THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF

BEST NEW

SCIENCE FICTION

Also available

The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction, vol. 2

The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics

The Mammoth Book of Best of the Best New SF

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga 3

The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21

The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics

The Mammoth Book of Book of Bikers

The Mammoth Book of Boys’ Own Stuff

The Mammoth Book of Brain Teasers

The Mammoth Book of Brain Workouts

The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes

The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

The Mammoth Book of Crime Comics

The Mammoth Book of The Deep

The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Fast Puzzles

The Mammoth Book of Funniest Cartoons of All Time

The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions

The Mammoth Book of Hard Men

The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: In Britain

The Mammoth Book of Illustrated True Crime

The Mammoth Book of Inside the Elite Forces

The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of King Arthur

The Mammoth Book of Limericks

The Mammoth Book of Martial Arts

The Mammoth Book of Men O’War

The Mammoth Book of Modern Battles

The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

The Mammoth Book of Monsters

The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters

The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes

The Mammoth Book of New Terror

The Mammoth Book of On the Edge

The Mammoth Book of On the Road

The Mammoth Book of Pirates

The Mammoth Book of Poker

The Mammoth Book of Prophecies

The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels

The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales

The Mammoth Book of Tattoos

The Mammoth Book of The Beatles

The Mammoth Book of The Mafia

The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

The Mammoth Book of True War Stories

The Mammoth Book of Twenties Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Wild Journeys

The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics

THE MAMMOTH BOOK
OF BEST NEW
SCIENCE FICTION

22nd Annual Collection

Edited by
GARDNER DOZOIS

ROBINSON

London

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the USA by St Martin’s Press 2009

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN 978-1-84529-930-9

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following materials:

“Boojum,” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette. Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette. First published in Fast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

“The Six Directions of Space,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 2008 by Alastair Reynolds. First published in Galactic Empires (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Gardner Dozois. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Shining Armour,” by Dominic Green. Copyright © 2008 by Dominic Green. First published in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume Two (Solaris), edited by George Mann. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Evil Robot Monkey,” by Mary Robinette Kowal. Copyright © 2008 by Mary Robinette Kowal. First published in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume Two (Solaris), edited by George Mann. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black,” by Jay Lake. Copyright © 2008 by Jay Lake. First published electronically online in Clarkesworld, March 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Political Prisoner,” by Charles Coleman Finlay. Copyright © 2008 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Special Economics,” by Maureen F. McHugh. Copyright © 2008 by Maureen McHugh. First published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Del Rey), edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Voyage Out,” by Gwyneth Jones. Copyright © 2008 by Gwyneth Jones. First published in Periphery: Exotic Lesbian Futures (Lethe Press), edited by Lynne Jamneck. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm,” by Daryl Gregory. Copyright © 2008 by Daryl Gregory. First published in Eclipse Two (Night Shade), edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Acknowledgments

Summation: 2008

TURING’S APPLES• Stephen Baxter

FROM BABEL’S FALL’N GLORY WE FLED • Michael Swanwick

THE GAMBLER • Paolo Bacigalupi

BOOJUM • Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE • Alastair Reynolds

N-WORDS • Ted Kosmatka

AN ELIGIBLE BOY • Ian McDonald

SHINING ARMOUR • Dominic Green

THE HERO • Karl Schroeder

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY • Mary Robinette Kowal

FIVE THRILLERS • Robert Reed

THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK • Jay Lake

INCOMERS • Paul J. McAuley

CRYSTAL NIGHTS • Greg Egan

THE EGG MAN • Mary Rosenblum

HIS MASTER’S VOICE • Hannu Rajaniemi

THE POLITICAL PRISONER • Charles Coleman Finlay

BALANCING ACCOUNTS • James L. Cambias

SPECIAL ECONOMICS • Maureen F. McHugh

DAYS OF WONDER • Geoff Ryman

CITY OF THE DEAD • Paul McAuley

THE VOYAGE OUT • Gwyneth Jones

THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM •Daryl Gregory

G-MEN • Kristine Kathryn Rusch

THE ERDMANN NEXUS • Nancy Kress

OLD FRIENDS • Garth Nix

THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY • James Alan Gardner

LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER’S MOONS’ BLUES •Gord Sellar

BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DOWN • Aliette de Bodard

THE TEAR • Ian McDonald

HONORABLE MENTIONS: 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Jonathan Strahan, Gordon Van Gelder, Ellen Datlow, Peter Crowther, Nicolas Gevers, Jack Dann, Mark Pontin, William Shaffer, Ian Whates, Mike Resnick, Andy Cox, Sean Wallace, Robert Wexler, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Torie Atkinson, Jed Hartman, Eric T. Reynolds, George Mann, Jennifer Brehl, Peter Tennant, Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, John Joseph Adams, Wendy S. Delmater, Rich Horton, Mark R. Kelly, Andrew Wilson, Damien Broderick, Gary Turner, Lou Anders, Cory Doctorow, Patrick Swenson, Bridget McKenna, Marti McKenna, Jay Lake, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Alastair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick, Stephen Baxter, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley, Ted Kosmatka, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Reed, Vandana Singh, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Daryl Gregory, James Alan Gardner, Maureen McHugh, L. Timmel Duchamp, Walter Jon Williams, Jeff VanderMeer, Gwyneth Jones, Dominic Green, William Sanders, Lawrence Watt-Evans, David D. Levine, Liz Williams, Geoff Ryman, Paul Brazier, Charles Coleman Finlay, Gord Sellar, Steven Utley, James L. Cambias, Garth Nix, David Hartwell, Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Allison, Shawna McCarthy, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, John Klima, John O’Neill, Rodger Turner, Tyree Campbell, Stuart Mayne, John Kenny, Edmund Schubert, Tehani Wessely, Tehani Croft, Karl Johanson, Sally Beasley, Connor Cochran, Tony Lee, Joe Vas, John Pickrell, Ian Redman, Anne Zanoni, Kaolin Fire, Ralph Benko, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Wood, David Moles, Mike Allen, Jason Sizemore, Karl Johanson, Sue Miller, David Lee Summers, Christopher M. Cevasco, Tyree Campbell, Andrew Hook, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Mark Watson, Sarah Lumnah, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P. O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661. $60 in the United States for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders 510-339-9198) was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the summation; Locus Online (locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source.

SUMMATION: 2007

The publishing world proved not to be immune to the deepening recession, and the genre suffered several major losses in 2008. About the best spin that can be put on it is to say that things could have been worse. (And things may yet still get worse, of course. The rumoured possible bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain, which has been buzzed about for months now, would, if it happens, likely have an adverse effect on many publishers.)

Much of 2008’s bad news was delivered on 3 December, what has come to be called Black Wednesday in the publishing industry, when Random House announced major restructuring and layoffs, making Bantam Dell part of Random House instead of an independent operation; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt saw resignations and firings even at the highest levels of the company (and caused a furore by announcing a “buying freeze” on new titles); and Simon & Schuster also announced significant staff cuts. Earlier, many people had been let go by Doubleday, and later there were huge layoffs at Macmillan, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and elsewhere. Random House, the largest publisher in the United States, was the most strongly affected, undergoing sweeping changes, with many divisions being consolidated. The Random House Publishing Group swallowed the adult imprints of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, including Bantam Spectra and Del Rey. The Knopf Publishing Group will absorb Doubleday as well as imprint Nan A. Talese. Senior Bantam Spectra editor Juliet Ulman was let go, as was Bantam Dell publisher Irwyn Applebaum and Doubleday publisher Steve Rubin; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publisher and senior vice-president Rebecca Saletan resigned and executive editor Ann Patty was fired; Simon & Schuster Children’s president Rick Richter and senior vice-president and publisher Rubin Pfeffer; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux lost publisher Linda Rosenberg, the heads of production and sub rights, a senior editor, and several assistants---and scores of people in lesser positions lost their jobs throughout the industry. The slaughter continued into the early months of 2009, with Del Rey editor Liz Scheier and Ballantine editor Anika Streitfeld being fired, along with Pantheon Books publisher Janice Goldklang.

German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, which had bought BookSpan, publisher of numerous book clubs, including the Science Fiction Book Club, just last year, turned around and sold their Direct Group North America in 2008, including BookSpan, to private investment firm Najafi Companies. What effect this will ultimately have on the Science Fiction Book Club is as yet uncertain, although at the moment they seem to be continuing to function pretty much as normal. Small press Wheatland Press went on “hiatus”, usually a bad sign, as far as issuing new titles is concerned, and may or may not be back, although they’re continuing to make already-released titles available for order. Several other small presses are rumoured to be teetering on the edge (while others seem to be doing okay).

Horrendous as all this is, it could have been worse. It was possible to see much of the restructuring of Random House coming a year or so back, even before the economic downturn had really taken hold, as a result of corporate mergers, and to date the party line is that Del Rey and Spectra will be kept as separate imprints. Most of the major SF lines are still in business, and a few, like the Hachette Book Group, which includes Orbit, even registered modest gains.

Of course, as the recession continues to deepen, there may be – and probably will be – lots of hard times left ahead.

Historically, books, magazines, and movies do well during recessions, as hard economic times make people search for cheap entertainment to distract themselves from their financial woes. The question for this particular recession is, Do books, magazines, and movies qualify as “cheap” entertainment anymore? These days, many hardcover books are in the $25 to $30 range, even a mass-market paperback can cost eight bucks, and in many places a single movie ticket can cost over $13 (for a family of five, once you throw in the eight-bucks-a-shot boxes of stale popcorn, you’re edging perilously close to having had to spend $100 to go to the movies). Even adjusting for inflation, it seems to me that this doesn’t really qualify as “cheap”. Ironically, the one form of entertainment in the genre that is still reasonably cheap, the digest-sized SF magazines, are being put out of business because they can no longer easily reach the customers; most people, even most regular SF readers, may go for years without ever laying eyes on an SF magazine, many don’t even know they exist, and even those who do may not be able to find one even if they go to a newsstand specifically searching for it. Perhaps the Kindle and the iPod and other similar text readers (and there are new and improved generations of them coming along all the time) will save the magazines by making them easily accessible to readers once again.

Considering the problems that have lately plagued Borders and other brick-and-mortar bookstores, they may save the publishing industry too, if anything can. Certainly everything in the publishing world is going to look very different ten years from now, and in twenty years it may be completely unrecognizable. Even today, many people are as likely or more likely to read a book on their iPod while commuting to work as they are to walk into a bookstore and buy a book. It’s worth noting that online bookseller Amazon was one of the very few businesses in the entire country to actually turn a profit in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The print magazines had a good year creatively, in terms of the quality of the material published, although circulation continued its slow decline. Asimov’s and Analog changed their trim size, getting larger although dropping pages, losing about 4,000 words’ worth of content in the process, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction changed from their decades-long monthly format to a bi-monthly format of larger but fewer issues, losing about 10 per cent of their overall content in the process. Opinion among industry insiders was divided as to whether these were sensible money-saving measures that will help the magazines survive or bad ideas, risky last-ditch attempts to save the magazines that could backfire; time will tell, I guess. With another big postal hike looming on the horizon in 2009, rising printing costs, and some major magazine distributors (including two of the nation’s biggest) beginning to charge a seven-cent-per-copy surcharge for all the magazines they distribute, a surcharge many magazines just can’t afford, things are looking precarious, and if the cost-cutting moves that Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF are taking turn out to be ineffective in offsetting rising costs, all of these magazines could be in serious trouble. (Just as I was finishing work on this Summation, word came in that Anderson News, the huge magazine wholesaler and distributor who had been one of the distributors demanding a seven-cent-per-copy surcharge for every copy of the magazines they handle had been forced to suspend operations because many publishers had balked at paying the surcharge and stopped shipping them product. The CEO there says that the company is working “towards an amicable solution” with the publishers, and it remains to be seen how this situation will ultimately play out.)

Realms of Fantasy magazine threw in the towel early in 2009, citing disastrously plummeting newsstand sales (although the declining advertising revenue due to the recession – ROF was always heavily dependent on advertising – may also have been a factor). The magazine would die after the April 2009 issue, a sad loss to the field.

The good news, such as it is, for the so-called Big Three magazines is that sales were nearly flat this year, with only minuscule declines from 2007. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered only a 2.7 per cent loss in overall circulation, from 17,581 to 17,102, not bad when compared to last year’s 5.2 per cent loss, 2006’s 13.6 per cent loss, or 2005’s disastrous 23.0 per cent; it seems that declines in circulation here are at least beginning to slow, even if they haven’t yet turned around. Subscriptions dropped from 14,084 to 13,842, and newsstand sales dropped from 3,497 to 3,260; sell-through rose from 30 per cent to 31 per cent. One encouraging note is that digital sales of the magazine through Fictionwise and Kindle were on the rise, although that rise is not yet reflected in these circulation figures. Asimov’s published good stories this year by James Alan Gardner, Mary Rosenblum, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, and others. Sheila Williams completed her fourth year as Asimov’s editor. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 5.1 per cent loss in overall circulation, from 27,399 to 25,999, with subscriptions dropping from 22,972 to 21,880, and newsstand sales dropping from 4,427 to 4,119; sell-through remained steady at 34 per cent. Analog published good work this year by Dean McLaughlin, Geoffrey A. Landis, Michael F. Flynn, Robert R. Chase, Ben Bova, and others. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there for twenty-nine years. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a small 2.7 per cent loss in overall circulation, from 16,489 to 16,044, with subscriptions dropping from 12,831 to 12,374 but newstand sales actually rising slightly from 3,658 to 3,670; sell-through rose from 33 per cent to 35 per cent. F&SF published good work this year by Charles Coleman Finlay, Ted Kostmatka, Albert E. Cowdrey, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Michael Swanwick, Steven Utley, John Kessel, and others. Gordon Van Gelder is in his twelfth year as editor and eighth year as owner and publisher. In its last full year, Realms of Fantasy published good stuff by Liz Williams, Carrie Vaughn, Greg Frost, Richard Parks, Tanith Lee, Eugie Foster, Aliette de Bodard, and others. Shawna McCarthy was the editor of the magazine from its launch in 1994 to its death in 2009.

Interzone doesn’t really qualify as a professional magazine by the definition of The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) because of its low rates and circulation – in the 2,000 to 3,000 copy range – but it’s thoroughly professional in the calibre of writers that it attracts and in the quality of the fiction it produces, so we’re going to list it with the other professional magazines anyway. Interzone had another strong year creatively, in 2008 publishing good stories by Greg Egan, Hannu Rajaniemi, Paul McAuley, Aliette de Bodard, Mercurio D. Rivera, Jamie Barras, Jason Sanford, and others. The ever-shifting editorial staff includes publisher Andy Cox, assisted by Peter Tennant. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static.

The survival of these magazines is essential if you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year – and you can help them survive by subscribing to them! It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines, since you can now do it electronically online with the click of a few buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. In the Internet age, you can also subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible. Furthermore, Internet sites such as Fictionwise (fictionwise.com), magaz!nes.com (magazines.com), and even Amazon.com sell subscriptions online, as well as electronic downloadable versions of many of the magazines to be read on your Kindle or PDA or home computer, something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvy set. And, of course, you can still subscribe the old-fashioned way, by mail.

So I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at asimovs.com; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $55.90 for annual subscription in the US. Analog’s site is at analogsf. com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 – $55.90 for annual subscription in the US. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, annual subscription – $50.99 in the US. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, £21 each for a six-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of £40 for both magazines for six issues; make cheques payable to TTA Press.

The print semi-prozine market is subject to the same pressures in terms of rising postage rates and production costs as the professional magazines are, and such pressures have already driven two of the most prominent fiction semi-prozines, Subterranean and Fantasy Magazine, from print into electronic-only online formats, with Apex following this year (see a review of the Apex site in the online section below), and I suspect that more will eventually follow. Print semi-prozines such as Argosy Magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Dreams of Decadence, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, Century, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, Eidolon, Spectrum SF, All Possible Worlds, Farthing, Yog’s Notebook, and the newszine Chronicle have died in the last couple of years, and I won’t be listing subscription addresses for any of them any more. Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw’s Flytrap, “a little ’zine with teeth,” produced two issues in 2008 and then died as well. It looks like Say . . . and Full Unit Hookup may also be dead, or at least on hiatus, since I haven’t seen them for a couple of years. Weird Tales survives in a new incarnation from a different publisher, and thanks at least in part to some clever promotional ploys, seems even to be thriving. Another refuge from the collapse of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing empire, Mythic Delirium, also still survives, publishing mostly poetry. Neither H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror nor the revived Thrilling Wonder Stories published an issue, but considering the erratic schedule on which most semi-prozines get published, with some supposed “quarterlies” unable to manage even one issue per year, it may be premature to declare them dead. Saw two issues of Fictitious Force, but since they’re not dated, it’s hard to tell when they were published, and since no address or subscription information is given anywhere, it’s hard to tell you how to order it; try website sciffy. com/dnw.

Warren Lapine and DNA Publications may be returning to the fray this year, with a newly relaunched version of Fantastic Stories, due to hit the stands in mid-2009.

Of the surviving print fiction semi-prozines, by far the most professional and the one that publishes the highest per centage of stories of professional quality, is the British magazine Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers. They published a huge more-than-double-length issue this year, Postscripts 15, which is most usefully considered to be an anthology and which is discussed in the anthology section below, but there was additional good stuff in Postscripts 14, Postscripts 16, and Postscripts 17 by Ian R. MacLeod, John Grant, Sarah Monette, Lisa Tuttle, Robert Reed, Vaughn Stanger, Marly Youmans, and others. Postscripts has announced that they’ll be changing from a magazine to an “anthology” format, mostly by changing the format from two column to full width and upping the word count from 60,000 to about 70,000–75,000 per issue. Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, seems to be publishing more science fiction these days, although they also continue to run slipstream and fantasy; they managed two issues in 2008, one of them a double issue, and published good stuff by William Shunn, Aliette de Bodard, Patrick O’Leary, Jennifer Pelland, Sandra McDonald, Elissa Malcohn, and others.

One of the longest-running of the fiction semi-prozines is the Canadian On Spec, edited by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, which once again kept reliably to its publishing schedule in 2008, bringing out all four scheduled quarterly issues; unfortunately, I don’t usually find their fiction to be terribly compelling; best work here was probably by Marissa K. Lingen, Kate Riedel, and Claude Lalumiere. The fiction in Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways In-flight Magazine, another collective-run magazine, one with a rotating editorial staff, which published its full six issues this year, tends to be somewhat livelier, and there were worthwhile stories there this year by Sarah Totton, Dirk Flinthart, Geoffrey Maloney, Aliette de Bodard, Lyn Battersby, and others. Another Australian magazine Aurealis, once thought to be dead, managed one issue this year under new editor Stuart Mayne, with worthwhile work by Stephen Dedman and Lee Battersby. Talebones, an SF/horror ’zine edited by Patrick Swenson, after surviving a rough patch last year, managed two issues in 2008, with good work by James Van Pelt, Paul Melko, Edd Vick, and others. Paradox, edited by Christopher M. Cevasco, an Alternate History magazine, only managed one issue this year. Neo-opsis, a Canadian magazine, edited by Karl Johanson, managed only two out of four scheduled issues in 2008. Jupiter, a small British magazine edited by Ian Redman, managed all four of its scheduled issues in 2008; it’s devoted exclusively to science fiction, a big plus in my book, but it’s a poorly produced and amateurish-looking magazine, and the fiction to date is not yet of reliable professional quality. Shimmer, Ireland’s Albedo One, and Greatest Common Denominator managed two issues this year, Tales of the Unexpected, Sybil’s Garage, and the long-running Space & Time, back from a close brush with death, one each. Turning to fantasy semi-prozines, Sword & Sorcery magazine Black Gate managed one issue this year, and there were three issues apiece of glossy fantasy magazines Zahir, Tales of the Talisman, and Aoife’s Kiss.

Many of the “minuscule press” slipstream magazines inspired by Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet have died or gone on hiatus in the last couple of years, but Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet itself seems to be still going strong, producing two issues in 2008. Mostly slipstream, literary fantasy, and fabulation here, of course, but there’s an occasional SF story, such as Charlie Anders’ in issue 22.

There’s not much left of the critical magazine market except for a few sturdy, long-running stalwarts. As always, your best bet is Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo-winner, published by Charles N. Brown and edited by a large staff of editors under the management of Kirsten Gong-Wong and Liza Groen Trombi. For more than thirty years now this has been an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews, and is undoubtedly the most valuable critical maga-zine/newszine in the field. Another long-lived and reliably published critical magazine is The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and a staff of associate editors, which publishes a variety of eclectic and sometimes quirky critical essays on a wide range of topics.

Below this point, most other critical magazines in the field are professional journals aimed more at academics than at the average reader. The most accessible of these is probably the long-running British critical ’zine Foundation.

Subscription addresses follow:

Postscripts, PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire, HU18 1PG, England, UK, published now as a quarterly anthology, $18 for one issue, 4 issues for $100 (Postscripts can also be subscribed to online, perhaps the easiest way, at store.pspublishing.com.uk.); Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $68.00 for a one-year first class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $40.00 per year, 12 issues, make checks payable to Dragon Press; Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in the US; Talebones, A Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy, 21528 104th St. Ct. East, Bonney Lake, WA 98390, $24.00 for four issues; Aurealis, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2149, Mt Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia (website: aurealis.com.au), $50 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, checks should be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian dollars; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to website onspec.ca; Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $28.00 Canadian for a four-issue subscription; Albedo One, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland, $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make cheques payable to Albedo One; Tales of the Unanticipated, P.O. Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $28 for a four-issue subscription (three or four years’ worth) in the US, $31 in Canada, $34 overseas; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; Electric Velocipede, Spilt Milk Press, see website electricvelocipede.com, for subscription information; Andromeda Spaceways Infight Magazine, see website androme-daspaceways.com for subscription information; Zahir, Zahir Publishing, 315 South Coast Hwy., 101, Suite U8, Encinitas, CA 92024, $18.00 for a one-year subscription, subscriptions can also be bought with credit cards and PayPal at zahirtales.com; Tales of the Talisman, Hadrosaur Productions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194, $24.00 for a four-issue subscription; Aoife’s Kiss, Sam’s Dot Publishing, P.O. Box 782, Cedar Rapids, IA 52406-0782, $18.00 for a four-issue subscription; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box 22897, Brooklyn, NY 11202-2897, $25.00 for a one year (four-issue) subscription, cheques or US postal money orders should be made payable to Paradox, can also be ordered online at paradoxmag.com; Weird Tales, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive, #234, Rockville, MD 20850-7408, annual subscription – four issues – $24 in the US; Jupiter, 19 Bedford Road, Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, £10 Sterling for four issues; Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Greatest Uncommon Denominator Publishing, P.O. Box 1537, Laconia, NH 03247, $18 for two issues; Sybil’s Garage, Senses Five Press, 307 Madison Street, No. 3L, Hoboken, NJ 07030-1937, no subscription information available but try website sensesfivepress.com; Shimmer, P.O. Box 58591, Salt Lake City, UT 84158-0591, $22.00 for a four-issue subscription.

As more and more print markets die, emit distressed wobbling noises, or switch to online formats, electronic magazines and websites are becoming increasingly important, and that’s not going to change; if anything, it’s likely to become even more true as time goes by. Already, if you really want to keep up with all the good short fiction being “published” during a given year, you can’t afford to overlook the online markets.

Of course, as we discussed here at length last year, the problem of how these online publications are going to make enough money to survive continues to be a vexing one, with several formulas being experimented with at the moment. Proving that electronic publication alone is not a guaranteed formula for success, several ezines died in 2007, and this year Aeon and Helix folded – Aeon, oddly, almost immediately after announcing that it was going to raise its rate of payment to professional levels. Both markets produced a lot of good work in their time, and both will be greatly missed. (In their last year, Helix published good work by Charlie Anders, Samantha Henderson, James Killus, George S. Walker, Annie Leckie, and others, and Aeon published good work by Jay Lake, Bruce McAllister, Lavie Tidhar, and others.)

Now that the late lamented Sci Fiction has died, probably the most important ezine on the Internet, and certainly the one that features the highest proportion of core science fiction, is Jim Baen’s Universe (baensuniverse.com), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, which takes advantage of the freedom from length restrictions offered by the use of pixels instead of print by featuring in each issue an amazingly large selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, stories by beginning writers, classic reprints, serials, columns, and features, certainly more material than any of the print magazines could afford to offer in a single issue. The best SF story in Jim Baen’s Universe this year was Nancy Kress’s “First Rites”, but there were also good SF stories by Ben Bova, Jay Lake, Lou Antonelli, Bud Sparhawk, Marissa Lingen, David Brin, and others. The best fantasy stories here were by Tom Purdom and Pat Cadigan. There was a lot of good solid work in Jim Baen’s Universe this year, but somehow it didn’t seem like there was as much first-rate work as last year.

A similar mix per issue of SF stories, fantasy stories, and features, including media and book reviews and a new story by Orson Scott Card, is featured in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself. There seems to be a greater emphasis on fantasy here than at Jim Baen’s Universe, and they do better with the fantasy, in terms of literary quality. The best story in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show this year, by a good margin, was Peter S. Beagle’s elegant Japanese fantasy “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri”, but they also featured good fantasy stories by Dennis Danvers, Stephanie Fray, and others, and good SF stories by Ken Scholes, Aliette de Bodard, Sharon Shinn, and others.

The new Tor Web site, Tor.com (tor.com), a blog/community meeting ground that features lots of commentary and archives of comics and art in addition to original fiction, has quickly established itself as another important Internet destination. The best stories published there this year were excellent works by Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Jay Lake, and Geoff Ryman, although there were also good stories by Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, and Brandon Sanderson.

Two former print magazines that have completed a transformation to electronic-only formats, something I think we’ll inevitably see more of as time goes by, are Subterranean (subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, and Fantasy (darkfantasy.org), edited by Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo. Subterranean usually leans toward horror and “dark fantasy”, although they also run SF, and, in fact, the two best stories featured there this year, stories by Chris Roberson and by Mike Resnick, were both SF, as were other good stories by Beth Bernobich and Mary Robinette Kowal; fantasy was represented by Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, and others. Fantasy, as should be expected from the title, usually sticks to traditional genre fantasy and the occasional mild horror story, sometimes a bit of slipstream, almost never running anything that could be considered SF. The best stories here this year were by Holly Phillips and by Rachel Swirsky, although there were also good stories by Gord Sellar, Peter M. Ball, Ari Goelman, and others.

Strange Horizons (strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, features more slipstream and less SF than I’d like, but lots of good stuff continues to appear there nevertheless; best stories this year were by Meghan McCarren, Constance Cooper, and Alan Campbell, but there was also good work by A. M. Dellamonica, Bill Kte’pi, Deborah Coates, and others. The best stories this year in Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (abyssanda-pex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbell and Ilona Gordon, were by Cat Rambo, Mecurio D. Rivera, and Ruth Nestvold, but Abyss and Apex also featured good stuff by Alan Smale, Marissa Lingen, Vylar Kaftan, and others. Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), which features elegantly perverse fantasy, slipstream, and even the occasional SF story, was co-edited by Nick Mamatas until July, when Sean Wallace took over as co-editor. My favourite stories here this year were by Jay Lake and Jeff Ford; there were also good stories here by Tim Pratt, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Stephen Dedmen, Eric M. Witchey, Don Webb, and others. Ironically, for an online magazine that has no real physical existence, the covers are quite striking, some of the best I’ve seen in a while. I particularly like the cover for Issue 19.

The Australian science magazine Cosmos publishes an SF story monthly, but they also frequently feature stories available as unique content on the Cosmos website (cosmosmagazine.com), all selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick; good stuff appeared in Cosmos this year, both online and in print, by Brendan DuBois, Steven Utley, Vylar Kaftan, Christopher East, and others. A similar mix of science fact articles and fiction is available from the ezine Futurismic (futurismic.com) and from new publication Escape Velocity (escapevelocitymagazine.com), issues of which can be downloaded to your computer.

Apex Digest is another former print magazine that has shifted completely to electronic online-only format and can now be found as Apex Online (apexbook-company.com/apex-online), still being edited by Jason Sizemore; good SF work by Steven Francis Murphy, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lavie Tidhar, and others appeared there, and they publish fantasy and critical articles as well.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies (beneath-ceaseless-skies) is a new ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy” that to date has published good work by David D. Levine, Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay, and others.

Shadow Unit (shadowunit.org) is a website devoted to publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, which in spite of the unlikeliness of the premise has attracted some top talent such as Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and others.

Book View Café (bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors”, including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zittel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a new website where work by them is made available for free – mostly reprints for the moment, although new work is promised, and the site also contains novel excerpts.

Flurb (flurb.net), edited by Rudy Rucker, publishes as much strange Really Weird stuff as it does SF, but there were good stories there this year by Bruce Sterling, Michael Blumlein, Lavie Tidhar, Terry Bisson, and others.

Below Flurb, science fiction and even genre fantasy become harder to find, although there are a number of ezines that publish slipstream/postmodern stories, often ones of good literary quality (and even the occasional SF story). They include: Revolution SF (revolutionsf.com), which also features book and media reviews; Coyote Wild (coyotewildmag.com); Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (ideomancer.com); Lone Star Stories (literary.erictmarin.com); Heliotrope (heliotropemag.com); Farrago’s Wainscot (farragoswainscot.com); and Sybil’s Garage (www.sensefive.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (bewilderingstories.com).

Chiaroscura and New Ceres seem to have died; at least, I’m no longer able to get to them. Last year I reported that quirky little ezine Spacesuits and Six Guns (spacesuitsandsixguns.com) was dead, but reports of its death seem to have been exaggerated, since it’s still there.

There’s also a website dedicated to YA fantasy and SF, Shiny (shinymag. blogspot.com).

Many good reprint SF and fantasy stories can also be found on the Internet, perhaps in greater numbers than the original ones, usually accessible for free. The long-running British Infinity Plus (users.zetnet.co.uk/ iplus) has ceased to be an active site, but their archive of quality reprint-stories is still accessible on the net, as is their archive of biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, interviews, and critical essays. The Infinite Matrix (infinitematrix.net) is also no longer an active site, but their substantial archives of past material are still available to be accessed online. Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free, Fantasy, Subterranean, Abyss and Apex, Strange Horizon, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue”. A large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (baen.com/library). Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (promo.net/pc/).

If you’re willing to pay a small fee for them, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomes available. The best and the longest-established such site is Fictionwise (fictionwise.com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer, in addition to individual stories; you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, as well as a selection of novels in several different genres; and you can subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (electricstory. com); in addition to the downloadable stuff for sale here (both stories and novels), you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.

But there are other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet besides searching for fiction to read. There are also many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Locus Online (locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, is easily the most valuable genre-oriented general site on the entire Internet, an indispensable site where you can access an incredible amount of information – including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards – and which is also often the first place in the genre to reveal fast-breaking news. I usually end up accessing it several times a day. One of the other major general-interest sites, Science Fiction Weekly, underwent a significant upheaval at the beginning of 2009, merging with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a new site called Sci Fi Wire (scifi.com/sfw); the emphasis here is on media-oriented stuff, movie and TV reviews, as well as reviews of anime, games, and music, but they feature book reviews as well. SF Site (sfsite.com) features reviews of books, games, movies, TV shows, and magazines, plus a huge archive of past reviews, and Best SF (bestsf.net/), which boasts another great archive of reviews and which is one of the few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues. Pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online was inactive throughout 2008, and editor David Truesdale finally announced at the end of the year that, as many of us suspected, it was not going to return; a pity. But a new short-fiction review site, The Fix (thefix-online.com), launched by a former Tangent Online staffer, is still going strong, and short-fiction reviews can also be accessed on The Internet Review of Science Fiction (irosf.com), which also features novel reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, and critical articles. Other good general-interest sites include SFRevu (sfsite.com/sfrevu), where you’ll find lots of novel and media reviews, as well as interviews and general news; SFF NET (sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), another valuable review site; The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), media and book reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (sffworld.com), more literary and media reviews; SFReader (sfreader.com), which features reviews of SF books; SFWatcher (sfwatcher.com), which features reviews of SF movies; SFCrowsnest (sficrowsnest.com); newcomer SFScope (sfscope.com), edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock, which concentrates on SF and writing business news; Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (fantasyhotlist. blogspot.com), io9 (io9.com); and SciFiPedia (scifipedia.scifi.com), a Wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia. One of the most entertaining SF sites on the Internet is Ansible (dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible. SF-oriented radio plays and podcasts can also be accessed at Audible (audi-ble.com), Escape Pod (escapepod.org), Star Ship Sofa (starship-sofa.com), and Pod Castle (podcastle.org). Long-running writing-advice and market news site Speculations has died.

This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe in the 1970s. All of the new annual original series launched last year – Lou Anders’s Fast Forward, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction – produced second volumes stronger than the initial volumes had been, a good sign. Even 2008’s second-tier anthologies – there were a lot of anthologies published this year – were often good enough to have been in contention for the title of year’s best anthology in other years.

It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing – none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet and, in fact, a few are rumoured to not be selling so well. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies at hand to choose from.

The best of them was probably Eclipse Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan, although there was only a whisker’s thickness of difference between it and Fast Forward 2 (Pyr), edited by Lou Anders. A half-step below them was The Starry Rift (Viking), edited by Jonathan Strahan; Sideways in Time (Solaris), edited by Lou Anders; The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume 2 (Solaris), edited by George Mann; and Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction (Eos), edited by Jack Dann, all of them strong enough to have carried off the prize in a weaker year. Postscripts 15, edited by Nick Gevers, a double-issue of the magazine that functioned essentially as an anthology, ought to be in the hunt here somewhere too.

Below these were a number of still-substantial anthologies such as The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Del Rey), edited by Ellen Datlow; Extraordinary Engines (Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers; Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (Norilana), edited by Mike Allen; Seeds of Change (Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams; and Subterfuge (Newcon) and Celebrations (Newcon), both edited by Ian Whates – with yet more anthologies a couple of steps below them.

Several reviewers, including me, criticized Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse last year for not having enough real science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can be levelled at his Eclipse Two. There are still a couple of fantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, but the bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ core science fiction. My favourite stories are by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroeder, Ted Chiang, and Daryl Gregory. Also good were stories by David Moles, Tony Daniel, Terry Dowling, Paul Cornell, and others. The best of the fantasy stories here are by Peter S. Beagle, Richard Parks, and Margo Lanagan.

Only a whisker-thickness behind is Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders. The best stories here are probably those by Paolo Bacigalupi and Ian McDonald, but the book also contains good work by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Paul Cornell, Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Bucknell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kay Kenyon, and others.

Don’t let the fact that it’s being published as a YA anthology put you off – The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, is definitely one of the best SF anthologies of the year, everything in it fully of adult quality, and almost all of it centre-core SF as well.

Best stories here are those by Kelly Link and Ian McDonald (his gorgeously colored Future India story, “The Dust Assassin”), but there are also excellent stories by Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, and others, including an atypical near-future story by Greg Egan, more openly political than his stuff usually is. The fact that several stories are told in the first person by teenage narrators, usually young girls, may make several of the stories seem a bit familiar if read one after the other (and is also the only real indication that this is a YA anthology), so space them out over time.

Another excellent anthology is Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders. Most Alternate History stories are SF (particularly those that add a timetravel element), but we’ve already seen a fair amount of Alternate History Fantasy in the last few years (it’s an Alternate World, but in it griffins or giants are real, or magic works), and now we’ve got Alternate History Mystery, producing a book that’s a lot of fun; most of the stories would fall under the Alternate History Mystery SF heading, I guess (including one with crosstime travel), rather than the Alternate History Mystery Fantasy heading, since although there’s a couple of fairly wild alternate possibilities here, there’s none with griffins or where magic works. The best stories in the book is probably by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, but there’s also excellent work by Kage Baker, Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Theodore Judson, S. M. Stirling, Chris Roberson, and others. The most likely Alternate, as it requires the fewest changes from our own timeline, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s story; the least likely is probably Mike Resnick and Eric Flint’s story, even more so than Chris Roberson’s story with its crosstime-travelling zeppelins.

Several of the basic plotlines here are pretty similar – important man found dead under strange, usually politically charged circumstances – although the settings change radically from story to story, so I’d recommend that you read these a few at a time rather than all in one sitting.

There are also some good solid stories in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II (Solaris), edited by George Mann, which is more even in quality than the first volume – none of the stories is as bad as the worst of the stories in the first one . . . but then again, none of the stories is as good as the best of the good stories were. The best stories here, in my opinion, are by Peter Watts, Eric Brown, Mary Robinette Kowal, Karl Schroeder, and Dominic Green. If I had to narrow it down to only two picks, it would be the Dominic Green and the Mary Robinette Kowal.

In the past, I’ve criticized the British magazine Postscripts for not running enough core science fiction, and as if to twit me on this, Postscripts 15, a huge double-length (or longer) issue that is probably best consideredas an anthology rather than a magazine, edited by Nick Gevers, bills itself an “all science fiction issue!” Not that that’s true, of course. By my definitions, there’s at least six or seven fantasy stories of one sort or another here, a reprinted article by Arthur C. Clarke, a metafiction piece by Brian W. Aldiss about meeting the Queen, and a fascinating autobiographical article by Paul McAuley about growing up in post-World War II England. Nevertheless, there is plenty of core science fiction here, most of it of excellent quality. Many of the best stories here are to be found in the special “Paul McAuley section”, which features, in addition to the above-mentioned autobiographical essay, a novel excerpt from McAuley’s The Quiet War, and four good stories by McAuley, one of which, “City of the Dead,” may be the pick of the issue, rivalled only by Ian McDonald’s (“A Ghost Samba”), which does almost as good a job of painting an evocative picture of a future Brazil as his Cyberaid stories have done with a future India. There are other good SF stories here by Chris Robertson, Matthew Hughes, Steven Utley, Jay Lake, Robert Reed, Mike Resnick, Beth Bernobich, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Justina Robson, Jack Dann, and Paul Di Filippo.

American publishers, especially the big trade houses, seem to like their genres segregated – no fantasy in science fiction anthologies, no science fiction in fantasy anthologies, no mystery or mainstream in either. That’s not true of Australian publishers, however, where it seems to be okay to jumble different genres together in the same anthology, and it’s certainly the rule with Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction, edited by Jack Dann – the follow-up to 1998’s monumental Dreaming Down Under, edited by Dann and Janeen Webb, which brings us a similarly rich stew of fiction by Australian authors working in different genres, horror, fantasy, slipstream, science fiction. A wide variety of moods, too, with some stories horrific and grim, others seeming almost to be Young Adult pieces. There’s a bit too much horror here for my taste – a few zombie stories go a long way with me, and there’s lots of zombie stories here, to the point where it almost seems to become a running (or lurching) joke – but there’s also enough fantasy and science fiction stories in this huge volume to make up into respectable anthologies of their own, and if horror is your cup of blood, you’ll find the horror stories to be of high quality. Almost everything here is of high quality, in fact (even the stories I didn’t care for were excellently crafted), a rich smorgasbord, by thirty-six different authors, representative of the obviously busy Australian scene. The best science fiction is from Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Lee Battersby, Stephen Dedman, Simon Brown, Sean McMullen, Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch, Rowena Cory Daniels, and Jason Fischer. Fantasy (sometimes shading into horror) is best represented here by Terry Dowling, Rjurik Davidson, Peter A. Ball, Russell Blackford, Isobelle Carmody, Richard Harland, and Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

The question, raised in the past by Greg Egan and others, as to whether there is such a thing in the first place as specifically Australian science fiction, as opposed just to science fiction in general, is a question too large to be settled here, but most of the stories in Dreaming Again that take place on Earth at least feature Australian settings, and a few of the stories – mostly the fantasies – seem to draw on Australian myths and legends.

Flying in the face of what I said above about American trade publishers, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a cross-genre anthology featuring SF, fantasy, horror, and slipstream stories. Oddly, for a book that puts “Science Fiction” first in its title, especially from a company like Del Rey, which is known for its solid, core, rather traditional science fiction, the smallest element in the mix is science fiction, with horror, fantasy, and slipstream making up the bulk of its contents – and what science fiction there is is soft near-future SF, with Datlow herself announcing in the Introduction (rather proudly, I thought) that “you won’t find off-planet stories or hard science fiction” in the anthology. The best story in the book, by a good margin, is one of those near-future SF stories, in fact, Maureen McHugh’s “Special Economics,” although there is also good SF work by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, Pat Cadigan, and Jason Stoddard. More unclassifiable but still readable stuff, often on the borderline between slipstream and SF/fantasy, is provided by Elizabeth Bear, Jeffery Ford, Laird Barron, Christopher Rowe, Lucy Sussex, and others.

Extraordinary Engines (Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers, is a steampunk anthology, many of whose stories double almost by definition as Alternate History. The best stories here are by Ian R. MacLeod and Kage Baker, but there’s also first-rate work by Jay Lake, Robert Reed, Jeff VanderMeer, James Lovegrove, Keith Brooke, and others.

One of last year’s strongest anthologies, appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere was disLOCATIONS, edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press. This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three original anthologies: Subterfuge, Celebrations, and Myth-Understandings. None of these is quite as strong as disLOCATIONS, but all contain good stories of various types, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these is Subterfuge, which, probably not coinciden-tally, considering my tastes, contains the highest per centage of science fiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF and fantasy). Best stories here are by Neal Asher and John Meaney, but there are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack, Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Tanith Lee and Dave Hutchinson. The best story in Celebrations, an anthology commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is a Phildickian SF piece by Alastair Reynolds, but there’s good work, both SF and fantasy, by Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken MacLeod, Dave Hutchinson, Brian Stableford, Liz Williams, and Molly Brown. The weakest of the three anthologies is Myth-Understandings, which features mostly fantasy. Best story here is Tricia Sullivan’s, although there’s also strong work by Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, and others.

One of last year’s strongest anthologies, appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere was disLOCATIONS, edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press. This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three original anthologies: Subterfuge, Celebrations, and Myth- Understandings. None of these is quite as strong as disLOCATIONS, but all contain good stories of various types, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these is Subterfuge, which, probably not coincidentally, considering my tastes, contains the highest per centage of science fiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF and fantasy). Best stories here are by Neal Asher and John Meaney, but there are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack, Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Tanith Lee and Dave Hutchinson. The best story in Celebrations, an anthology commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is a Phildickian SF piece by Alastair Reynolds, but there’s good work, both SF and fantasy, by Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken MacLeod, Dave Hutchinson, Brian Stableford, Liz Williams, and Molly Brown. The weakest of the three anthologies is Myth-Understandings, which features mostly fantasy. Best story here is Tricia Sullivan’s, although there’s also strong work by Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, and others.

An odd item, another British small-press anthology, is The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, Quercus One (Three Legged Fox Books), edited by Paul Brazier, an anthology of stories that have supposedly been previously published in electronic form on the members-only Quercus SF site (quercus-sf.com – although it doesn’t seem to have been updated for several years, and may be fallow). Half of the book is taken up by rather specialized Alternate History stories about alternate fates for the nowdestroyed West Pier in Brighton, England, hence the title, and the rest of the book is devoted to more generalized SF, fantasy, and slipstream stories. Best thing here is a high-tech literalization of Egyptian mythology by Liz Williams, but there are also good stories by Geoff Ryman, Lavie Tidhar, Andy W. Robertson, Chris Butler, and others.

Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, edited by Mike Allen, is a mixed science fiction/fantasy anthology, with a few slipstream stories thrown in for good measure. In an exceptional year for original anthologies, it doesn’t come in at the top of the heap, but there is a lot of good stuff here, and the cover, an effective use of an old painting, is lovely. The best story in Clockwork Phoenix, by a considerable margin, is an SF story by Vandana Singh, but there is also good work by John C. Wright, Cat Sparks, C. S. MacCath, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by Tanith Lee, Marie Brennan, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Ekaterina Sedia, and others.

Another good anthology, full of solid, enjoyable work, is Seeds of Change (Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams. Best story here by a substantial margin, and one of the best of the year, is Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words”, but there is also good work to be had here from Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Mark Budz, Tobias Buckell, and others

2012 (Twelfth Planet Press), edited by Alisa Krasnestein and Ben Payne, delivers a smaller proportion of substantial work than Seeds of Change, although there are still worthwhile stories here by Sean McMullen and Simon Brown.

There are probably no award-winners in Transhuman (DAW), edited by Mark L. Van Name and T. K. F. Weisskopf (title makes the subject matter self-explanatory, surely), but there is a respectable amount of good solid core SF. Best story here is by David D. Levine, but there are also good stories by Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, Sarah A. Hoyt, Wen Spenser, and others.

Future Americas (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, and Front Lines (DAW), edited by Denise Little, are a bit more substantial than these DAW anthologies usually are. Best story in Future Americas is by Brendan DuBois; best story in Front Lines is by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Dimension Next Door (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, was worthwhile but minor.

Another pleasant surprise last year was the sudden appearance of two pretty good ultra-small press anthologies from Hadley Rille Books, edited by Eric T. Reynolds, Visual Journeys and Ruins Extraterrestrial. Reynolds brought out another three anthologies this year, Return to Luna (Hadley Rille Books), Desolate Places (Hadley Rille Books – co-edited with Adam Nakama), and Barren Worlds (Hadley Rille Books – co-edited with Adam Nakama), but unfortunately they were much weaker, with some decent work but nothing particularly memorable. Return to Luna was marginally the strongest of the three.

Noted without comment is Galactic Empires (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The best fantasy anthology was probably Fast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Playful and a lot of fun, it’s an anthology of original pirate story/fantasy crosses, pirate/slipstream crosses, and even a few pirate/SF crosses. If some authors here give the impression that the whole of their research into pirates consisted of watching a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean, others clearly know their stuff, and, for the most part, even the stories that are the sketchiest on the pirate stuff make up for it with the colourful fantasy element. There’s first-rate work here by Garth Nix, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Kage Baker, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Naomi Novik, Howard Waldrop, Carrie Vaughn, and others. Also excellent is Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (Subterranean), edited by William Schafer. The stories here are fairly representative of the kind of stories usually to be found on the Subterranean website, although none of them actually appeared there, being published for the first time here instead: fantasy, dark fantasy sometimes shading into horror, a smattering of science fiction, all extremely well crafted. The best stories here are by William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, Patrick Rothfuss, Kage Baker, although there’s also good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Carey, and others. Also good was A Book of Wizards (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Marvin Kaye, which featured novellas by Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Patricia A. McKillip, and others. There was also another instalment in a long-running fantasy anthology series, Swords and Sorceress XXIII (Norilana), edited by Elizabeth Waters.

Pleasant but minor fantasy anthologies included Warrior Wisewoman (Norilana), edited by Roby James; Enchantment Place (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Fellowship Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes; Mystery Date (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Something Magic This Way Comes (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Sarah Hoyt; Witch High (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Catopolis (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack; My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by P. N. Elrod; Magic in the Mirrorstone: Tales of Fantasy (Mirrorstone), edited by Steve Berman; and Lace and Blade (Lada), a fantasy/romance cross edited by Deborah J. Ross.

It’s worth mentioning here that some of the anthologies mentioned above as SF anthologies, such as Clockwork Phoenix, Dreaming Again, and the Whates anthologies, had substantial amounts of good fantasy in them as well, sometimes nearly half the contents.

The line between fantasy and slipstream is often hard to draw rigorously, but anthologies that seemed to me more slipstream than fantasy

(in spite of some of their titles) included: Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy (Five Senses Press), edited by Ekaterina Sedia; Subtle Edens (Elastic Press), edited by Allen Ashley; Alembical (Paper Golem), edited by Lawrence M. Shoen and Arthur Dorrance; Spicy Slipstream Stories (Lethe Press), edited by Nick Mamatas and Jay Lake; A Field Guide to Surreal Biology (Two Cranes Press), edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg; and Tesseracts Twelve (Edge), edited by Claude Lalumiere.

Shared world anthologies, many of them superhero oriented, included Wild Cards: Inside Straight (Tor), edited by George R. R. Martin; Wild Cards: Busted Flush (Tor), edited by George R. R. Martin; Hellboy: Oddest Jobs (Dark Horse), edited by Christopher Golden; and Ring of Fire II (Baen), edited by Eric Flint.

As usual, novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, was featured in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXIV (Galaxy), the last in this long-running series to be edited by the late Algis Budrys. No word yet on whether the series will continue under different editorship.

There were lots of stories about robots this year, and lots of stories about zombies, including a dedicated zombie anthology. There were at least three retropunk Space Pirate stories, and two stories about really nasty mermaids who kill people. There were two or three pastiches of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and two gritty retellings of Hansel and Gretel. Stories appeared that were obviously inspired by Second Life, as well as by MMORPGs like Worlds of Warcraft, and by anime. There were several stories that tried to put new twists on the idea of people’s minds being uploaded into a computer, including several where survivors were not happy about having to continue to deal with nagging relatives who were now “virtual”. In addition to the dedicated Alternate History magazine, Paradox, there was also lots of Alternate History stuff published elsewhere, most of it leaning towards steampunk – there were three Alternate History anthologies, Sideways in Crime, Extraordinary Engines, and Steampunk, but almost every market featured steampunkish Alternate History stories this year, including a few Alternate History/Mystery crosses in Interzone, Postscripts, and elsewhere that could just as easily have fit into Sideways in Crime.

Science fiction continued to pop up in unexpected places, both in print and online, from the Australian science magazine Cosmos to the MIT Technology Review. Even The New Yorker published two stories this year that could be considered to be genuine SF, an unheard of occurrence that made some observers glance at Hell to see if it had frozen over (there have been stories by SF writers in The New Yorker before, but they’ve usually been slipstream/surrealist/literary pieces of the sort that is more typical of the magazine).

(Finding individual pricings for all of the items from small-presses mentioned in the Summation has become too time-intensive, and since several of the same small presses publish anthologies, novels, and short story collections, it seems silly to repeat addresses for them in section after section. Therefore, I’m going to attempt to list here, in one place, all the addresses for small presses that have books mentioned here or there in the Summation, whether from the anthologies section, the novel section, or the short-story-collection section, and, where known, their website addresses. That should make it easy enough for the reader to look up the individual price of any book mentioned that isn’t from a regular trade-publisher; such books are less likely to be found in your average bookstore or even in a chain superstore, and so will probably have to be mail-ordered. Many publishers seem to sell only online, through their websites, and some will only accept payment through PayPal. Many books, even from some of the smaller presses, are also available through Amazon.com.)

Addresses: PS Publishing, Grosvener House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, West Yorkshire, HU18 1PG, England, UK, pspublishing.co.uk; Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802, goldengryphon. com; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, MA 01701-0809, nesfa. org; Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519, subterra-neanpress.com; Solaris, via solarisbooks.com; Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951, oldearthbooks.com; Tachyon Press, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107, tachyonpublications.com; Night Shade Books, 1470 NW Saltzman Road, Portland, OR 97229, nightshadebooks.com; Five Star Books, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901, galegroup.com/fivestar; NewCon Press, via newcon-press.com; Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060, smallbeerpress.com; Locus Press, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, locusmag.com; Crescent Books, Mercat Press Ltd., 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, Scotland EH3 7AL, crescentfiction.com; Wildside Press/ Cosmos Books/Borgo Press, P.O. Box 301, Holicong, PA 18928-0301, or go to wildsidepress.com for pricing and ordering; Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc. and Tesseract Books, Ltd., P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada, edgewebsite.com; Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787, aqueductpress.com; Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, phobosweb.com; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092, fairwoodpress. com; BenBella Books, 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 508, Dallas, TX 75206, benbellabooks.com; Darkside Press, 13320 27th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98125, darksidepress.com; Haffiner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48073-1239, haffinerpress.com; North Atlantic Press, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701; Prime, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH 44735, primebooks.net; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, fairwoodpress.com; MonkeyBrain Books, 11204 Crossland Drive, Austin, TX 78726, monkeybrainbooks.com; Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, Order Dept., 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon NH 03766-1405, wesleyan.edu/wespress; Agog! Press, P.O. Box U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia, uow.ed.au/~rhood/agog-press; Wheatland Press, via wheatlandpress.com; MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse; Arsenal Pulp Press, 103--1014 Homer Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 2W9, arsenalpress.com; DreamHaven Books, 912 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408, dreamhavenbooks.com; Elder Signs Press/Dimensions Books, order through dimensionsbooks.com; Chaosium, via chaosium.com; Spyre Books, P.O. Box 3005, Radford, VA 24143; SCIFI, Inc., P.O. Box 8442, Van Nuys, CA 91409-8442; Omnidawn Publishing, order through omni-dawn.com; CSFG, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, csfig.org.au/publishing/anthologies/the_outcast; Hadley Rille Books, via hadleyrillebooks. com; ISFiC Press, 707 Sapling Lane, Deerfeld, IL 60015-3969, or isficpress. com; Suddenly Press, via suddenlypress@yahoo.com; Sandstone Press, P.O. Box 5725, One High St., Dingwall, Ross-shire, IV15 9WJ UK, sandstone-press.com; Tropism Press, via tropismpress.com; SF Poetry Association/ Dark Regions Press, sfpoetry.com, cheques to Helena Bell, SFPA Treasurer, 1225 West Freeman St., Apt. 12, Carbondale, IL 62401; DH Press, via diamondbookdistributors.com; Kurodahan Press, via website kurodahan. com; Ramble House, 443 Gladstone Blvd., Shreveport, LA 71104, ramble-house.com; Interstitial Arts Foundation, via interstitialarts.org; Raw Dog Screaming, via rawdogscreaming.com; Three Legged Fox Books, 98 Hythe Road, Brighton, BN1 6JS, UK; Norilana Books, via norilana.com; coeur de lion, via coeurdelion.com.au; PARSECink, via parsecink.org; Robert J. Sawyer Books, via sfwriter.com/rjsbooks.htm; Rackstraw Press, via rack-strawpress; Candlewick, via candlewick.com; Zubaan, via zubaanbooks. com; Utter Tower, via threeleggedfox.co.uk; Spilt Milk Press, via electricvelocipede.com; Paper Golem, via papergolem.com; Galaxy Press, via galaxypress.com; Twelfth Planet Press, via twelfthplanetpress.com; Five Senses Press, via sensefive.com; Elastic Press, via elasticpress.com; Lethe Press, via lethepressbooks.com; Two Cranes Press, via twocranespress. com; Wordcraft of Oregon, via wordcraftoforegon.com; Down East, via downeast.com.

If I’ve missed some, as is quite possible, try Googling the name of the publisher.

Once again, there were a lot of novels published in the SF/fantasy genres during the year, and although the recession-driven recent upheavals in the publishing world may reduce their numbers somewhat next year, they’re certainly not going to vanish from the bookstore shelves in 2009.

According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were a record 2,843 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2008, up 4 per cent from 2,723 titles in 2007. (This total doesn’t count media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, most Print-On-Demand books, or novels offered as downloads on the Internet – all of which would swell the total by hundreds if counted.) Paranormal romances continued to boom, both in number of titles published (there were 328 paranormal romances this year, up from 290 last year) and in robustness of sales; several of the best-selling writers in America – Stephanie Meyers, Charline Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher – are paranormal romance writers. Original books were down slightly, by 2 per cent, to 1,671 from last year’s total of 1,710. Reprint books were up by 16 per cent, to 1,172 compared to last year’s total of 1,013. The number of new SF novels was down by a statistically insignificant amount, one book, to 249 from last year’s total of 250. The number of new fantasy novels was down by 5 per cent to 439 from last year’s total of 460. Horror dropped by 12 per cent, to 175 titles, as opposed to last year’s total of 198, still up from 2002’s total of 112.

Busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so, as usual, I’ll limit myself to mentioning that novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2008 include:

Saturn’s Children (Ace), by Charles Stross; The Dragons of Babel (Tor), by Michael Swanwick; The Quiet War (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; The Last Theorem (Del Rey), by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl; Lavinia (Harcourt), by Ursula K. Le Guin; Little Brother (Tor), by Cory Doctorow; Matter (Orbit), by Iain M. Banks; Going Under (Pyr), by Jusina Robson; Navigator (Ace), by Stephen Baxter; Weaver (Ace), by Stephen Baxter; The Dragon’s Nine Sons (Solaris), by Chris Roberson; Incandescence (Gollancz), by Greg Egan; House of the Stag (Tor), by Kage Baker; The Night Sessions (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Marsbound (Ace), by Joe Haldeman; A Dance with Dragons (Bantam), by George R. R. Martin; Hunter’s Run (HarperCollins), by George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham; City at the End of Time (Del Rey), by Greg Bear; The Prefect (Ace), by Alastair Reynolds; House of Suns (Gollancz), by Alastair Reynolds; Zoe’s Tale (Tor), by John Scalzi; The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins), by Neil Gaiman; Victory of Eagles (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; Pirate Sun (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Judge (Eos), by Karen Traviss; Earth Ascendant (Ace), by Sean Williams; Firstborn (Del Rey), by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter; An Evil Guest (Tor), by Gene Wolfe; Rolling Thunder (Ace), by John Varley; The Ghost in Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Carroll; Anathem (Morrow), by Neal Stephenson; Flora’s Dare (Harcourt), by Ysabeau S. Wilce; Misspent Youth (Del Rey), by Peter F. Hamilton; Ender in Exile (Tor), by Orson Scott Card; Keeper of Dreams (Tor), by Orson Scott Card; Null-A Continuum (Tor), by John C. Wright; Valor’s Trial (DAW), by Tanya Huff; Shadowbridge (Del Rey), by Gregory Frost; Lord Tophet (Del Rey), by Gregory Frost; An Autumn War (Tor), by Daniel Abraham; The Martian General’s Daughter (Pyr), by Theodore Judson; The Steel Remains (Gollancz), by Richard Morgan; The Valley-Westside War (Tor), by Harry Turtledove; Slanted Jack (Baen), by Mark L. Van Name; The Hidden World (Tor), by Paul Park; Stalking the Vampire (Pyr), by Mike Resnick; Victory Conditions (Del Rey), by Elizabeth Moon; The Edge of Reason (Tor), by Melinda Snodgrass; Bone Song (Bantam Spectra), by John Meaney; The Philosopher’s Apprentice (Morrow), by James Morrow; The Time Engine (Tor), by Sean McMullen; The Engine’s Child (Del Rey), by Holly Phillips; January Dancer (Tor), by Michael F. Flynn; Very Hard Choices (Baen), by Spider Robinson; The Stars Down Under (Tor), by Sandra McDonald; Renegade’s Magic (Eos), by Robin Hobb; Escapement (Tor), by Jay Lake; Before They Are Hanged (Pyr), by Joe Abercrombie; Half a Crown (Tor), by Jo Walton; Juggler of Worlds (Tor), by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner; Nation (HarperCollins), by Terry Pratchett; and Duma Key (Scribner), by Stephen King.

Small presses once published mostly collections and anthologies, but these days they’re active in the novel market as well. Novels issued by small presses this year, some of them among the year’s best, included: Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key (Subterranean), by Kage Baker; Implied Spaces (Night Shade), by Walter Jon Williams; The Bird Shaman (Bascom Hill), by Judy Moffett; The Word of God: or, Holy Writ Rewritten (Tachyon), by Thomas M. Disch; The Song of Time (PS Publishing), by Ian R. MacLeod; Hespira (Night Shade), by Matthew Hughes; Dogs (Tachyon), by Nancy Kress; The King’s Last Song (Small Beer Press), by Geoff Ryman; The Shadow Pavilion (Night Shade), by Liz Williams; Leaving Fortusa: A Novel in Ten Episodes (Norilana), by John Grant; Shadow of the Scorpion (Night Shade), by Neal Asher; and The Madness of Flowers (Night Shade), by Jay Lake.

The year’s first novels included: Singularity’s Ring (Tor), by Paul Melko; Pandemonium (Del Rey), by Daryl Gregory; Black Ships (Orbit), by Jo Graham; The Magicians and Mrs Quent (Bantam Spectra), by Galen Beckett; The Ninth Circle (Gollancz), by Alex Bell; A Darkness Forged in Fire (Pocket), by Chris Evans; Apricot Brandy (Juno), by Lynn Cesar; Seekers of the Chalice (Tor), by Brian Cullen; Thunderer (Bantam), by Felix Gilman; Havemercy (Bantam), by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett; Whitechapel Gods (Roc), by S. M. Peters; Mad Kestrel (Tor), by Misty Massey; Gordath Wood (Ace), by Sarath Patrice; Superpowers (Three Rivers Press), by David J. Schwartz; Immortal (Delta), by Traci C. Slatton; The Mirrored Heavens (Bantam), by David J. Williams; and Paraworld Zero (Blue World), by Matthew Peterson. The Melko and the Gregory probably attracted the most attention of these.

Associational novels by people connected with the science fiction and fantasy felds included: Wit’s End (Putnam), by Karen Joy Fowler; White Sands, Red Menace (Viking), by Ellen Klages; Black and White (Subterranean), by Lewis Shiner; The Somnambulist (Morrow), by Jonathan Barnes; Tigerheart (Del Rey), by Peter David; and The Shadow Year (Morrow), by Jeffrey Ford. Ventures into the genre by well-known mainstream authors, included: The Island of Eternal Love (Riverhead), by Daina Chaviano; The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf), by John Updike; and The Enchantress of Florence (Random House), by Salman Rushdie.

Individual novellas published as stand-alone chapbooks were not as strong this year as they’ve been in other years, but there were still some good ones out. Subterranean published: Kilimanjaro: A Fable of Utopia, by Mike Resnick; Muse of Fire, by Dan Simmons; Stonefather, by Orson Scott Card; and Conversation Hearts, by John Crowley. PS Publishing brought out: The Economy of Light, by Jack Dann; Gunpowder, by Joe Hill; Planet of Mystery, by Terry Bisson; Template, by Matthew Hughes; Mystery Hill, by Alex Irvine; The City in These Pages, by John Grant; The Situation, by Jeff VanderMeer; Revolvo, by Steve Erikson; Val/Orson, by Marly Youmans; The Book, the Writer, the Reader, by Zoran Zivkovic; The Bridge, by Zoran Zivkovic; Living with the Dead, by Darrell Schweitzer; and Camp Desolation and An Eschatalogy of Salt, by Uncle River. Aqueduct Press produced Distances, by Vandana Singh. Wyrm Publishing produced Memorare, by Gene Wolfe. Norilana published The Duke in His Castle, by Vera Nazarian. Knopf published Once Upon a Time in the North, by Philip Pullman. And Monkeybrain published Escape from Hell!, by Hall Duncan.

Novel omnibuses this year included: The Jack Vance Reader (Subterranean), by Jack Vance; Five Novels of the 1960s and 1970s (Library of America), by Philip K. Dick; Books of the South: Tales of the Black Corridor (Tor), by Glen Cook; and The Chronicles of Master Li and Number One Ox (Subterranean), as well as many omnibus novel volumes published by the Science Fiction Book Club. (Omnibuses that contain both short stories and novels can be found listed in the short story section.)

As has been true for the last couple of years, after the long drought of the 1990s, when almost nothing out-of-print got back into it, this is the best time in decades to pick up reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels, not even counting Print On Demand books from places such as Wildside Press, the reprints issued by The Science Fiction Book Club, and the availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads from Internet sources such as Fictionwise. Here are some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably difficult to impossible:

Tor reissued: Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov; The Dragon in the Sea, by Frank Herbert; Starfish, by Peter Watts; The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds, both by Scott Westerfeld; and the associational novel In Milton Lumky Territory, by Philip K. Dick. Orb reissued: Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison; Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear; and Inferno, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Baen reissued: Farmer in the Sky and Between Planets, both by Robert A. Heinlein. Orbit reissued: The Reality Dysfunction, by Peter F. Hamilton; and Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, and Use of Weapons, all by Iain Banks. Cosmos reissued: Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper; The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell, Jr; and Planet of the Damned, by Harry Harrison. Tachyon reissued: The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers. Paizo/Planet Stories reissued: The Ginjer Star, by Leigh Brackett; and Lord of the Spiders, by Michael Moorcock. Overlook reissued: Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake. Golden Gryphon Press reissued: The Physiognomy, The Beyond, and Memoranda, all by Jeffrey Ford.

Lots of science fiction and even hard science fiction here, as usual, although there are also fantasy novels and odd-genre-mixing hybrids on the list as well. Although we often hear the lament that science fiction has been driven off the bookstore shelves, it just isn’t true. There’s still lots of it out there to be found.

This was another good year for short story collections. The year’s best collections included: The Best of Michael Swanwick (Subterranean), by Michael Swanwick; East of the Sun and West of Fort Smith (Norilana Books), by William Sanders; Dark Integers and Other Stories (Subterranean), by Greg Egan; Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard Waldrop Reader (Old Earth Books), by Howard Waldrop; Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade), by Paolo Bacigalupi; The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon), by James Patrick Kelly; The Best of Lucius Shepard (Subterranean), by Lucius Shepard; Nano Comes to Clifford Falls (Golden Gryphon), by Nancy Kress; The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), by John Kessel; and Pretty Monsters (Viking), by Kelly Link. Other good collections included: Harsh Oases (PS Publishing), by Paul Di Fillipo; The Ant King and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), by Benjamin Rosenbaum; Strange Roads (Dreamhaven), by Peter S. Beagle; The Garble and Other Stories (Tor UK), by Neal Asher; Starlady and Fast-Friend (Subterranean), by George R. R. Martin; Space Magic: Stories by David D. Levine (Wheatland Press), by David D. Levine; The Wall of America (Tachyon), by Thomas M. Disch; The Autopsy and Other Tales, by Michael Shea; Binding Energy (Elastic Press), by Daniel Marcus; Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (Subterranean), by Jack McDevitt; Tempting the Gods (Wildside Press), by Tanith Lee; The Adventures of Langdon St Ives (Subterranean), by James Blaylock; Crazy Love (Wordcraft of Oregon), by Leslie What; Walking to the Moon (Wildside), by Sean McMullen; Billy’s Book (PS Publishing), by Terry Bisson; Long Walks, Last Flights, and Other Journeys (Fairwood Press), by Ken Scholes; What the Mouse Found and Other Stories (Subterranean), by Charles de Lint; and Just After Sunset (Scribner), by Stephen King.

As has become common, there were also a lot of good retrospective collections by older writers (as specialty press hardcovers, many of them may be too expensive for casual readers, although there are a few less-expensive paperbacks here as well), including: The Van Rijn Method (Baen – an omnibus of stories about Falstaffan space adventurer Nicolas Van Rijn, plus the well-known novel The Man Who Counts), by Poul Anderson; David Falkayn: Star Trader – The Technic Civilization Saga (Baen – another ominibus of stories and a novel), by Poul Anderson; Works of Art (NESFA Press), by James Bliss; Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances (Haffiner Press), by Leigh Brackett; Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith (Prize/Planet Stories), by Leigh Brackett; H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (Barnes & Noble), by H. P. Lovecraft; The Worlds of Jack Williamson: A Centennial Tribute 1908–2008 (Haffiner Press), Jack Williamson, edited by Stephen Haffiner; Gateway to Paradise: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Six (Haffiner Press), Jack Williamson; The Metal Giants and Others: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume One (Haffiner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; The Star Stealers: The Complete Adventures of the Interstellar Patrol: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Two (Haffiner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; The Collected Captain Future: Volume One: Captain Future

and the Space Emperor (Haffiner Press), by Edmond Hamilton; Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Subterranean – an omnibus of stories and the eponymous novel, written as by “Kilgore Trout”), by Philip José Farmer; Laugh Lines (Tor – an omnibus of six stories and two novels), by Ben Bova; Button, Button: Uncanny Stories (Tor), by Richard Matheson; Boy in Darkness and Other Stories (Peter Owen), by Mervyn Peake; Elric: The Stealer of Souls (Del Rey – an omnibus of stories and novels), by Michael Moorcock; Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn (Del Rey – an omnibus of stories and novels), by Michael Moorcock; Viewpoints Critical: Selected Stories (Tor), by L. E. Modesitt, Jr; Skeleton in the Closet and Other Stories (Subterranean), by Robert Bloch; Summer Morning, Summer Night (PS Publishing), by Ray Bradbury; Skeletons (Subterranean), by Ray Bradbury; and Project Moonbase and Others (Subterranean – an omnibus of screenplays and never-filmed adaptations of early Heinlein stories), by Robert A. Heinlein.

The most expensive of these is Bradbury’s Summer Morning, Summer Night, which sells for $750.00 (!); one wonders if they’re flying out the door at that price, although there probably are a few collectors willing to pay that much. The bulk of the retrospective collections sells somewhere in the $40 range. The paperbacks from Baen and Tor are much less expensive.

As usual, small press publishers were important – indispensable, really – to the short story collection market, since, with only a few occasional exceptions, the big trade publishers largely don’t do them anymore. Without them, collections would barely exist. As you can see, Subterranean (with the more contemporary stuff) and Haffner Press (with the retrospective stuff) had especially active years. Among trade publishers, Baen seems the most active, particularly in publishing omnibus volumes that contain both short stories and novels.

A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at sites such as Fictionwise and ElectricStory, and The Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.

The reprint anthology market seemed a bit weaker overall this year than last year. As usual, the bumper crop of “Best of the Year” anthologies were probably your best bet for your money in this market. It’s sometimes hard to tell how many of these there are, as they come and go so quickly, but the field seems to have been winnowed a bit from last year’s record total of fourteen. Science fiction was covered by three and a half anthologies, down from six anthologies last year: the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from Robinson, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-sixth (in the US) twenty-second (in the UK) annual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its thirteenth annual volume; Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007 (Prime), edited by Richard Horton; and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan (this is where the “half a book” comes in, although I doubt that it’ll divide that neatly in practice). Jonathan Strahan’s Best Short Novels series has died, as has Richard Horton’s announced but never appearing Space Opera Best series. The annual Nebula Awards anthology usually covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functioning as a de facto “Best of the Year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them (and thanks to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” practice, the stories in it are often stories that everybody else saw a year and sometimes even two years before); this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (Roc), edited by Ben Bova. There were two and a half Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson, Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, up to its nineteenth volume; Horror: The Best of the Year 2008 Edition (Prime), edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace; 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 Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, this year up to its twenty-First Annual Collection. Fantasy was covered by four anthologies (if you add two halves together): by the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the Datlow/Link & Grant anthology; by Year’s Best Fantasy 8 (Tachyon) edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer; by Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (Prime), edited by Rich Horton; by Best American Fantasy (Prime), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer; and by the fantasy half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan. There was also The 2008 Rhysling Anthology (Science Fiction Poetry Association/Prime), edited by Drew Morse, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year. If you count the Nebula anthology and the Rhysling anthology, there were eleven “Best of the Year” anthology series of one sort or another on offer this year, down from last year’s fourteen.

At the beginning of 2009 it was announced that the long-running Datlow/Link & Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series had died. Ellen Datlow has announced that she will begin doing a different “Best Horror” series for Night Shade Books, exact title as yet undetermined, to be published sometime in 2009 and covering stories published in 2008. So next year we’ll be half a book down in this category, losing the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of the former Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror book.

The last few years have featured big retrospective anthologies, but there were none of them this year and, as a result, fewer stand-alone reprint anthologies of exceptional merit. The best of the reprint anthologies was probably Steampunk (Tachyon), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, which featured good reprint stories by Michael Chabon, James Blaylock, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian R. MacLeod, Neal Stephenson, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, and others. Also good was Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, which featured stories about the you-know-what and its aftermath by George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Octavia Butler, and others. If you like zombies (which were so frequently encountered this year, even in the science fiction anthologies, that they seemed to be taking over the field), you’ll want The Living Dead (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams and packed full of zombie stories by Dan Simmons, Michael Swanwick, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Andy Duncan, and others. Another attempt at subgenre definition and canon-forming was The New Weird (Tachyon), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, a mixed anthology of reprint stories (the best by M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, and Jeff Ford), some original material, critical essays, and transcribed blog entries which had some good stuff in it but which ultimately left me just as confused as to what exactly The New Weird consisted of when I went out as I’d been when I went in. Good work was also to be found in The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe II (Baen), edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Volume Two (Tor), edited by Edmund R. Schubert and Orson Scott Card, volumes of stories from two of the most prominent ezines.

Otherworldly Maine (Down East), edited by Noreen Doyle, was a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology which featured strong reprints by Edgar Pangborn, Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, and others, as well as good original work by Gregory Feeley, Lee Allred, and Jessica Reisman. Just exactly what qualifies one to be a Savage Humanist is a bit unclear, in spite of a long analytical introduction, but The Savage Humanists (Robert J. Sawyer Books), edited by Fiona Kelleghan, features good reprint stories by Tim Sullivan, Greg Frost, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others. When Diplomacy Fails (Isfic Press), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, is a reprint anthology of military SF by Harry Turtledove, Gene Wolfe, David Weber, Tanya Huff, Resnick and Flint themselves, and others. The Best of Abyss & Apex: Volume One (Hadley Rille Books), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, is drawn from the website of the same name. And a perspective on SF from another part of the world is given by The Black Mirror and Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Austria (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Franz Rottensteiner.

Reprint fantasy anthologies included Tales Before Narnia (Del Rey), edited by Douglas A. Anderson; and The Dragon Done It (Baen), edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of fantasy/mystery crosses. There was a big retrospective reprint horror anthology, Poe’s Children: The New Horror (Doubleday), edited by Peter Straub, featuring reprints by Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Straub himself, and others.

Reissued anthologies of merit this year included The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2B (Tor), edited by Ben Bova; The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy (Running Press), edited by Mike Ashley; A Science Fiction Omnibus (Penguin Modern Classics), edited by Brian W. Aldiss; and The Reel Stuff (DAW), edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg. There were almost no SF-and-fantasy-oriented reference books this year, with the closest approach probably being Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, Second Edition (Sirius Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi. There were a number of critical books about SF and fantasy, including Maps and Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeneys), by Michael Chabon; Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press), by Farah Mendlesohn; The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 2 (Aqueduct), by Eileen Gunn and L. Timmel Duchamp; and What Is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction? (Beccon), by Paul Kincaid. There were autobiographies by or biographies/critical studies of specific authors, including Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (HarperCollinsUK), by J. G. Ballad; H. Beam Piper: A Biography (McFarland), by John F. Carr; An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (Greenwood), by Andrew M. Butler; Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography (McFarland), by Jeffrey Marks; The Vorkosigan Companion (Baen), by Lillian Stewart Carl and Martin H. Greenberg (a guide to the work of Lois McMaster Bujold); Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (St. Martin’s Press), by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette; Basil Cooper: A Life in Books (PS Publishing), edited by Stephen Jones; The Richard Matheson Companion (Gauntlet Press), by Stanley Wiater and Matthew R. Bradley; and a posthumously published collection of articles on diverse subjects by Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect (Putnam).

The year also saw the publication of two books of a kind that I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of: collections of articles previously published electronically online in blogs and in other Internet sources. They were Your Hate Mail Is Being Graded: Ten Years of Whatever (Subterranean Press), by John Scalzi, Whatever being the very popular blog that Scalzi won a best fanwriter Hugo for his work in this year, and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (Tachyon), by Cory Doctorow.

It was another weak year in the art book field, after several fairly strong ones earlier in the decade. Once again your best buy was probably Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art. Also worthwhile were The Other Visions: Ralph McQuarrie (Titan Books), by Ralph McQuarrie; The Paintings of J. Allen St. John: Grand Master of Fantasy (Vanguard), by Stephen A. Korshak; As I See: The Fantastic World of Boris Artzybashoff (Titan Books), by Boris Artzybashoff; Virgil Finlay: Future/ Past (Underwood Books), by Virgil Finlay; A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Centipede Press), edited by Jerad Walter; Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess (Dark Horse Books), by Charles Vess; and Telling Stories: The Comic Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), edited by Edward Mason.

There were a fair number of genre-related non-fiction books of interest this year. The most central of these was probably Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (Atlas), a collection of futurist articles, many by scientists or SF writers, edited by Damien Broderick. The edges of the possible in science, as we understand them today, is also explored in Physics of the Impossible (Doubleday), by physicist Michio Kaku, and in 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense (Doubleday), by Michael Brooks. Fans may also be interested in an examination of superhero science, Superheroes! (I. B. Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year), You Call This the Future? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning Life in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell.

There were lots of genre movies that did big box-office business this year, although few critical darlings or films thought of as “serious” movies.

According to the Box Office Mojo site (boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (counting in stuff like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as fantasy/SF – Hell, it’s even got aliens! – rather than “action/adventure”, and including animated movies but excluding the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, which is probably stretching the definition of “genre movie” too far); thirteen out of twenty of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films; and at least twenty-seven out of the hundred top-earning movies (depending on where you draw the lines – and for reasons of my own personal prejudices, I’m not counting horror/slasher/thriller movies) – were genre films.

In fact, it’s clear that genre films of one sort or another have come to dominate Hollywood at the box-office, producing most of the year’s really big money-makers, and that’s been true for a while now. During the last decade, each year’s top-grossing film has been a genre film of some sort: superhero movies (three of this year’s top-earners are superhero movies, and 2007’s biggest earner was Spider Man 3, a lesson that I doubt has been lost on the movie-makers), or fantasy/adventures such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or The Return of the King, or SF/adventures such Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, or even fantasy movies ostensibly for children such as Shrek 2 or The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. You have to go all the way back to 1998 before you find a non-genre film as the year’s top-earner, Saving Private Ryan.

Of course, the kicker is, what do you mean by “genre film”?

Of the year’s top ten highest-grossing films, of the nine that can be considered to be genre movies of one sort or another, three are superhero movies (The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Hancock, with The Incredible Hulk finishing in fourteenth place and Hellboy II: The Golden Army finishing in thirty-eighth place); one is fantasy/adventure (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with the comparable The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian finishing in thirteenth place); four are animated films (Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, with superhero – sort of – animated feature Bolt finishing in nineteenth place, and The Tale of Despereaux, released at the end of the year, perhaps destined to climb the charts); and one is a glossy vampire/romance movie (Twilight). (For those interested, other than Quantum of Solace, the two highest-earning non-genre films were Sex and the City and Mamma Mia!, which finished in eleventh and twelfth places respectively – unless you want to make the somewhat arch argument that they’re fantasy films as well.)

Like last year, there were almost no actual science fiction films on the list at all, even in the top hundred, let alone the top ten. The closest approach to a real SF film out this year was the animated film Wall-E, which did make the top ten list, in fifth place, in fact, and although its science was a bit shaky (you can’t make an ecosystem out of one plant and one cockroach), for the most part it treated its science fiction tropes with respect and intelligence, and what satiric needling there was at the genre was affectionate. In fact, with its humans who have become so pampered and constantly waited on by machines that they’ve lost the ability to walk, it may be the purest expression of 1950s’ Galaxy-era social satire of the Pohl/Kornbluth variety ever put before the general public. Wall-E itself got treated with an amazing amount of respect for an animated film ostensibly for children, as Ratatouille and The Incredibles had been before it, and is probably the one out of the top-grossing genre films that came the closest to being treated as a “serious movie”. At least some animated films are big money-makers these days and are clearly not being watched only by children anymore (if they ever were only watched solely by children in the first place, which I doubt).

The year’s other Great White Hope as far as SF movies were concerned was a glossy $80-million remake of the old fifties’ movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which, in spite of a good opening weekend, made it only to thirty-ninth place. Some fans protested that the movie wasn’t a faithful remake of the original film – but, of course, the original film itself wasn’t faithful to the ostensible source material, Harry Bates’ Astounding story “Welcome to the Master,” so that’s nothing new. Major plot-logic holes were the real problem here. Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated continuation or at least elaboration of the Star Wars saga, looking at stuff that happened between the cracks of the major movies, may have gone to the Star Wars well once too often, or perhaps people were thrown by the change in medium from live-action to animated, since it only finished seventy-ninth on the list of year’s top-earners. A remake of the classic Jules Verne novel Journey to the Center of the Earth was not even as watchable as the fifties’ version, in spite of having better special effects and the considerable advantage of not having Pat Boone in it. The only other science fiction film I could find (unless you count Space Chimps, which I don’t intend to) was Jumper, adapted with very little fidelity from a YA SF novel by Steven Gould, although it could with excellent justification be considered to be a superhero movie instead; it was supposed to be the start of a franchise, but since it earned $80 million but cost $85 million to make, that seems dubious – although the foreign revenues were better.

That was it for science fiction films, as far as I can tell. When I say “genre film” from here on down, we’re talking about fantasy films or superhero movies.

The top-grossing film of the year, by a huge margin, was The Dark Knight, which also got treated with a good deal of respect by critics for a superhero movie, mostly because of the late Heath Ledger’s riveting turn as the Joker, bringing a scary intensity to the part that surpassed and probably supplanted even Jack Nicholson’s famous interpretation of the role. You have to wonder if Christian Bale, who played Batman, and whose movie this ostensibly was, was bemused at the fact that nearly every review of the film spent all of its time raving about Heath Ledger and often didn’t mention Bale at all. (Still, at least he gets to collect his residuals, which may be some consolation.) Ledger’s performance will be long remembered by fans and would alone push The Dark Knight into the realm of classic superhero movies such as Spiderman and The X-Men, although the rest of the movie is pretty good too, dark and creepily elegant, but overlong and perhaps a bit muddled. The sly and frequently amusing Iron Man finished in second place in the top-grossing list, mostly because of a snarky performance by Robert Downey, Jr. The Big Green Angry Guy did better in his second outing as a film star, The Incredible Hulk, easily outdrawing Ang Lee’s muddled and overly complex previous Hulk movie, although not doing as well as his fellow superhero and Avengers teammate Iron Man (you could see them setting up the forthcoming Avengers movie throughout both Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, by the way). Although it seemed like two movies jammed together, neither of which the filmmakers really knew what to do with, Will Smith delivered enough of a star turn as a degenerate drunken superhero to put Hancock into fourth place. Wanted was about a guild of super-powered assassins.

(These totals are somewhat misleading, since they’re only talking about domestic grosses. If you add the foreign grosses to the domestic grosses, you have to shuffle the rankings around some. Indiana Jones (combined total: $786,001,411), Hancock ($624,386,476), and even Kung Fu Panda, which only finished sixth on the domestic-gross list (combined total: $631,465,619), coming in ahead of Iron Man ($581,804,570). Nothing can come close to unseating The Dark Knight, though, whose combined total is $997,012,892! And top-selling computer games such as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs make even more money than the movies do. Little wonder that print science fiction, and even print fantasy, have come to be seen by many as poor cousins, with even print bestsellers not coming even remotely close to earning what SF and fantasy do in other media.)

Sequels or new instalments of established franchises often did only so-so this year. The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did the best of any of them at the box-office (although even fans of the franchise seemed only lukewarm about the new Indiana Jones; Harrison Ford looked tired throughout, and I suspect that the producers would like to carry on the franchise using Shia LaBeouf instead, but he doesn’t show enough charisma here to convince me he could carry the franchise by himself). Below this point, things get dicier. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian placed a respectable thirteenth on the top-ten domestic earners list, but although it earned $141,621,490, it cost $200 million to make, which might have been bad news for the continuation of this franchise, except that foreign revenues bumped its combined total to $419,646,109, which might have saved it, as foreign revenues have saved a couple of movies in the last few years. It was a similar scenario with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which cost $145 million to make but earned only $102,277,510, until foreign revenues boosted its combined total to $290,903,563; of course, this franchise has been going steadily downhill since the original movie. Things were even more stark with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, in at thirty-eighth place, which cost $85 million to make but earned back only $75,791,785, and even with foreign revenues, could make it “only” to $158,954,785, which might have made it a failure in Hollywood terms. Too bad, as the original movie, Hellboy, was one of the most successful films of its year, both commercially and artistically; but the sequel, although it featured absolutely stunning visual effects, lacked the headlong narrative momentum and much of the rough humour of the original movie, and often got bogged down in confusing and perhaps unnecessary subplots. Star Wars: The Clone Wars could only make it to seventy-ninth place, in spite of the Star Wars name. And the “long-awaited” sequel to the last X-Files movie, this one called The X-Files: I Want To Believe, fell out of the top hundred list altogether, only managing to make it to 107th place, not enough people wanted to believe that this was something they really wanted to see, and this may well have been a case of waiting too long, until after interest and enthusiasm had cooled, before trying to do another sequel.

Cloverfield, a postmodern version of an old-fashioned giant-monstertrampling- through-a-city movie, widely referred to as “the Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla,” hauled in a combined total of $170,764,026 but cost only $25 million to make, rock-bottom cheap by today’s standards, so I’m sure that its producers are happy with its performance. There actually were some scary moments in this, if the constantly swirling and somersaulting camera didn’t make you flee the theatre with nausea or vertigo first. The execrable 10,000 B.C. is what you get when you’re sitting around in a pitch meeting and somebody says, “Hey! Egyptians meet mammoths!” The even more dreadful Speed Racer was another misguided attempt to make a live-action version of a campy old animated TV show, not unlike last year’s Underdog. The Happening was another fundamentally incoherent and not-particularly-scary M. Night Shyamalan movie, and Igor and the prophetically titled The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything were the year’s animated movies that didn’t make lots of money. There was a YA steampunk movie called City of Ember released late in the year that I haven’t seen, and a film version of another well known Young Adult fantasy novel, The Spiderwick Chronicles, which ditto.

The Magic Realist movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, came out right at the end of the year, to mixed but generally pretty good reviews; you’re on your own there, since I haven’t seen it either.

The best hope for a science fiction movie for next year seems to be the upcoming Star Trek prequel – which is kind of sad. Not surprisingly, there are a number of superhero movies in store for lucky audiences as well.

Coming up on the more-distant horizon are a version of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, directed by Ridley Scott, and a version of John Wyndham’s Chocky, directed by Steven Spielberg. On the even more distant horizon is a version of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, directed by Roland Emmerich.

The Writers Guild of America strike swept over the television industry early in 2008, leaving downed trees and wreckage in its wake, and probably contributing to the demise of a few already shaky shows – but even though some of the biggest genre shows on television, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who, Torchwood, were forced by the strike to go “on hiatus” until 2009 or even (in the case of Dr Who) until 2010 (as were some lesser shows such as Kyle XY and Fear Itself) – ratings are down across the board this season and some of last season’s biggest hits are wobbling in the ratings and in danger of being cancelled – there’s still plenty of genre shows to watch, with a large number of hopeful replacements waiting in the wings, and yet another row of potential shows looming beyond that. In fact, it’s clear that genre shows – mostly fantasy shows, although there are still actually a few science fiction shows left here and there – have come to dominate the TV airways to almost as great a degree as they dominate the Hollywood top-grossing films list, although cop/forensic/detective shows are still holding their own (last year’s wave of hybrid fantasy/SF cop shows largely failed to establish itself, with only Saving Grace surviving).

Shows like Moonlight, New Amsterdam, Cavemen, The Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Flash Gordon, and UFO Hunters were swept out to sea by the writers’ strike, and show no sign of coming back; many of them, like the jaw-droppingly awful Cavemen, probably wouldn’t have made it even without the strike.

Jericho, a watchable after-the-atomic war show that had been given a new lease on life after a massive fan write-in campaign, was granted a partial new season, still failed to attract audiences large enough for the network, and finally died for good, although the usual rumors that it might be picked up by another network swirled around for a while before fading away. One of last season’s big hits, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has struggled in the ratings this year, having become even more grim and apocalyptic than it was before, and may be in jeopardy; I’d like to see it survive because it’s one of the few new SF shows in a sea of fantasy shows. Eureka, another SF show, seems to be doing well, although it’s pleasantly quirky and even comic instead of dark, intense, and violent, which may explain why.

They also seem to be darkening Heroes, which made it through the strike intact, but which has been taking substantial hits in the ratings recently, which may be cause and effect (in economic hard times, audiences don’t particularly want grim and depressing, getting enough of that in everyday life; the show has also become complicated enough that it’s almost impossible to keep track of the plot, which probably doesn’t help), and which has sunk low enough quickly enough that it may actually be in danger of being cancelled, in spite of its Mega-Hit status last year; towards the end of the year, there was a big shake-up at Heroes, with several writers and producers fired, and we’ll see if that helps, although it may be too late. Smallville lost villain Lex Luthor when Michael Rosenbaum, the actor who has played him so vividly since the beginning of the series, decided to move on, a major blow that may eventually sink the show, although they’re gamely carrying on at the moment. Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis, both in hiatus at the moment, have announced that their upcoming seasons will be their last, although heartbroken fans can console themselves with the fact that each show will be followed by “two-hour special events” set in the same universe, and later by new spinoff shows, Caprica for Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe for Stargate Atlantis.

Perhaps the best of the new SF series is BBC America’s Primeval, which has been accurately referred to as “Torchwood meets Jurassic Park,” with a Torchwood-like team of investigators dealing with the incursions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts who for some unknown reason are popping through “anomalies” and wreaking havoc in the modern world. It’s a cleverly written show, intense and fast-moving, and the producers have been smart enough to vary the Prehistoric-Monster-of-the-Week formula with the occasional monster from the future, as well as bringing in timetravel paradoxes and Alternate Reality scenarios. Dr Who and Torchwood are in hiatus (although, unlike most shows that are “in hiatus,” they’re expected to actually return), but BBC America also has a Young Adult Dr Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures, ongoing as well.

If last year was The Year of the Cop, this year seems to be the year of the updated X-Files clones, with new shows Fringe, Eleventh Hour, and, to some degree, Sanctuary (with a splash of Hellboy thrown in), all repeating variations of The X-Files formula, some pretty blatantly. It’s too early to say if any of these shows are going to establish themselves, but although Fringe has the biggest guns behind it and has gotten the most praise and press coverage to date, Eleventh Hour seems to actually be edging it in the ratings. A hangover from the Year of the Cop is Life on Mars, about a present-day cop who’s mysteriously thrown back in time to 1973; this is actually the American version of the popular British limited series of the same name, and, unsurprisingly, I’ve already heard connoisseurs saying that the British version was better, but the American version may yet establish itself.

The campy old 1970s’ show Knight Rider, about a crime-fighting boy and his talking robot car, has come roaring back from oblivion revved up and ready for action, although the question that haunted the old series haunts this one as well: with everything the car can do, what do you need the boy for? (The answer: for the love scenes and the occasional fistfight.) So far, its ratings have been unspectacular, and it may be sent back to the garage. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is the series TV version of this year’s feature film with the same name, and so far seems to be doing better than the movie did.

My Own Worst Enemy and Chuck danced on the borderline between SF and the spy thriller, with My Own Worst Enemy having perhaps the most SF-like element, technology that can infuse two very different personalities into the same person’s body, which they time-share unwittingly until the barriers between them start to break down; in spite of an interesting premise, though, My Own Worst Enemy has already been cancelled, while Chuck seems to be doing fairly well.

Pushing Daisies was still much too self-consciously and self-congratulatory “weird” for my taste, and perhaps wore out its welcome with the rest of its audience as well, since ratings plummeted from last season, and its was cancelled late in the year. Perhaps inspired by the initial success of Pushing Daisies last season are two new supernatural shows more lighthearted in tone than the rather grim Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, a Thorne Smith-like show called Valentine, about the problems faced by lingering mythological figures in dealing with the modern world, kind of like The Beverley Hillbillies with Greek gods instead of hillbillies, and The Ex-List, about a woman inspired by a prophecy to seek her One True Love. Valentine is doing very poorly in the ratings, and its future is doubtful, and The Ex-List has already been cancelled. Legend of the Seeker, a rare high fantasy show, something not often seen on TV, is based on a Terry Goodkind novel, Wizard’s First Rule; and HBO is giving us a smalltown Southern take on vampires, True Blood, based on the bestselling “Sookie Stackhouse” novels of Charlaine Harris. I still can’t deal with the returning Saving Grace (cop talks with her own personal angel) either, and I never warmed to the lawyer-has-vivid-hallucinations-or-visions-perhapssent- by-God show Eli Stone – which was cancelled by the end of the year anyway. I don’t pay much attention to the long-established “supernatural” shows such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, and Supernatural, but they all seem to be doing fine, as are a number of “reality” shows based on investigating weird phenomena, such as Ghost Hunters, Monster Quest, and Paranormal State. The newer supernatural show Reaper is wobbling in the ratings a bit but still has a chance to survive.

Most of the buzz about upcoming shows seems to be being generated by Josh Whedon’s Dollhouse. The creator of former mega-hit Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Whedon gained a huge cult following for Buffy and for other shows such as Angel and Firefly, and a lot of people have high hopes that Whedon’s return to series TV, whose cast is peppered with Buffy and Angel alumni, will produce something similarly good. The premise doesn’t look promising to me, and its “downloading fake personalities and memories into spies to make them more effective agents” gimmick has already been pre-empted to some extent by My Own Worse Enemy, but Whedon is an extremely talented writer who has spun unlikely thread into gold before, so it’ll be interesting to see if he can do it again with Dollhouse.

A TV mini-series version of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic was released in the United Kingdom, but if it’s got on to the airwaves in the US yet, I so far haven’t been able to find it.

Coming up from AMC is a new version of the old British show The Prisoner, another cult favourite, which Prisoner fans seem to be either dreading or looking forward to with anticipation, depending on who you talk to, and mini-series versions of George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones from HBO and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars from AMC. Let’s hope that they can do a better job with them than the Sci Fi Channel did with Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

The 66th World Science Fiction Convention, Denvention 3, was held in Denver, Colorado, from 6 August to 11 August, 2008. The 2008 Hugo Awards, presented at Denvention 3, were: Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon; Best Novella, All Seated on the Ground, by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear; Best Related Book, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, David G. Hartwell; Best Professional Editor, Short Form, Gordon Van Gelder; Best Professional Artist, Stephan Martiniere; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), Doctor Who, “Blink”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Stardust; Best Semi-prozine, Locus, edited by Kristen Gong-Wong and Lisa Groen Trombi; Best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, John Scalzi; Best Fan Artist, Brad Foster; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Mary Robinette Kowal.

The 2007 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Texas, on 26 April, 2008, were: Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon; Best Novella, Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress; Best Novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Always,” by Karen Joy Fowler; Best Script, Pan’s Labyrinth, by Guillermo Del Toro; the Andre Norton Award to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling; plus the Author Emeritus Award to Ardath Mayhar and the Grand Master Award to Michael Moorcock.

The 2008 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on 2 November, 2008, during the Seventeenth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay; Best Novella, Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand; Best Short Fiction, “Singing of Mount Abora,” by Theodore Goss; Best Collection, Tiny Deaths, by Robert Shearman; Best Anthology, Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow; Best Artist, Edward Miller; Special Award (Professional), to Peter Crowther, for PS Publishing; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Midori Syner and Terri Windling for the Endicott Studios Web site; plus the Life Achievement Award to Patricia McKillip and Leo and Diane Dillon.

The 2008 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Downtown Radisson Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 29 March, 2008, were: Best Novel, The Missing, by Sarah Langan; Best First Novel, Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill; Best Long Fiction, “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best Short Fiction, “The Gentle Brush of Wings,” by David Niall Wilson; Best Collection, Proverbs For Monsters, by Michael A. Anzen and 5 Stories, by Peter Straub (tie); Best Anthology, Five Strokes to Midnight, edited by Gary Braunbeck and Hank Schwaeble; Non-Fiction, The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre, by Jonathan Maberry and David F. Kramer; Best Poetry Collection, Being Full of Light, Insubstantial, by Linda Addison, and Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet, by Charlee Jacob and Marge B. Simon (tie); plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to John Carpenter and Robert Weinberg.

The 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by In War Times, by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

The 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “Finisterra,” by David Moles, and “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear (tie).

The 2007 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison.

The 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Black Man, by Richard Morgan.

The 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall.

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to Stanley G. Weinbaum.

Death hit the SF and fantasy felds hard again this year. Dead in 2008 and early 2009 were:

Sir ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 91, one of the founding giants of modern science fiction, the last surviving member of the genre’s Big Three, which consisted of Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master Award, as famous for predicting the development of telecommunications satellites as for being involved in the production of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, author of such classics as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, The Sands of Mars, A Fall of Moondust, and The City and the Stars; ALGIS BUDRYS, 77, author, critic, and editor, author of the classic novel Rogue Moon, which many thought should have won the Hugo in its year, plus Who?, Michaelmas, Hard Landing, and distinguished short stories such as “A Scraping at the Bones”, “Be Merry”, “Nobody Bothers Gus”, “The Master of the Hounds”, and “The Silent Eyes of Time”; THOMAS M. DISCH, 68, writer and poet, one of the most acclaimed and respected of the New Wave authors who shook up SF in the mid-60s, also considered to be a major American poet, author of the brilliant 334, Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, a large body of biting and sardonic short fiction, and the acerbic critical study of SF The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, which, ironically, finally won him a Hugo; JANET KAGAN, 63, author of the wildly popular “Mama Jason” stories, which were collected in Mirabile, as well as the novel Hellspark, and one of the most popular Star Trek novels ever, Uhura’s Song, winner of the Hugo Award for “The Nutcracker Coup”; a close personal friend; BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY, 71, British SF author whose highly inventive novels such as The Fall of Chronopolis, The Pillars of Eternity, and The Zap Gun were a strong infuence on the British New Space Opera of the 1980s and 90s; MICHAEL CRICHTON, 66, bestselling author of such technothrillers as The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, Rising Sun, Eaters of the Dead, and others, most of which were made into successful movies (Eaters of the Dead was filmed, pretty faithfully, as The Thirteenth Warrior); JOHN UPDIKE, 76, major American novelist, poet, and critic, author of literary novels such as Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, perhaps best known to genre audiences as the author of fantasy novels The Witches of Eastwick (which was filmed under the same name) and The Widows of Eastwick; ROBERT ASPRIN, 62, creator and editor of the popular Thieves’ World series of braided anthologies and novels by many hands, as well as an author of comic novels such as Another Fine Myth, Phule’s Company, and their sequels; DONALD WESTLAKE, 75, who wrote some SF, including the novel Anarchaos under the name “Curt Clark,” but who was much better known as a multiple Edgar Award-winning mystery writer, author of two of the most important mystery series of our day, the Parker novels, under the name “Richard Stark,” and the John Dortmunder novels under his own name, plus many stand-alone novels; GEORGE W. PROCTOR, 61, author of sixteen SF and fantasy novels and two co-edited anthologies; JAMES KILLUS, 58, SF writer, atmospheric scientist, and technical writer, author of SF novels Book of Shadows and SunSmoke; RICHARD K. LYON, 75, SF novelist and research chemist; HUGH COOK, 52, SF/fantasy writer, author of the ten-volume Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series; LEO FRANKOWSKI, 65, SF writer, author of The Cross Time Engineer and its many sequels; STEPHEN MARLOWE, 79, prominent mystery novelist who also occasionally wrote SF as Milton Lesser; JODY SCOTT, 85, author of Passing for Human and I, Vampire; MICHAEL de LARRABEITI, 73, author of the surprisingly dark and violent YA Borribles trilogy; BRIAN THOMSEN, 49, SF editor, writer, and anthologist; EDWARD D. HOCK, 77, well-known mystery writer who also dabbled in fantasy and SF; GARY GYGAX, 69, sometimes called the father of fantasy gaming, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, author also of fantasy novels The Annubis Murders and The Samarkand Solution; DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, 46, novelist and essayist, author of Infinite Jest; JOHNNY BYRNE, 73, veteran British SF/ writer; LINO ALDANI, 83, Italian SF writer; WERNER KURT GIESA, 53, German SF, fantasy, and horror writer; JOSE B. ADOLPH, 74, Peruvian author, playwright, and scholar; LYUBEN DILOV, 80, Bulgarian SF writer; HUGO CORREA, 81, Chilean SF author; GEORGE C. CHESBRO, 68, SF writer; SYDNEY C. LONG, 63, SF writer and Clarion Workshop graduate; EDD CARTIER, 94, veteran pulp illustrator, especially known for his many black-and-white illustrations for the pioneering fantasy magazine Unknown Worlds; JOHN BERKEY, 76, prominent SF cover artist; DAVE STEVENS, 52, cartoonist and comics writer, creator of the character The Rocketeer; ROBERT LEGAULT, 58, SF reader, professional copy editor, and former managing editor of Tor Books; a friend; FORREST J. ACKERMAN, 92, longtime fan and enthusiastic booster of horror films, also an agent and occasional writer/anthologist, founder of the long-running Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, coiner of the term “sci-fi,” which is loathed in some genre circles, although mostly ubiquitous these days outside them; famed fantasy artist and illustrator JAMES CAWTHORN, 79; MURIEL R. BECKER, 83, SF scholar; JOSEPH PEVNEY, 97, film and TV director who directed many of the episodes of the original Star Trek series; BEBE BARRON, 82, who, with husband Lewis Barron, created the striking electronic score for Forbidden Planet; ALEXANDER COURAGE, 85, composer of the theme music for the original Star Trek series; ROBERT H. JUSTMAN, 82, supervising producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation; CHARLTON HESTON, 84, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green; PAUL NEWMAN, 83, one of the most famous film actors of the twentieth century, whose genre connections were actually somewhat weak, limited to voiceover work in the animated film Cars, the unsuccessful SF movie Quintet, and The Hudsucker Proxy, which had some fantastic elements; ROY SCHEIDER, 76, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in 2010 and Jaws; JAMES WHITMORE, 87, probably best known to genre audiences for his roles in Them! and Planet of the Apes; JOHN PHILLIP LAW, 71, film actor best known to genre audiences for his role as the blind “angel” in Barbarella; HEATH LEDGER, 28, film actor no doubt to be recalled for a long time by genre audiences for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight; film actor VAN JOHNSON, 92, best known to genre audiences for roles in Brigadoon and The Purple Rose of Cairo; comic film actor HARVEY KORMAN, 81, who had some minor genre connections for voiceover work on TV’s The Flintstones, but who is known by practically everybody for his role as Hedly Lamarr in Blazing Saddles; MAJEL BARRETT RODDENBERRY, 76, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and also an actress in her own right, appearing in several Star Trek episodes and providing the voice of the Enterprise’s computer; PATRICK McGOOHAN, 80, acclaimed stage, television, and film actor, best known to genre audiences for his role as Number Six in TV’s The Prisoner; RICARDO MONTALBAN, 88, film and television actor, best known to genre audiences for his roles in TV’s Fantasy Island and as the villainous Khan in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; BOB MAY, 69, who played the Robot on TV’s Lost in Space; JACK SPEER, 88, long-time SF fan who wrote the first history of fandom, Up to Now, plus the Fancyclopedia; HARRY TURNER, 88, acclaimed British fan artist; KEN SLATER, 90, long-time SF fan who operated the UK mail-order list Operation Fantast; NORMA VANCE, 81, wife of SF writer Jack Vance; RAYMOND J. SMITH, 77, husband of writer Joyce Carol Oates; Dr CHRISTINE HAYCOCK, 84, widow of SF critic Sam Moskowitz; ANGELINA CANALE KONINGISOR, 84, mother of SF writer Nancy Kress; EVA S. WILLIAMS, 92, mother of SF writer Walter Jon Williams; BARNET EDELMAN, 77, father of SF editor and writer Scott Edelman; HAZEL PEARSON, 77, mother of SF writer William Barton; CLAUDIA LIGHTFOOT, 58, mother of SF writer China Miéville; MARION HOLMAN, 88, mother of SF editor and publisher Rachel Holman; and DANTON BURROUGHS, 64, grandson of SF writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I can think of no genre justification for mentioning them, but I can’t let the obituary section close without mentioning the deaths of TONY HILLERMAN, 83, one of the great mystery writers of the last half of the twentieth century, author of the adventures of Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, such as Dance Hall of the Dead, Thief of Time, and Skinwalkers; JAMES CRUMLEY, 68, mystery writer who in some ways was the natural heir to Raymond Chandler, author of one of the ten best mystery novels of all time, The Last Good Kiss, as well as other hard-edged detective novels such as Dancing Bear and The Mexican Tree Duck; STUDS TERKEL, 96, compiler of books of interviews on topics of historic significance, such as The Good War and Working; and Nobel Prize-winner ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, 89, probably the most famous of modern Russian writers, author of The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, among others, and who I suspect was an infuence on SF writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin (there, a genre connection at last!).