Well, the dreaded Y2K-crisis deadline is past, and so is the changing of the millennium (except for the calendar purists, who still shoulder the proud and lonely burden of insisting it’s not the twenty-first century yet, when everybody else on earth thinks that it is), and, so far, the world has not come to an end, the angel has not descended with the seventh seal, and civilization has not collapsed – more to the point for this particular book, the publishing industry has not collapsed either, and science fiction has stubbornly refused to die, although strangely hopeful notices of its imminent demise have been put forth every year for more than a decade now.
(Of course, just because these Symbolically Significant Dates have passed, doesn’t mean that the human race couldn’t still be destroyed by a dinosaur-killer asteroid tomorrow, or that civilization, the economy, and/or publishing couldn’t still collapse at any time – it wouldn’t do to become sanguine. Nevertheless, that’s probably not the way to bet it.)
Even as you read these words, someone, somewhere, is telling his friends with gloomy relish that science fiction is dying, is on its deathbed, gurgling its last, is sure to blink out like a guttering candle any second now. So far, though, not only has this not happened, but, all things considered and the proper disclaimers being made, science fiction as a genre actually looks rather healthy, here on the brink of a new century and a new millennium.
The next line of defense is to say, well, the science fiction genre may be making a lot of money, but all the quality has been leached out of it, and nothing gets published anymore except for crap and media tie-in books, so that even though the genre may not be about to physically die, its soul and mind and heart are dead, or dying. Except that this isn’t true either. Even discounting all of the tieins and media and gaming-associated books, there are considerably more science fiction novels of quality being published now than were being published in 1975 (including a few that would not have been allowed to be published back then), possibly more than were being published even ten years ago, and quite probably more than any one reader is going to be able to read in the course of one year, unless he makes a full-time job of it. (And yes, the majority of the stuff on the shelves – although probably not as much as the famous 90 percent – may be crap, but then, the majority of the stuff on the shelves has always been crap, no matter what decade you’re talking about. Not even getting into the issue that one person’s crap is another person’s valued entertainment – some people like media tie-in novels!) Although the widely held belief is that most SF writers can’t sell their books anymore, the fact is that more writers, by a large margin, are making far more money from writing SF than was the case in 1975, and that science fiction books
(not just media novels) are selling far better than anyone in 1975 ever dreamed that a science fiction book could sell. Although the widely held belief is that new writers can’t break into the genre anymore, the fact is that new writers are still coming into the field in large numbers, as many or more than in 1975, and although some of them eventually will find their careers stalled by poor sales, at least as many will go on to grow audiences and become rising new stars. Thanks to (close your eyes! I’m about to commit heresy!) the big bookstore chains, it’s considerably easier to find science fiction books (or books of any sort, for that matter) than it used to be, even in parts of the country where there once weren’t any bookstores at all, for all intents and purposes; back when I was a teenager, in the early ’60s, most bookstores didn’t even carry science fiction books, let alone have a science fiction section … and the closest bookstore to my small New England town was more than an hour away by train. In fact, in spite of related death-of-literacy/nobody-reads-anymore laments, more books were sold to more people in 1999 than at any time in history. And the Internet is making it easier to find books, both new and used, even in those places not reached by the chain stores (using an on-line used-book-finder service, I’ve recently tracked down several books that I’d been looking for unsuccessfully for years in more traditional used-book stores).
The next lament is usually that the genre has no future because kids aren’t reading for pleasure anymore, having been seduced away by computer games and other forms of media entertainment, or at least that they’re not interested in reading fiction with fantastic elements anymore – but the immense success of the Harry Potter books, staggering even by regular mainstream standards, should take care of that one (for those of you who didn’t already draw the same lesson from the Goosebumps phenomenon a couple of years back).
Not that all things are perfect in the SF genre, or that there are no problems or drawbacks. Things are changing in the genre, and with every change, someone gets hurt. But every change is also an opportunity. The number of books being published in mass-market paperback has been shrinking – but, at the same time, the number of books published in trade paperback and as hardcovers has been on the rise. The dwindling of the midlist and the backlist has been a severe handicap to the genre in recent years, but there are signs that this is beginning to turn around … and the coming of print-on-demand systems may be about to make the problem moot, anyway.
As usual, there were plenty of omens to be found, both positive and negative, and what conclusions you reached about whether things were looking good or looking bad for science fiction depended on which evidence you selectively chose to examine, and what weight you arbitrarily decided to give to it. One of Norman Spinrad’s recent columns for Asimov’s, for instance, painted such a black picture of the current state of the field that we had dozens of readers writing in to the magazine in various stages of panic or despair, saying that they hadn’t realized until then that science fiction was about to go down the crapper. At roughly the same time, Publishers Weekly ran a state-of-the-genre article by Robert K. J. Killheffer that was considerably more optimistic than Spinrad’s, almost aggressively upbeat, in fact.
I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, as is usually the case in life.
One of the major negative omens that could be read this year was the acceleration of Merger Mania. In the last two years, Putnam Berkley and Viking Penguin merged to form Penguin Putnam, Inc., bringing together under the same publishing umbrella three formerly independent SF lines, Ace, Roc, and DAW; Bertelsmann bought Random House, including Bantam Doubleday Dell, bringing Del Rey, Bantam Spectra, Doubleday, and Dell under the same roof; and, in England, the Orion Publishing Group bought Cassell, which resulted in the merger of SF lines Gollancz and Millennium. In 1999, HarperCollins bought Avon Books and William Morrow, bringing two SF imprints, Avon Eos and HarperPrism, under the same management. (One much-feared merger, though, the announced purchase of Ingram, the largest book distributor, by Barnes & Noble, the largest of the bookstore chains, fell apart in 1999, much to the relief of independent bookstore owners, after reports that the Federal Trade Commission was going to block or delay the purchase.)
So far, the impact of all this merging has been smaller than feared, with Ace, Roc, DAW, Del Rey, and Bantam Spectra surviving, for the moment, as separate imprints; nor has the overall number of books released from Millennium gone down appreciably (it may even have gone up). Things went less quietly with the HarperCollins/Avon merger, though, with seventy-four people losing their jobs, and the disappearance of the HarperPrism line, which will be merged into Avon Eos to produce a new line (incorporating bought-but-not-yet-published HarperPrism titles) called Eos.
The merger also touched off another round of Editorial Musical Chairs, after several quiet years, with Lou Aronica, John Silbersack, and John Douglas all leaving jobs at either Avon or Harper (a little later, fallout from the earlier Bertelsmann /Random House merger, Pat Lo Brutto left Bantam Spectra as well) — unlike earlier years, though the game may have run critically short of chairs, as, by press time, none of these very experienced publishing people had managed to find permanent employment elsewhere.
Although all this was sufficient to cause many a sleepless night for many an editor, including me, the chances are that the ordinary reader didn’t even notice that there was anything going on, and wouldn’t, even if things got much worse. After all the smoke had cleared, Avon Eos was left standing — as Eos — and, since it absorbed many of the upcoming HarperPrism titles, the overall number of titles published during the year remained about the same. There were even those who suggested that the efficiency and the profitability of the genre would improve because of these mergers, and certainly SF in recent years has been a field where a good deal of fat could be trimmed without coming anywhere near vital muscle tissue.
So far, then, SF as a genre has come remarkably well through some choppy seas, with only the troubled magazine market really taking on any significant amounts of water. Big changes are ahead, though, as we steer into a new century, and although my guess is that the sum total of those changes will probably prove to be positive, I think there’s little doubt that ten years down the line, the publishing
industry is going to look quite different than it does today — perhaps even radically, fundamentally different.
One of the most valid of the negative criticisms leveled against today’s genre is that the big trade publishers, with a cautious eye on their bottom line and large amounts of money invested in each book, knowing that they have to appeal to mass audiences, are sometimes too timid in the kinds of books they’ll accept, making it difficult to impossible for authors with quirky, eccentric work, stuff that might appeal more to a niche audience than to a mass audience, to get their books into print in the first place. With the advent of print-on-demand systems, however, this is changing fast, and deals that would have been sneered at as vanity publishing ten years ago are beginning to look surprisingly attractive — if you can print your own book, or have it printed for you by a small press, have it listed on key Internet sites such as Amazon.com, and even get it into the higher-end chain bookstores, as some of the more prominent print-on-demand publishers are able to do, with no need to stockpile large numbers of printed books, and orders filled only as they come in (no wastage, no returns, no print-five-books-to-sell-one), then what do you really need a traditional trade publishing house for at all? One answer is, for the up-front money, the advance. But since you get the royalties from publishing your own book, with no need to split with the publisher, if your book really sells well, in high enough numbers, you may not miss the advance much, if at all. Of course, if it doesn’t sell well, you’ve basically published your book for nothing, no cash return whatsoever. So it’s a gamble. But then, publishing has always been a gamble anyway, even by the traditional methods. (Another answer to “Why do you need a trade house?” is, to provide publicity and promotion — but with most lines doing little or none of that these days, except for the lead titles they expect to make big money on, the Internet may soon give you a fighting chance of doing that job yourself as well or better, too.)
Trade publishers will probably never entirely disappear, even in the most radical of scenarios. But they may well end up publishing mostly the high-end, high-stakes, high-expectation books by Big Authors, while everything below that level is published by an array of small-press publishers filling niche markets in a much more specialized (and efficient) way than has been possible up until now, so that nothing will be too quirky or offbeat or “marginal” to get a chance to seek its own audience … however small that audience may turn out to be. Nor do I think that this would necessarily be a bad thing. It’s probably harder (though not impossible) for an author to get rich in this scenario — but then, getting rich has always been an improbable outcome for the overwhelming majority of authors anyway.
Nor is print-on-demand technology the only potential change just down the road that could radically alter the nature of the publishing world as we know it. The on-line booksellers, such as Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, are just starting to have a big effect on things, with quite probably a much bigger impact yet to come. The field of electronic books, e-books, is also in its infancy, but already books and even magazines are available to be downloaded into portable handheld computers such as Palm Pilots, Cassiopeias, Rocket eBooks, Visors,
Psions, and others through sites such as Peanut Press, Alexandria Digital Literature, Memoware, Mobibook, Rocket E-Book, Project Guttenburg, and a dozen other such sites. An industry insider told me a few months ago, sneeringly, that the sales of such electronic books would never amount to anything more than chump change, but I’m not so sure. Sales of handheld computers are climbing fast, and I’m willing to bet that within two or three years, four or five at most, most of the homes that have a PC will also have a handheld — or more than one.
So there are interesting times ahead of us, in the next century, in the next millennium. Things will probably be “interesting” after the fashion of the famous old Chinese curse, of course, but let’s hope that things will also be “interesting” in the more traditional, straightforward usage of the word, interesting because suddenly we can see dozens of new potentials and new horizons opening up before us where before there was only one possibility — or none. In that sense, the century ahead may be very interesting indeed. Or so we can hope.
Once again, it was a bad year in the magazine market, with sales down almost across the board, and not just of science fiction magazines, either; many magazines far outside genre boundaries were affected as well.
Last year, I predicted, perhaps incautiously, that most of the genre magazines would probably survive into the next century — well, alas, I was wrong. Because the big story in the professional magazine market was the death, early in 2000, of Science Fiction Age, which ceased publication with its May 2000 issue.
Science Fiction Age’s circulation had slipped steadily for the last four years, slipping another 26.3 percent in 1999. According to Science Fiction Age’s former editor, Scott Edelman, though, the magazine was still profitable when it was killed, mostly because of the advertising revenue it brought in — just not profitable enough for parent company Sovereign Media, who are making greater profits on their nongenre magazines such as wrestling, media, and log-cabin hobbyist magazines, and decided to use the money tied up in Science Fiction Age to start some other kind of magazine instead where they could expect a greater return on their investment.
The death of Science Fiction Age is a major blow to the field; not only was Scott doing a good job with the magazine, having turned it into one of the top markets in the business, but it was one of the few magazines these days that was publishing a predominance of good solid core science fiction, rather than the fantasy, horror, and slipstream that saturates much of the rest of the field, particularly at the semiprozine level. It will be sorely missed.
The news in the rest of the magazine market was hardly much more cheerful. Sales were down everywhere. After an 11 percent gain in overall circulation in 1998, Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 24.1 percent loss in overall circulation in 1999, although newsstand sales were still slightly higher than in 1997. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 13.4 percent loss in overall circulation in 1999, although their newsstand sales were also slightly higher than in 1997. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 6.3 percent loss in overall circulation, the smallest drop of any of the professional magazines, most of that in
newsstand sales. Realms of Fantasy registered a 10.7 percent loss in overall circulation, slipping in both subscription and newsstand sales. Interzone held steady at a circulation of about four thousand copies, more or less evenly split between subscriptions and newsstand sales. Circulation figures for Amazing are not available, but sales are rumored to be somewhere in the ten thousand-copy per issue range, most of that sold on the newsstands.
As I’ve mentioned before, some of these figures probably look worse than they actually are. Many of these magazines, even the ones with declining circulations, may have actually increased their profitability in the last couple of years by adjusting their “draw” (sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine’s efficiency, and thereby lowering costs — and so increasing profitability) instituting cost-saving procedures in printing and physical production, targeting direct-mail outlets such as bookstores as opposed to scattershot mass markets (magazine racks in supermarkets — where SF magazines usually don’t sell well), and eliminating their reliance on Publishers Clearing House-style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, which can actually cost more to fulfill than they actually bring in in revenue. The (more or less) digest-sized magazines (trim size went up slightly for Asimov’s and Analog last year, with F&SF the only remaining “true” digest-sized magazine — but the principle remains the same) also have the traditional advantage that has always helped the digest magazines to survive, that they’re so cheap to produce in the first place that you don’t have to sell very many of them to make a profit — whereas a large-format slick magazine like Science Fiction Age is much more expensive to produce, which in turn means that you need to sell a greater number of copies in order to be profitable.
Nevertheless, the continued decline in circulation of the professional magazines is worrisome. Part of the problem for these magazines is their relative invisibility. It’s harder than ever for the SF magazines to get out on the newsstand, because of magazine wholesaler consolidation and the recent upheavals in the domestic distribution network, which means fewer chances to attract new subscribers to replace the loss of old subscribers through natural attrition. The blunt fact is that most people — including many habitual science fiction readers (even, astonishingly, many convention-attending SF fans) — have no idea that the SF magazines even exist, and even if they do know about their existence, have probably never seen a copy offered for sale. Actually, considering that there is absolutely no advertising or promotion done for most of these magazines, none, zero, it’s no wonder that most people have never heard of them. In a way, it’s surprising that they sell as well as they do. What other product do you know that sells itself completely by word of mouth, with no advertising or promotional budget at all?
I have a feeling that use of the Internet as a promotional tool, using Web sites and other on-line means to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions, is what’s going to save these magazines in the end, if anything can. Only time will tell if Internet promotion can turn things around, help the magazines do an end-run around the bottleneck of dwindling presence on the newsstands, of if it’ll turn out to be a case of too little, too late.
Meanwhile, not all of the news in this market was downbeat. The Internet Web sites for both Asimov’s and Analog, which went up in 1998 (Asimov’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog’s is at www.analogsf.com) continue to bring in a small but steady flow of new subscriptions every month, many of them from heretofore untapped new audiences (particularly from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems), and I presume that the same is the case with the newish Web sites for other professional magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/) and Interzone (http://www.sfsite.com/interzone/). Asimov’s and Analog also worked out a deal with Peanut Press (http://www.peanutpress.com) late in 1999 that enables readers to download electronic versions of the magazines into Palm Pilot handheld computers, with the choice of either buying an electronic “subscription,” or of buying them individually on an issue-by-issue basis; the numbers here have been small so far, but sales are growing steadily, and since it seems to me that this is an area with almost unlimited potential for growth, this could be a lot of help as well.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, while Analog celebrated its seventieth anniversary early in 2000, Asimov’s celebrated its twenty-second anniversary, Interzone its ninth full year as a monthly magazine (the magazine itself was founded in 1982), and Realms of Fantasy completed its fifth full year of publication as one of the healthiest of the genre magazines, partially because of the enormous amount of advertising revenue it is reputed to draw. Amazing Stories, which returned from the dead last year as a glossy mixed SF/media magazine, completed its second full year of publication in its new incarnation (the title itself has been around, in one version or another, since 1926); parent company Wizards of the Coast was sold to Hasbro in 1999, but early indications are that this won’t hurt Amazing-in fact, it may even mean a new influx of money for it, and help it get distribution along with Hasbro’s cardgaming magazine, Top Deck.
Other than changes discussed above, the general information for most of these magazines remains more or less the same as last year, as far as personnel and format are concerned.
All of these magazines deserve your support, and, in fact, in today’s troubled magazine market, one of the very best things you can do to ensure that short fiction remains alive and viable in the science fiction/fantasy market (and, by extension, that the genre itself remains healthy, since most of the significant evolution of the field goes on at short-story length) is to subscribe to the magazines that you like. In fact, subscribe to as many of them as you can — it’ll still turn out to be a better reading bargain, more fiction of reliable quality for less money, than buying the year’s hit-or-miss crop of original anthologies could supply.
(Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796—$29.97 for annual in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033—$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog Science
Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323—$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60 for an airmail one-year (twelve issues) subscription. Amazing Stories, send e-mail to or call 800-395-7760, $10.95 for a four-issue (one-year) subscription. Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co., Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703 — $16.95 for annual subscription in U.S. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically on-line, at their various Web sites.)
It was another chaotic year in the still very young field of on-line electronic publishing, and although it remains true that the great promise of on-line-only fiction remained largely unfulfilled this year (as far as SF is concerned, anyway), this is an area where things are changing very fast, and everything can (and probably will) look completely different just a few months down the line.
Most of the year’s big stories in this market were negative, although some potentially very positive stories are still just over the horizon as I write these words. Last year saw the death (as an active electronic magazine, anyway) of Algis Budrys’s e-zine Tomorrow, while this year saw the death of Ellen Datlow’s Event Horizon site (itself a replacement for the earlier Omni Online site, now also defunct, for which Datlow had been fiction editor). Launched in mid-1998, Event Horizon had quickly established itself as perhaps the most reliable place on-line in which to find good professional-level original SF/fantasy/horror stories, one of which, Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” had won a World Fantasy Award by the end of 1999. Unfortunately, by the end of 1999, the money had also run out, and, unable to find further financial backing, Event Horizon died.
By the beginning of 2000, though, the indomitable Ellen Datlow had already landed a new job on-line, as the fiction editor for a forthcoming major new Web site to be launched in April of this year, part of an extensive expansion and renovation of the Sci Fi channel site (scifi.com), which recently bought the long-running e-zine Science Fiction Weekly, and is also home to the audio-play site Seeing Ear Theater, and to the monthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog; Datlow will be publishing SF stories and novellas on the site on a monthly basis, and, if history is any guide, the chances are that this will make it a major player in the on-line fiction market. Also opening at the beginning of the year was another major new site, GalaxyOnLine (run by renowned SF editor/writer Ben Bova), which features a distinguished lineup of columnists such as Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and many others, runs scientific articles and book and movie reviews, and which, to date, has published one on-line original SF story, by Orson Scott Card. If they continue to publish originals (and it’s to be hoped that they do), this site could become a major player in this market as well. More on both of these sites next year.
There are a fairly large number of sites here and there around the Internet that archive good reprint SF stories. The British Infinity Plus (htt://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/. ) is a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good-quality reprint stories, most (though not all) by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. At Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/ghenres.htm), you can read the first half of a selection of reprint stories for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay a small fee (less than fifty cents per story in most cases) for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. Reprint stories (as well as novels) are also available to be bought in downloadable electronic formats at Alexandria Digital Literature (http://alexlit.com). In addition to the pro-magazine sites listed previously, there are also many SF-oriented sites that are associated with existent print magazines — Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.eidolon.net/; Aurealis (http://www.aurealis.hl.net/) Altair (www.sfsite.com/altair/); Trans Versions (http://www.salmar.com/transversions/); Albedo (http://homepage.eircom.net/~goudriaan/); On Spec (http://www.icomm.ca/onspec/), but although many of them have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, few of them publish original on-line-only fiction with any regularity; although magazines like Asimov’s and Analog regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Eidolon Online, which published a good original story in 1997, doesn’t seem to have published any complete on-line originals since.
Although professional-level original fiction may be somewhat scarce, there are also many general-interest sites that are among the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, sites that, while they don’t publish fiction, do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Among the sites I visit the most frequently while Web surfing are: the SF Site (www.sfsite.com/, one of the most important genre-related sites on the whole Web, 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 which also serves as host site for the Web pages of a significant percentage of all the SF/fantasy print magazines in existence, all of which can be accessed either directly or referenced from the Fictionhome page (http://www.sfsite.com/fiction/fichome.com.htm); Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the on-line version of the newsmagazine Locus; a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, database archives,
lists of links to other sites of interest, and to Mark Kelly’s short fiction-review column, which at present is the only place on the Net where you can find regularly appearing reviews of SF and fantasy short fiction; Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/), more media and gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but which also features news and book reviews in every issue, as well as providing a home for an erudite and sometimes controversial column by SF’s premier critic, John Clute (and which is about to undergo a major renovation as part of the new scifi.com site); and SFF NET (http://www.sff.net) a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” a link to the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, and a link to the research data and reading lists available on the Science Fiction Writers of America page (which can also be accessed directly at http://www.sfwa.org/.) A new general review site, SFRevu (http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), seemed to have died late last year when, overcome with ennui, its editor burned out and gave up on it, but it’s back in business again as of early 2000, the editor having gotten a second wind. Similarly, up until a few days ago, I would have said that the extremely valuable short-fiction review site, Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent/), had died, as nothing new had been posted there from early August 1999 until mid-March 2000, but editor David Truesdale has lately resurfaced, blaming technical difficulties and a too-full work schedule for his long silence, and vows to get Tangent Online going again on a regular basis; mind, there’s still nothing new posted there as I type these words, some weeks later, but Truesdale’s reassurances at least give me some hope that Tangent Online will someday be reborn — which would be a good thing for the entire genre, as venues that regularly review short fiction are vanishingly rare, either in print or on-line. If keeping up with all this still doesn’t give you enough to do, live on-line interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi channel (http://www.scifi.com/chat/) every other Tuesday night at 9:00 P.M. EST; regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (http://www.cybling.com/); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (http://www.talkcity.com/). Genie has for all intents and purposes died, but many bulletin board services, such as Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large on-line communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate. The SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10.00 P.M. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on SFF.Net, and probably on other BBSs as well.
Another way to kill time on the Net with SF-related activities is to listen to audio-play versions of your favorite SF stories. The best site for this at the moment is the long-established (by Internet standards) Seeing Ear Theater (http://www.scifi.com/set/), but coming up this year is another new audio-play site, Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), which will feature weekly hour-long dramatic programs hosted by Harlan Ellison. And soon, you may be able to watch SF-oriented original Web TV shows on-line as well, if sites such as GalaxyOnline and scifi.com can bring their plans to fruition.
It’s worth keeping a close eye on what’s happening in this area, since the whole on-line market is changing so fast that you can miss something just by turning your head for a moment; it’ll almost certainly look very different next year than it does now.
I wonder if it’s not eventually going to be the fate of most semiprozines, both fiction semiprozines and the academically oriented critical ones, to give up their print editions and be reborn in electronic on-line-only formats, as Tangent and Speculations have already done. Only time will tell. In the meantime, it was an uneven year in the semiprozine market, as always, with old titles dying, older ones being reborn, others falling into that silent semiprozine limbo that is usually a bad sign in this area, and hopeful new contenders casting themselves into the ring even as beaten contestants are carried out on stretchers.
The big story this year for most folks would probably be the mind-boggling rebirth of the fiction semiprozine Century, after almost four years of total silence, but since the new issue is dated 2000, we’ll have to let a review of it go until next year. (In the meantime, if you’d like to take the chance that Century won’t vanish again, and subscribe — and this was widely considered to be perhaps the best and most literate of the fiction semiprozine back in its glory days — we’ll list the subscription address below.) The long-awaited (also for years) first issue of Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society also came out late in 1999, but because it’s also dated 2000, we’ll wait to review it next year as well (and we’ll list its subscription address below, if you want to take a chance on it).
The big story in this market for last year was the consolidation of several fiction semiprozines under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications, which now publishes Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction; Aboriginal Science Fiction; Weird Tales; and the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; as well as Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures. (Last year, it was widely reported that the Australian magazine Altair: Alternative Airings in Speculative Fiction was going to be joining the DNA group as well, but that doesn’t seem to have happened — at least, Altair is at present maintaining a separate subscription address, and a separate Web page.) In DNA Publications’s first year, Lapine has done a good job of beginning to stabilize publication schedules for the magazines, which all published more frequently than they had last year (with the exception, oddly, of Lapine’s own Absolute Magnitude), subscription rates have also begun to creep up for all of them, and Lapine is reported to be pleased with their success so far, and optimistic about the future. Now he needs to work on producing a more reliable
level of quality in the fiction published by those magazines, which, at the moment, is widely uneven, varying dramatically not only from story to story within the same magazine but from title to title. The best overall level of fiction in the DNA magazines this year was probably to be found in Absolute Magnitude and Altair, with the other magazines trailing behind. Still, let us keep our fingers crossed that the DNA magazines are going to turn out to be a success story financially, because, frankly, the fiction semipro market could use one. (Information about all of the DNA Publications magazines can be found at http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm.)
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, one of the most reliably published of all the semiprozines, completed its twelfth year of publication, and, so far, has survived the death of founder and coeditor Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1999 (see below), with plans to continue the magazine for at least another year.
Terra Incognita, one of the newer semiprozines, and one that has maintained a high level of literary quality over the last couple of years (although a low level of reliability, as far as meeting their announced publishing schedule is concerned), managed to publish no issue at all in 1999, let alone the four they were supposed to have produced, although apparently an issue did eventually appear early in 2000, which we’ll consider for next year. Similarly, there was supposedly an issue of Tales of the Unanticipated published this year, but we didn’t see it in time to consider anything from it for this volume, and will have to hold it over for later. The curiously named LC-39 started this year, but although it’s a handsome production, looking more like a small-sized trade paperback than a magazine, most of the fiction in it struck me as rather weak; maybe it’ll get better as it goes along. Odyssey, an ambitious full-size, full-color British magazine, died this year (perhaps because it never really could decide whether it was a science fiction magazine, a horror/fantasy magazine, or a media/gaming-oriented magazine, or perhaps merely because it was too expensive to produce), as did old-timer Crank! and mayfly-fast newcomer Age of Wonder last year. There were no issues of Non-Stop, Xizquil, Argonaut Science Fiction, Next Phase, Plot Magazine, or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, as far as I could tell, for the second year in a row, and I suspect some or most of them may be dead.
Of the surviving fiction semiprozines, Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, is an increasingly attractive little magazine, lively and interesting, and, although officially a horror semiprozine, is publishing a higher percentage of science fiction and fantasy as well these days. Indigenous Fiction: Wondrously Weird & Offbeat is still around, although it leans more in the direction its subtitle would indicate than toward more traditional SF or fantasy. The long-running Space & Time has reinvented itself as a full-size slick magazine with nice covers, and, probably as a result, is now getting national distribution on some newsstands. Although anything but slick, the eclectic little Irish semiprozine Albedo published some surprisingly good fiction this year by Brian Stableford, Esther M. Freisner, Colin Greenland, and others, including an evocative and fascinating novelette by Tais Teng. There are two Canadian fiction semiprozines, On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction and TransVersions. TransVersions, the newcomer, still seems the livelier of the two
as far as the fiction is concerned, while the long-established On Spec, one of the longest running of all the fiction semiprozines, has seemed a bit tired in recent years; On Spec is the more reliably published of the two, though (one of the most reliable in the entire semiprozine market, in fact). Australia brings us three topnotch fiction semiprozines, one new one, Altair: Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction (no, don’t ask me what the subtitle means), and the two others, Aurealis, Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction and Eidolon, The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, among the longest established of all fiction semiprozines (along with On Spec). Although most of these magazine have (and traditionally have had) difficulty sticking to their publication schedules (Aurealis and Eidolon are ostensibly quarterly magazines, but Aurealis published just two issues in 1999, and Eidolon managed only one; Altair, a biannual, published both of its scheduled issues) they also published, as usual, some of the best fiction in the semiprofessional market, with good work by Sean Williams, Paul Blake, and others in Altair, by Chris Lawson, Simon Ng, Andrew Morris, and others in Eidolon, and by Kyla Ward, John Ezzy, Robert Cox, and others in Aurealis. The dominant British fiction semiprozine is certainly The Third Alternative, a slick and handsome full-size magazine that features the work of top authors, but which features “slipstream,” literary surrealism, and horror rather than anything that most genre fans are going to recognize as SF or fantasy. Much the same could be said of the long-established Back Brain Recluse (most British semiprozines seem to lean in this direction, in fact), although I haven’t seen an issue of that for a while.
A promising new SF-oriented fiction semiprozine, scheduled to begin publication early in 2000, is the British Spectrum SF, which already has an impressive lineup of first-rate professional writers, including Alastair Reynolds, Keith Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, and Garry Kilworth, set for its first two issues. Let’s hope it turns out to be as good as it sounds; if it does, it could quickly become a key player in this market.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market much anymore, but there the most prominent magazine seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance, with perhaps Talebones as a follow-up.
Turning to the critical magazines, Charles N. Brown’s Locus and Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle, as always, remain your best bet among that subclass of semiprozines known as newszines, and are your best resource if you’re looking for publishing news and/or an overview of what’s happening in the genre; SF Chronicle is still missing issues, although they’re doing better than last year, but, almost alone in the whole semiprozine category, fiction or critical, Locus comes out on time month after month, like clockwork, as it has been doing for more than thirty years. The only other magazine in the market that comes even close to this remarkable record is The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, which completed its eleventh full year of publication in 1999, once again bringing out its scheduled twelves issues of reviews, critical articles, esoteric miscellany, and sometimes fiercely contentious opinion. Another critical magazine that seems to be pretty reliably published is Speculations, a useful magazine that featured writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market
news, had a pretty good publishing-reliability record as well, but early in 2000 announced that it was abandoning its print edition and would henceforth be available only in electronic form, at its Web site, http//:www.speculations.com. Most of the other criticalzines come out so erratically that you could fairly say that they don’t really have schedules. There was an issue of Lawrence Person’s Nova Express out this year, but Steve Brown’s SF Eye has suspended publication. I’m pretty sure that the print version of David A. Truesdale’s Tangent is dead at this point — at least, I can’t honestly recommend that you spend your money subscribing to it, since I have my doubts that it will ever appear again — and even the fate of the on-line version, Tangent Online, is up in the air, although I have a little more faith that Truesdale will be able to get that one rolling again; let’s hope so, since in its heyday Tangent was performing an invaluable service for the field, one that’s not really being supplied by any other publication, with the sole exception of Mark Kelly’s columns in the print and on-line versions of Locus.
(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $56 for a one-year first-class subscription, $46 for a second-class subscription, twelve issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, Algol Press, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $20 for a one-year subscription, $25 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, $32 per year, twelve issues; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, TX 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite 109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian dollars”; Eidolon, the Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6906, $45 (Australian) for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair, Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction, P.O. Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia, $36 for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk Co., Dublin, Ireland; $30 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to Albedo One; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence — all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988, all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, all checks payable to D.N.A. Publications; Century, Century Publishing, P.O. Box 150510, Brooklyn, NY 11215-0510, $20 for a four-issue subscription; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, P.O. Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR, United Kingdom, 17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to Spectrum Publishing; TransVersions, Paper Orchid Press, P.O. Box 52531, 1801 Lakeshore Road West, Mississauga, Ontario L5J 4S6, four-issue subscription,
$20 U.S. or $24 Can., plus postage; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue, #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $15 for a four-issue subscription; Space and Time, 138 W. 70th Street, 4B, New York, NY. 10023-4468, $10 for a two-issue subscription (one year), $20 for a four-issue subscription (two years); Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn, NY 11230-6011, $15 for a four-issue subscription, checks payable to LRC Publications; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 S.E. 250th PI., #104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Indigenous Fiction, Wondrously Weird & Offbeat, I.F. Publishing, P.O. Box 2078, Redmond, WA 98073-2078, $15 for a one-year (three-issue) subscription; LC-39, Launch Publications, P.O. Box 9307, Baltimore, MD 21227, $12 for a one-year subscription, checks payable to Launch Publications; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, United Kingdom, $22 for a four-issue subscription, checks made payable to TTA Press; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237. Many of these magazines can also be ordered on-line, at their Web sites; see the on-line section, above, for URLs.)
It was a weak year in the original anthology market, even weaker than last year, with few original anthologies published, and even fewer of any significant quality. The best original SF anthology of the year, with little competition, was undoubtedly Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg (Avon Eos), the companion volume to last year’s highly successful fantasy anthology Legends. Like Legends, Far Horizons is an anthology of stories set in various well-known fictional worlds, except that this time those worlds are (ostensibly, anyway) science fictional ones rather than fantasy. If you’re already a fan of any of the famous SF series featured here, there’s little doubt you’ll get more than your money’s worth in entertainment value out of Far Horizons (if you’re a fan of all of the series included here, you should be out the door and headed to the nearest bookstore already!) The only quibble I have is that the backstories involved in some of these long-running series have grown so complicated that a reader who comes to some of these novellas cold, without having read anything in that particular series before, may have trouble understanding what’s going on in the story, or at least in appreciating its full emotional impact, which depends in part on an appreciation of prior context. All of the stories here suffer from this problem to some degree; the ones that do the best job of telling a satisfactory story that stands on its own feet without reference to the parent series being necessary include Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Old Music and the Slave Women,” Dan Simmons’s “Orphans of the Helix,” Nancy Kress’s “Sleeping Dogs,” Robert Silverberg’s “Getting to Know the Dragon,” and Gregory Benford’s “A Hunger for the Infinite,” but the other stories are well worth reading too, if you can overcome or overlook the dependent-on-familiarity-with-the-backstory flaw, or if you’re already familiar with earlier work in the series. (There are a few interesting curiosities involved in the selection of the material for inclusion here,
such as Anne McCaffery and Robert Silverberg being represented by stories in lesser-known series, since their best-known science fiction series had already been included in the fantasy anthology Legends — but that kind of hairsplitting will mean little to the average reader.) As a $27.50 hardcover, it’s the most expensive anthology of the year, and some may hesitate because of the price, but considering the amount of quality of work you get for the money, it’s really one of the best reading bargains of the year.
Running through the rather meager possibilities for a follow-up candidate for the title of best original SF anthology of the year, we quickly come to Moon Shots, edited by Peter Crowther (DAW), followed a half step or so down by Not of Woman Born, edited by Constance Ash (Roc). Both of these are substantial anthologies, although both suffer from the twin faults of original theme anthologies: some of the stories are too similar to each other, with motifs and assumptions and even major plot elements repeating in story after story (the stories by Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, and Scott Edelman in Moon Shots, for instance; the Stableford and the Edelman stories even share the idea that the architects of a reviving future space program would want to involve one of the last surviving participants of the twentieth-century space program as a PR stunt!), while at the same time, paradoxically, other stories are so far off the theme that it’s hard to see any real justification for including the story in the anthology in the first place. (In Moon Shots, Colin Greenland’s straight mainstream story certainly falls into this category, as does Robert Sheckley’s flimsy supernatural tale, and the justifications for including Ian McDonald’s surrealistic “Breakfast on the Moon, with Georges,” or Gene Wolfe’s “Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?” — a homage to an obscure R. A. Lafferty story, which must make the Wolfe story rather puzzling to those who haven’t read the Lafferty — are suspiciously weak as well; while in Not of Woman Born, several of the strongest stories, including the Walter Jon Williams, the Susan Palwick, and the Michael Armstrong, really have little to do with the ostensible theme of the anthology). With Moon Shots, I also found it somewhat disappointing that an anthology “in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the first manned moon landing” was so gloomy and pessimistic overall, with it being taken for granted in story after story that humankind’s exploration of space is essentially over, and perhaps the human race itself is washed up as well (all of which contrasts oddly with Ben Bova’s aggressively upbeat introduction to the anthology, which states the belief that the real Age of Space is just beginning — something I tend to believe myself). Nevertheless, both Moon Shots and Not of Woman Born are superior anthologies, with Moon Shots being undoubtedly the best original DAW anthology in more than a decade. The best stories in Moon Shots, in my opinion, were Stephen Baxter’s “People Came from Earth,” Paul J. McAuley’s “How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen,” and Brian Stableford’s “Ashes and Tombstones,” although there’s also good work here by Eric Brown, Brian Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, and others. The best stories in Not of Woman Born were Walter Jon Williams’s “Daddy’s World,” Sage Walker’s “Hunting Mother,” and Susan Palwick’s “Judith’s Flowers,” although there’s also good work by Jack McDevitt, Janni Lee Simner, Michael Armstrong, Constance Ash
herself, and others. As inexpensive paperback originals, both anthologies make fairly good reading bargains too.
After the three titles discussed above, finding really worthwhile anthologies becomes much more problematic. Of the year’s remaining original SF anthologies, the two best are both small-press items: in the long-running Canadian anthology series, Tesseracts, the latest edition, Tesseracts8, edited by John Clute and Candas Jane Dorsey (Tesseract Books), and the assembled-on-line “SFF Net” anthology (mentioned also above), The Age of Reason: Stories for a New Millennium, edited by Kurt Roth (SFF NET). Both will be hard to find in bookstores (especially The Age of Reason), and so are probably better mail-ordered, and both are a bit pricey, but they’re probably worth it, not only because of the quality of the fiction, which is reasonably high overall in both cases but because both anthologies will serve as an introduction to a lot of writers with whom the average reader is likely to be unfamiliar, instead of the familiar stable of usual suspects who feature in many of the year’s other anthologies (especially paperback fantasy anthologies, which seem to use much the same roster of authors in one anthology after another). Tesseracts8 features an excellent novella by Karl Schroeder, and good work by Sally McBride, Yves Meynard, Ursula Pflug, A. M. Dellamonica, Cory Doctorow, and others. The Age of Reason doesn’t have any one standout piece that reaches the level of quality of the Schroeder story in Tesseracts8, but it does feature a large amount of good work, much of it from unknowns or near unknowns such as Diana Rowland, Vera Nazarian, James A. Bailey, Susan J. Kroupa, Deborah Coates, and many others, as well as good stuff from bigger names such as Geoffrey A. Landis, Lois Tilton, G. David Nordley, Timons Esaias, Dave Smeds, and others. (Tesseracts Books, The Books Collective, 214-21 10405 Jasper Ave., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 3S2 — $9.95 (Canadian) for a paper edition, $23.95 (Canadian) for a cloth edition of Tesseracts8; SFF Net, 3300 Big Horn Trail, Piano, TX 75075—$14.95 For The Age of Reason: Stories for a New Millennium; the book can also be ordered online at http://www.sff.net.)
After this point, we begin to run out of options fast. Although I suspect that many of the individual authors knew better, the New Age sillinesses that were part of the conceptual baggage that participants in the shared-world anthology Past Lives, Present Tense, edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (Ace), were perforce constrained to make use of (such as the idea that transferring a dead person’s DNA into a living person would enable the living person not only to experience the past memories of the dead person as if they were their own but would create a self-aware conscious persona of the dead person that could then sit inside the living person’s skull and have long conversations with them about current happenings in the plotline), tip the stories from being science fiction to unadmitted fantasy, in my opinion. Most of the stories are rather weak anyway, with only R. Garcia y Robertson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch managing to fashion anything really readable out of this upromising clay. Future Crimes, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers (DAW), is a promising theme, one that has produced many great SF stories over the years, but again the stories here are rather weak, with only the Alan Brennert story rising a bit above the average. The idea behind
the very strange “anthology,” Quantum Speculative Fiction, edited by Kurt Roth, based on a concept by publisher Gordon Meyer, is that you buy a three-ring loose-leaf notebook containing some original stories, with room for more, and then subsequently, four times a year, they send you an additional batch of new stories, which you can then clip into the notebook. It’s an interesting experiment, but in practice has not turned out to be an entirely successful one for me, perhaps because of the “anthology‘s” narrow specialization, devoted to publishing only “funny” stories — most of which, alas, I didn’t find to really be all that funny; humor being as subjective as it is, of course, you may find them hilarious. There are some good writers involved, including Michael Bishop, Leslie What, Robert L. Nansel, Terry McGarry, Kage Baker (who has the single best story here, “Desolation Rose,” although it’s not particularly funny), James Van Pelt, Richard Parks, K. D. Wentworth, and others. (This might work better if the contents were more generalized, and not restricted to just comic stories — but I’m not sure if this clip-in loose-leaf notebook concept is really a feasible one for fiction, no matter what kind of material they were using.) I haven’t seen an “installment” of Quantum Speculative Fiction in a while now, and I’m not sure if they’re really still continuing with it or not, but if you’d like more information (I can’t find a price listed anywhere in the package I got), contact Obscura Press, P.O. Box 1992, Ames, IA 50010-1992, or send e-mail to www.quantumsf.com. And, as usual, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XV, edited by Algis Budrys (Bridge), presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.
Other original SF anthologies this year included Alien Abductions, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers (DAW), and the mixed SF/fantasy anthology Prom Night, edited by Nancy Springer (DAW).
In fantasy, there didn’t seem to be any one single standout anthology, one that was obviously the year’s best (like last year’s Legends). The most substantial item in this category is probably the mixed fantasy/horror anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Avon) (which I choose to view as a fantasy anthology for these purposes; it does seem to lean more toward that end of the spectrum anyway), which contains good work by Tanith Lee, Nancy Kress, Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Neil Gaiman, Delia Sherman, Nalo Hopkinson, Harvey Jacobs, Susan Wade, Melanie Tem, and others.
Below this point, there was only the usual welter of paperback fantasy theme anthologies, most of which could fairly be described as “pleasant but minor.” The best of the lot, by a hair, was probably Merlin, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), which contained good work by Jane Yolen, Charles de Lint, Michelle West, Brooks Peck, and others. A Dangerous Magic, edited by Denise Little (DAW), contained interesting stuff by Peter Crowther, Michelle West, John DeChancie, and others; while Twice upon a Time, also edited by Denise Little (DAW), fairy tales retold from the viewpoint of the villian, contained worthwhile stuff by Esther M. Friesner, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Leslie What, Alan Rodgers, Jane Lindskold, Richard Parks, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and others. Chicks ’n Chained Males, edited by Esther Friesner (Baen), which ought to get some kind of special award for dumbest title of the year (bad enough that the book actually
carries a supposedly tongue-in-cheek disclaimer from the editor on the back cover, specifically blaming publisher Jim Baen for it!) is another in the series of comic anthologies that began several years back with Chicks in Chainmail; the book contains comic work Elizabeth Moon, Susan Shwartz, Harry Turtledove, Susan Casper, Lawrence Watt-Evans, K. D. Wentworth, and others, but there’s definitely the feeling about the whole project that the joke is wearing thin, and that most of this ground has been covered before.
Since these are all relatively inexpensive paperbacks, you’ll probably get your money’s worth of entertainment out of them — don’t expect anything really substantial here, though.
A fantasy shared-world anthology was Legends: Tales from the Eternal Archives #1, edited by Margaret Weis “with” Janet Pack and Robin Crew (DAW). I don’t pay close attention to the horror genre anymore, but at a quick glance it would seem that the most prominent and acclaimed original horror anthology was probably 999, edited by A1 Sarrantonio (Avon). Other original horror anthologies included Northem Frights 5, edited by Don Hutchison (Mosaic Press); White of the Moon, edited by Stephen Jones (Gollancz); and the mixed mystery-horror anthology Dark Detectives, edited by Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer).
Big news in this market for next year will probably be the appearance of the new volume in the prestigious Starlight anthology series, and perhaps (we hope) the appearance of the first volume in the as-yet untitled major new original anthology series that will be “like Full Spectrum,” from Avon Eos. And the long-delayed “Space Colony” anthology edited by Greg Benford and George Zebrowski is supposed to hit print soon. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much to really look forward to on the horizon in the original anthology market, not that we’ve heard about yet, anyway.
In spite of gloom so luxuriant among many fans and writers that it amounted to despair, in spite of the widely accepted myth that there are almost no publishing houses left in business anymore that publish genre books, and that almost everything that does come out is a media spin-off novel, in spite of mergers and shake-ups that cost the field at least one SF line, the fact is that more or less the same number of SF and fantasy books were published this year as last year (not counting media-oriented books), that there were actually more new SF and fantasy novels (again, not counting media novels) published in 1999 than there had been in 1998, and that with the opening floodgates of the print-on-demand market, it’s possible that there could be a significant number more published next year (nor does it look like any really significant cuts are ahead for most of the regular trade publishers). In spite of the mergers and cutbacks and shake-ups, in spite of continuing moaning about how the genre is dying, there’s still a lot of science fiction/ fantasy/horror books being published, and chances are there will continue to be a lot of genre books published in the foreseeable future.
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,999 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint, published in 1999, nearly the same as last year’s total of 1,959. Original books were down by 1 percent, down to 1,107 from last year’s total of 1,112, after a 12 percent gain last year brought the totals up from 1997’s low of 999. The number of new SF novels was up, with 251 novels
published, as opposed to 242 novels published in 1998, and 229 published in 1997, almost back up to the 1996 total of 253; the number of new fantasy novels was also up, with 275 published, as opposed to 233 novels published in 1998, the highest total since 1994’s 234, and the first time in five years that more fantasy than SF novels were published; horror continued to slide downward after a brief upturn in 1998, with 95 horror novels published as opposed to 110 novels in 1998, down considerably overall from 1995’s high of 193 titles.
A spot of perspective is perhaps in order: the number of original mass-market paperbacks published this year, 350, is alone higher than the total number of original genre books, of any sort, published in 1972, which was 225. Unless there’s a crash so disastrous coming that it amounts to the de facto collapse of most of the publishing industry (possible, but not likely, unless there’s a general society-wide Great Depression), it’s hard to imagine that the genre will be reduced to those kind of numbers — which everyone regarded as “normal” and even healthy, in the 1970s — anytime soon.
I don’t have time to read many novels, and this year I’ve had perhaps even less time than usual, so I can contribute no really definitive overview — but certainly among the best novels of the year, you’d have to list Teranesia (HarperPrism), by Greg Egan, A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (Tor), Darwin’s Radio, by Greg Bear (Del Rey), All Tomorrow’s Parties, by William Gibson (Putnam), The Cassini Division, by Ken Macleod (Tor), Ancient of Days, by Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos), Forever Free, by Joe Haldeman (Ace), The Martian Race, by Gregory Benford (Warner Aspect), Manifold: Time, by Stephen Baxter (Del Rey), and The Naked God, by Peter Hamilton (Warner Aspect). Although I haven’t yet read it, Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (Avon), was enough of a cult success, with an appeal stretching far outside the boundaries of the field as they are usually drawn, that it probably should have special attention called to it in any year-end wrap-up. As should the immensely popular Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling, which may have outsold anything else in the genre this year; in fact, the chances are good that if somebody who is not a regular fantasy or science fiction reader has heard of any book with fantastic elements this year, it’s a Harry Potter book that they’ve heard of; that ought to be more than enough to get them included in any year-end wrap-up that hopes to give an accurate picture of what was happening in 1999.
Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1999 include Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card (Tor); On Blue’s Waters, Gene Wolfe (Tor); Sky Coyote, Kage Baker (Harcourt Brace); Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle (Roc); Greenhouse Summer, Norman Spinrad (Tor); The Far Shore of Time, Frederik Pohl (Tor); Dog Eat Dog, Jerry Jay Carroll (Ace); Finity, John Barnes (Tor); Precursor, C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Bios, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor); A Calculus of Angels, J. Gregory Keyes (Del Rey); Kirinya, Ian McDonald (Millennium); The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett (HarperPrism); A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen); Down There in Darkness, George Turner (Tor); The Extremes, Christopher Priest (St. Martin’s Press); The Conqueror’s Child, Suzy McKee Charnas
(Tor); Mammoth, Stephen Baxter (Millennium); Minions of the Moon, Richard Bowes (Tor); The Rainy Season, James P. Blaylock (Ace); Architects of Emortality, Brian Stableford (Tor); Dark Cities Underground, Lisa Goldstein (Tor); Climb the Wind, Pamela Sargent (HarperPrism); Return to Mars, Ben Bova (Avon); Still Life, Hal Clement (Tor); Cavalcade, Alison Sinclair (Millennium); The Stone War, Madeleine E. Robins (Tor); A Red Heart of Memories, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Ace); Moonfall, Jack McDevitt (HarperPrism); Waiting, Frank M. Robinson (Forge); Memoranda, Jeffrey Ford (Avon Eos); Against the Tide of Years, S. M. Stirling (Roc); Souls in the Great Machine, Sean McMullen (Tor); Singer from the Sea, Sheri S. Tepper (Avon Eos); Tower of Dreams, Jamil Nasir (Bantam Spectra); Foreign Bodies, Stephen Dedman (Tor); Starfire, Charles Sheffield (Bantam Spectra); There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell, Pat Murphy (Tor); Cave of Stars, George Zebrowski (HarperPrism); The Eternal Footman, James Morrow (Harcourt Brace); Black Light, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); The Veiled Web, Catherine Asaro (Bantam Spectra); The Terrorists of Irustan, Louise Marley (Ace); The Stars Compel, Michaela Roessner (Tor); The Silicon Dagger, Jack Williamson (Tor); The Quiet Invasion, by Sarah Zettel (Warner Aspect); The Marriage of Sticks, Jonathan Carroll (Tor); Mr. X, Peter Straub (Random House); and Saint Fire, Tanith Lee (The Overlook Press).
Mention should also be made of some recent omnibus reissues of classic novels, back in print again after an absence of years (or, in some cases: even decades): Dark Ladies, Fritz Leiber (Tor/Orb), which gathers together two classic Leiber novels, Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness; Rings, by Charles L. Harness (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203—$25), which collects together the Harness novels The Paradox Men, The Rings of Ritornel, and Firebird, and adds to them a never-before-published novel, Drunkard’s Endgame; The Great Book of Amber: The Amber Chronicles 1 – 10, by Roger Zelazny (Avon Eos), an omnibus of the first ten volumes in the Amber series; Biting the Sun, by Tanith Lee (Bantam Spectra), which includes Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine; and The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule & Typewriter, by Hal Clement (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203 — $25.00), which gathers his classic novels Needle, Iceworld, and Close to Critical. Some very good stand-alone novels also were reprinted this year, including: Emphyrio, by Jack Vance (Orion Millennium); The War Against the Rull, by A. E. van Vogt (Tor/Orb); The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers (Ballantine Del Rey); The Dreaming Jewels, by Theodore Sturgeon (Vintage); Free Live Free, by Gene Wolfe (Tor/Orb); The Silver Meta/ Lover, by Tanith Lee (Bantam Spectra); The Deceivers, by Alfred Bester (iBooks/Simon & Schuster); The Wonder, by J. D. Beresford (Bison Books); Omega: The Last Days of the World, by Camille Flammarion (Bison Books); 334, by Thomas M. Disch (Vintage); and Camp Concentration, by Thomas M. Disch (Vintage). All of these publishers are to be commended for bringing long-out-of-print titles back into print, something that for too long has been left to the small presses by most of the trade publishers. The new Orion Millennium line, the Tor/Orb line, and the Vintage line are particularly worth checking out, with almost everything they reissue of interest. It’s really encouraging to see backlist titles starting to come back into print again with increasing
regularity, although even more could — and probably should — be done along these lines.
It seemed a somewhat weaker year for first novels than the last couple of years have been. Shiva 3000, by Jan Lars Jensen (Harcourt Brace), seemed to attract the most attention this year, followed by The Silk Code, by Paul Levinson (Tor) and Starfish, by Peter Watts (Tor). Other first novels included Gardens of the Moon, Steven Erikson (Bantam UK); King Rat, China Miéville (Tor); Code of Conduct, Kristine Smith (Avon Eos); Shanji, James C. Glass (Baen); The Shadow of Ararat, Thomas Harlan (Tor); Nocturne for a Dangerous Man, Marc Matz (Tor); and The Thief’s Gamble, Julliet E. McKenna (HarperPrism). As usual, all publishers who are willing to take a chance publishing first novels should be commended, since the publishing of such novels is a chance that must be taken by someone if new talent is going to be able to develop, and if the field itself is going to survive.
Although I didn’t read anywhere near all of the novels this year (probably physically impossible, for anyone for whom it wasn’t a full-time job), or even the majority of them, what I did have time to read was of pretty high quality, and on the basis of that sample alone, it looked like a pretty strong year for the novels to me — as indeed it has been for the past several years now. Tor obviously had a strong year, as did Avon Eos (in spite of catastrophic shake-ups there), as did the new English line Millennium in its debut year, and HarperPrism in what, alas, proved to be its last year. And since I still frequently hear the old line about how nobody publishes “real” science fiction anymore (in spite of what’s amounted to a renaissance in the ultra-hard SF novel in the last four or five years, paired with a boom in scientifically literate modern space opera), the fact is that the majority of novels on this year’s list of notable books were center-core science fiction novels. Even omitting the fantasy novels and the borderline genre-straddling work on the list, you still had the Egan, the Vinge, the Gibson, the Bear, the Haldeman, the Benford, the Bova, the McAuley, the Clement, the Baxter, the Macleod, the Stableford, and close to a dozen others — all unquestionably pure-quill core SF, with many of them “hard SF” as rigorous and challenging as any that’s ever been written by anyone in the history of the genre.
As usual, predicting what’s going to take the major awards this year is a daunting task. I think that Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky has a shot at winning the Hugo. The Vinge novel might also have a shot at the Nebula, but there the situation is complicated by the fact that SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule enables popular books from last year such as George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings and Maureen McHugh’s Mission Child to compete for this year’s award, so the probable winner becomes very hard to call. We’ll just have to wait and see what does win!
Borderline novels by SF writers this year included The Rift (Avon), by Walter Jon Williams (writing as Walter J. Williams), a Big Fat Disaster novel, set in the near future, about a humongous earthquake striking the Mississippi Valley, that contains enough of Williams’s typical stylishly bleak tropes to be satisfying to his usual fans, and which is compellingly readable enough to appeal to a broader
audience as well. There were also two intriguing borderline novels this year that will have to be special-ordered from small presses, but which are well worth the trouble: Interstate Dreams (Mojo Press), by Neal Barrett, Jr., a bizarre and occasionally very funny mix of mystery, fantasy, and black humor in a mode that has been called Texas magic realism, similar in tone to Barrett’s cult classic The Hereafter Gang (which John Clute called “the Great American novel,” and which moved Joe Landsdale to exclaim “God Himself couldn’t have written a better novel!”) … and The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan (Xlibris), by William Sanders, a freewheeling, gritty, and funny mix of fantasy, SF, and hard-edged thriller that will appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed Sanders’s short fiction, such as the recent Nebula finalist “The Undiscovered.” (Mojo Press, P.O. Box 1215, Dripping Springs, TX 78620 — $14 for Interstate Dreams, by Neal Barrett, Jr.; The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, by William Sanders, can be ordered from Xlibris Press for $25 for a hardcover edition and $15 for a trade paperback edition, or it can be ordered from Sanders’s own Web site at www.sff.net/people/sanders/bbrt.htm or ordered from Amazon.com.).
Associational novels by genre authors this year included Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday), by Jonathan Lethem; The Crook Factory (Avon), by Dan Simmons; Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story (St. Martin’s Press), by Lewis Shiner; and Essential Saltes: An Experiment (St. Martin’s Press), by Don Webb; plus a slew of mystery novels by SF writers, including Defense for the Devil (St. Martin’s Press), by Kate Wilhelm; two novels by Mary Rosenblum writing as Mary Freeman, Devil’s Trumpet (Berkeley) and Deadly Nightshade (Berkeley); Freezer Burn (Mysterious Press), by Joe L. Lansdale; and two novels by Ron Goulart, Groucho Marx, Private Eye (St. Martin’s Press) and Elementary, My Dear Groucho (St. Martin’s Press).
It was another pretty strong year for collections, something that’s been true for a couple of years now. The best collections of the year included: A Good Old-Fashioned Future, by Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra); The Robot’s Twilight Companion, by Tony Daniel (Golden Gryphon); The Martians, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra); The Dragons of Springplace, by Robert Reed (Golden Gryphon); Sex and Violence in Zero-G, by Allen Steele (Meisha Merlin); Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories, by Lucius Shepard (Four Walls, Eight Windows), and Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King (Scribner).
Also good were: Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, by Terry Dowling (MP Books); A Safari of the Mind, by Mike Resnick (Wildside Press); Apostrophes & Apocalypses, by John Barnes (Tor); The Lady of Situations, by Stephen Dedman (Ticonderoga); Dakota Dreamin’, by Bill Johnson (Cascade Mountain); Dragon’s Fin Soup, by S. P. Somtow (EMR);The Dream Archipelago, by Christopher Priest (Earthlight); New Adventures in Sci-Fi, by Sean Williams (Ticonderoga); Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories, by Rick Wilber (University of Tampa Press); Seven for the Apocalypse, by Kit Reed (University
Press of New England); and Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories, by John Shirley (Night Shade).
There were also several strong retrospective collections — collections that return long-unavailable work to print — this year, including: Baby Is Three: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume. VI (North Atlantic), by Theodore Sturgeon; Futures Past, by A. E. van Vogt (Tachyon Publications); Farewell to Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber (White Wolf); The Complete Boucher, by Anthony Boucher (NESFA Press); The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume 1: The Metal Man and Others, by Jack Williamson (Haffner); and The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume 2: Wolves of Darkness, by Jack Williamson (Haffner).
Several of these collections function almost as theme collections, with Christmas the unifying theme in the Willis collection, baseball in the Wilber collection, while Somtow’s Dragon’s Fin Soup offers us “eight modern Siamese fables” set in Thailand, and Steele’s Sex and Violence in Zero-G collects near-future stories mostly dealing with the construction of orbital habitats and the early stages of solar system exploration and interworld commerce. Robinson’s The Martians also has an obvious enough theme, and has been described as a collection of outtakes from the writing of his massive Mars novel trilogy, but while that’s true enough in a way, with characters from the trilogy reappearing in stories here, the collection also features poetry, scraps of “nonfiction,” some (rather self-indulgent) autobiographical metafictional bits, and even Martian “alternate worlds” stories that don’t share the story line of the trilogy, including a few where the terraforming of Mars has gone wrong, and even a couple of “mainstream” pieces in which we never went to Mars in the first place; in fact, rather than being just a straightforward collection of stories set on Robinson’s fictional Mars, it’s a tricky, elusive, postmodern grab bag of a book, whose closest relative in the genre is probably Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home —although if Robinson included recipes, or a cassette of flute music, I missed them (but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were there!). Although many of the “stories” are barely stories at all as we usually understand the term in the genre, the cumulative effect of the collection is powerful, and oddly moving. Speaking of Mars, Rainbow Mars, by Larry Niven (Tor), is an odd item, an omnibus of collection of Niven’s long-running series of stories about Svetz, the hapless time traveler, matched with a complete new novel, the eponymous Rainbow Mars, which takes Svetz to an alternate-world Mars for further adventures; I’ll mention it both here and in the novel section, since it’s both a collection and a novel wrapped up in one package.
Turning to fantasy, the late Robert A. Heinlein is not usually thought of as a fantasy writer (in spite of Glory Road, one of the major fantasy novels of the early 1960s, before Tolkien’s widespread popularity), but The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein, by Robert A. Heinlein (Tor), ought to be checked out as an eye-opener both by fantasy purists who’ve never read anything by Heinlein before and by hardcore Heinlein fans who’ve never read anything but his science fiction work; there’s good stuff here such as “Waldo” and “‘— And He Built a Crooked House’,” mixed with lightweight stuff such as “The Man who Traveled in Elephants” and “Our Fair City,” but note particularly “‘They —’” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” pioneering classics of the ultimate paranoia How-Do-You-Know-What-Is-Real?
story; today we’d say they were Dickian, but both were published before Phil Dick even started writing, and they’ve influenced almost all subsequent work in this mode, including recent movies like The Matrix. And although it’s really neither science fiction nor fantasy, as the terms are conventionally used, Avram Davidson fans will certainly want the mystery collection The Investigation of Avram Davidson (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff; these are not hardcore classical whodunits being rather of the ironic “biter bit” variety that in many cases might just as easily have fit into The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (where many of them did appear), but they display all of Davidson’s usual wit and offbeat erudition, and several of them (such as the wonderful “The Lord of Central Park”) have minor fantastic elements as well. As you can see, the big trade houses like Tor and Bantam Spectra are bringing out more collections these days, not only collections by big names such as Larry Niven and Robert A. Heinlein and Connie Willis, but, increasingly, even collections by middle-level names such as Bruce Sterling, John Barnes, and Kim Stanley Robinson. If you want collections by New Young Writers, though, for the most part, you still have to turn to small presses such Golden Gryphon Press and Meisha Merlin. (One of the most encouraging stories of the year is that Golden Gryphon Press, which could have died with its founder, Jim Turner, is going to continue under the stewardship of Turner’s brother Gary; in fact, under that stewardship, excellent collections by Tony Daniel and Neal Barrett, Jr., have already appeared — we’ll list the Barrett next year — and new collections by Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Paul Russo, and others, are already in the pipeline.) While small presses like NESFA Press, North Atlantic, Tachyon, and Haffner remain vital — and unrivaled by the trade publishers — for bringing collections of long-out-of-print work of historical importance back in a form where it can be accessed by modern readers.
Very few small-press titles, though, will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail order is still your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, MA 01701-0809 — $25 for The Compleat Boucher, by Anthony Boucher; Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL — $23.95 for The Dragons of Springplace, by Robert Reed and $24.95 for The Robot’s Twilight Companion, by Tony Daniel; Wildside Press, P.O. Box 45, Gillette, NJ 07933-0045 — $15 for A Safari of the Mind, by Mike Resnick; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701 — $30 for Baby Is Three: Volume VI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, by Theodore Sturgeon; Meisha Merlin Press, P.O. Box 7, Decatur, GA. 30031 — $16 for Sex and Violence in Zero-G, by Allen Steele; Tachyon Publications, PMB #139, 1459 18th Street, San Francisco, CA. 94107 — $17 plus $2.50 postage for Futures Past, by A. E. van Vogt; University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL. 33606—$24.95 plus $2.50 postage for Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories, by Rick Wilber; Alexander Publishing, 13243 Vanowen Ave, #5, North Hollywood, CA 91605 — $15.95 for Dragon’s Fin Soup, by S. P. Somtow; MP Books, P.O. Box 407, Nedlands, Western Australia 6909, Australia — $29.95 for Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling; Ticonderoga Publications, P.O.
Box 407, Nedlands, Western Australia 6009, Australia — $17.95 plus $5 shipping for The Lady of Situations, by Stephen Dedman and $19.99 for New Adventures in Sci-Fi, by Sean Williams; Cascade Mountain Publishing, 1652 NW Summit Dr., Bend, OR 97701 — $12.95 for Dakota Dreamin’, by Bill Johnson; Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48073-1239 — $32 plus $5 postage for The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume One: The Metal Men and Others and $32 plus $5 postage for The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Two: Wolves of Darkness; University Press of New England/Wesleyan, 23 South Main St., Hanover, NH 03755 — $16.95 plus $2.50 postage for Seven for the Apocalypse, by Kit Reed; Night Shade Books, 870 East El Camino Real, #133, Mountain View, CA 94040 — $16.95 for Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories, by John Shirley.
It was a moderately unexciting year overall in the reprint anthology field, although there were still a few good values here and there.
The best bets for your money in this category, as usual, were the various best-of-the-year anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 33 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), edited by Connie Willis; this year there was also a retrospective anthology of work by past winners of the SFWA Grand Master Award (see below). Science fiction is being covered by two best-of-the-year anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year’s Best SF series (HarperPrism), edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its fifth annual volume. (It would be inappropriate for me to review Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF, since it’s a direct competitor to this volume, but suffice it to say that the general critical consensus seems to be that in a field as large and diverse as science fiction, there’s more than enough room for two “best” anthologies every year; in fact, there’s usually not all that much overlap between my selections and Hartwell’s, which means that a greater spectrum of writers gets a chance to be showcased every year than would otherwise be the case.) If there was a new edition in a new best-of-the-year series concentrating on genre work of various sorts published in Australia, The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (HarperCollins Australia Voyager), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne, which was up to volume two last year, I didn’t see it. Once again, there were two best-of-the-year anthologies covering horror in 1999: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Caroll & Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to volume ten, and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Winding, this year up to its twelfth annual collection. In spite of the increasing popularity of the fantasy genre, fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Winding half of the Datlow/Winding anthology.
Turning to retrospective SF anthologies, books that provide a historical/critical overview of the evolution of the field, one of your best bets here is the above-mentioned anthology of work by writers who have won SFWA’s Grand Master Award, The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 1 (Tor), edited by Frederik Pohl, which
may be the most substantial single-volume SF reprint anthology of the year, containing classic work by Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, and Jack Williamson, much of which may be unavailable to (or even unknown to) modern generations of readers; two more volumes are to follow. Historic perspective of an interestingly quirky sort is provided by My Favorite Science Fiction Story (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, in which famous science fiction writers were asked to select their favorite science fiction story. The anthology features good work by Cordwainer Smith, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Howard Waldrop, Ward Moore, Gordon R. Dickson, Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, and others, plus interesting commentary from the selectors as to why they picked the story that they did. Some of the choices also shed light on the sources and inspiration for the selectors’s own work, something that’s suddenly very clear when you see Joe Haldeman select Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” as his favorite SF story (for an idea of what I mean, read Haldeman’s own story “Anniversary Project” after first reading the Pohl), or Connie Willis select Ward Moore’s “Lot,” or Harry Turtledove select Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chicken”; some of the choices are at first glance surprising, like Arthur C. Clarke selecting Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” but make perfect sense when you think about them, and give you an interesting new perspective from which to examine the selector’s work. The best work from the last few years of F&SF, including strong stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Maureen F. McHugh, Bruce Sterling, John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand, and others, is featured in The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Collection, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder (Tor). Noted without comment is The Good New Stuff (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by Gardner Dozois, a retrospective overview of the evolution of “adventure SF” from the ‘60s to the ’90s, a follow-up volume to last year’s The Good Old Stuff.
There were several interesting “regional” reprint anthologies this year. Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Damien Broderick (Tor), gives us an overview of the booming Australian SF scene, and features good work by George Turner, Greg Egan, Chris Lawson, Lucy Sussex, Stephen Dedman, Cherry Wilder, Sean Williams, Hal Colebatch, Damien Broderick himself, and others. Northern Suns, edited by David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant (Tor), showcasesSF writers from Canada, and features good work from Cory Doctorow, Eric Choi, Sally McBride, Jan Lars Jensen, Nalo Hopkinson, W. P. Kinsella, Karl Schroeder, Geoff Ryman, and others. If you can get only one of these, Centaurus is slightly stronger than Northern Suns, but you ought to get both if you can afford it, to get a feeling for what’s happening in worlds of SF writing outside the usual American/British axis. For a look at a really different world, where the featured writers will be unknown to much of the English-speaking genre audience, check out The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy, edited by Margaret Jull Costa and Annella McDermott (Dedalus).
Two interesting small-press items, reprint anthologies somewhere on the borderland between SF and horror, are Technohorror: Inventions in Terror and Bangs & Whimpers: Stories about the End of the World, both edited by James Frenkel (Roxbury Park/Lowell House). Technohorror features good reprint work by Harlan
Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Damon Knight, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Stephen King, and others (including an early Greg Egan story, from back when it looked as if he were going to turn out to be a horror writer instead of a hard-science writer), while Bangs & Whimpers (one of only two apocalyptic millenniumoriented books I can think of from this year, in SF, anyway, as opposed to the dozens that had been predicted) contains good reprints from Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Reed, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, James Tiptree, Jr., James Thurber, Isaac Asimov, and others.
Noted without comment are Future War, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace), Armageddons, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace), Isaac Asimov’s Valentines, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace), Isaac Asimov’s Werewolves, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace), and Isaac Asimov’s Solar System, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace).
Worth looking into in the reprint fantasy anthology market this year were The Mammoth Book of Arthurian Legends and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy II, both edited by Mike Ashley (Carroll & Graf).
Other than the above-mentioned “best” anthologies by Stephen Jones and Datlow and Windling, there didn’t seem to be a lot of reprint horror anthologies this year, but then again, I haven’t been following the horror field closely, so I might have missed them. One of the few I did see was 100 Hilarious Little Howlers, edited by Stephen Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble).
An associational anthology that many SF/fantasy fans might enjoy, one that features the work of familiar genre authors such as Stephen Baxter, Tom Holt, Liz Holliday, and Richard A. Lupoff, is Royal Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley (Robinson).
It was a solid, if unexceptional, year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, with many of the best bargains in the related art book field.
The single most substantial volume of the year, in fact, was a book that could be considered to be either a cultural history of the field or an art book, depending on how you squint at it (we’ll list it in both places), Frank M. Robinson’s monumental Science Fiction of the 20th Century (Collector’s Press). The Robinson book reproduces some of the most luminous (and most lurid) covers of the old pulp magazine era, thus making it one of the year’s best art books, but although those glorious pulp images speak well for themselves, Robinson’s discussion of the covers, setting them in their cultural context, is the icing on the cake, and functions as a shrewd and knowledgeable study of American pop culture in general, and science fiction in particular. Camille Bacon-Smith’s Science Fiction Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press) also offers a pop-culture perspective on science fiction, particularly on the interactions of science fiction and science fiction “fandom,” the several (only partially overlapping) subcultures of readers and enthusiasts — fans, originally from fanatic —that revolve (ostensibly, anyway) around the science fiction genre itself; but although there’s a large amount of useful information
here, and even some valuable insights, the author’s sloppiness with matters of fact (most of them easily researchable) and generally vague grasp of genre history diminishes the book’s value as a reference tool, although many members of the lay audience may find it entertaining and accessible.
There were also several drier, more academically oriented, reference books this year, probably more for the specialist than for the average reader, including: Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, edited by Neil Barron (Scarecrow Press); Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, by Russell Blackford, Van Ikin, and Sean McMullen (Greenwood Press); and The Fantasy Literature of England, by Colin Manlove (Macmillan UK). The extremely valuable research tool The Locus Index to Science Fiction (1984-1998), by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento, combined with the Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, by William G. Contento, is now available in CD form, from Locus Press for $45 — and if you have anything other than the most casual of interests in the SF field, this is an essential purchase that will pay for itself many times over in short order (myself, I find that there’s rarely a week that goes by when I don’t use it to look up something). It can be ordered on-line, at the Locus Online site, www.locusmag.com, and regular updates for it are available there as well. A more specialized, but also valuable, research tool, also in CD form, is the Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index (1890-1998), by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento, also available from Locus Press for $45.
A generalized book of genre criticism was Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality, by Gwyneth Jones (Liverpool University Press), while critical studies of individual writers included Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/ Science Fiction, by Jeanne Cortiel (Liverpool University Press), and The Road to Castle Mount: The Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg, by Edgar L. Chapman (Greenwood). Books about writers included George Turner: A Life, by Judith Raphael Buckrich (Melbourne University Press), Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan, by John Taliaferro (Scribner), and a charming, frank, and insightful autobiography by Brian W. Aldiss. The Twinkling of an Eye, or, My Life as an Englishman (St. Martin’s Press). Books of interviews with genre figures included Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction, by Eric Leif Davin (Prometheus), and The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana, by J. Neil Schulman (pulpless.com). Further on the edges of the field, there were also several critical studies of fairy tales, including When Dreams Come True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Traditions, by Jack Zipes (Routledge), The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives, by Sheldon Cashdan (Basic Books), and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, by Marina Warner (Farrar Straus Giroux).
Out on the edges of the field in a different direction are two reference books for places that don’t exist: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Harcourt Brace), and Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, by Brian Stableford (Simon & Schuster). Also out on the borderlands somewhere, perhaps on the edge of Art Book Land, is The Book of End Times, by John Clute
(HarperPrism), a collage of illustrations, quotations, and photographs dealing with the turning of the millennium and the end-of-the-world frenzy it’s been known to whip up.
Which edges us neatly into the art book field, which was fairly strong this year. I’ve already mentioned Frank M. Robinson’s Science Fiction of the 20th Century, which, if considered as an art book, would be right up there at the top of the category. As would three retrospective collections, Legacy: Selected Paintings and Drawings by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, by old master Frank Frazetta (Underwood), Transluminal: The Paintings of Jim Burns, by new(er) master Jim Burns (Paper Tiger), and Maxfield Parrish 1870 – 1966, by Maxfield Parrish (Abrams), a master not usually thought of as a genre artist at all, but one whose work has clearly had a deep and lasting impact on genre work, particularly fantasy landscape art. Last year, during his Locus Award acceptance speech, Arnie Fenner took me to task for referring to Spectrum 5 as “a sort of Best-of-the-Year series that compiles the year’s fantastic art,” but it’s hard to see any other description of the book that really fits (sorry, Arnie!); certainly it fits Spectrum 6: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, by Cathy and Arnie Fenner (Underwood) just as well as it fit Spectrum 5, and is what makes this valuable as an overview of — just as it says — the contemporary fantastic art field, and places it near the top of the art book category as well. This year, though, it has a worthy rival in the overview-of contemporary-fantastic-art category, Fantasy Art of the New Millennium. The Best in Fantasy and SF Art Worldwide, by Dick Jude (Voyager). Worth checking out as well is an overview of rarely seen art from what might just as well be another world, as alien as it is to the Western tradition, Spirit Country: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art, compiled by Jennifer Isaacs (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).
Also worthwhile in this category were The Book of Sea Monsters, by Bob Eggleton (Paper Tiger); Soft As Steel, The Art of Julie Bell, by Julie Bell (Paper Tiger); and The World of Michael Parkes, by Michael Parkes (Steltman).
There were a fair number of general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year. Leading the list for most genre readers would probably be three nonfiction titles by well-known genre writers: Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays 1934 – 1998, by Arthur C. Clarke (St. Martin’s Press), which is just what it says it is; Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, by Gregory Benford (Avon Eos), also self-explanatory; and Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like a Scientist and Write Science Fiction, by Charles Sheffield (Baen), an odd but effective cross between science essays and writing-advice articles by a scientist who is also an SF writer (as are all three of these authors, by the way).
Moving a bit further afield, we have a new book from one of my favorites, The Knowledge Web: From Electronic Agents to Stonehenge and Back — and Other Journeys Through Knowledge, by James Burke (Simon & Schuster). Anyone who has read Burke’s famous Connections, or seen any of the TV versions of Burke’s work, knows what they’re in for here — bits of obscure knowledge of the history of technology and surprising insights into ways in which they relate and interact, all flavored with Burke’s wry, antic humor — and Burke doesn’t disappoint. Assuming continued interest in alternate history and in space travel on the part of SF fans
(a fairly safe bet), then many may be intrigued by What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Crowley (Putnam), and Entering Space: Creating a Space-Faring Civilization, by Robert Zubrin (Putnam). And books such as The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene (W. W. Norton & Co.), and At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kauffman (Oxford University Press), may help you keep up with some of the more extreme mind-bending conceptualization done by today’s cutting-edge hard science writers, such as Greg Egan or Brian Stableford or Alastair Reynolds.
There are no less than two different biographies of the late Carl Sagan out this year: Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone (Henry Holt), and Carl Sagan: A Life, by Kery Davidson (Wiley), either or both of which may be of interest to genre readers, considering Sagan’s status as perhaps the most prominent science popularizer of the last half of the twentieth century. And moving a bit further out on the borderlands, but still of interest to many genre readers, I’m willing to bet, is Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel (Walker & Co.).
There may have been more genre movies released in 1999 than at any other time in history, and they ran the full spectrum from immense box-office blockbuster to immense box-office bomb, and from quiet little “serious” films to Big, Loud, and Dumb spectaculars; there were even a few movies that managed to do tremendously well at the box office and be of high artistic quality at the same time. I guess the millennium really must be at hand!
The most talked-about genre movie of the year was certainly Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace, which had the unhappy fate of being at the same time the most anticipated and the most disappointing movie of the year. Not that it’s easy to call a movie that made as much money as The Phantom Menace did a “failure” — not while expecting anyone to keep a straight face, anyway. The movie made tons and tons of money, especially in the overseas market, and, last time I looked, had settled into the title of “highest-grossing movie of all time.” (Although sales of Star Wars books and spin-off products were nowhere near as high as anticipated, particularly in Britain, where they tanked in great numbers … so perhaps even this huge cash cow ultimately didn’t produce quite as much “milk” as they’d been counting on.) Artistically, however, although it may not have been a total failure, it certainly wasn’t anywhere near the success that most Star Wars fans had hoped that it would be. After months of intense hype, and a promotional campaign that whipped fans up into a frenzy of anticipation, with some dedicated individuals waiting outside in all weather for weeks to buy advance tickets, I think that most people, even many of the hardcore Star Wars fans, walked away from the movie disappointed, to one extent or another — which may make it difficult to whip up anywhere near the same level of anticipation again for Episode Two. (One subjective but perhaps telling point: when I saw the original Star Wars for the first time, in 1977, the audience leaped to their feet at the end, cheering, and
gave the movie a spontaneous standing ovation. When I saw The Phantom Menace, there was no such outburst at the end; instead, the fans filed quietly out of the theater, looking subdued, pensive, and, yes, disappointed. Not the way Lucas wanted them to react, I’m sure!)
There was still a lot to admire in The Phantom Menace, including some spectacular special effects, some wonderfully evocative sets, costuming, and set dressing, and a couple of well-staged fight scenes. Even some of the performances weren’t bad, with Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor doing the best they could with the limited material they had to work with; Neeson in particular did a good enough job of bringing a sense of quiet strength and gravitas to his role as Qui-Gon Jinn, a Jedi knight and mentor to the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor), that you regret the fact that he gets toasted by the villain, Darth Maul, and so won’t make it into episode two. However, the writing is awful (particularly the dialogue, which is terrible even by Star Wars standards), the plot is muddled, illogical, uninvolving, and inconsistent (full of stuff that was obviously added at the last moment, without lots of thought about its implications, that retroactively invalidates everything in the “first” three movies), the characterization is minimal even for an action film (I don’t think Darth Maul gets four lines of dialogue in the whole movie, and his motivations are completely unexplained, which makes him curiously uninvolving as a villain; there’s not nearly enough time spent on the relationship between Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, either), and some of the actors are just awful (although you could charitably ascribe this to lack of effective direction, If you’re so inclined). The kid, for instance, Anakin Sywalker, the pivotal character upon whom the whole plot revolves, and who is called upon to carry whole sections of the film on his puny little shoulders, is as waxen and lifeless as a department-store dummy (a major-league mistake making him a little kid, anyway, in my opinion; a lot of the tropes that jar and don’t make sense when applied to a six-year-old would play much better with a teenager, someone about the same age that Luke was in the original Star Wars). Which brings us to Jar Jar Binks, the “comic relief” character who makes large stretches of this film teethgrittingly unpleasant to sit through, and who is probably the most widely and intensely despised fictional character of the year, if not the decade, inspiring dozens of anti-Jar Jar sites to spring up on the Internet almost overnight. Jar Jar has also been widely attacked as a vicious racial caricature, and while I think that this was probably unconscious rather than deliberate on the part of the film makers, it is hard to watch him in action for long without being uneasily reminded of Stepin Fetchit … .
Lucas has amassed a great deal of goodwill and positive emotional capital over the years with the Star Wars movies and books — let’s hope he hasn’t spent too much of it with The Phantom Empire to successfully lure customers back into the theater for episode two. Let’s also hope that episode two is a better movie as a movie than was episode one; there are some failings that special effects alone can’t adequately compensate for, no matter how snazzy they are. Perhaps he’d be better off getting his buddy Steven Spielberg (who, no matter what you think of him, would never make the kind of elementary storytelling and movie-craft mistakes
that Lucas makes here) to direct the next one, and settle for the role of producer instead.
The Phantom Menace may have been the box-office champ, but there were other movies that sold phenomenal numbers of tickets as well, and which may actually have been effectively more profitable than it was, considering how overwhelmingly less expensive they were to make. This is especially true in the case of the box-office blockbuster (and cultural phenomenon) The Blair Witch Project, which managed to rake in multiple millions in spite of a production budget of merely $30,000 (practically no budget at all, even by the most modest Hollywood standards!). I must admit that my first thought on seeing the movie was, How did they manage to even spend as much as $30,000 on this? Aside from some videotape equipment, there’s nothing visible on-screen that costs more than a couple of hundred bucks, no sets, no costuming that couldn’t have come off the rack at Kmart, and effectively no actors other than the three young leads, all unknowns. In fact, the movie is perfectly convincing as an amateur film made out in the woods somewhere by a trio of broke and not particularly talented student filmmakers. But the producers of The Blair Witch Project have shrewdly turned necessity into an advantage; because they had no special-effects budget, they never show us whatever it is that’s supposed to be menacing this tentful of unhappy campers out in the woods, allowing the imaginations of the audience to supply horrors far more frightening than anything that could be explicitly shown on the screen, and thus scaring the crap out of audiences who yawned through big-budget, special-effects-heavy, blood-spattered gorefests such as The Haunting. (The other key to the success of The Blair Witch Project is a very clever postmodern campaign that suggested that all this is “real,” that this really is footage found in a film can in the woods after the student filmmakers you see on-screen disappeared, never to be seen again — suggested this so effectively, including even a fake “documentary” about the “case” of the missing filmmakers that appeared on A&E, that there are some people unwilling to give up their emotional investment of belief even now, and who will still passionately insist that the whole thing is “real” and “actually happened.” In fact, there are still Internet sites devoted to defending just this proposition! Another unexpected mega-hit was The Sixth Sense, which almost all the critics hated (including one major review that made it embarrassingly clear in retrospect that the critic had walked out at some point in the middle of the movie, if he’d ever actually gone in the first place), but which survived and prospered almost entirely on word of mouth, eventually building a huge audience. Which it deserved. The Sixth Sense was that rare animal, an intelligent and subtly underplayed supernatural horror movie; I went to the theater expecting to hate it, and instead walked away thinking that it was one of the best movies of the year. The writing is terrific here, tight and sharp, as is the intricate plotting, which works with the precision of a Swiss watch. The acting is also excellent; Bruce Willis — proving once again that he really can act if you force him to — is very good, but the boy, Haley Joel Osment, walks away with the movie, giving one of the best performances by a child actor that I’ve ever seen, anywhere; on my way out through the parking lot, I kept thinking, Boy, if they’d gotten that
kid to play Anakin Skywalker, he might have saved the movie! Another relatively “quiet” supernatural movie, and another one that raked in millions, was The Green Mile, which now joins that small but distinguished group — along with Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption —of movies made from Stephen King books that are actually worth watching.
Another box-office champ was The Matrix, which borrowed cyberpunk tropes from a dozen previous books and movies and stylishly reinvented them for the late ’90s, but whose wonderful, state-of-the-art special effects and glossy production values couldn’t disguise the fact that it was conceptually and spiritually empty at heart, more an arcade game or a live-action anime than a “real” movie, raising intriguing questions that it then didn’t bother to face or answer, settling instead for an extended shoot-everything-in-sight climax that had the teenage boys jumping and bopping in their seats, but which sent much of the rest of the audience home unsatisfied (and which, with its man-in-long-black-trenchcoat-walking-around-blasting-everything-in front-of-him imagery, plays somewhat creepily in retrospect after the Columbine High School massacre). Also slick but essentially calorie free (although also a big moneymaker) was The Mummy, which had great special effects, but which somehow, in spite of all the computer-generated gruesomeness and ambulatory rotting corpses, managed not to be even as scary as the 1932 original, whose entire special-effects budget consisted of some bandages to wrap Boris Karloff up in; nobody seems to know how to pace either a scary movie or a thriller anymore, and only the Blair Witch people seem to have figured out that less is usually more as far as scaring the audience is concerned. (To be fair, The Mummy doesn’t take itself terribly seriously, a relief after something like The Matrix, and is full of nice tongue-in-check stuff, admirably handled by the affable Brendan Fraser.) In spite of time-travel motifs, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, can’t really be described as an SF movie, but it’s certainly a fantasy of some sort, or at least a spoof of that sort of fantasy, and was immensely popular.
Animated movies of one sort or another also scored big this year, with Toy Story 2, Tarzan, South Park; Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and the part-live-action, part-animated Stuart Little all finishing near the top of the money-earning charts. (Somewhat surprisingly, the South Park movie also turned out to be one of the most tuneful and enjoyable movie musicals in years, while functioning at the same time as a devastating and spot-on satire of movie musicals, especially Disney animated musicals; don’t expect to hear most of the incredibly foul-mouthed songs on the radio, though, no matter how catchy they are! It’s a lucky break for the Academy that it was “Blame Canada” that got nominated for an Oscar for best song, and not “Uncle Fucka.”)
Not all of 1999’s genre movies were big moneymakers, of course; not by any means. Some of them bombed pretty thoroughly, and the higher the movie’s budget was, the more grandiose the producer’s expectations, the longer and harder it had to fall. Wild Wild West, a big-budget remake of the campy old TV show that was expected to do big business, tanked big-time instead, and was probably the most critically savaged movie of the year as well; not even the charismatic Will Smith could save this one, although he at least managed to salvage a hit song (from the sound track) out of the wreckage. Other big-budget flops this year included
the above-mentioned The Haunting, Inspector Gadget, My Favorite Martian, The House on Haunted Hill, End of Days, Deep Blue Sea, Universal Soldier: The Return, Dogma, Virus, Stigmata, The Muse, Mystery Men, and Sleepy Hollow (which made the odd choice of reinventing Washington Irving’s charming little fable as a stylishly bleak splatterpunk movie). A fairly high-end movie called The Astronaut’s Wife was announced, but if it ever played through Philadelphia, it must have done so fast, probably not a good sign. Caught somewhere between the top and the bottom of this food chain were movies that were probably mildly successful commercially, but not that successful, not even close to battling in the same league as The Phantom Menace and The Matrix and Stuart Little; how pleased the producers were with their track records probably depended on how much money they’d invested in them in the first place. My guess is that the producers were probably disappointed with the relatively modest success of the year’s three other cyberpunk and/or virtual-reality movies, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, and New Rose Hotel, all of which have enthusiastic boosters (particularly The Thirteenth Floor), but which were certainly overshadowed by the immense commercial success of The Matrix, and mostly critically ignored, or — unfairly — dismissed in a “been there, done that” fashion as just another Matrix; I don’t think any of them actually dogged out, but certainly none of them found the kind real mass audience they were supposed to find, either. Nor did The 13th Warrior, which presented Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (in many ways as much a dry scholarly joke as a novel) as a sort of sword-and-sorcery-with-Vikings movie. Or The Bicentennial Man, which one friend described as “a robot Mrs. Doubtfire,” and which most reviewers criticized for being too long, too slow, and too syrupy; perhaps it should have stuck closer to the source material. On the other hand, the producers of lower-budget, lower-expectation films that became modest sleeper hits such as GalaxyQuest, a sharp and funny satire of media SF and of Star Trek in particular, and Blast from the Past, a low-brow but good-natured comedy about a man encountering modern society for the first time after growing up locked in a bomb shelter, perfectly cast with Brendan Fraser to bring a likable, gee-whiz, naive-but-not-stupid quality to a role that might just as well be Casper Hauser, or a Man from Mars — were probably more satisfied with how many tickets they moved. I’m not sure how Muppets in Space and The Muse did, and I missed both of them, but they don’t seem to have set any sales records either.
And, of course, there are other ways to measure success than just by how well something did at the box office. The surreal Being John Malkovich, for instance, was pretty far down the highest-grossing list, but it was a succès d’estime (it showed up on most critic’s lists of the year’s best movies), as was the stylish and often grisly (far more violent than the average animated movie) Japanese animated production, Princess Mononoke. One of the best movies of the year didn’t make a dime, as far as I can see, and was pulled out of the theaters only a week or so into a disastrous theatrical first run — nevertheless. The Iron Giant is the kind of wonderful “family” entertainment that Disney animated movies promise to deliver, but (with recent exceptions such as Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and A Bug’s Life) rarely ever do, with the added bonus of being intelligent, witty, thought provoking, and even at times suspenseful, as well as warmhearted, with a much lower maudlin quotient, and
no damn songs. In short, The Iron Giant is one of the best animated movies I’ve ever seen, as delightful for adults as for children, and I’d recommend going out and buying the videotape or CD, since it’s long banished from theaters, never to return. Another warmhearted and very well-crafted “small” movie is October Sky, which isn’t technically a genre film at all, but which will certainly appeal to many genre fans with its gritty yet moving portrait (based on a true story) of a poor kid who uses model-rocket making as his gateway out of a Dickensian coal town and ultimately into a job in the space program. Even better than these two fine movies, though, is a movie that I missed on first release a couple of years back (I don’t think that it ever passed through Philadelphia theaters at all), The Whole Wide World; I must admit that the idea of a movie based on the eccentric life of pulp fantasy writer Robert E. Howard sounded like an unlikely candidate for excellence to me, but, against all odds, The Whole Wide World turns out to be a terrific film, moving and absorbing (largely because of a hypnotically intense performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard), and certainly the best movie ever made about a genre writer, by a large margin; go out and rent this one, too (if you can even find it at the rental store; many places don’t carry it).
There are lots more genre movies coming up on the horizon for 2000, some of which sound promising, some of which sound like they’re going to be Just Awful; impossible to sort out at this distance which of them are going to be the Big Box-office Blockbusters and which the flops, although it sounds like expectations are being built moderately high for the Val Kilmer Mars-exploration movie. And, of course, oceans of ink (or Internet phosphors, anyway) are already being spilled speculating about how the forthcoming live-action movie version of Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings is going to turn out, and whether Star Wars, Episode Two is going to be better than Episode One (and who is going to be cast to play the teenage Anakin Skywalker, a role for which every conceivable actor except possibly Daffy Duck has been suggested), although neither of those are going to show up next year, or probably even the year after. Oddly, there’s no new Star Trek movie in production, the producers reportedly not wanting to put something out that would have to compete with the new Star Wars movies. Considering at what a low ebb the whole Star Trek franchise seems to be at the moment, I think this may be a mistake (out of sight, out of mind, and then suddenly you’re Old News, and they don’t let you make a new feature film when you finally decide that you want to) — but then, they don’t pay me for advice.
SF and fantasy on television seemed to be in a chaotic, transitional state this year, with most of the former big shows gone, or at least obviously nearing the end of their runs. Dueling cult favorites Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have both gone off the air, as have Hercules and Highlander, and shows such as The X-Files and Star Trek: Voyager are obviously (and even admittedly) winding down, with maybe another year left ahead of them, or maybe not.
The departure of all these high-profile shows has obviously left a power vacuum, which producers are scrambling to fill. So far, a Babylon 5 spin-off and an X-Files spin-off (as well as several strongly imitative X-Files clones by other hands) have
proved unsuccessful, and have already been pulled off the airways, and the oncemighty Star Trek franchise seems to be at its lowest ebb in years, reduced to only the least popular (even among most Star Trek fans) of its shows, with even it probably on the way out (and with rumors flying that several potential new series suggested to replace it have been rejected by the network), and not even a new theatrical movie anywhere on the horizon (rumors that the studio is reluctant to commit to one have also been flying).
Some show is going to rush in to fill this vacuum, becoming the new cult favorite, and gaining huge audiences. The only question is, which?
So far, it looks to me as if Farscape might have the fast track. A reasonably intelligent (for a TV space opera) show that is played with some brio and panache (although I find it hard to get past the fact that all the aliens look suspiciously like Grover from Sesame Street; if you can deal with half the cast being Muppets without losing your willing suspension of disbelief, you’ll respond better to the show than I’ve been able to), Farscape has clearly been building a loyal audience. Whether it can build enough of an audience to become ‘the new Babylon 5,’ as I’ve heard it touted in some circles, I don’t know — but it seems to me that Farscape has the best chance of achieving this status of any of the hopeful new pack of genre shows.
The only show that looks like it might be a serious competitor, on the “sci-fi” end of the television spectrum anyway, is Cleopatra 2525, the replacement for Hercules, which has been picking up strong ratings in its time slot. A couple of years ago, I referred to shows such as Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as “Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt” shows; well, along with the lame Canadian show Lexx (although to a lesser degree than Lexx, which is really dumb, to a jawdropping degree), Cleopatra 2525 might be thought of as a “Sci-fi-jiggle show,” since it seems mainly devoted to coming up with moderately implausible reasons for having scantily dressed women running around and shooting things (in Lexx, the scantily dressed woman doesn’t even usually get to shoot stuff, although there’s a great deal of high-school level sexual innuendo, served up with much nudgenudge winking and leering). More intelligent, and actually less cartoonish in spite of being an animated series, is Futurama, a new comedy, set in the future, from the creators of The Simpsons (which itself is still on, and still popular, after all these years, although no longer quite the Cult Favorite it once was). Another new show, Now and Again, is sort of a cross between The Six-Million Dollar Man and Universal Soldier, although it seems to be running low on plot twists already. Sliders finally died completely, to no one’s great regret. Roswell is a sort of soapopera-with-UFO-aliens show, while First Wave is The Fugitive with UFO aliens, more or less. Third Rock from the Sun is a comedy with aliens, although of a more benign sort, Mork & Mindy/Alf-ish types rather than the sinister big-eyed analprobing Earth-conquering variety. Can a game show with UFO aliens be far behind? Probably someone has one on the drawing board even as I type this. (Who Wants to Be Abducted by an Alien Millionaire? perhaps.)
Meanwhile, over on the fantasy end of the television spectrum, the above-mentioned Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are still going strong. Buffy has launched a successful spin-off show, Angel, although the Highlander
spin-off, Highlander: The Raven, may have died; at least I haven’t seen it around for a while. Several other pop-supernatural shows seem to have achieved one degree or another of success, such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Charmed, GvsE, and a plethora of Angels-among-Us shows; there’s even an actual daytime soap opera, Passions, in which most of the characters are witches! The Drew Carey Show often breaks triumphantly into the surreal, with the whole cast suddenly breaking into a song-and-dance number in the middle of a scene, or Daffy Duck coming to apply for a job, but it’s perhaps stretching things too far to list it as a fantasy show, in spite of all that. South Park is still on, still uses a lot of fantastic tropes, and is still occasionally funny; the movie was better, though (and by far the best Satan-coming-to-Earth-to-bring-about-the-end-of-the-world movie of the year, in a year that saw several of them, some with budgets as large as the GNP of small Third-World nations).
All in all, it still doesn’t seem to me like there’s all that much really worth watching on television, as far as genre shows are concerned. Put on The History Channel or A&E or the Discovery Channel instead. Or, better still, turn the set off altogether, and read a book.
The 57th World Science Fiction Convention, Aussiecon Three, was held in Melbourne, Australia, from September 2 – 5, 1999. The third worldcon to be held in Australia, Aussiecon Three drew an estimated attendance of 1,872, the smallest worldcon since 1985, the last time that worldcon was held in Australia. The 1999 Hugo Awards, presented at Aussiecon Three, were: Best Novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis; Best Novella, “Oceanic,” by Greg Egan; Best Novelette, “Taklamakan,” by Bruce Sterling; Best Short Story, “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” by Michael Swanwick; Best Related Book, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, by Thomas M. Disch; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation, The Truman Show; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Ansible, edited by Dave Langford; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Ian Gunn; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Nalo Hopkinson.
The 1998 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Marriott City Center Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 1, 1999, were: Best Novel, Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman; Best Novella, “Reading the Bones,” by Sheila Finch; Best Novelette, “Lost Girls,” by Jane Yolen; Best Short Story, “Thirteen Ways to Water,” by Bruce Holland Rogers; plus an Author Emeritus award to Philip Klass, the Ray Bradbury Award for Dramatic Screenwriting to J. Michael Straczynski, and a Grand Master Award to Hal Clement.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Fifth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 4 – 7, 1999, were: Best Novel, The Antelope Wife, by Louise Erdrich; Best Novella, “The Summer Isles,” by Ian R. MacLeod; Best Short Fiction, “The Specialist’s Hat,” by Kelly Link; Best Collection, Black Glass, by Karen Joy Fowler; Best Anthology, Dreaming Down-Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb; Best Artist, Charles Vess;
Special Award (Professional), to Jim Turner, for Golden Gryphon Press; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Richard Chizmar, for Cemetery Dance Publications; plus a Life Achievement Award to Hugh B. Cave.
The 1999 Bram Stoker Award, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California on June 5, 1999, were: Best Novel, Bag of Bones, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, Dawn Song, by Michael Marano; Best Collection, Black Butterflies, by John Shirley; Best Long Fiction, “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” by Peter Straub; Best Short Story, “The Dead Boy at Your Window,” by Bruce Holland Rogers; Nonfiction, DarkEcho Newsletter Volume 5 #1 – 50, edited by Paula Guran; Best Anthology, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg; Best Screenplay, Gods and Monsters, by Bill Condon and Dark City, by Alex Proyas (tie); Best Work for Young Readers, “Bigger Than Death,” by Nancy Etchemendy; plus a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Corman and Ramsey Campbell.
The 1998 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Brute Orbits, by George Zebrowski.
The 1998 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang.
The 1998 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to 253: The Print Remix, by Geoff Ryman, with a Special Citation to Lost Pages, by Paul Di Filippo.
The 1998 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan.
The 1997 James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award was won by “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation,” by Raphael Carter.