Last year I said that 1999 was one of the legendary years of the science fiction future, and we have lived through it. So of course was 2000, the turning point, the end of a thousand-year period of growth and change and a significant moment in the Christian Era (AD). Well, the world didn’t end, nor did the Second Coming come, nor the aliens in whatever form. Nor was there a socialist civilization in Boston, Massachusetts, as envisioned by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward in the 1880s. And now that that millennium is gone, we live in the Year One CE, and all the SF written about the ’80s and ’90s is just fiction—now robbed of most of its significant prophetic power—and must stand or fall as fiction, on the merits of its execution and/or historical importance. Even Arthur C. Clarke, whose special year is 2001, will have to wait a while longer for commercial travel to the Moon. It is a sobering thought to consider that fifty years ago 2000 looked like the relatively distant future, a time of wonders and radical difference. Now the year 2000 looks somewhat like the 1950s, plus computers and minus the Cold War. Most of the same buildings are standing in most major cities.
Some things don’t change fast enough, other changes leave us breathless or shocked. Fifty years is not so long, less than the career of Jack Williamson for instance, who published in 1929 and this year too, in the course of seven decades of writing SF—and barring unforeseen circumstances, Williamson will be in his eighth decade of writing when you read this. I leave you again with the thought that we should set our SF stories farther ahead in time, lest we become outdated fantasy too soon.
Looking backward from December 2000, I see a past year of tremendous growth for the SF field, and many reasons for optimism in the year ahead. Australia is still full of energy and big science-fictional plans a year or two after the 1999 Melbourne world science fiction convention, and Australian writers are continuing to break out worldwide, at least in the English language. Canadian SF is still thriving, and Canada is still introducing new world-class SF and fantasy writers to the world stage each year. The UK may not perhaps be the UK much longer, since Scotland is getting its own Parliament, but either way England, Ireland, and Scotland are a major force in SF, and Interzone has grown into one of the three or four leading SF magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF are its peers) in the world. The best new SF magazine of the year is Spectrum SF, from Scotland. There are stirrings of energy in France and in French SF, new awards and conferences there, and German SF has recently produced at least one new writer on the world stage, Andreas Eschbach. And the world SF convention is now becoming more global and is likely to be held in Scotland, Australia, Japan, and perhaps elsewhere in the world in the next decade.
Worldwide, the small press is a force of growing strength and importance in the field, in part due to the availability of computers within reach of the average fannish budget and in part due to the new economies of instant print, now prevalent in the USA and soon to reach everywhere. Hardly a day goes by without a new instant print review copy of a small press trade paperback in the NYRSF* mailbox. Many of them are in fact self-published works that do not meet professional standards of writing, it is true, but a few of them are carefully written, well-edited gems. And the books from the more established small presses, from Golden Gryphon, Ministry of Whimsey, Borderlands, and others, continue to impress.
The field lost two fine magazines this year, Amazing and SF Age, but a perceptible increase in the number and quality of small press magazines helped to cushion the loss, as did the announcement of several high-paying online short fiction markets. Interestingly, none of the highest paying online publishers intend to actually make money selling the fiction, but are supporting it as a promotional expense! I wonder how long that will last. Certainly not many months in the future if the world stock markets continue to lose trillions of dollars (I write at a particularly low point in recent economic times). Still, we are better off right now than in the not-too-distant past, and are all grateful that SF is of promotional value in 2001. I hope to find some excellent science fiction online this year to reprint next year in this series.
As to the quality of the year’s fiction, 2000 was a particularly fine year, with grand old names and hot new talents competing for attention. It was a good year to be reading the magazines, both pro and semi-professional. It was a strong year for novellas, with fifteen or twenty of them in consideration for the limited space allowed in this book by length constraints; you’ll have to go to the competing Year’s Best in fat trade paperback to sample more novellas. And there were a hundred shorter stories in consideration, from which this rich selection was chosen. So I repeat, for readers new to this series, my usual disclaimer: this selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2000. I could perhaps have filled two or three more volumes this size and then claimed to have nearly all of the best—though not all the best novellas. I believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it all in one even very large book, also implies presenting some substantial variety of excellence, and I left some writers out in order to include others in this limited space.
My general principle for selection: this book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is clearly that and not something else. I personally have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. This year Kathryn Cramer and I launch the Year’s Best Fantasy in paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction too. But here, I chose science fiction. It is the intention of this Year’s Best series to focus on science fiction, and to provide readers who are looking especially for science fiction an annual home base.
Which is not to say that I chose one kind of science fiction—I try to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. This is a book about what’s going on now in SF. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2000. I hope that this book and its companions are essential reading in SF.
—David G. Hartwell
Pleasantville, NY
*The New York Review of Science Fiction (www.NYRSF.com or c/o Dragon Press, PO Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570) is a monthly 24 page journal of essays and reviews on SF and fantasy.