed, as well as good work by Jack
McDevitt, Resnick himself, and others. Nova Scotia; New Scottish Speculative Fiction is, as the title indicates, a “regional” anthology, with the usual quirks and contradictions of same (with some people selected as “Scottish authors” on very dubious grounds). Unlike many recent anthologies of this type, most of the stories here do have a strong regional flavor (sometimes too much so; one story is written in such a heavy dialect as to be nearly incomprehensible) but at least the anthology collects some first-rate stories, the best being by total newcomer Hannu Rajaniemi (who manages the remarkable feat of out-Strossing Charles Stross with his very first story) and relative veteran Ken MacLeod (with a clever reply to James Blish’s famous “A Case of Conscience”). Also included is a first-rate fantasy by Jane Yolen, intriguing SF/fantasy hybrids by Charles Stross and A. J. McIntosh, and good work by Jack Deighton, John Grant, Neil Williamson, and others.
Another regional anthology, Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction (Edge), edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman, may have a claim on the title of follow-up candidate for best original SF anthology—it’s uneven in quality, with a fair amount of weak work, but it does feature an excellent story by Peter Watts and Darryl Murphy, plus good stuff by Jerome Stueart, Candas Jane Dorsey, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Pat Forde, and others. Other candidates were Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures (Baen), edited by T. K. F. Weisskopf, and Gateways (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg. Both of these tended to be solid rather than exceptional, but they did feature a decent amount of good-quality work, and so were a good bet for your money. Of the two, Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures shades Gateways by a hair, in my opinion, even though most of the stories in the Weisskopf anthology don’t really fit my definition of “far future” stories. There’s enjoyable work by Paul Chafe, James P. Hogan, Mark L. Van Name, and others in Cosmic Tales, and enjoyable work by Gregory Benford, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Irene Radford, and others in Gateways, along with one of Robert Scheckley’s last stories. A step or two below these are I, Alien (DAW) edited by Mike Resnick, and Women of War (DAW), edited by Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter—entertaining but mostly minor stuff, probably worth your money in entertainment value at their relatively low mass-market prices. Yet another regional anthology, Future Washington (WSFA Press); edited by Ernest Lilley, was somewhat disappointing overall, especially since the strongest story here (by a considerable margin), Cory Doctorow’s “Human Readable,” had only the most tenuous of connections to Washington itself. The book’s also somewhat disappointing in its bleak uniformity of tone, with story after story showing future Washington destroyed, drowned, in flames, ravaged by terrorists, torn by riots, Balkanized by civil war, and so on. Apparently dredging up any sort of optimism about the nation’s future is beyond the abilities of most SF writers at the moment, although an upbeat or even utopian story or two would have made for a welcome variation of tone.
There was an Alternate Worlds anthology this year, Alternate Generals III (Baen), edited by Harry Turtledove. Although not as strong as Turtledove’s The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, from last year, and less freewheeling (First Heroes pushed the edge of the envelope for Alternate History stories in several respects), the more-conventional Alternate Generals III does feature some worthwhile stuff. The best stories here are by William Sanders and Lee Allred, but there’s also good work by Mike Resnick, Judith Tarr, A. M. Dellamonica, the late Chris
Bunch, and others. (It may be overpriced as a hardcover, though—I would have thought it would sell better as a mass-market paperback.) There were two “tribute” anthologies, honoring dead authors by encouraging other authors to produce work influenced by their style and concerns, or set in fictional worlds they’d created: The Enchanter Completed (Baen), edited by Harry Turtledove, honoring L. Sprague de Camp, and Hal’s World (Wildside), edited by Shane Tourtellotte, honoring Hal Clement. The better of the two is the Turtledove, which features light but entertaining work by Michael F. Flynn, David Drake, Judith Tarr, Turtledove himself, and what may be Poul Anderson’s last published story. It saddens me a bit, though, that almost all the authors here have picked De Camp’s fantasy worlds to play in, mostly ignoring his science fictional ones—a new tale or two of the Viagens Inter-planetarias would have been welcomed, at least by me. Most of the new fiction in Hal’s World is rather weak, although the nonfiction tributes and memoirs are often quite interesting.
The trend toward “retro-pulp” anthologies, typified by last year’s All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories and McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, continued this year with Adventure, Volume I (MonkeyBrainBooks), edited by Chris Roberson. Blurbed as “the all-genre, all-adventure pulp anthology for the new millennia!!,” this unpretentious and easygoing anthology accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. There’s nothing of award caliber here, but many of the stories—spread across several different genres: SF, fantasy, horror, historical, mystery—are among the year’s most enjoyable and fun to read, including stories by Kage Baker, Mike Resnick, John Meaney, Mark Finn, Neal Asher, Michael Kurland, Matthew Rossi, Roberson himself, and others. (Oddly, the stories here that don’t work are the ones that are the most self-consciously “retro-pulp,” crudely satirizing old pulp forms in a heavy-handed “Boy’s Own Adventure” style—fortunately, there’re only a couple of these.) A cross between a “retro-pulp” anthology and a tribute anthology is The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown. More tightly focused and specialized than Adventure, concentrated as it is on stories inspired by the work of one author, it suffers from the same weakness, in that the most unsuccessful stories descend into arch parody rather than admiring homage. Nevertheless, there is good work here by Stephen Baxter, Liz Williams, Adam Roberts, Brian Stableford, Eric Brown, Peter Crowther, and others. Jules Verne also showed up in Eric Brown’s chapbook novella The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne (PS Publishing)—a busy year for a dead guy. Another curious cross, this time between a “retro-pulp” anthology and a Young Adult anthology, and easily winning the competition for the longest title of the year (if not the decade), was Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cell-phones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out (McSweeney’s), edited by Lemony Snicket; the best work here is by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, but there is also likeable work by Nick Hornby and Jonathan Safran Foer.
There seemed to be fewer slipstream/fabulist/New Weird/whatever anthologies this year than there’d been the previous few years. Practically the only ones I saw
were all from the same publisher: Polyphony 5 (Wheatland), edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, TEL: Stories (Wheatland), edited by Jay Lake, and The Nine Muses (Wheatland), edited by Forrest Aguirre and Deborah Layne. Polyphony 5 seemed weaker overall than previous volumes of Polyphony had been, although there was still good work here by Richard Wadholm, Theodora Goss, Jeff Vander-Meer, Sally Carteret, M. K. Hobson, Alexander Lamb, Leslie What, and others. The enigmatically titled TEL: Stories seemed for the most part more self-consciously self-indulgent than successful in producing viable “experiments” in “extremes of style and vision.” Of course, as a veteran of last century’s New Wave Wars, reading this book was an exercise in déjà vu, with many of the “experiments” virtually indistinguishable from ones you could have found in any number of books or magazines back in the ‘60s, which perhaps explains the leaden feeling of ennui that gradually stole over me as I read it. (As someone said, “One thing that never changes—the avant-garde.”) Best story here, by a considerable margin, is Gregory Feeley’s “Fancy Bread,” although there’s also interesting work by Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Anil Menon, Dean Wesley Smith, and others. The Nine Muses seemed rather dry and abstract, with none of the stories coming near being as interesting as the introductory essay by Elizabeth Hand. The best thing here is probably by Ursula Pflug.
There weren’t quite as many good novellas in individual chapbook form this year as last, but there were a few. The best was probably Burn, by James Patrick Kelly, from Tachyon, but PS Publishing brought out the previously mentioned The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne, as well as The Cosmology of the Wider World, by Jeff Ford and Fishin’ with Grandma Matchie, by Steven Erikson. Temporary Culture brought out Arabian Wine by Gregory Feeley; Subterranean Press brought out Inside Job, by Connie Willis and The Life of Riley, by Alex C. Irvine. Telos brought out Approaching Omega by Eric Brown, and the Aqueduct Press brought out The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding), by L. Timmel Duchamp and Alien Bootlegger, by Rebecca Ore.
As usual, novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, was featured in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXI (Bridge); edited by Algis Budrys.
In the odd but meaningless coincidence department, there were two stories this year about ornithologists searching in unknown territory for bird species thought to be extinct (“Audubon in Atlantis,” by Harry Turtledove and “The Last Akialoa,” by Alan Dean Foster); and two stories about firefighters battling blazes set by terrorists (“Burn,” by James Patrick Kelly and “Point of Origin,” by Catharine Wells).
It was a moderately weak year for original fantasy anthologies. The best of the year, with little real competition, was undoubtedly another Book Club original, The Fair Folk (SFBC), edited by Marvin Kaye, which featured good stories by Tanith Lee, Patricia A. McKillip, Kim Newman, Jane Yolen, Midori Snyder, and others. There was also an original anthology devoted to sword and sorcery stories this year, Lords of Swords (Pitch Black Books), edited by Daniel E. Blackston. Most of the other original fantasy anthologies this year were pleasant but minor, including Renaissance Faire (DAW); edited by Andre Norton and Jean Rabe; Magic Tails (DAW), a cat anthology (what else?) edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Pack, and Maiden, Matron and Crone (DAW), edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin H.
Greenberg. There were several good YA fantasy anthologies this year, including Young Warriors (Random House), edited by Tamora Pierce and Josepha Sherman, and Fantastic Companions (Fitzhenry & Whiteside); edited by Julie E. Czerneda, and even a new Best of the Year series dedicated to YA stuff, The Year’s Best Fantasy for Teens (Tor); edited by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
I only saw one cross-genre anthology this year, Winter Moon (Luna), a romance/ fantasy cross containing stories by Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, and C. E. Murphy. There were several shared-world anthologies, in both SF and fantasy, including The Man-Kzin Wars XI (Baen), edited by Larry Niven; Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar (DAW), by Mercedes Lackey; and Bedlam’s Edge (Baen), edited by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill. Kong Unbound (Pocket); edited by Karen Haber, is made up mostly of pop-culture articles about “You Know Who,” but does contain one good story by Howard Waldrop.
I don’t follow horror closely anymore, but there, as far as I could tell, the prominent original anthologies of the year included Outsiders: Twenty-two All-New Stories From the Edge (Roc); edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and Dark Delicacies: Original Stories of the Macabre from Today’s Greatest Horror Writers (Carroll & Graf), edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb. Other original horror anthologies included All Hell Breaking Loose (DAW), edited by Martin H. Green-berg, and In the Shadow of Evil (DAW); edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers.
Finding individual pricings for all of the items from small presses mentioned in the 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 the Summation, whether from the anthologies 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. Addresses: PS Publishing, Grosvener House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, West Yorkshire, HU18 IPG, England, UK, www.pspublishing.co.uk; Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802, www.goldengryphon.com; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, 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 Press, 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 Books, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901, www.galegroup.com/fivestar; Wheatland Press, P.O. Box 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070, www.wheatlandpress.com; Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060, www.smallbeerpress.com; Crescent Books, Mercat Press Ltd., 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, Scotland EH3 7AL, www.crescentfiction.com; Wildside Press/Cosmos Books/ Borgo Press, P.O. Box 301, Holicong, PA 18928-0301,
www.wildsidepress.com; Thunder’s Mouth, 245 West 17th St., 11th Flr., New York, NY 10011-5300, www.thundersmouth.com; Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc. and Tesseract Books, Ltd., P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada, www.edgewebsite.com; Aio Publishing, P.O. Box 30788, Charleston, SC 29417; Rose Press, 22 West End Land, Pinner, Middlesex, HA5 IAQ, England, UK, therosepress@groups.msn.com; Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787, www.aqueductpress.com; WSFA Press, Washington Science Fiction Association, Inc., 10404 43rd Avenue, Beltsville, MD 20705; Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, www.phobosweb.com; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092, www.fairwoodpress.com; BenBella Books, 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 508, Dallas, TX 75206, www.benbellabooks.com; Red Deer Press/Robert J. Sawyer Books, 813 MacKimmie Library Tower, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4; Darkside Press, 13320 27th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98125, www.darksidepress.com; Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48073-1239, www.haffnerpress.com; Meshia Merlin, P.O. Box 7, Decatur, GA 30031, www.meishamerlin.com; North Atlantic Press, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701; Prime, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH, 44735, www.primebooks.net; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, www.fairwoodpress.com; MonkeyBrain Books, 11204 Crossland Drive, Austin, TX 78726, www.monkeybrainbooks.com; Altair Australia, www.altair-australia.com; Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts St., New York, NY 10017, www.sevenstories.com; Telos Publishing, www.telos.co.uk; Pitch Black Books, www.pitchblackbooks.com; University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 1111 Lincoln Mall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0630; Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, Order Dept., 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon NH 03766-1405, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress; Overlook Press, www.overlookpress.com; Temporary Culture , P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072; Centipede Press, 2565 Toller Court, Lakewood, CO 80214, www.millipedepress.com/centipede_press.html; Beccon Publishing, Roger Beccon, 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, England, UK.
2005 seemed like another pretty good year for novels; total numbers declined slightly, yes, but only after four previous years of record increases, and there were still far more novels published than any one reader is going to be able to read unless they made a full-time job of doing nothing else.
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,516 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint (but not counting “media tie-in novels,” gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, print-on-demand novels, or novels offered as downloads on the Internet) published in 2005, down 1 percent from 2,550 titles in 2004. (To put these figures in some historical perspective, for the benefit of those who will leap in screaming “SF is dying!” at the mention of a 1 percent loss, there were 2,158 books published in 2001, and only 1,927 books as recently as 2000.) Original books were up by 4 percent to 1,469 from last year’s total of 1,417, a new record. Reprint books were down by 8 percent, to 1,047 from last year’s total of 1,133, after several years of increases. The number of new SF novels was up by 2 percent
to 258 as opposed to last year’s 253. The number of new fantasy novels was up by 6 percent to 414 as opposed to last year’s 389, a new high. Horror was up by a whopping 23 percent, rising to 212 titles as opposed to last year’s 172 (in 2002, the total for horror was only 112, so I guess this market has largely recovered from the Big Horror Bust of the late ’90s).
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, as usual, I’ll limit myself to mentioning those novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2004:
Accelerando (Ace), by Charles Stross; Olympos (Eos) by Dan Simmons; Old Twentieth (Ace), by Joe Haldeman; The Well of Stars (Tor), by Robert Reed; Transcendent (Del Rey), by Stephen Baxter; Pushing Ice (Ace), by Alastair Reynolds; Fifty Degrees Below (Bantam Spectra), by Kim Stanley Robinson; Anansi Boys (Morrow), by Neil Gaiman; A Feast for Crows (Bantam Spectra), by George R. R. Martin; Buried Deep (Roc), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Learning the World (Tor), by Ken MacLeod; A Princess of Roumania (Tor), by Paul Park; Shadow of the Giant (Orbit), by Orson Scott Card; Seeker (Ace), by Jack McDevitt; Mind’s Eye (Simon & Schuster UK), by Paul McAuley; Band of Gypsys (Gollancz), by Gwyneth Jones; The House of Storms (Ace), by Ian R. MacLeod; Sunstorm (Del Rey), by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter; Lady of Mazes (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Brass Man (Tor), by Neal Asher; Destroyer (DAW), by C. J. Cherryh; The Rosetta Codex (Orbit), by Richard Paul Russo; The Seven Hills (Ace), John Maddox Roberts; Resolution (Pyr), by John Meaney; Godplayers (Thunder’s Mouth), by Damien Broderick; The Hidden Family (Tor), by Charles Stross; The Narrows (Del Rey), by Alexander C. Irvine; Orphans of Chaos (Tor), by John C. Wright; The Hallowed Hunt (Eos), by Lois McMaster Bujold; 9 Tail Fox (Gollancz), by Jon Courtenay Grimwood; The Sunborn (Warner Aspect), by Gregory Benford; To Crush the Moon (Bantam Spectra), by Wil McCarthy; The World Before (Eos), by Karen Traviss; Mammoth (Ace), by John Varley; Glass Soup (Tor), by Jonathan Carroll; Snake Agent (Night Shade), by Liz Williams; The Carpet Makers (Tor), by Andreas Eschbach; Living Next Door to the God of Love (Bantam Spectra), by Justina Robson; Mists of Everness (Tor), by John C. Wright; Double Vision (Orbit), by Tricia Sullivan; Spin (Tor), by Robert Charles Wilson; The Mysteries (Bantam), by Lisa Turtle; Woken Furies (Del Rey), by Richard K. Morgan; Fledgling (Seven Stories), by Octavia E. Butler; Od Magic (Ace), by Patricia A. McKillip; and Thud! (HarperCollins), by Terry Pratchett.
The first novel that drew the most attention this year was probably Counting Heads (Tor), by David Marusek, although if you go by the Locus convention of considering it one novel split into three parts, then HammeredlScardownlWorldwired (Bantam Spectra), by Elizabeth Bear got a lot of reviews, as did Rocket Science (Fair-wood), by Jay Lake. Other good first novels this year included Bear Daughter (Ace), by Judith Berman; The Prodigal Troll (Pyr), by Charles Coleman Finlay; Old Man’s War (Tor), by John Scalzi; Here, There and Everywhere (Pyr), by Chris Roberson; The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (Bantam Spectra), by Tim Pratt; Singer of Souls (Tor), by Adam Stemple; Melusine (Ace), by Sarah Monette; Vellum (Del Rey), by Hal Duncan; Magic or Madness (Razorbill), by Justine Larbalestier; Spotted Lily (Prime), by Anna Tambour; Fly by Night (HarperCollins), by Frances
Hardinge; Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Miffllin), by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu; and Poison Study (Luna), by Maria V. Snyder.
As usual, there were some hard-to-classify novels out on the edge of genre this year, including books by mainstream authors who were dipping their toes into genre to one degree or another, as well as associational novels by genre authors. These included: Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land (Morrow), by John Crowley; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor), by Cory Doctorow; Quantico (HarperCollinsUK), by Greg Bear; The Girl in the Glass (Harper/Dark Alley), by Jeffrey Ford; The Amphora Project (Grove), by William Kotzwinkle; Zanesville (Villard), by Kris Saknussemm; The War at Troy (HarperCollins UK), by Lindsay Clarke; and The Necessary Beggar (Tor), by Susan Palwick. Small presses also published a fair number of novels this year, including one of the year’s best, The Summer Isles (Aio Publishing), by Ian R. MacLeod, as well as Alanya to Alanya (Aqueduct), by L. Timmel Duchamp; The Engine of Recall (Robert J. Sawyer Books), by Karl Schroeder; and Lint (Thunder’s Mouth), by Steve Aylett,
My subjective opinion, based on reviews and “buzz,” is that this year was a bit weaker overall for novels than last year, but that there were still more good novels published in 2005 than any one person is ever likely to be able to find time to read. There was a good deal of fantasy and hard-to-categorize genre-mixing stuff on the lists, but also quite a lot of novels that were unmistakably center-core SF, including the Stross, the Haldeman, the Baxter, Rusch, the Robinson, the Marusek, the Bears, the Asher, the Clarke & Baxter, the Reynolds, the MacLeod, the Simmons, and a bunch of others.
Tor clearly had a good year, as did Ace. New SF line Pyr did well in its first year. And now that small presses such as Night Shade, Aqueduct, and Thunder’s Mouth are getting into publishing novels in addition to the big commercial houses, there’s more out there to choose from than ever.
The last few years have also been the best time in decades to pick up reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels, and that remained true in 2005 as well. There’s such a flood of titles coming back into print these days, from both small presses and regular trade publishers (to say nothing of Print On Demand books from places such as Wildside Press, and the availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads on Internet sources such as Fictionwise, and through reprints issued by The Science Fiction Book Club) that it’s become difficult to produce an exhaustive list of such titles. I’ll just list some of the more prominent reprints that caught my eye this year: ibooks reissued: Triplanetary, by E. E. Smith, Emphyrio, by Jack Vance, Blood Music, by Greg Bear; Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke; The Gate of Worlds, by Robert Silverberg; and Strangers, by Gardner Dozois; Eos reissued: Beauty, by Robin McKinley; Bantam Spectra reissued: A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin; Ace reissued: Podkayne of Mars, by Robert A. Heinlein and Silverlock, by John Myers Myers; Pocket reissued: Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, and Citizen of the Galaxy all by Robert A. Heinlein; BenBella Books reissued: Soothsayer, by Mike Resnick; Tor reissued: Flying in Place, by Susan Palwick and The Prestige, by Christopher Priest; Tor Teen reissued: The Borribles, by Michael de Larrabeiti; Orb reissued: When Gravity
Fails, by George Alec Effinger; Pyr reissued: Star of Gypsies, by Robert Silverberg; Vintage reissued: Dr. Futurity and The Crack in Space, by Philip K. Dick; Warner Aspect reissued: Furious Gulf and Sailing Bright Eternity, by Gregory Benford; Wesleyan University Press reissued: The Two of Them and We Who Are About To … , by Joanna Russ; HarperCollins reissued: Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank; Penguin Classics reissued; The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells; Overlook Press reissued: Non-Stop, by Brian W. Aldiss and Bug Jack Barron, by Norman Spinrad; Small Beer Press reissued: Mockingbird, by Sean Stewart; The University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books reissued: At Winter’s End, by Robert Silverberg; Gollancz reissued: two mainstream novels by Philip K. Dick, In Milton Lumky Territory and Mary and the Giant; Thunder’s Mouth Press reissued: Master of Time and Space, by Rudy Rucker; Simon & Schuster reissued: Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard; Cold Spring Press reissued: Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees.
There were a lot of omnibus collections of reissued novels this year, including some that mixed novels with short stories by the same author. They included: Cities in Flight (Overlook Press), three famous novels by James Blish; Deathworld (Ben-Bella Books), three equally famous novels plus some related material by Harry Harrison; Imperium (Baen), three novels plus some short stories in the same sequence by Keith Laumer; Viriconium (Bantam Spectra), three novels plus one collection in the “Viriconium” series, by M. John Harrison; A Logic Named Joe (Baen), three novels and three short stories by Murry Leinster; and Stark and the Star Kings (Haffner Press), five novels plus a new novelette with shared settings and characters by Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, writing either solo or in collaboration. Plus many omnibuses of novels—and many individual novels—are reissued each year by The Science Fiction Book Club, too many to individually list here.
Get ’em now, while you have the chance. If the present wave of reprints ends, they might not be available again for years.
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell did win the Hugo last year, as I predicted, but Gene Wolfe’s The Knight lost the Nebula to Lois McMasters Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, so my record as a prophet is uneven. I don’t think I’m even going to try to call the major awards this year, as I don’t see any clear favorites, or any best-sellers of the stature of Clarke’s book. The critical favorite was probably Charles Stross’s Accelerando, and if you put a gun to my head and forced me to guess, I’d predict that as the Hugo winner. I rarely have any feeling for what’s going to win the Nebula anymore, and I doubt that this year will be different.
This was another good year for short-story collections, although perhaps not quite as strong as last year. The year’s best collections included: The Cuckoo’s Boys (Golden Gryphon), by Robert Reed; The Children of the Company (Tor), by Kage Baker; Heart of Whitenesse (Subterranean), by Howard Waldrop; Greetings and Other Stories (Tachyon), by Terry Bisson; Numbers Don’t Lie (Tachyon), by Terry Bisson; Mothers and Other Monsters (Small Beer Press) by Maureen F. McHugh; Starwater Strains: New Science Fiction Stories (Tor), by Gene Wolfe; Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press), by Kelly Link; The Fiction Factory (Golden Gryphon), by Jack Dann, et al.; Little Machines (PS Publishing), by Paul McAuley; Eternity and Other
Stories (Thunder’s Mouth), by Lucius Shepard; The Gist Hutner and Other Stories (Night Shade), by Matthew Hughes; Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon), by Gregory Frost; Bloodchild and Other Stories Second Edition (Seven Stories Press), by Octavia E. Butler; The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories (Thunder’s Mouth), by Paul Di Filippo; Ordinary People (Aqueduct), by Eleanor Arnason; and George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth (Golden Gryphon) by George Alec Effinger. There were also a number of big career-spanning retrospective collections: Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp (NESFA Press) by L. Sprague de Camp; Platinum Pohl (Tor), by Frederik Pohl; Tales (Library of America), by H. P. Lovecraft; The Man Who Lost the Sea: Volume X: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic) by Theodore Sturgeon; Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Centipede), by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; A Sound of Thunder (HarperPerennial), by Ray Bradbury; Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories (Gollancz), by Leigh Brackett; The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances (Night Shade), by William Hope Hodgson; Adrift on Haunted Seas (Cold Springs), by William Hope Hodgson; The Masque of Manana (NESFA Press), by Robert Sheckley; Once upon a Time (She Said) (NESFA Press), by Jane Yolen; The Collected Clark Ashton Smith, Volume I (Night Shade Books), by Clark Ashton Smith; Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril (NESFA Press), by Judith Merril; and Eternity Lost: The Collected Stories of Clifford D. Simak (Darkside Press), by Clifford D. Simak.
Other good collections this year included: Cultural Breaks (Tachyon), by Brian W. Aldiss; The Periodic Table of Science Fiction (PS Publishing), by Michael Swanwick; The Last of the O-Forms (Fairwood Press), by James Van Pelt; Wild Things (Subterranean), by Charles Coleman Finlay; Strange Itineraries (Tachyon), by Tim Powers; Looking for Jake and Other Stories (Del Rey), by China Mieville; 20th Century Ghosts (PS Publishing), by Joe Hill; Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories (Eos), by Garth Nix; To Charles Fort, with Love (Subterranean), by Caitliln R. Kiernan; I Live with You (Tachyon), by Carol Emshwiller; The Fall of Tartarus (Gollancz), by Eric Brown; In the Palace of Repose (Prime), by Holly Phillips; Ships in the Night (Altair Australia), by Jack McDevitt; A Tour Guide to Utopia (MirrorDanse), by Lucy Sussex; Harrowing the Dragon (Ace), by Patricia A. McKillip; Wasps at the Speed of Sound (Prime), by Derryl Murphy; Catastrophies, Chaos & Convolutions (Baen), by James P. Hogan; Gunning for the Buddha (Prime), by Michael Jasper; Dogs of Truth (Tor), by Kit Reed; Singing Innocence and Experience (Wildside), by Sonya Taaffe; and Gravity Wells (Eos), by James Alan Gardner.
Reissued collections this year included: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tachyon), by James Tiptree, Jr.; The Last Defender of Camelot (ibooks), by Roger Zelazny, Expanded Universe (Baen), by Robert A. Heinlein, and R Is for Rocket (PS Publishing) and S Is for Space (PS Publishing), by Ray Bradbury.
And, as usual, “electronic collections” continue to be available for downloading on-line as well, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory.
As has been true for a long time now, the bulk of collections released this year were done by small-press publishers such as Golden Gryphon, Tachyon, NESFA,
Subterranean, Night Shade, and Small Beer. The regular trade publishers such as Tor, Baen, and Eos continue to do a few collections a year—but for the most part, if you want collections, you have to go to the small presses. Since the advent of on-line bookselling, this has become easier, and many small-presses now have Web sites that you can order from (do a Google search on the name of the press), and you can even find titles from some of the more prominent small presses on the shelves of specialty SF bookstores or the larger chain stores. But in some cases, you’ll still have to go to mail-order to get what you want. It can be worth the time and trouble, though, especially for material you can’t get anywhere else.
It was another fairly good year in the reprint anthology market; in addition to the usual “Best of the Year” and award anthologies, there were some big retrospective anthologies and some strong stand-alones giving you good value for your money. This year there were ten “Best of the Year” anthologies available, including a specialized regional anthology and one devoted to fiction for teenagers. Science fiction was covered by six anthologies: the one you are holding in your hand, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, now up to its twenty-third annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its tenth annual volume; Science Fiction: The Best of 2004 (ibooks), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber; Best Short Novels 2005 (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Johanthan Strahan; plus the SF halves of two anthologies split between SF and fantasy, The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1 (MirrorDanse), edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Tor), edited by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. There were two “Best of the Year” anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones and now up to its sixteenth edition; and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press)—this year up to its eighteenth annual collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Fantasy was covered by five anthologies: by the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the Datlow/Link & Grant anthology; by Year’s Best Fantasy 5 (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer; by Fantasy: The Best of 2004 (ibooks), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Karen Harber, and by the fantasy halves of the Congreve /Marquardt and Yolen/Hayden anthologies. The most recent Nebula Awards anthology is Nebula Awards Showcase 2005 (Roc), edited by Jack Dann.
There were a number of good retrospective SF anthologies, including Fourth Planet from the Sun: Tales of Mars from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Thunder’s Mouth), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, which featured stories by Roger Zelazny, John Varley, Leigh Brackett, Philip K. Dick, and others; The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (Del Rey), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, which featured stories by L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, Theodore Sturgeon, and others; The Tiptree Award Anthology 2 (Tachyon), edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, which featured stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Eileen Gunn, Leslie What, Gwyneth Jones, L. Timmel Duchamp, and others; and The World Turned Upside Down (Baen), edited by David Drake, Jim Baen, and Eric
Flint, which featured stories by Fritz Leiber, John W. Campbell, Jr., Leigh Brackett, Arthur C. Clarke, and others. Noted without comment is a similar big retrospective anthology, The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction (St. Martin’s), edited by Gardner Dozois.
Also noted without comment are: Galileo’s Children (Pyr), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Beyond Singularity (Ace) and Robots (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
Just about the only reprint fantasy anthologies I saw were both big solid collections of classic fantasy stories: The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley—which was a good value if you like comic fantasy, featuring reprint stories by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Esther M. Friesner, Paul Di Filippo, and others (and a few originals, including stories by Tom Holt and Adam Roberts); and Seekers of Dreams: Masterpieces of Fantasy (Cold Springs Press), edited by Douglas A. Anderson, another mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology. The only reprint horror anthology I saw was H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales (Cold Springs Press), edited by Douglas A. Anderson, but at least it was an intriguing idea for an anthology, and featured some rarely-seen material.
It seemed like 2005 was a decent if not exceptional year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field. Reference books included: Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Scarecrow Press), by Brian Slableford, a companion volume to last year’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature; The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders (Greenwood), edited by Gary Westfahl; Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood), edited by S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemiqnowicz Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults: Fifth Edition (Libraries Unlimited), by Ruth Nadelman Lynn; Horror: Another 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman; and Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide (Greenwood), edited by Darrell B. Lockhart.
Sometimes the line between “reference books” and “critical studies” is a hard one to draw, and some may argue that some of those above belong in one category rather than the other. Somewhat arbitrarily I’m going to categorize the books that follow as critical studies, although many of them can be used as reference books as well: Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, 5th Edition (Libraries Unlimited), by Neil Barron; Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazine from 1950 to 1970 (Liverpool), by Mike Ashley; Science Fiction (Polilty), by Roger Luckhurst; The Science in Science Fiction (BenBella Books), by Robert Bly; Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso) by Frederic Jameson; and Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Scarecrow Press), edited by James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria.
There were critical studies of specific authors, including Ursula K. Le Guin: Beyond Genre (Routledge), by Mike Cadden, Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition (Routledge), by Farah Mendlesohn, Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison (Science Fiction Foundation), edited by Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, Christopher Priest: The Interaction
(Science Fiction Foundation), edited by Andrew M. Butler; and an update of A Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Bison Books), by Richard A. Lupoff. Books of essays by specific authors, included: A Reverie for Mister Ray (PS Publishing), by Michael Bishop; Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars (HarperCollins), by Ray Bradbury; The SEX Column and Other Misprints (Cosmos), by David Langford; The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul (Thunder’s Mouth), by Rudy Rucker; Soundings: Reviews 1992—1996 (Beccon), by Gary K. Wolfe; On SF (University of Michigan Press), by Thomas M. Disch; and The Disappointment Artist and Other Essays (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem. There were biographies of authors, including Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams (Ballantine), by Nick Webb and The Bradbury Chronicles: the Life of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow), by Sam Weller; an autobiography, the updated version of Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (BenBella Books), by Jack Williamson, and a book-length autobiographical sketch of one author’s nervous breakdown, Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature (Raincoast Books), by Jan Lars Jensen. There were how-to-write books, including Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop (Small Beer Pres), by Kate Wilhelm; Writing the Other (Aqueduct), by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward; and About Writing (Wesleyan University Press), by Samuel R. Delany. Books of interviews with authors included, Conversations with Isaac Asimov (University Press of Mississippi), by Carl Howard Freedman; J. G. Ballard: Conversations (ReSearch), edited by V. Vale; and Voices of Vision (Bison Books), by Jayme Lynn Blaschke; and even a book of quotations drawn from SF stories, Science Fiction Quotations (Yale), edited by Gary Westfahl.
For media fans, there was a book of acerbic but often hilarious movie reviews, Weapons of Mass Seduction (Wheatland), by Lucius Shepard; an anthology of critical essays about a cancelled TV show, Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepards, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly (BenBella Books), edited by Jane Espenson; and two anthologies of critical essays about “You-Know-Who,” the big hairy fella, Kong Unbound: The Cultural Impact, Pop Myths, and Scientific Plausibility of a Cinematic Legend (Pocket), edited by Karen Haber, and King Kong Is Back!: An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape! (BenBella Books), edited by David Brin and Leah Wilson (if you’re only going to get one Kong book this year, make it the Haber, which not only has the more interesting and entertaining essays of the two, but throws in a good story by Howard Waldrop as well). There was also an art book of paintings of King Kong by Joe DeVito; see below for more information.
It seemed like a fairly weak year in the art book field. The best bet for your money was probably the latest edition in a Best of the Year—like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 12: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. There were also a number of retrospective overviews of the work of individual artists, including: Imago (Heavy Metal), by Jim Burns; Daydreaming: The Art of Slawek Wojtowicz (xlibris), by Slawek Wojtowicz; Through Prehensile Eyes: Seeing the Art of Robert Williams (Last Gasp), by Robert Williams; Welcome to My Worlds: The Art of Rob Alexander (Paper Tiger), by Rob Alexander; Revelations: The Art of Max Bertolini (Paper Tiger), by Max Bertolini; Arts Unknown: The Life and Art of Lee Brown Cove (Nonstop), compiled
by Luis Ortiz; and Visions of Heaven and Hell (Rizzoli), a collection of drawings by well-known horror writer Clive Barker, who also has a considerable reputation as a graphic artist.
More specific projects include Worlds: A Mission of Discovery (Design Studio Press), by Alec Gillis, which takes us mock-documentary style through a landing on an alien planet; Kong: King of Skull Island (DH Press), by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland, with John Michlig, which takes us on a visual tour around the famous monster’s home; and The Stardragons (Paper Tiger), by Bob Eggleton and John Grant, which takes us into Deep Space. George R. R. Martin fans will want The Art of George R. R. Martin’s a Song of Ice and Fire (Fantasy Flight Games), edited by Brian Wood.
Turning to more general genre-related nonfiction books of interest, there were several futurology books this year that took a shot at forecasting the unexpected twists and turns the next few decades may take, including Shaping Things (MIT Press), by Bruce Sterling, a “manifesto for the future of design” and an exploration of how the design of everyday objects will transform society; Nano Future: What’s Next for Nanotechnology (Prometheus Books), by J. Storrs Hall, and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), by Ray Kurzweil. There’s also an update of Wil McCarthy’s similar book from 2003, Hacking Matter, available for download at McCarthy’s site, www.wilmccarthy.com. A cautionary note, warning that our society may already be in the midst of making the same kind of mistakes that have destroyed advanced civilizations throughout history is struck by Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking), by Jared Diamond. These books vary on how radical a future they predict for the coming decades—Sterling’s is the most plausible-sounding, Kurzweil’s is wild-eyed and extreme enough that it’s tempting to picture him walking through Times Square wearing a sign-board that reads “The Singularity Is Near!” On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that the most outrageous and far-out of the social satires of ’50s writers like Pohl and Kornbluth now look pretty much like everyday mundane reality here in the ’oughts—so who knows?
It’s harder to come up with a genre-related justification for mentioning Life in the Undergrowth (BBC Books), by David Attenborough, except that, like the best science fiction, it gives us a fascinating look at worlds we’d otherwise never see, even if those worlds are in the grass beneath our feet rather than in outer space—the life-ways, survival tactics, and mating rituals of the creatures who inhabit that grass-roots world, in fact, are far stranger, more surprising, and more intricate than those attributed to most of SF’s aliens. It’s probably even harder to come up with a rationalization for mentioning Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Overlook Duckworth), by Adrienne Mayor, except that many SF/fantasy readers are also interested in the ancient world, or at least in the reflection of it used in many fantasy novels. This book does an excellent job of demonstrating that the ancient world was much more complex and contradictory than it’s usually portrayed as being by writers of pseudo-medieval fantasy. No reason at all to mention a paperback reprint of The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City (Anchor Books) and Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury), both by Robert
Sullivan, except for that one above about showing us worlds that we’d otherwise never see and, in fact, wouldn’t even know were there—but it’s my book, and I’m going to mention them anyway.
It was a busy year for genre films—there were a lot of them made, and a number of them made a lot of money. (According to the Box Office Mojo site, of the ten movies that grossed the most money worldwide in 2005, eight were genre films; out of the top twenty moneymaking films, thirteen were genre movies.) Some of them were even worth watching.
The big moneymaker of the year, and certainly the top-grossing film for science fiction, was Star Wars: Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith, which managed to be more action-packed and straightforward than most of the current run of Star Wars films, although since it was still loaded with the plot logic holes, stiff acting, and the bad dialog characteristic of this series of late, it’s hard to call it an artistic success—“better than the last two movies” is about the best you could get even most Star Wars fans to say. (The classical arc of the rise and fall of Darth Vader actually has a lot of potential mythological resonance, as Lucas knows perfectly well, and if they’d gotten a good actor to play Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, rather than the almost comically wooden Hayden Christensen, had given him some better psychological motivation, and had written some good dialog for him, his story might actually have been quite powerful; as it was, though, most of that potential was lost.) This theoretically brings the Star Wars storyline to a close, since even Lucas is now admitting that he’s probably never going to actually make the other three movies originally projected back in 1976. There’s no way this cash cow is not going to continue to be milked, though, and there’s already talk about forthcoming Star Wars—related television series (and, of course, Star Wars books and computer games will continue to appear, as is also true with Star Trek, even after the death of that franchise on both the big or the little screen).
The year’s other big moneymaker in science fiction was Steven Spielberg’s remake of The War of the Worlds. The movie was fast-paced and suspenseful, and, being a Spielberg movie (Spielberg is always good at the visuals), there are some wonderful images in it—it is almost worth watching the whole movie just for the image of the flaming train racing through the countryside. That being said, I regretted the fact that Spielberg somehow managed to skew the movie into being yet another Spielberg “small child in jeopardy (Dakota Fanning sure does scream a lot in this film)/self-centered-immature-father-in-a-dysfunctional-family-learns-to-value-his-children-over- himself” movie rather than really focusing on the disaster that’s overcoming humanity at large. This was a frustrating movie for me, since in some ways it’s more faithful to H.G. Wells’s novel than the previous Hollywood version was—and yet at the same time gave me the feeling that in spite of all that faithfulness to the text, Spielberg had somehow ended up missing the point of the novel altogether. It made bucketloads of money, though, even if not quite as much as Revenge of the Sith.
Below this point, most of the year’s other SF films were failures to one degree or another, at least at the box office. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was slick and flashy, with impressive special effects, but somehow forgot to be funny. The best version
of this by far remains the original BBC radio version, which is even preferable to Douglas Adams’s original book in some ways. The Island had a “surprise” twist that most experienced genre fans figured out from the coming attractions, and little else to recommend it—even a lot of car chases and explosions couldn’t keep this one afloat. That was true of several movies this year, including Aeon Flux; the “killer robot airplane runs amok” movie Stealth (which had lots of explosions in it) ; and even Doom, a movie “adapted” from a popular video game that was practically nothing but guys shooting things with very big guns—perhaps an indication that the “all you need are car chases, gun battles, and big explosions” school of moviemaking is finally losing its charm. In spite of less violent and more imaginative special effects, the “family” movie Zathura failed at the box office, too, as did a better movie, by far the best of this bunch, and one of the best SF movies of the year, Serenity.
Based on Joss Whedon’s failed TV series “Firefly,” which also couldn’t manage to find an audience, Serenity is actually a pretty good piece of entertainment—fast-paced, action-packed, and shot through with Whedon’s trademark wry wit. Why didn’t it work at the box office, then? Perhaps the cross of Western and space movie was just too jarring for most people, too odd a taste. Perhaps, in spite of many ingenious SF touches (such as having the characters occasionally speaking Chinese to each other), it was too blatantly a cowboy show “translated” into SF, recycling plots and situations familiar from a thousand old Westerns. Or perhaps it was the fact that the underlying assumptions here just don’t make a lot of sense (you use a spaceship to transport seven or eight cows across space to another planet, as they do in one of the Firefly episodes, and, in spite of the vast amounts of energy this would take, this is somehow a financially worthwhile proposition?), that put people off—although this is hardly the first genre show to be based on underlying assumptions that don’t really bear scrutiny. Whatever the reason, this is the second time that FireflylSerenity has failed to find an audience, and may be the last shot it gets—although Whedon is reportedly hoping that the sales of the movie on DVD will be good enough to generate interest in another television series. (This seems dubious to me—but who knows?)
Most of the year’s other top-selling films were fantasy movies—although that category wasn’t without its failures, either. The top-grossing fantasy movie was also one of the best, at least among the live-action films: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I myself didn’t think this was quite as stylishly directed as last year’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, still the best of the series in my opinion, but if the picaresque plot occasionally bogged down, as it did (I thought that three magical contests were at least one too many, and possibly two too many), it was a pretty decent job of handling the material all in all, and there probably were few who left the theater feeling that they didn’t get their money’s worth of entertainment. King Kong was also pretty successful, both critically and at the box office, though not quite at the Lord of the Rings—level of ticket sales they apparently were hoping for, perhaps because word of mouth rapidly spread that it needed editing. Almost everybody, critics and ordinary viewers alike, agreed that it needed cutting, although opinion varied whether it needed twenty minutes, a half an hour, or even a full hour’s worth of footage chopped out. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was also moderately successful, although perhaps not as big a smash as the producers had hoped. It struck me as Lord of the Rings—lite myself, but then, I never much liked the
original book itself, which had too much undisguised Christian propaganda for my taste. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also did moderately well in ticket sales, but I disliked that even more; the old Gene Wilder version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was hardly my favorite movie either, but Tim Burton’s Charlie struck me as inferior to it in almost every respect (even the songs were worse!), and especially in the portrayal of Willy Wonka—I usually like Johnny Depp, but the broad imitation of Michael Jackson he does throughout here as Willy Wonka made my skin crawl and added a pederastic subtext that the movie really didn’t need.
Below this point, we’re back in bomb-out territory again, as far as live-action fantasy movies are concerned. The movie version of the old TV series Bewitched was a box-office disaster, and perhaps the most critically savaged movie of the year. (Its competition for that title might be another old TV series made into a movie, The Honeymooners, but it’s out of our purview here, not being a fantasy, just bad.) The Brothers Grimm was also a box-office bomb, territory director Terry Gilliam has visited before, but even the most fanatical Terry Gilliam fans, who usually sing his praises no matter how few tickets were sold, can’t seem to find a lot positive to say about this one. Son of the Mask, an ill-advised sequel to The Mask in which the family dog is gifted with the powers of a god, also (dare I say it? Oh, what the hell) dogged-out.
Animated fantasy movies also had their ups and downs. The box-office champ undoubtedly was Madagascar, the most successful critically were Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (which I liked a lot better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). As is usual with films by Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, Howl’s Moving Castle seemed to slip through town without anybody taking much notice of it, but although it’s not quite as good as his masterpiece Spirited Away, it is stuffed with wonderful and magical things, like all Miyazaki films, and is well worth making the effort to track down. Chicken Little did okay, although not as well as some recent Pixar movies have done, which is probably what they were shooting for. Robots and Hoodwinked did less well.
In the field of comic-book movies, Batman Begins was a commercial and critical success, ranking up there with Spider-Man and The X-Men; and The Fantastic Four was a jaw-dropping disaster, ranking up there with, unfortunately, The Hulk—it’ll probably end up making a decent amount of money, especially with overseas and DVD sales thrown in, but it was an extremely bad movie regardless, a disappointment for all those comics fans who had a right to expect better for one of the comics world’s most famous and beloved franchises. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, sort of Spy Kids—lite, tanked, as did Sky High, sort of The Incredibles—lite.
Kingdom of Heaven was another expensive box-office disappointment in the sword and sandal movie field. They haven’t had a big success in this area since Gladiator, and you have to wonder how many more shots they’re going to get. Kingdom of Heaven actually wasn’t a bad movie, certainly better than Alexander the Great and Troy, even though it tromped down a bit hard on the “Author’s Message” pedal, and should have starred costar Liam Neeson instead of the wispy Orlando Bloom (as a blacksmith, yet! Have you ever seen a blacksmith? They have arms wider around than Orlando’s entire body!), who lacked the gravitas for the part.
Horror movies? Yes, there were horror movies—Constantine. The Fog, Underworld:
Evolution House of Wax—but I didn’t see any of them. For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that Constantine was a commercial failure (Whoa, dude!), and apparently Underworld: Evolution is not.
Coming up next year: little I’m looking forward to. There’ll be a new X-Men movie, and an attempt to establish some other comic-book franchises.
The winds of change seem to be blowing coldly through the movie industry, as DVD sales become more important than first-run box office as overall ticket sales for the industry continue to fall year after year as ticket prices continue to rise. Oddly, no Hollywood genius has figured this equation out yet, even though with the turnover between a film in first-run release and that same movie being available for sale or rental on DVD now down to three months or less, and the costs of taking a family of five to a movie creeping inexorably toward sixty bucks. Few families bother to go to the movies anymore unless it’s for a Big Screen Spectacular like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that won’t look as good on the home screen. “The hell with it, we’ll wait for the DVD to come out” is something heard more and often these days for all but the most big ticket of events. With movies now readily available on your iPod and even your cell phone, to say nothing of DVDs of those movies delivered right into your house via Netflix and pay-on-demand cable and satellite systems, the urge just to stay at home and not bother to go out, even to a video-rental store, let alone to a movie theater, must grow more widespread all the time. Some producers are experimenting with releasing movies to theaters and to DVD at the same time, a move that some say will doom the movie industry and some say will save it, reaching the eighty percent of the potential audience who never go to the theater at all. Although probably some art-house and specialty theaters will survive, and big-screen IMAX theaters are doing increasingly well with Big Ticket releases like Harry Potter movies, it may be that the days of the cineplex are numbered.
Turning to SF and fantasy television shows, most of this year was just the fallout from last year’s sudden explosion of unexpected mega-hit genre shows, from Lost and Desperate Housewives (although this is really a genre show only by courtesy, in spite of the conceit that it’s being narrated by a ghost) to Medium, which in turn spawned a trio of “alien invasion” SF shows—Surface, Invasion, and Threshold—and a few more “I see and/or fight dead people” shows such as The Ghost Whisperer, The Night Stalker, and Supernatural. This year was spent shaking down from all that, with shows enjoying one degree or another of success, and few new contenders being added to the race.
The once-potent ratings blockbuster Joan of Arcadia died after network suits fixed it to death. The Night Stalker went through town as fast as green corn through the hired man. Andromeda breathed its last, and I believe that The Dead Zone is gone as well. The Ghost Whisperer and Supernatural seem to have established themselves as fairly solid series. Of the alien-invasion trio, Threshold has died, but Invasion and Surface seem to be doing okay enough to stay on the air, for the moment, anyway (although the ultimate fate of Surface may still be in doubt), although neither is a ratings monster. Invasion seems to be the one that’s the most popular with the critics, and it may be getting some advantage from holdover audiences from Lost, which airs just before it. Veteran shows Smallville and Charmed, which looked likely to be canceled all last year, got picked up for new seasons after all, and, as
both seem to be doing better this year, will probably be picked up for another new season (moving Smallville to another night and away from head-to-head competition with Lost seems to have helped).
Lost and Desperate Housewives both continue to be very popular and successful shows, with Lost winning the Golden Globe for Best Drama and Desperate Housewives winning the Golden Globe for Best Comedy. Some critics are muttering about a “sophomore slump” for Desperate Housewives, and some Lost fans seem to find the solutions to enigmas such as what’s in the Hatch and what the monster looks like less evocative than the mysteries themselves had been—a problem that this series is always going to have, I fear.
Now that Star Trek: Enterprise, Firefly, Farscape, Babylon 5, and Andromeda have sunk, vanishing into hyperspace with nary a ripple left behind, the special-effects-heavy hardcore SF show is left in the hands of the “Stargate” franchise—Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis—and in those of popular new contender Battlestar Galactica. All seem to be doing well. It was hard to even get me to watch Battlestar Galactica, since I loathed the old Lorne Green series so much, but I must admit that they’ve done a good job with the remake, which is much darker and more concerned with psychological motivations and realpolitik than the ham-handed Battlestar Galactica of old. It’s very reminiscent in tone of Babylon Five in fact, and seeming to do nearly as well with the critics. Of course, although shows like Babylon Five and Farscape were successes d’estime, they never succeeded in pulling in large-enough audiences to keep them on the air, and it’ll be interesting to see if Battlestar Galactica can pull that off where they could not.
In spite of the huge success of Lost, and the lesser but not entirely trivial success of Invasion, Surface, Battlestar Galactica, and the Stargate shows, few new science fiction shows seem to be on the drawing boards for next season. Guess it’s a lot cheaper to produce MediumlGhost Whisperer—type shows instead. Or even cheaper, the ever-reliable reality shows. (Feh.)
The 63rd World Science Fiction Convention, Interaction, was held in Glasgow, Scotland, from August 4—8, 2005, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,321. The 2005 Hugo Awards, presented at Interaction, were: Best Novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke; Best Novella, “The Concrete Jungle,” by Charles Stross; Best Novelette, “The Faery Handbag,” by Kelly Link; Best Short Story, “Travels with My Cats,” by Mike Resnick; Best Related Book, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn; Best Professional Editor, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Jim Burns; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Battlestar Galactica, “33”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form) The Incredibles; Best Semiprozine, Ansible, edited by David Langford; Best Fanzine, Plokta; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Sue Mason; Best Web site, SCI FICTION; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Elizabeth Bear.
The 2004 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Bismark Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, on April 30, 2005, were: Best Novel, Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold; Best Novella, “The Green Leopard Plague,” by Walter Jon
Williams; Best Novelette, “Basement Magic,” by Ellen Klages; Best Short Story, “Coming to Terms,” by Eileen Gunn; Best Script, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson; plus the Grand Master Award to Anne McCaffrey.
The 2005 World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Fourteenth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin, on November 6, 2005, were: Best Novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke; Best Novella, “The Growlimb,” by Michael Shea; Best Short Fiction, “Singing My Sister Down,” by Margo Lanagan; Best Collection, Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan; Best Anthology, Acquainted with the Night, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas (tie); Best Artist, John Picacio; Special Award (Professional), to S.T. Joshi, for scholarship; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Robert Morgan, for Sarob Press, plus Life Achievement Awards to Tom Doherty and Carol Emshwiller.
The 2005 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Hilton Burbank Hotel in Burbank, California, on June 25, 2005, were: Best Novel, In the Night Room, by Peter Straub; Best First Novel, Covenant, by John Everson and Stained, by Lee Thomas (tie); Best Long Fiction, The Turtle Boy, by Kealan-Patrick Burke; Best Short Fiction, “Nimitseahpah,” by Nancy Etchemendy; Best Collection, Fearful Symmetries, by Thomas F. Monteleone; Best Anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Dat low, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant; Nonfiction, Hellnotes, edited by Judi Rohrig; Best Illustrated Narrative, Heaven’s Devils, by Jai Nitz; Best Screenplay, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth and Shaun of the Dead, by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (tie); Best Work for Younger Readers, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War, by Clive Barker and Oddest Yet, by Steve Burt (tie); Best Poetry Collection, The Women at the Funeral, by Corinne De Winter; Best Alternative Forms, The Devil’s Wine, by Tom Piccirilli; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Michael Moorcock.
The 2004 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Market Forces, by Richard Morgan.
The 2004 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “Sergeant Chip,” by Bradley Denton.
The 2004 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Life, by Gwyneth Jones.
The 2004 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Iron Council, by China Mieville.
The 2004 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman and Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo (tie).
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, awarded at Readercon, went to Leigh Brackett.
Dead in 2005 or early 2006 were: ROBERT SHECKLEY, 77, one of SF’s foremost humorists and satirists, author of The Status Civilization, Journey Beyond Tomorrow, and Mindswap, as well as hundreds of short stories, including the famous “The Seventh Victim, which was filmed as The Tenth Victim; CHARLES L. HARNESS, 90, veteran author whose most famous stories were probably “The Rose” and “The New
Reality,” author as well of many other novels and stories, including The Ring of Ritornel and The Catalyst; KENNETH BULMER, 84, veteran British author, author of dozens of novels, perhaps best known for the “Dray Prescott” series written as “Alan Burt Akers”; MICHAEL G. CONEY, 73, SF writer, author of Mirror Image, The Hero of Downways, Brontemek, and many others; J. N. WILLIAMSON, horror writer and editor of the long-running horror anthology series Masques, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America; CHRIS BUNCH, 62, SF writer, author of Shadow Warrior, Star Risk, Last Legion, and others; WARREN NOR-WOOD , 59, SF writer, author of The Planet of Flowers and The Windhover Tapes, among others; JOSEF NESVADBA, 79, leading Czech SF writer, CHRISTIAN ANTON MAYER, 83, German SF writer who wrote as “Carl Amery”; DENIS LINDBOHM, 78, Swedish author; VLADIMIR VOLKOFF, 72, French SF writer; DAN TSALKA, 69, Israeli SF writer; PIERRE BURTON, 84, Canadian author; WILLO DAVIS ROBERTS, 79, Young Adult and fantasy writer; ELIZABETH CHATER, 94, romance writer and occasional SF author; BRUCE B. CASSIDAY, 84, veteran author and editor; MAGDALENA MOUJAN OTANO, 79, Argentine author; JEFF SLATEN, 49, SF writer; EVAN HUNTER, 78, who wrote under both that name and as “Ed McBain”—under which name he wrote the “87th Precinct” novels—was one of the mainstays of the mystery genre, and who also wrote a few SF novels such as Tomorrow’s World and Rocket to Luna; JOHN FOWLES, 79, well-known author of novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus, who also wrote books such as A Maggot, which incorporated some genre elements; SAUL BELLOW, 89, prominent author and Nobel laureate whose Mr. Sammler’s Planet had mild genre elements; BYRON PREISS, 52, prominent book packager and editor whose companies included Byron Preiss Visual Publications and ibooks; HOWARD DEVORE, fan and fannish scholar, best known for producing, with Donald Franson, the reference book A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards; DANIEL RICHE, 56, French editor and anthologist; JOHN BROSNAN, 58, author, critic, and fan; SAMUEL H. POST, 81, SF editor and father of SF writer Jonathan Vos Post; KEITH PARKINSON, 47, well-known fantasy artist, winner of two Cheslea Awards; BERNIE ZUBER, 72, artist and fan; GERALD POLLINGER, 79, prominent literary agent; DAN HOOKER, 54, literary agent; SCOTT WINNETT, 42, former Locus editorial assistant and reviewer; BILL BOWERS, 62, well-known Cincinnati-area fan and fanzine editor; ROBERT WISE, 86, famous movie director, best known to the genre as director of such movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain; JAMES DOOHAN, 85, actor, best known for his role as Scotty on the original Star Trek TV show, although he also wrote a few genre-related novels; BOB DENVER, 70, actor, best known for his role as Gilligan on the semi-fantasy TV show (it certainly had nothing to do with reality) Gilligan’s Island, although I remember him better as Maynard G. Krebbs from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; UFO researcher PHILIP J. KLASS, 86 (not to be confused with the Phil Klass who writes as William Tenn); NOREEN SHAW, widow of SF editor Larry Shaw and coeditor with him of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Axe; TAMMY VANCE, 43, daughter-in-law of SF writer Jack Vance; HAROLD WOOSTER, 86, father of SF critic Martin Morse Wooster; ERMYN HECK, mother of SF critic and novelist Peter Heck; and JUDITH LOUISE KOHN, 63, sister of SF writer Susan Casper.