SUMMATION:
1995

Nineteen ninety-five seemed to be a fairly glum year, with a lot of grim recessionary talk to be heard at most gatherings of science fiction professionals, although the actual numbers didn’t really seem to justify the intensity of the gloom; perhaps the unusually large number of deaths of prominent figures in the science fiction community during 1995, including some of the most beloved individuals in the field, helped to set the emotional tone of the year.

In spite of all the recessionary talk, the overall number of books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1995 rose by 13 percent over the previous year, according to the newsmagazine Locus, reversing three years of minor decline, with that total including 659 new science fiction/fantasy/horror novels. Even focusing strictly on science fiction, there were still 239 new SF novels published in 1995, the number up from last year’s total, so it can be seen that SF remains an enormous genre, one which grows even larger if you add in the related fantasy and horror genres, as is usually the custom. The SF publishing scene was, overall, relatively quiet in 1995, although the magazine market continued to deteriorate, with several major titles lost and others struggling (see below). There have been cutbacks at some houses, and even SF publishing lines have been lost over the last couple of years, but, as usual, these losses have been balanced by the launching of new lines or by some publishers increasing the number of titles they release, leaving the overall totals roughly the same. Wizards of the Coast, for instance, abruptly abandoned plans for an ambitious new SF/fantasy book line, one they’d wooed Janna Silverstein away from Bantam last year to edit, but relatively new lines such as HarperPrism and Warner Aspect and Tor Forge and White Wolf continued to expand throughout the year (although White Wolf later contracted a bit in early 1996—having perhaps expanded too fast—laying off some staff and cutting back on their projected, and perhaps overly ambitious, book line); and a big hardcover list of somewhere between thirty and fifty new titles per year has been announced by Avon. The comics and gaming worlds, by comparison, were much harder hit by recessionary economics than the SF publishing world has been, with massive cutbacks at companies like Marvel and DC Comics, and many comics titles being dropped or sold, and with big cutbacks in the gaming areas under way at companies like White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast.

There was another vigorous round this year of the publishing world’s favorite game, editorial musical chairs. Lou Aronica, who had moved to Berkley from Bantam in 1994, moved to Avon to become their new senior vice president and publisher. Jennifer Hershey moved from Bantam shortly thereafter, where she had been executive editor of Bantam Spectra and senior editor at Bantam Books, to become the new executive editor at Avon. Christopher Schelling, the executive editor at HarperPrism, retired for health-related reasons and was replaced by John Douglas, who had since 1983 been senior editor at Avon. Jennifer Brehl, who had been the late Isaac Asimov’s editor at Doubleday, will take over at Avon as senior editor in charge of the science fiction program. Owen Lock, former Del Rey editor in chief, moved on to become vice president and editor at large of the Ballantine Publishing Group, while Kuo-Yu Liang, former Del Rey sales manager, has moved up to become associate publisher of Del Rey and will oversee the SF programs at Ballantine in general.

Everyone waited throughout the year for Bantam Spectra to announce a replacement for Jennifer Hershey, with rumors targeting one editor or another for the job, but so far, as of the time this is being written, Bantam has not dropped the other shoe, and the position remains vacant.

A bit more than halfway through the decade, with the twenty-first century looming on the horizon, it’s perhaps an appropriate time to take a brief look at how science fiction is doing as a genre, and what the prospects are for its future.…

… If it has a future, of course. Gloomy prognostications about the imminent death of the SF genre continued to appear here and there throughout the year. The editor of Interzone, David Pringle, recently published an editorial in which he made some disturbingly plausible comparisons between the decline of the Western as a genre and the possible future decline of SF as a genre, or at least as a print genre—arguing that, like the Western before it, print SF is becoming secondary to its film and TV forms, and may vanish as suddenly as did midlist Western novels, which pretty much disappeared from the British racks, quite suddenly, in the mid-1980s. Pringle says, “Already one senses that there is a younger generation for whom science fiction means film-and-TV sf before it means books or other written forms. And an ever-greater proportion of the sf books which do get published, and enjoy sales, are movie or TV spinoffs.” And it’s certainly possible to come up with a lot of evidence in support of this view if you look around: The new British magazine SFX, which bills itself as the “world’s greatest SF magazine,” publishes no print fiction at all, being devoted to SF in other forms; SF media magazines proliferate wildly here in the United States; TV Guide is now running a regular “Sci-Fi” column that never mentions print SF, or print authors (unless they’re working on a TV show); the huge media-oriented “SF” conventions, often with attendances in excess of eight or nine thousand people, where it’s possible to walk around for days without meeting anyone who knows anything about print SF, or cares. And so on. Along similar lines, during a recent visit to Britain, for the Scottish Worldcon, most of the SF writers I spoke to were sunk in gloom because many of the British publishers are now refusing to buy science fiction, insisting on buying only fantasy instead, one writer saying that a book editor had told him “if you don’t have a Celtic trilogy to offer, don’t bother us”; the sales department of one of the major British publishers has been quoted as saying that “the UK sf market is now too small to be worth bothering with”; and a prominent British SF writer has said that it’s now impossible for him to sell science fiction novels without “disguising” them as horror or fantasy novels—an ironic turnaround since the days of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was impossible to sell fantasy without “disguising” it as science fiction!

Of course, what most of the American professionals in attendance wanted to know was—could it happen here? Are SF’s days numbered, as a print genre anyway?

Well, yes,’ it could happen here, and print SF’s days might be numbered—but not necessarily. Such gloomy scenarios are hardly new, and should probably be taken with a grain of salt. To add a bit of historical perspective, I recently came across a New Worlds anthology from 1975, which was predicting the imminent death of the genre back then, for many of the same reasons. In fact, in more than twenty years of surveying the state of the genre in the course of preparing Best of the Year anthologies, it’s hard to remember a year in which somebody wasn’t predicting the imminent death of the field—just as they were doing back in 1961, when the fanzine Hugo was won by a symposium with the title “Who Killed Science Fiction?”

It sometimes seems to me that the current state of SF publishing would be best expressed in a sequence of good news–bad news jokes: For example, the good news is that a lot more SF writers are making a lot more money—an enormously greater amount of money—and selling much greater numbers of books than was thought even remotely possible in the seventies; the bad news is that the dwindling of the midlist and the near disappearance of the backlist is making it a lot more difficult to have a reasonable career as an SF writer if you’re not a best-selling A-list author, driving more and more writers who would once have gotten by comfortably as midlist SF writers into having to write media tie-in novelizations and Star Trek books in order to survive. Or, the good news is, in today’s greatly expanded market, it’s probably easier to sell a first and even a second novel than it was twenty years ago; the bad news is that with the much more efficient and immediate return figures made possible by computers, and the fact that bookstore chains such as B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks won’t order a book by someone whose last couple of books haven’t sold well (which they can now check by clicking a few buttons), and that publishers are highly reluctant to buy from someone whom they can’t sell to the chains, many authors are finding it considerably more difficult—if not impossible—to sell their third or fourth novel than it was to sell their first and second, nipping in the bud some careers that in the old days might instead have been allowed to develop to the point where the author was successful in building an audience. (If you applied the same standards—immediate commercial success, or oblivion—to Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov, for instance, nobody would ever have heard of them, either.) Or, the good news is, books—and not just SF books—are selling in greater numbers today than ever before; the bad news is, the big bookstore chains are gobbling an ever increasing share of those sales, forcing independent booksellers out of existence, and even the chains themselves are contracting, closing more and more individual stores in favor of huge “superstores” … so that more books than ever before are being sold, but at fewer and fewer locations nationwide. Or, the bad news is, every time you walk into a bookstore, you’re overwhelmed by what seem like ever increasing amounts of media tie-in books—Star Trek books, Star Trek: The Next Generation books, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine books, Star Trek: Voyager books, X-Files books, Highlander books, Tek War books—and Celtic fantasy trilogies, and gaming-oriented books, and so on, until sometimes it seems next to impossible to spot the SF books that cling to rack space here and there, sometimes visible if someone hasn’t buried them under a stack of Star Wars or Magic: The Gathering books; the good news is, in spite of all that, there are still adult SF and fantasy novels of quality and intelligence there to be found.… In fact, there are probably more such novels being published now than there were twenty years ago, since, although the number of peripheral items has grown, the core of the field itself has continued to grow as well.

I choose to believe that print SF does have a viable future, although I admit that it’s something I choose to believe, something taken on faith, an intuition at best, rather than a proposition for which I can muster an overwhelmingly convincing body of evidence. I don’t like to see statements about the imminent death of the field, not so much because they disagree with that intuition or item of faith, but because I fear in some primitive part of my hindbrain that such statements have an incantatory function—that if enough people say it, they may conjure that future into existence. This may not be just superstition—after all, all you have to do to engineer the death of the genre, or at least a severe setback for it, is to plant the idea that print SF is dying or is passé or is not worth bothering with anymore into the minds of six or seven people, executives highly placed in the publishing world, who will then, by refusing to invest resources in SF lines anymore or by telling the editors under them not to buy SF, create that very future in a self-fulfilling prophecy. I suspect that something of the sort has happened in British publishing, where the meme “Fantasy sells, SF doesn’t” has replicated to the point where no one is bringing SF books out anymore. And since none are available for readers to buy, nobody buys them, thus neatly proving the point that they don’t sell.

So we should be careful what we wish for—we may get it!

An interesting point, here in the looming shadow of the twenty-first century, one that may or may not turn out to be significant: in spite of an almost universal agreement in the SF publishing world that electronic publishing is never going to amount to anything (or that if it eventually does, that time is still twenty or thirty years away), this year, for the first time ever, this anthology contains a story that never saw print in any form before its appearance here, a story that until now existed only as phosphor dots on a computer screen, and is only now, with the publication of this book, appearing on paper in a form you can pick up and hold in your hands. I can’t help but feel that this is a signpost to the future—or at least to a future. But only time will tell.

*   *   *

It was a very bad year in the magazine market, with several major losses, and major shake-ups and changes under way at other magazines. The cost of paper continued to escalate alarmingly throughout 1995, and this, coupled with 1994’s massive hike in postage rates and a dramatic industrywide drop-off in “stamp” subscription sales (Publishers Clearing House, for instance, the largest “stamp” subscription seller, experienced a 30 percent drop in overall sales last year), has hurt every magazine in existence to some extent. Magazines across the entire marketplace were affected, not just the science fiction magazines … although the SF magazines, which usually have lower circulations than general-interest magazines, are perhaps even more vulnerable to such changes, being, for instance, among the first magazines to be dropped from PCH stamp cards when belt-tightening is thought to be in order. In such a publishing climate, the marginal publications are often the first to die—a gloomy prospect for the science fiction market, especially with the threat of new and even more massive postal rate hikes looming on the horizon. And yet, in spite of this glowering and forbidding atmosphere, several newer magazines seem to have established themselves, and brand-new magazines continued to struggle to be born, bravely ignoring the seemingly overwhelming odds against their survival; it would be nice to think, although perhaps this is whistling past the graveyard, that a few of them will manage to beat the odds and establish themselves successfully as well.

Even putting the most optimistic spin possible on things, though, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the major stories in the magazine market this year were negative.

The biggest story, and perhaps the greatest loss, was the death of Omni as a regular print magazine. Early in 1995, after publishing four regular issues, Omni announced that it was immediately ceasing publication of its regular monthly edition, and was instead converting its monthly editions to interactive online information services, “supplemented” by quarterly print issues, to be sold only on newsstands; mail subscriptions were immediately phased out. Two issues of the “quarterly” print format were published in 1995 (one of them was actually published in January 1996, although it was dated 1995), and then, early in 1996, it was announced that the quarterly print edition was being killed as well. Supposedly Omni continues to exist as an “electronic online magazine” on America Online, and as a recently established Web page on the World Wide Web (http://www.omnimag.com/), although no one as yet seems to know exactly what that means, now that the print edition has vanished altogether. The party line is that Omni has not died at all, merely changed its format, making a deliberate attempt to “get a jump on the new millennium” by moving into the “new frontier” of electronic publishing, which they represent as the future of publishing, particularly magazine publishing. Most industry insiders are skeptical, speculating that the change was forced on Omni by escalating production costs for the monthly print edition and by the fact that most of Omni’s subscriptions were cut-rate “stamp” subscriptions from Publishers Clearing House, which often cost more to fulfill than the income they brought in—that, in other words, they were merely putting the best face possible on a change they would have had no choice but to make anyway. It will be very, very interesting (and perhaps significant for the future of the magazine market, especially as there are several other electronic “magazines” in the process of being launched) to see if the electronic “online” version of Omni can survive. One commonly asked question is, Where’s the money going to come from? This is an especially pertinent question in regards to the Web page, where there will likely be no charge to access the Omni area, as there is on America Online. So far, much of Omni’s electronic publishing has been underwritten by major advertisers such as the car company Dodge Neon, which sponsored the online publication of some of the novellas published in the Omni Online area of America Online last year (the novellas were considered to make up an “online anthology” called Neon Visions), but it remains to be seen whether or not advertisers will remain interested now that there is no print publication at all to support the “online magazine” version.

While all this furor has been going on, starting in February of 1995, Omni Online began “publishing” a new novella every month in electronic format. Some of these novellas have since shown up in print format, while some are still available to be read only as phosphor dots on a computer screen (unless you download them and print them out, of course). The quality of these novellas has been very high, ranging from good to excellent, including a few of the year’s best stories. The Omni Online series, featuring work by such prominent writers as Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, Jack Dann, Paul J. McAuley, Robert Silverberg, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and many others, has greatly increased the number of good novellas available this year … a very positive thing, since there are few places in the genre where it is possible to sell a novella. Only Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and, now, Science Fiction Age are able to accommodate them—which in turn discourages writers from attempting to write them in the first place. So it’s great to see a new market for novellas, encouraging authors to write more of them, especially as I consider the novella to be perhaps the form most perfectly suited for the production of good science fiction. On the other hand, I get the uneasy feeling that almost nobody is actually reading these novellas, even the bulk of the core SF-reading audience—certainly they are not showing up on award ballots or even nomination lists or recommended reading lists in anything like a proportion commensurate with their quality. If this is true, it may bode ill for the eventual success of this series. We’re in unknown territory here, however, so it’s anybody’s guess as to what will happen; perhaps the availability of these novellas on the World Wide Web will not only help the core SF-reading audience catch up with them but find them vast new audiences as well. It’s an encouraging sign that even after the publication of the initial six novellas commissioned by Dodge Neon, Omni Online has continued to publish a novella a month, continuing through the early months of 1996, and is still continuing to do so as I type these words. Only time will tell if this is indeed the opening-up of an exciting new frontier or merely a doomed dead end. Award-winning editor Ellen Datlow has been maintained as the fiction editor for both the “electronic online magazine” version of Omni on America Online and the Omni Online series of novellas, which is good news, and another encouraging sign.

Other major stories in this market this year were as grim or grimmer, alas. Amazing was shopped around by parent company TSR throughout 1994, found no buyers, and at last officially died in 1995, after publishing one final digest-sized issue, dated as winter 1995. Thus ends its remarkable sixty-nine-year history. Amazing has been pronounced dead before during the twenty years I’ve been editing Best of the Year anthologies, only to come miraculously back to life in another form, but I get the glum feeling that this time, in this economically depressed publishing climate, it’s not going to be able to pull off its usual Lazarus trick, and that it’s gone for good. Several anthologies designed to use up Amazing’s leftover inventory are apparently scheduled to be published, and one actually did make it into the bookstores in 1995 (see below). Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine managed to publish two issues in 1995, one a special “Jesus” issue guest-edited by Damon Knight, and then was killed by editor-publisher Dean Wesley Smith, who is closing down both Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine and Pulphouse Publishing in general in order to devote more time to his own career as a fiction writer. Thus ends, with a whimper rather than a bang, the history of Pulphouse Publishing, one of the most ambitious small-press publishing programs of our times, and a line that only a few years back was widely expected to evolve into one of the major players in the SF publishing scene of the nineties. The print edition of the revived Galaxy was killed this year as well, although supposedly it too will continue as an “electronic online magazine”; I can’t say that I’ll miss Galaxy much, since, frankly, most of the fiction in it struck me as dreadful. Louis L’ Amour’s Western Magazine, a stablemate of Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction which occasionally featured borderline or associational work by SF writers such as Steven Utley and W. M. Shockley, died, proving too expensive to produce in a large, full-size format even though it had reached a respectable circulation (by digest-magazine standards) of 130,000 copies per issue. Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, formerly Weird Tales before a title change was forced on it last year, only managed to publish one issue this year out of its supposed quarterly schedule, but they promised to make a comeback next year, and I hope that they do. Along similar lines, Aboriginal SF, which was declared officially dead in the early spring of 1995, may not be quite so dead after all—editor Charles Ryan has announced that Aboriginal SF will return to print in 1996. Industry insiders remain skeptical of this, but time will tell; meanwhile, we wish them well.

It was another precarious year for the three major digest magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which all continued to lose circulation to one degree or another, with Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction undergoing some major internal changes as well.

Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction—particularly Asimov’s—suffered from being dropped from Publisher’s Clearing House “stamp cards” as a belt-tightening measure by PCH. Analog lost about 4,000 in subscriptions and another 1,000 in newsstand sales, for a 7.1 percent loss in overall circulation. Asimov’s Science Fiction lost about 9,000 in subscriptions (most of these PCH “stamp” subscriptions) and another 1,000 in newsstand sales, for a 16.9 percent loss in overall circulation (a possible minor bright spot here is that early 1996 figures show the newsstand/bookstore sales creeping up by about a thousand copies). The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had lost almost 10 percent of its overall circulation in 1994, managed to slow its losses to the point where it almost broke even in 1995, losing 600 newsstand sales but gaining 391 subscription sales, thus losing only 209 copies overall, a very encouraging sign. Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction got a new president and publisher, Carla Graubard, replacing Joachim P. Rosler, who himself had replaced Christoph Haas-Heye only six months earlier. Early in 1996, it was decided that, as an economizing move in the face of rising paper costs, Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction would drop sixteen pages per issue, and would also be cut back to a schedule of publishing eleven times per year, ten regular issues plus one “double” issue on sale for two months, the same yearly schedule followed by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Then, only hours ago as I typed the final clean copy of this summation, it was announced that Dell Magazines, including Analog and Asimov’s and the two mystery magazines Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s, as well as a large number of crossword-puzzle and astrology magazines, had been sold to Penny Press, a family-owned Connecticut-based publisher.

This could turn out to be a positive change for Analog and Asimov’s, which have been hurt by the huge corporate overhead and corporate rent charged against them by the parent corporation Bertelsmann, eating into the profitability, making them more marginal than they had been at a much smaller company such as Davis Publications, where the overhead had been correspondingly lower. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, is in the enviable position of having very low overhead, produced as it is by a minimal staff pretty much out of the living rooms of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Ed Ferman, so the magazine’s profitability stays high. In like fashion, a smaller company, with much smaller corporate overhead, could send the relative profitability of Analog and Asimov’s soaring, even if there was no immediate increase in overall circulation.

Let’s hope that this optimistic scenario is the one that comes to pass. Although you can, of course, discount this opinion—since I am, after all, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction—I still feel that the three digest magazines are the real core of the field, providing what little continuity and cohesive sense of community there is in the genre these days, as well as showcasing emerging new writers, and that the loss of them would be a devastating blow to science fiction—one that in the long run might even prove fatal to the evolution of the SF genre as a genre, eliminating most of the continuity from one literary generation to another. So keep your fingers crossed that the traditional digest magazines manage to survive through the precarious days ahead.

The British magazine Interzone completed its fifth full year as a monthly publication and won its first Hugo—oddly, because of circulation requirements, in the semiprozine category. Overall circulation was down slightly again, continuing a trend a couple of years old, but the magazine passed its hundredth-issue anniversary, a rare benchmark in a genre crammed with short-lived magazines, and—I hope!—doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger of vanishing. The literary quality of the stories remained high, perhaps a bit higher than last year overall (although, because of the way things fell out, I actually ended up using fewer stories from Interzone in this year’s Best than in last year’s), perhaps because they seemed to be using less fantasy this year; the quality of the fantasy stories in Interzone has in general not been very good, and it’s my own opinion that they would be better off sticking mainly to science fiction, as, for instance, in the interesting (although very uneven) “high-tech” issue guest-edited by Charles Platt. Overall, Interzone is one of the most reliable genre sources in which to find first-rate material—rating right up there, in my of course biased opinion, with magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (I still think that the much-vaunted “redesign” of the magazine has done nothing but make it uglier and harder to read, but perhaps that’s just my old-fashioned taste.) Talking to British fans while in Scotland for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I was dismayed by how little support for Interzone there seems to be among the British fannish community, with many fans actually saying that they hoped it would die soon. I remember a similar attitude in British fandom in the late sixties about New Worlds magazine—it was shortsighted then, and it’s even more shortsighted now. Without Interzone, the already depressed British SF publishing scene would become a wasteland, and there would be no place left for new British writers to develop their craft. Most of the people who decry Interzone as being “artsy” and “not really science fiction” conveniently forget that Interzone helped to develop major new writers such as Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Iain Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Ian R. MacLeod, and others—almost all of whom are hard-science writers, and some of whom are writing “hard science fiction” in as pure and rigorous a form as it has ever been written. If these people are not writing science fiction, I’d like to know who is. No, far from being the “marginal” artsy not-kosher not-really-SF magazine that some British fans claim that it is, Interzone is and has been vital to the evolution of science fiction in the eighties and nineties, and I personally hope that it continues to be so for many years to come.

Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow, two newish large-size SF magazines, each successfully completed their third full year of publication. The overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped slightly for the first time since its launch in 1993; it lost about 1,476 subscription sales and 3,536 newsstand sales, for a 9 percent loss in overall circulation; the magazine attributes most of this loss to readers switching to their newly launched sister fantasy magazine, Realms of Fantasy, which is a reasonable explanation, as long as the circulation doesn’t continue to drop. Last year, editor Scott Edelman took me to task for speculating here—as many genre insiders were speculating at the time—about whether Science Fiction Age could really be profitable, considering how much more expensive it ought to be to produce a slick, full-color, large-format magazine like Science Fiction Age than a digest-sized magazine like Asimov’s or F&SF; in rebuttal, on one of the online networks, Scott insisted in no uncertain terms that Science Fiction Age was indeed doing very well financially. I’m glad to hear this and to stand corrected, especially since, considering what’s happening with most of the other SF magazines, the genre could certainly use a real success story—I must add, though, even at the price of irking Scott again, that his denials have done nothing to stop genre insiders from continuing to speculate along the same lines. I hope that it is true that Science Fiction Age is a resounding success, though, since it’s becoming clear that artistically Science Fiction Age is the most important new magazine to have been launched since the start-up of Asimov’s Science Fiction back in 1977. When Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow both launched, I actually preferred the fiction that Tomorrow was publishing, but the quality of the fiction in Tomorrow has stayed the same, or perhaps even worsened a bit, while that in Science Fiction Age has clearly improved during the same period, so that now I think that Science Fiction Age is inarguably pulling ahead of Tomorrow in terms of yearly overall literary quality. The general consensus of the field seems to be agreeing with this assessment—a story from Science Fiction Age has already won that magazine its first Nebula Award, stories from it have been on the final Hugo ballot, and a story from it is on this year’s final ballot for the Nebula Award as I type this.

This is not to say that Tomorrow is a bad magazine, by any means; although its circulation, about three thousand copies, is minuscule compared to that of Science Fiction Age, it remains a thoroughly professional magazine in every way except circulation (to be fair, Science Fiction Age, which is backed by a publishing company, obviously has much greater financial resources—and access to distribution channels—than Tomorrow, which is run out of editor Algis Budrys’s living room), has kept to its schedule faithfully (something magazines with greater resources sometimes don’t manage to do), and continues to publish good fiction. Perhaps it’s fairer to say that although the average Science Fiction Age story and the average Tomorrow story are not that dissimilar in quality, Science Fiction Age has to date managed to publish more stories of a more exceptional quality, stories that stand out a bit above the general level of the rest of the stories the magazine published that year. Perhaps this is in part because Tomorrow chooses to publish lots of short-short stories per issue—a mistake that Pulphouse and Galaxy were also making—and it’s much rarer to come across a short-short story of exceptional quality (a really good short-short is perhaps the hardest thing in the business to write) than it is to find a longer story that works at a similar level of excellence. Science Fiction Age has been concentrating on longer stories, even recently adding a section printed on nonslick paper that enables it to publish novellas, and I think that this has helped to give it a slight overall edge over Tomorrow.

In 1994, Science Fiction Age launched a companion magazine, Realms of Fantasy, a slick, large-size, full-color magazine devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction, edited by veteran magazine editor Shawna McCarthy. The magazine completed its first full year in 1995, and although it has yet to produce anything really exceptional, Realms of Fantasy did improve dramatically in quality this year, as I predicted it would, as McCarthy began to hit her editorial stride, and will probably continue to improve. The first professional magazine devoted entirely to fantasy to be launched for a number of years, Realms of Fantasy is looking increasingly important as fantasy anthology series such as Xanadu die, and fantasy magazines such as Worlds of Fantasy and Horror falter. Realms of Fantasy has already achieved a much higher level of consistent literary quality than the usually disappointing Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, the field’s other major fantasy magazine, and has already placed a story on this year’s final Nebula Award ballot, an unusual accomplishment for a magazine slightly more than a year old.

As usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Mondo 2000 to Cricket to VB Tech. Playboy in particular, under fiction editor Alice K. Turner, continues to run a relatively large amount of SF. Promised for next year is a so-called Playboy rival, a competing men’s slick magazine called Rage, which is scheduled to use short SF from writers such as Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury.

(Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796, $29.90 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined October/November double issue, in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines Fiction Group, P.O. Box 5130, Harlan, IA 51593-5130, $33.97 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined October/November double issue; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $52 for an airmail one-year—twelve issues—subscription; Analog, Dell Magazines Fiction Group, P.O. Box 5133, Harlan, IA 51593-5133, $33.97 for a one-year subscription, ten issues plus a combined double issue; Tomorrow, The Unifont Company, Box 6038 Evanston, IL 60204, $20 for a one-year (six issues) subscription; Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Terminus Publishing Company, 123 Crooked Lane, King of Prussia, PA 19406-2570, $16 for four issues in U.S.)

Fiction semiprozines continue to proliferate, here in the era of cheap and sophisticated desktop publishing technology—and the life expectancy of most of them remains, to be polite about it, problematical. Because almost all semiprozines are severely undercapitalized and run on shoestring budgets, they are unable to survive the first cash-flow crunch that comes along. The odds against any one of them surviving are, dismayingly, even higher than the odds against a new professional publication surviving. Still, each one of them hopes to be the lucky exception that will survive and establish itself—and perhaps one or more of them will. Stranger things have happened.

Of the newish fiction semiprozines, by far the best, and one of the best semiprozines launched in some time, is Century, a new bimonthly (supposedly) fiction magazine edited by Robert K. J. Killheffer. This is a thoroughly professional magazine, operating on a level of sophistication, eclecticism, and literary quality rarely seen in the semiprozine market. Of course, even though most of the writers to appear in the magazine this year were writers whose names will be familiar to genre readers, Century itself is, quite consciously and deliberately, far out on the edge of the science fiction/fantasy spectrum … if not considerably beyond that edge. Several good to excellent stories appeared in Century this year, although most of them are hard to justify as science fiction or even, occasionally, as fantasy. My favorite story from Century this year was Kelly Link’s rich and eccentric “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” from Century 3, which was one of several stories this year (Terry Bisson’s “There Are No Dead” was another one) that remind me of the kind of story that Bradbury used to write, forty years ago: evocative, richly nostalgic, and yet with a bit of a weird twisted edge to it to keep it from being too cloying or sappy. Century also published good to excellent work this year from Avram Davidson, Holly Wade Matter, Jim Cowan, J. R. Dunn, Don Webb, William Browning Spencer, Kelley Eskridge, Michael Bishop, Beverly Suarez-Beard, Mary Rosenblum, Greg Abraham, Gerald Pearce, and others, and one of those stories, the Eskridge, showed up on this year’s final Nebula ballot, an almost unheard-of achievement for a newly launched semiprozine. Of course, literary quality is no guarantee of survival—the field is littered with the corpses of literarily ambitious semiprozines, only the most recent of which belonged to Strange Plasma and New Pathways—and the magazine is not going to reach its full potential until it appears on a more reliable schedule (they only managed three out of a scheduled five bimonthly issues this year). But certainly Century is a magazine that deserves to survive, for what that’s worth, and most definitely deserves your support, in that most practical form of all: money sent in for a subscription.

The only other fiction semiprozine that is operating on a similar level of quality to Century is Crank!, edited by Bryan Cholfin, although it is perhaps even further out over the edge than Century. The stories in Century may not be science fiction or fantasy, but they usually hew closer to the conventions of traditional narrative than do the stories in Crank!, which tend to push more aggressively into avantgarde fictional territory. The magazine has more of an Attitude (it is well named), priding itself on being deliberately eccentric in a contentious, in-your-face, what-are-you-looking-at? confrontational sort of a way. It is also even more unreliable in keeping to its publishing schedule, managing to publish only one issue out of a projected four in 1995. That issue, though, Crank! 5, contained good to excellent work by Michael Bishop, Eliot Fintushel, Jim Marino, and others.

Of the more science fiction–oriented of the newer semiprozines, your best bets are Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, two slick, professional-looking, full-size magazines with full-color covers. Absolute Magnitude is the better-looking of the two magazines, slicker, with more evocative covers (although, strangely, it is much more poorly copyedited on the inside than Pirate Writings is); but, although both magazines published good work in 1995, Pirate Writings continues to have a slight edge in the overall quality of the fiction it contains. Pirate Writings published professional-level work this year by Jack Cady, Paul Di Filippo, Terry Bisson, Uncle River, Larry Tritten, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Roger Zelazny, and others. Absolute Magnitude published professional-level work by Allen Steele, Janet Kagan, Terry Bisson, Hal Clement, Barry B. Longyear, and others. Both Absolute Magnitude and Pirate Writings publish a lot of reprints from other SF magazines and anthologies, sometimes reprinting stories that are only a couple of years old, which is a practice I find perplexing, considering the limited amount of space that both magazines have for publishing original fiction of their own. I could perhaps—perhaps—see this if they were doing classic reprints from twenty or thirty or forty years ago, stories that might be hard to find these days, but why devote all that valuable space to reprinting stories that were widely available only a few years before and are still easily accessible? I must admit that I don’t understand the reasoning behind this.

Expanse, Through the Corridor, and Offworld seem to have died, and, as I saw no issues this year of the promising Mindsparks, it may have died as well, although I hope it’s merely on hiatus. Sirius Visions, A Speculative Fiction Magazine Specializing in the Literature of Hope, also died, after producing three largely disappointing issues. As far as I can tell, there were two issues this year of Next Phase, two issues of the new Plot Magazine, two issues of Tales of the Unanticipated (which featured professional-level work by Maureen F. McHugh and R. Neube, among others), two issues of Space & Time (which featured professional-level work by Paul Di Filippo, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and others), one issue of Argonaut Science Fiction, one issue of Xizquil (Xizquil 13, which featured a good story by Sue Storm), and three issues of a promising new Canadian magazine called Transversions (which featured professional-level work by Robert J. Sawyer, Eileen Kernaghan, Steve Carper, Uncle River, Heather Spears, and others).

The British semiprozines Back Brain Recluse and REM are rumored to still exist, although I haven’t seen an issue of one in a long time. A new British semiprozine called Beyond was launched in 1995, but is subsequently rumored to have died. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, in its eighth year of publication, continues to maintain its quarterly publishing schedule reliably, but I remain largely unimpressed by the level of fiction in it. I haven’t been following the horror semiprozine market, but apparently there were single issues of Weirdbook, Grue, Eldritch Tales, and Midnight Grafitti published this year, two issues of The Urbanite, and twelve issues of Aberrations, making it perhaps the most frequently published of the semiprozines. (Aberrations remains largely distasteful to me, since I don’t like their usual blend of hard-core porno and violent splatterpunk horror, but there are some indications toward the end of the year that they are beginning to try to publish “better” stories, or at least stories that are less tightly specialized in the porno/splatterpunk mode; at the very least, rather than filling each issue with total unknowns, they have begun to run some stories by writers who have established some degree of professional reputation, perhaps a sign of the direction in which they’re trying to turn.) Cemetery Dance seems to have gone on hold, owing to editor Richard Chizmar’s health problems.

Of the long-established SF fiction semiprozines, the best bets remain the two Australian magazines, Aurealis and Eidolon, and the Canadian magazine On Spec. On Spec seemed a bit low-energy this year, only producing three issues out of its scheduled four; perhaps the staff is still worn-out from helping to run 1994’s Canadian Worldcon. On Spec is still a handsome and interesting magazine, well worthwhile, with perhaps the best covers of any of the semiprozines (rivaled only by Century), although the overall quality of the fiction seemed a bit down this year, perhaps because they devoted one issue to horror fiction and that issue was weaker than usual; Aurealis also had a “special horror issue,” and it also was weaker than usual. The double issue this year of Eidolon, Eidolon 17/18, was particularly worthwhile, featuring good professional-level work by Harlan Ellison, Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling, and others. Eidolon published three issues out of an announced schedule of four (unless you count their double issue as two separate issues); Aurealis published its scheduled two issues. All three of these magazines are worth your support; they have all been around long enough to be considered fairly stable and reliable, and all have good track records for delivering interesting and unusual fiction. Eidolon had perhaps the best fiction of the three this year, and On Spec had the best covers.

As always, if you are looking for news and/or an overview of what’s happening in the genre, Charles N. Brown’s Locus and Andrew I. Porter’s Science Fiction Chronicle remain your best bet among that subclass of semiprozines known as “newszines.” Along with the digest fiction magazines, they are one of the binding threads that help to give the genre as much continuity and sense of community as it manages to have these days. The New York Review of Science Fiction (which had a big turnover last year, losing Donald Keller, Robert Killheffer, Jenna Felice, and Gordon Van Gelder for one reason or another, although David G. Hartwell remains in overall charge), after seven full years of publication, has become an institution in the field; by far the most reliably published of the “criticalzines,” it is also the one that does the most equitable job of balancing the interests of the scholar and the general reader, and while nobody will be interested by every article they publish, I think that most people will find something of interest in almost every issue. Even the more technical scholarly essays here seem to be less bristlingly formidable and recondite these days than they were in the first few years of the magazine’s life—or perhaps I’ve just gotten used to them! The New York Review of Science Fiction is probably the “criticalzine” to order if you’re an intelligent lay reader interested in the science fiction field, being livelier and less abstract and technical than some of the more formal academic journals devoted to science fiction studies.

There didn’t seem to be an issue of Steve Brown’s Science Fiction Eye in 1995, and there was only one published in 1994, so I can’t help but wonder if Steve is losing interest in this project; when he does get around to publishing an issue, it’s usually interesting and entertaining. Much the same could be said of Nova Express, edited by Lawrence Person—it’s entertaining and eclectic, when you can find it, but there’s only been one issue produced in the last two years; that issue, however (the spring/summer 1995 issue), does feature a very interesting interview with Bruce Sterling and a transcript of a typically fiery polemical speech by him, plus a pretty complete Sterling bibliography.

The new criticalzine Non-Stop Magazine, edited by K. J. Cypret, also managed only one issue in the last two years; that issue, dated winter 1995, had a lot of interesting stuff in it, most notably an article by Paul Di Filippo and a long interview with Charles Platt, but the magazine’s relentless self-congratulatory preening about how hip it is and how uncool everything else is does get tiresome after a while; still, there is some intriguing material here, including fiction by Barry N. Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tern, and Steve Carper. Tangent, edited by David A. Truesdale, another newish criticalzine, had better luck keeping to its schedule, publishing its announced four issues this year, although at least one of them was a bit late. Concentrating as it does on the reviewing of short fiction, Tangent is a very welcome addition to the critical scene, and performs an invaluable service to the field; no other magazine devotes itself to reviewing short fiction—in fact, except for Mark Kelly’s column in Locus, very little short fiction, especially short fiction from the magazines, gets reviewed anywhere else—and so Tangent is filling a nearly vacant ecological niche, and, in the main, doing a good job of it. One of their new columnists, Paul T. Riddell, is a Hunter S. Thompson wanna-be of sorts, trying to do Thompson-like self-consciously outrageous riffs on the science fiction world, but I find him more tiresome than entertaining; he’s working the pugnacious, deliberately offensive, spit-in-your-eye, let’s-get-a-fan-feud-going tradition that extends back at least as far as Dick Geis, but some of Riddell’s remarks spin on beyond provocative to a sort of rabid, frothingat-the-mouth raving, and I’m pretty sure that a few of them would prove actionable if anybody went to the trouble of taking him and Tangent to court. Let’s hope that that doesn’t happen—I’d hate to see Tangent destroyed because of Riddell, as it is a genuinely worthwhile magazine, and one that deserves the support of anyone who’s interested in short fiction.

The criticalzine Monad died with Pulphouse Publishing, although one issue may still be in the pipeline. Speculations is not so much a criticalzine as a magazine of writing advice for young or would-be authors, the sort of thing you can find in the SFWA Bulletin if you can find a SFWA Bulletin, plus a fairly extensive section of market reports and market news; many people will probably find this useful.

(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $53 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $42 for one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570, $31 per year, twelve issues; Science Fiction Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $10 for one year; Nova Express, White Car Publications, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, TX 78755-2231, $10 for a four-issue subscription; Tangent, 5779 Norfleet, Raytown, MO 64133, $20 for one year, four issues; On Spec, the Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Crank!, Broken Mirrors Press, P.O. Box 380473, Cambridge, MA 02238, $12 for four issues; Century, P.O. Box 9270, Madison, WI 53715-0270, $27 for a one-year subscription; Non-Stop Magazine, Box 981, Peck Slip Station, New York, NY 10272-0981, $18 for one year, four issues; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $39 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian dollars”; Eidolon, the Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6006, $45 (Australian) for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; REM, REM Publications, 19 Sandringham Road, Willesden, London NW2 5EP, United Kingdom, £7.50 for four issues; Xizquil, order from Uncle River/Xizquil, Blue, AZ 85922, $11 for a three-issue subscription to begin with issue 14; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, 53 Whitman Ave., Islip, NY 11751, $15 for one year (four issues), all checks payable to Pirate Writings Publishing; Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, D.N.A. Publications, P.O. Box 13, Greenfield, MA 01302, four issues for $14; Argonaut Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4201, Austin, TX 78765, $8 for two issues; Space & Time, 138 W. 70th Street (4B), New York, NY 10023-4432, one year (two issues), $10; Transversions, Island Specialty Reports, 1019 Colville Rd., Victoria, BC, Canada, V9A 4P5, four-issue subscription, $18 Can. or U.S., “make cheques payable to Island Specialty Reports”; PLOT Magazine, Calypso Publishing, P.O. Box 1351, Sugar Land, TX 77487-1351, four issues for $12, “make checks payable to Calypso Publishing”; Grue Magazine, Hells Kitchen Productions, Box 370, Times Square Sta., New York, NY 10108, $13 for three issues; Aberrations, P.O. Box 460430, San Francisco, CA 94146-0430, one year (12 issues), $31; Next Phase, Phantom Press Publications, 5A Green Meadow Drive, Nantucket, MA 02554, one year (three issues), $10; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite 109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25.)

*   *   *

It was a mixed year in the original anthology market. There were a few strong science fiction anthologies—even, unusually, some strong “hard science” anthologies—and a few good fantasy anthologies … but there were also a lot of fairly mediocre anthologies, anthologies that might, at best, contain one or two good to decent stories apiece. Since the trend these days is away from mass-market paperback anthologies, with more and more original anthologies being published as trade paperbacks or twenty-buck-and-up (almost twenty-five dollars in some cases) hardcovers, this can get expensive fast. A quick and dirty—but fairly conservative—estimate indicates that in order to buy all the original anthologies mentioned in this section, it would cost you in excess of four hundred dollars. Even taking out of this total the price of the year’s three or four best original anthologies, the ones that are probably actually worth what they cost to buy, that still means that you’d have to pay in excess of three hundred dollars in order to read, at a very generous estimate, ten or twelve good to decent stories. It seems to me it would be considerably more cost-effective to subscribe to some of the SF or fantasy magazines instead, where you’d get more good stories for a lot less money—but then, since I’m a magazine editor myself, you can safely dismiss this opinion if you’d like.

Only a couple of years ago, I was bemoaning the fact that original fantasy anthologies had become a rare item, if not an endangered species, but this year there was a flood of them; probably there were more original fantasy anthologies than original science fiction anthologies published this year, although a couple of cases are hard to call, containing as they do both fantasy and science fiction stories. On the other hand, like a fever burning itself out, the genre seems to have mostly worked its way free of the shared-world anthologies which seemed poised to take over the field in the mid- to late eighties, the infection having largely moved on to other areas. Most of the shared-world anthologies this year were media-related, comics-related, or gaming-related, with only a few center SF shared-world anthologies left. Almost all of the original anthologies being done today are still theme anthologies, although in a few cases, including some of the year’s best, the themes are at least getting fuzzier or more general, broader, less confining and specific—stories that take place in the far future, stories that examine new frontiers in science, and so on. This may be a good thing. Over the years, I’ve found it to be a good rule of thumb that the more specific and limiting an anthology’s theme is, the more disappointing the overall book is likely to be. Many SF stories don’t fit well into pigeonholes, and often, the more easily pigeonholeable a story is, the more mediocre it is as well—ask ten SF authors to write stories about, say, teleporting Buddhist aliens who are crime-fighting race-car drivers who live in Dallas, and, more likely than not, you’re going to end up with ten disappointing stories. Tell the same ten writers merely to write the best stories that they possibly can, with only the most general of themes, as at least one editor was naive enough to do this year, and the results are likely to be considerably more impressive. (Ideally, you shouldn’t need a theme at all, only the ten good writers—but very few publishers will buy an anthology these days, either original or reprint, that isn’t a theme anthology … which explains the loopiness of some of the themes you see, as anthologists cast desperately around for something.)

At one time, there were at least five or six major SF anthology series, including Orbit, New Dimensions, Nova, Universe, and others, but they have vanished one by one over the years, until now the only one left (although others are scheduled to start up in the near future) is Full Spectrum, which has been published at irregular intervals since the late eighties, and which is now up to its fifth volume. Full Spectrum 5 (Bantam Spectra), edited by Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein, received the kind of rave reviews when it came out that Full Spectrum anthologies usually get, but, frankly, although there are a few good stories here, I found the anthology to be, on the whole, something of a disappointment. The first disappointment was that most of the stories in the book are not really core science fiction, but instead are either fantasy or some variant of metafiction/surrealism … and that most of the fantasy stories are weak even when considered as fantasy stories. There is some good work in the book, but, with one possible exception, nothing really of first-rate quality. Leaving aside the One Possible Exception for a moment, the best story here is probably Howard V. Hendrix’s “The Music of What Happens,” although it’s a bit too long for its weight, and occasionally the level of New Age spirituality that you have to wade through gets a bit too thick for my taste, a problem I often have with Hendrix’s stuff; still, it is a respectable story, and definitely worth reading. Jean Mark Gawron’s “Tale of the Blue Spruce Dreaming (Or How to Be Flesh)” and William Barton’s “When a Man’s an Empty Kettle” both have some good new ideas in them (particularly the Gawron), but both felt too long to me, as though both could have been trimmed by at least a third. Michael Bishop’s “Simply Indispensable” took a good idea and ruined it (for me, anyway) by a great deal of extremely coy overwriting. Jonathan Lethem’s “The Insipid Profession of Jonathan Hornebom” was very well crafted, but it seemed to me to fall between two stools: considered as a satire, it wasn’t satirical enough, or nearly funny enough, not enough of a real takeoff on Heinlein’s famous story, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”; considered as a straight story, not a satire, you have to wonder: Why bother?—since the Heinlein story actually covered this same ground as well or better more than forty years ago, and it doesn’t seem that Lethem has actually brought all that much of a fresh slant to the material. So the story is neither one thing nor the other, and so, in my opinion, fails as both, in spite of the vividness of the writing. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Shimabara” is also very well crafted, but, although interesting for the historical detail it conveys, is one of those pieces of metafiction I mentioned above, certainly not SF, and probably not fantasy, either. Neal Stephenson’s “Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast” is a pleasant entertainment, adroitly handled, but the ground that it covers is very familiar. Richard Bowes’s “Fountains in Summer” is engrossing, but doesn’t really go anywhere; it’s too obviously a part of a larger work to stand well on its own feet as an independent piece of fiction. There is also good work here—not first-rate work, but good solid work—by Patricia A. McKillip, Mark Bourne, Pat York, Karawynn Long, Paul Park, and others. Which brings us to the One Possible Exception, Gene Wolfe’s “The Ziggurat,” which, line by line, is working on a level of craft far above anything else in the book, the level of craft of a first-rate work … but which is also a cryptic story that left me wondering, when I’d finished it, just how I was supposed to have reacted to it, and exactly what I was supposed to have taken away from it. Many women readers have reacted negatively to the main character, at least one of them describing him angrily in a review as “a sexist asshole,” and I found myself disliking him as well; it’s hard not to, since he is stubborn and blinkered and at times downright pigheaded (the death of his son, for instance, seems to me to be at least as much his own fault, for insisting on going back to the cabin, against all common sense, as it is the fault of the actual murderer), and since the opinions of women he expresses throughout are, to say the least, severe. But, as Wolfe is an author who loves to play subtle games with the reader, and in whose work things can seldom be taken at face value, this may be exactly the way you are supposed to be reacting to him. I suspect that it’s an entirely different story depending on whether you like the main character and sympathize with his reactions or not—and I don’t see anything on the page that clearly indicates just how the author wanted you to react to him. Still, any story that can arouse such violently polarized responses, and can leave as many questions in the mind of a reader after he’s finished turning the pages as this one does, is definitely one worth reading.

All of Full Spectrum’s founding editors have subsequently left Bantam, and even two out of three of the editors of this volume are now gone, with only Tom Dupree still working for the company, but apparently the series will continue, with a new volume being assembled even as I write, and it will be very interesting to see if the future editors, whoever they turn out to be, can do something to revitalize this important series, which I have considered to be in a slump for the last few years, although other critics do not necessarily agree with me. One of the few other surviving original anthology series, this year’s Hubbard Award anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XI (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, is, as usual, made up of novice work by young writers, some of whom may—or may not—develop interestingly in years to come. Scheduled for next year is the launch of a new anthology series from Tor called Starlight, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which sounds promising; supposedly there will be a new edition of George Zebrowski’s long-dormant Synergy anthology series sometime in the indefinite future, too, as this series has reportedly been sold to a new publisher, White Wolf. With luck, perhaps at least one of these anthology series can establish itself, making the SF original anthology series market look a bit less like an endangered species right on the brink of extinction.

Turning to the nonseries SF anthologies, I was considerably more impressed with New Legends (Tor), edited by Greg Bear, than I was with Full Spectrum 5; in fact, New Legends is clearly the best original SF anthology of the year, and, although I won’t go quite as far as the reviews that have described it as “the Dangerous Visions of the nineties,” it’s certainly one of the most substantial and important anthologies to appear in a good long time. New Legends contains, in my opinion, several of the year’s best stories, and very little in it is less than good—in fact, even the “merely” good stuff in New Legends is better than almost anything in Full Spectrum 5. The best stuff here includes Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets,” which includes some extremely sophisticated conceptualization and weird-new-idea stuff; Ursula K. Le Guin’s quietly lyrical and moving “Coming of Age in Karhide,” which returns to the setting of The Left Hand of Darkness; Paul J. McAuley’s evocative “Recording Angel,” which comes as close as anything I’ve seen to effectively capturing at least some of the mood and tone of Cordwainer Smith’s best work; and Carter Scholz’s compelling “Radiance,” which, although it’s borderline science fiction at best, is certainly one of the most powerful stories I’ve read this year. A step down from there, although still very good, we have Mary Rosenblum’s eloquent “Elegy”; Poul Anderson’s “Scarecrow”; a story by “Sterling Blake” (pseudonym for a Big-Name Author) called “A Desperate Calculus,” which is harrowing and effective (although it does reproduce almost exactly the plot of Tiptree’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”); and Robert Silverberg’s “The Red Blaze Is the Morning.” Also worthwhile were Greg Abraham’s slow but thoughtful “Gnota”; Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Rorvik’s War,” which covers territory I’ve seen covered before (for instance, in Joe Haldeman’s much shorter “The Private War of Private Jacobs”), but which covers it in an interesting way; and Gregory Benford’s bizarre “High Abyss.” A good bit weaker, but still respectable, are Sonia Orin Lyris’s “When Strangers Meet” and George Alec Effinger’s “One” (although the suggestion that the story has remained unsold for years because it was too “dangerous” to print is nonsense). I myself didn’t care all that much for Robert Sheckley’s “The Day the Aliens Came,” which seemed heavily dated, but then, Sheckley’s work has always been something of a blind spot for me, and I know that other reviewers have rated it up at the top. The weakest story here is probably James Stevens-Arce’s “Scenes from a Future Marriage,” although even it is more substantial than several of the stories in Full Spectrum 5.

On the whole, this is a very impressive anthology, with some of the best work of the year in it, and almost nothing that is less than good.

One strong “hard science”–oriented anthology in a year is a rarity, but this year we had two—Far Futures (Tor), edited by Gregory Benford, is another good anthology, and the runner-up for the title of the best original SF anthology of the year. Far Futures is more uneven and less impressive overall than New Legends, but it does contain some first-rate work, and almost everything in it is at the least solid and competently professional. As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this is an anthology of five novellas set in the very far future—at least a thousand years, although many of them go all the way to the End of Time, billions of years from now, or even further. Benford boasts in the introduction that in this “hard science” anthology “You’ll find no fin de siècle, ‘bored parties at the end of time’ narratives,” which I assume is a sneer at the work of writers such as Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, and Gene Wolfe … although, frankly, a few of these stories could have used a bit of the stylistic flash and élan of those writers, since the biggest flaw of some of the stories here is a tendency to trudge in a rather pedestrian manner past a catalog of Ultimate Wonders, as though both the authors and their characters have been numbed by the immense scale of everything. The best stories here, though, skillfully avoid this problem—Joe Haldeman’s “For White Hill” and Poul Anderson’s “Genesis” both manage to operate on a sweepingly cosmic scale while at the same time remaining focused on human characters whose ultimate fate you come to care about. The Anderson in particular delivers a few genuine jolts of pure-quill old-fashioned undiluted Sense of Wonder, something the genre does all too rarely these days. The rest of the stories struggle to achieve the effect that Haldeman and (particularly) Anderson pull off, getting the mix wrong to one degree or another, although none of them are outright failures, and other readers may well like some of them better than the ones I’ve listed as my favorites. Greg Bear’s “Judgment Engine” has an opaque opening and a flat detached style that makes it somewhat difficult to get into, but it ultimately repays the effort, delivering some intriguing and very original speculative content and thinking … although in a rather abstract, bloodless way (appropriate, I guess, since none of the characters in “Judgment Engine” have any blood!) that makes it hard to get any really satisfying emotional jolt out of the story, even though it does involve the End of the Universe as we know it. A similar problem mars Charles Sheffield’s “At the Eschaton,” which manages to be an emotionally flat story even though it’s about an obsessed-to-the-point-of-madness character who will go to literally any ends to get his dead wife back. In spite of all the main character’s heavy breathing and garment-ripping, though, there is somehow not a lot of emotional charge here, and even though stars and galaxies are destroyed on a scale that would make even the old Superscience boys of the thirties blanch, and the story literally takes us to the End of the Universe, and beyond, somehow not a lot of excitement is generated by all these wonders. In spite of a lot of bright, inventive thinking, good prose, and certainly enough vastness of scale for anybody, “At the Eschaton” is ultimately unsatisfying—and I think that the reason why it fails is the reason why many stories of this sort fail. For instance, when the main character makes his first jump into the future, awakening two hundred years later, there are no sensory details of the future mentioned at all, no evocative local color—we get no idea of what being in the future feels like, on a mundane, everyday, minute-to-minute scale: The present is people talking in a featureless room; the future is people talking in another featureless room; the End of Time itself is people talking in another featureless room … so that in spite of all the grand galactic sweep, the story ultimately feels claustrophobic. The much-vaunted Sense of Wonder does not automatically come just from making your canvas as large as possible if you haven’t done a good job on the figures moving through the landscape. This is not a mistake that Anderson makes, for instance, canny old pro that he is, nor would Aldiss or Wolfe have made it, either. The weakest of the novellas here, by a considerable margin, is Donald Kingsbury’s “Historical Crisis,” a pastiche of and comment on Asimov’s Foundation trilogy that is not really a comfortable match with the contents of the rest of the book; in fact, it feels as if it has wandered in out of some other anthology altogether. Still, four out of five of these stories are strong, and two of them are among the year’s best, so Far Futures is obviously one of your best buys of the year.

(Interestingly, almost every one of these novellas involves downloading someone’s mind/personality into a computer, and often the replicating of that downloaded personality … even though this is something that Benford himself is on record as saying that he considers to be unlikely to the point of impossibility, and something that he has criticized the cyberpunks for using as a motif, giving it as an example of how they play the game of hard science “with the net down.” A bit inconsistent, then, to find the same motif used so extensively here, in a book self-billed as the hardest of the hard …)

I must say that I’m pleased that these two anthologies are made up largely of core science fiction, not fantasy, not postmodernism, not metafiction, not magical realism. I like all of those forms, and have published all of them myself, but it’s nice to see some good solid science fiction every once in a while, too!

Mention should probably be made here of the so-called electronic anthology Neon Visions, edited by Ellen Datlow, which appeared over the year as a sequence of novellas published electronically on Omni Online. Taken individually, the six novellas are of impressive quality—although not all of them are center science fiction, either—and if you consider it to be an actual anthology (which is arguable, since the novellas have not been assembled in one place in any concrete form, a form that you could hold in your hand—or even “access” all at once), then it would be one of the year’s best, ranking just under New Legends and Far Futures. I suspect that most people won’t really consider this to have been published, though, until the “anthology” comes out in print form, if it ever does. This whole issue raises many interesting questions that are going to be haunting award-eligibility committees for years to come.

Most of the year’s other original science fiction anthologies, unfortunately, are considerably weaker than the three mentioned above. How to Save the World (Tor), edited by Charles Sheffield, has some of the same earnest, heavily polemical quality as Sheffield’s 1994 anthology Future Quartet: Earth in the Year 2042: A Four-Part Invention. Unfortunately, the stories in this book, less substantial than those in Future Quartet, epitomize the worst of both worlds: Considered purely as fiction, they’re thin, overly didactic, and frequently dull; considered as earnest sociological speculation, as works of futurology that might actually suggest some workable societal change that would indeed teach us How to Save the World, they are at the best highly impractical and unlikely, and at the worst downright silly.

Also not terribly impressive, although perhaps a bit better overall than How to Save the World, were The Ultimate Alien (Dell), edited by Byron Preiss, John Betancourt, and Keith R. A. DeCandido and Nanodreams (Baen), edited by Elton Elliott, both mixed reprint-original anthologies where the reprint stories were stronger than the original work; Nanodreams is the stronger of the two overall, although by far the best story in it is a reprint of Greg Bear’s ten-year-old “Blood Music.” Women at War (Tor), edited by Lois McMaster Bujold and Roland J. Green, is one of several anthologies this year—Sisters in Fantasy, Sisters of the Night (female vampires), the Women of Wonder anthologies, The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, the satirical Chicks in Chainmail—that seem to be specifically targeting women as a potential market, an interesting change of strategy, since many SF publishers have traditionally (and mistakenly, in my opinion) considered women to be a demographically insignificant share of the buying audience. Women at War seems to be trying to appeal to both the female audience and the audience for Military SF, something that seems unlikely at first glance, Military SF being generally considered to be a province that appeals largely to men—until you realize that Bujold’s own novels probably reach just such a mixed audience, at which point you begin to wonder if the editors aren’t onto something after all. At any rate, there is some good if not exceptional work here by Judith Tarr, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and others, although the stories tend to be less gung ho bloodthirsty and enthusiastically predatory, and to question the morality/inevitability of war itself more, than is the usual wont of most Military SF. It will be interesting to see if this anthology actually finds the audience it’s seeking. Superheroes (Ace), edited by John Varley and Ricia Mainhardt, also seems somewhat confused as to what audience it’s aimed for; obviously, a book about people with superhuman powers is aimed at the comics audience, or at least at the same fringe of it who enjoy the Wild Card series edited by George R. R. Martin, but there’s an odd mocking, satirical, demythifying slant to most of the stories here, which tend to make fun of the whole idea of costumed crime-fighters with secret identities, unlike the Wild Card stories, which, in spite of a few conscious ironies, on the whole treat the same mythological structure with affection and respect; most comics fans take comics very seriously, however, and they are unlikely to be amused by demythifying stories that ridicule the core assumptions of their field, so it seems to me that Superheroes is in danger of alienating the very audience who are most likely to be interested in it in the first place. Most of the stories here are SF only by courtesy, of course, and most are decidedly minor, although a few of them are entertaining; the best stories here are by Roger Zelazny—although it is also by far the furthest away from the ostensible theme—and by John Varley, although the same basic idea that Varley deals with here rather heavy-handedly, playing it for yucks, was handled with much more subtlety and grace by Kim Newman in his story “Übermensch!” a few years back.

The year’s remaining SF anthologies are considerably more successful as anthologies, more entertaining, more substantial, better buys for your money, although all of them mix fantasy and science fiction to one extent or another. Amazing Stories: The Anthology (Tor), edited by Kim Mohan, is a mixed reprint and original anthology of stories, both SF and fantasy, drawn from the pages of Amazing, some of them that leftover inventory we were discussing up in the magazine section; this is an impressive anthology overall, with good original work by Paul Di Filippo, William Barton, R. A. Lafferty, George Zebrowski, Janet Berliner and George Guthridge, Mark Rich, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Kathe Koja, and strong reprints by Ursula K. Le Guin, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Bloch, and Thomas M. Disch. Warriors of Blood and Dream (AvoNova), edited by Roger Zelazny, is also an entertaining anthology, and contains some surprisingly effective stuff for what at first glance seems like a throwaway junk theme anthology idea (Martial Arts stories), although it suffers from the sameness-of-material problem that affects most theme anthologies if you read the stories in them all in one go. The best story here, by a considerable margin, is Walter Jon Williams’s “Broadway Johnny,” a gorgeously colored romp that blends classical Chinese mythology with the chop-sockey atmosphere of Hong Kong kung fu movies; the result is droll and extremely entertaining. My second favorite, in spite of being totally predictable, is Joe R. Lansdale’s noirish “Master of Misery”—this is a kind of story that’s almost extinct these days, although once they filled the pages of men’s magazines such as Argosy in their thousands, a straightforward noir adventure story, what used to be referred to as “men’s adventure,” with no fantasy element at all, and, as I’ve said, totally familiar in plot, but exciting and very vividly written and plotted; don’t look for profundity here, but it would make a great movie of the week for some TV network. Hard to say how the other stories would have held up if you’d seen them one by one, rather than squeezed in here with stories covering much the same ground; there are a lot of stories dealing with martial arts fighting in VR, for instance, which lose some of their potential impact when read one after the other, and in some stories the level of rather portentous and pretentious Martial Arts Mysticism (of the “Remember, Grasshopper…” school of profundity, where everything sounds like an aphorism found inside a fortune cookie) can get rather thick. The book also contains good work by Dave Smeds, Gerald Hausman, and Steven Barnes—whose story is too long, but which does cover some territory not covered elsewhere here in an interesting way, although at the price of your having to wade through a fairly high Martial Arts Mysticism level. Nothing is really first-rate here, with the exception of the Williams novella, but it is a cheerful and unpretentious book that’s fun to read.

Many of the same comments could be made about Wheel of Fortune (AvoNova), also edited by Roger Zelazny, which is also an entertaining read, although not quite as strong overall as Warriors of Blood and Dream, if only because it doesn’t have a big Walter Jon Williams novella in the middle of it to help anchor it. The best story here is William Sanders’s fast, funny, and fanciful “Elvis Bearpaw’s Luck,” although William Browning Spencer’s imaginative but somewhat more somber “The Oddskeeper’s Daughter” is also in the running; the anthology also features good work by Don Webb, Michael A. Stackpole, John DeChancie, Richard Lupoff, and others. (Unusually, all the “celebrity editors” this year—Zelazny, Peter S. Beagle, David Copperfield—seem to have actually edited their respective anthologies, to one extent or another; certainly Zelazny seems to have done most of the work here himself, and shows a surprisingly adroit touch for a man whose only previous experience as an anthologist was putting together one of the Nebula Award volumes.)

The stream of anthologies edited by Mike Resnick over the past few years seems to be running dry, but there was a Resnick anthology this year, and a fairly good one, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. (Quite a few anthologies this year, including the Zelazny books above and half a dozen others, seem to be sort of “stealth Greenberg” anthologies, where his name shows up only in small print on the inside pages, in the copyright information; but I’m listing as Greenberg-edited anthologies only those books where his name actually appears as editor on the cover. I figure that he himself knows best how to value his contribution to any particular book, and probably will list himself on the cover if he thinks he ought to be there.) There’s nothing terribly profound here, of course, but Sherlock Holmes in Orbit will be a lot of fun for Holmes fans, especially if you read these a few at a time rather than all in one sitting. Of course, some of the writers here have a surer touch at imitating the Master than others, and the knowledge of The Canon possessed by some of the contributors is shaky, but some of them do quite a good job, especially considering that they’re covering territory and dealing with kinds of material that Doyle himself never had to deal with; the best stories here are by Vonda N. McIntyre, Frank M. Robinson, Susan Casper, Mark Bourne, George Alec Effinger, and Robert J. Sawyer.

There were supposedly regional anthologies of stories from Colorado and from Ohio this year, but I didn’t see them, and will try to catch up with them next year. There was a reprint anthology of Canadian science fiction, On Spec: The First Five Years (Tesseract), which reprinted material from the semiprozine.

The relatively few shared-world anthologies this year included The Man-Kzin Wars VII (Baen), no editor listed, which contained some strong material by Gregory Benford, Marlo Martin, and Hal Colebatch; Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (Bantam Spectra), a Star Wars–related anthology edited by Kevin J. Anderson; The Exotic Enchanter (Baen), edited by L. Sprague De Camp and Christopher Stasheff; The Day the Magic Stopped (Baen), edited by Christopher Stasheff; Bolos 2: The Unconquerable (Baen), no editor listed; The Ultimate Spiderman (Berkley), edited by Stan Lee; Swords and Sorceress XII (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; and An Armory of Swords (Tor), edited by Fred Saberhagen.

There was also an interesting Young Adult SF anthology—a type of anthology which seems to be becoming more common—A Starfarer’s Dozen (Harcourt Brace), edited by Michael Stearns.

Turning to the fantasy anthologies, the best fantasy anthology of the year is probably Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn (HarperPrism), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Janet Berliner. Like almost all of this year’s fantasy anthologies, this one contains some horror (the line between them being a fine and often a subjective one), but Immortal Unicorn leans decisively away from horror and toward a more gentle, literate, humanistic sort of fantasy—something I personally approve of, as I have grown tired of the facile nihilism and fashionable designer despair, the gloatingly relished sexual violence, and the ever escalating and ever more grotesque levels of gore and mayhem and splatter that characterize most horror these days. The stories in Immortal Unicorn, however, are much more frequently wise and charming and life-affirming, without being sappy or saccharine, than they are grotesque or despairing, something that’s like a cool breeze on a sullenly hot day in the current blood-spattered market, and this is one of the few big, expensive hardcover anthologies I’ve seen this year that is worth the money. The best story here is probably Peter S. Beagle’s own “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,” a gentle, wry, and whimsical take on a classic fantasy situation, cousin-germane to Thurber’s “The Unicorn in the Garden”; Karen Joy Fowler’s somewhat more hard-edged (although still ultimately gentle) “The Brew” is also a contender. The anthology also features good work by Lisa Mason, Michael Armstrong, George Guthridge, Ellen Kushner, Dave Smeds, Susan Shwartz, Judith Tarr, and others.

The year’s other major Janet Berliner anthology, for some inscrutable reason referred to as a “multi-author collection” instead of an anthology, is David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible (HarperPrism), edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner. David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible is not as strong as Immortal Unicorn overall, and leans much more toward horror, but still contains enough fantasy and hard-to-classify stuff that I’m listing it here with the fantasy anthologies. The best story here, by a considerable margin, is a fast, furious, bizarre, and yet charming extravaganza by S. P. Somtow, “Diamonds Aren’t Forever,” but the book also contains strong and offbeat work by Lisa Mason, Dave Smeds, Dave Wolverton, and others. Berliner also edited an anthology called Desire Burn, a mixed reprint/original anthology which was nowhere near as substantial as the two above.

Another anthology that some commentators might choose to list as a horror anthology, although I’ve decided to list it, on balance, as a fantasy anthology, is The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors (Tor), edited by Terri Windling. However you list it, this is certainly one of the year’s strongest anthologies, and it can be a harrowing book to read, although the horrors encountered here tend more toward emotional abuse (though there are a share of physical horrors as well) than the standard parade of raped and mutilated women and abused and murdered children described with relishing hand-rubbing glee in most modern horror. In a way, though, the emotional/ psychological abuse is sometimes more harrowing, although Windling and her authors do allow some hope to creep in here and there, and the essays that are mixed in with the stories often offer practical advice and encouragement for children in abusive situations, if only as testimony that it is possible to survive such situations and put your life back together in a positive way; the anthology is, after all, directed specifically toward Childhood’s Survivors. There is strong work here by Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner, Munro Sickafoose, Kara Dalkey, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling herself, and others.

The year’s other major fantasy anthology is Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (Morrow AvoNova), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, another strong and enjoyable book that must certainly be in contention for the title of the year’s best fantasy anthology. This is the third in a series of anthologies of “updated” fairy tales told with modern sensibilities, mixing fantasy with mild horror, and another of those anthologies that, because of the similarity of tone of some of the stories, is better read one story at a time than all at one sitting. The best story here is probably John Brunner’s “The Emperor Who Had Never Seen a Dragon,” although the book also has good work by Tanith Lee, Nancy Kress, Lisa Goldstein, Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, Kathe Koja, Nancy A. Collins, and others.

Fantasy’s only continuing original anthology series, Xanadu, is reported to have died, a major blow to the genre. The last volume in the series, Xanadu 3 (Tor), edited by Jane Yolen, delivers the series’s trademark mix of different styles of fantasy, over a nicely eclectic range of moods, and features strong work by Susan Palwick, Astrid Julian, Claire Parman Brown, Bruce Holland Rogers, Jo Clayton, Josepha Sherman, and others. This series will be missed. It bewilders me that original fantasy anthology series don’t seem to be able to succeed—Elsewhere and Other Edens didn’t survive, either—at a time when dozens of fantasy novels crowd the bookshelves and climb the bestseller lists, one-shot fantasy anthologies often do very well, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror is an established institution of the field, and even fantasy magazines seem to be flourishing. You’d think that a continuing fantasy anthology series would be a natural—but so far nobody has been able to make one work. I have no idea why.

Turning to the year’s other fantasy anthologies, somewhat less substantial than the ones listed above, Heaven Sent (DAW), a (mostly) fantasy anthology edited by Peter Crowther, is somewhat weaker overall than his 1994 anthology Blue Motel: Narrow Houses Volume 3, but still contains interesting work, and features an eclectic mix of fantasy, horror, and even SF. My favorite here, in fact, is a science fiction (sort of) story by Ian McDonald, “Steam,” yet another story (there were several this year) that tries to out-Bradbury Bradbury, this one not so much in the nostalgia/evocativeness of the setting as in the sheer audacious headlong bravura prose-poetry of the writing itself; does a pretty good job of it, too, although, as with Bradbury himself, even at his prime, the singing prose can also come to seem overheated and overdone if you fall out of the spell for a moment and look at it with a coldly critical eye. There is also strong work here by John Brunner, Judith Moffett, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and others. Sisters in Fantasy (Roc), edited by Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg, is a bit weaker overall, and tends to lean a bit away from traditional fantasy toward the literary/metafictional end of the spectrum, but does contain strong work by Nancy Kress, Judith Tarr, Jane Yolen, Katharine Kerr, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (Penguin), edited by Larry McCaffery, leans even further in that direction, qualifying more as a “slipstream” anthology and not as a fantasy/SF anthology at all, although there are some names here that will be familiar to the genre audience. The Ultimate Dragon (Dell), edited by Byron Preiss, John Betancourt, and Keith R. A. DeCandido, is filled with pleasant but mostly minor material. Much the same could be said of Adventures in the Twilight Zone (DAW), edited by Carol Serling, and Witch Fantastic (DAW), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. Fantastic Alice (Ace), edited by Margaret Weis, is mostly disappointing, only serving to prove that Lewis Carroll’s whimsical magic casts a fragile and subtle spell that is not easy to duplicate, and which shreds and tatters in less skilled and cunning hands, leaving little behind; the best attempts here at handling the idiosyncratic Alice material are by Roger Zelazny, Esther M. Friesner, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Peter Crowther—although I don’t think Carroll himself would have liked any of them. Chicks in Chainmail (Baen), edited by Esther M. Friesner, is a one-joke anthology—satiric takes on the “woman warrior” motif—and the joke quickly wears thin, although you’ll enjoy the stories more if you read them one at a time, spaced widely apart. Considerably more substantial than the two immediately above are Ancient Enchantresses (DAW), edited by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch, Martin H. Greenberg, and Richard Gilliam, Enchanted Forests (DAW), edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg, and Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Aspect), edited by Katharine Kerr. The themes in each of these cases are specialized enough that some of the stories come to seem too similar, and some of the work in each of these rather large anthologies is flat and dull, but each also contains strong stories, notably by Gregory Feeley, Lois Tilton, Nancy Etchemendy, and Karawynn Long in Enchanted Forests, Susan Shwartz, William F. Wu, and Deborah Wheeler in Ancient Enchantresses, and Elizabeth Moon and (especially) Poul Anderson in Tales of the Knights Templar.

There were a whole bunch (that, of course, is a precise technical term used in criticism: “a whole bunch”) of fantasy anthologies about King Arthur and the Matter of Britain this year, including: The Camelot Chronicles (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley; The Merlin Chronicles (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley; The Book of Kings (Roc), edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg; Excalibur (Warner Aspect), edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer; and Return to Avalon (DAW), edited by Jennifer Roberson. Although they are at times rather heavy textured, your best bets here are probably the two Ashley anthologies, which also contain good reprint material. There were also Arthurian stories in Ancient Enchantresses and Enchanted Forests, as well as in most of the other fantasy anthologies, in almost all of the fantasy magazines, and even in the SF magazines—the Matter of Britain has certainly been getting a workout lately, with several more Arthurian anthologies on the way for next year.

Another anthology which blended fantasy with mild horror, noted without comment, is the mixed reprint/original erotic ghost story anthology Killing Me Softly (HarperPrism), edited by Gardner Dozois.

I haven’t been following the horror field closely for several years, but it seemed to me that the most prominent original horror anthologies of the year probably included Peter Straub’s Ghosts (Pocket Star), edited by Peter Straub, and Tombs (White Wolf), edited by Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer. We were also up to our asses in vampires this year, with gimmicky theme vampire anthologies everywhere, including Sisters of the Night (Warner Aspect), edited by Barbara Hambly and Martin H. Greenberg (female vampires); Blood Muse (Donald I. Fine), edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg (artists who are vampires); Vampire Detectives (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (self-explanatory—silly perhaps, but self-explanatory); and Celebrity Vampires (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other celebrities as bloodsuckers); and the mixed reprint/original anthology 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg (really short vampire stories, so that now you can have the pleasure of reading about vampires even while you’re on the toilet). In addition, there were lots of vampire stories in fantasy magazines, SF magazines, other general fantasy anthologies, less specialized horror anthologies, and hordes (flocks? herds? prides?) of them in the horror semiprozines. Needless to say, there are lots more vampire anthologies on the way for next year. Vampire anthologies also shade off into the “Erotic Horror” anthologies, especially as there are few Erotic Horror anthologies that don’t feature a vampire story or two. An example of a deliberate cross between the vampire anthology and the Erotic Horror anthology is Love Bites (Richard Kasak Books), edited by Amarantha Knight, although most of the year’s other Erotic Horror anthologies—such as Dark Love (Roc), edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer, and Martin H. Greenberg; Forbidden Acts (Avon), edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer; and Seeds of Fear (Pocket), edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett—have their share of vampires as well. As though they had been demanding equal time with the vampires, there were also anthologies about werewolves and the Frankenstein monster, most of them reprints—although The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, (actually late 1994, but we missed it) is mostly original. There were also anthologies about witches, including the Resnick and Greenberg mentioned above and a mixed reprint/original anthology, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, and even an anthology of less-easy-to-classify monsters from less familiar cultures, Orphans of the Night (Walker), edited by Josepha Sherman.

I am waiting confidently for someone to combine the year’s two hot trends and come up with Arthurian Vampires, or maybe Vampire Arthurs! or The Bloodsucking Idylls of the King. I’m sure we won’t have long to wait.

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The number of new SF novels went up slightly in 1995, after declining a bit in 1994. According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,250 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1995, up 13 percent from 1994, and reversing three years of decline. Of that total, not counting gaming- and media-related novelizations, 659 titles were novels … and of that total, 239 of them were SF novels (up from 204 in 1994), 227 were fantasy novels (down from 234 in 1994), and 193 were horror novels (up from 178 in 1994). It should be noted that while adult horror is sometimes claimed to be “dying”—although there still seemed to me to be plenty of it around—young adult horror is booming, and this explains why the number of horror titles continues to climb. Of those 193 titles, 84 of them were Young Adult horror (of the adult horror novels, a whopping 22 percent were vampire novels). Young Adult horror now makes up 55 percent of all Young Adult novels with genre elements. Young Adult fantasy is proliferating, too, accounting for 18 percent of the fantasy novel total; Young Adult science fiction, once a vibrant field, now, alas, lags far behind both Young Adult Horror and Young Adult Fantasy … which may well help to explain, as Charles Sheffield has suggested, why young readers seem to be going into reading horror and fantasy when they grow up, rather than science fiction. There were fewer original mass-market paperbacks published this year, continuing a trend now several years old; according to Locus, there are now fewer new mass-market paperbacks published than there are new hardcovers. The trade paperback format in particular has grown at the expense of the mass-market paperback format; there were almost four times as many trade paperbacks published in 1995 as there were in 1982, the total up 30 percent even since last year, and it’s the mass-market format, once the center of the field, whose numbers dwindle to make room for them. This makes a certain amount of sense—with most mass-market paperbacks these days costing nearly six dollars, and some edging up toward eight dollars, many readers would prefer to pay twelve to fourteen dollars for a trade paperback instead, getting for the extra money a larger and more “prestigious”-looking (and often sturdier) book with bigger type and (often) better paper and better covers, something that looks more impressive when displayed on a library shelf at home; some readers are even willing to move up into the twenty- to twenty-five-dollar range for a hardcover, for the same kind of reasons. As long as the prices of a mass-market paperback and a trade paperback remain fairly close to one another, a lot of people are going to decide they’re getting a better buy for their money with the trade paperback … and since paperback prices are certainly not going to go down anytime soon (especially with paper prices headed up), the mass-market paperback format seems likely to continue dwindling for the foreseeable future.

In spite of all the grim recessionary talk that has preoccupied the field for the last couple of years, SF is still an enormous genre by any reasonable standards, and gets even larger if we count the fantasy titles. There are a lot of new novels published every year. Even limiting discussion to the SF novels alone—and most SF readers will read at least some of the fantasy novels as well, even if they don’t read much of the horror—it’s obviously just about impossible for any one individual to read and review 239 new novels—let alone somebody with all of the reading that I have to do at shorter lengths for Asimov’s and for this anthology.

Therefore, as usual, I’m going to limit myself to listing those novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1994, including: Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz); Evolution’s Shore, Ian McDonald (Bantam Spectra); Legacy, Greg Bear (Tor); The Stone Garden, Mary Rosenblum (Del Rey); Sailing Bright Eternity, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); Waking the Moon, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (Bantam Spectra); Metropolitan, Walter Jon Williams (HarperPrism); Slow River, Nicola Griffith (Del Rey); The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); Alvin Journeyman, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Remake, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); The Ganymede Club, Charles Sheffield (Tor); The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay (HarperPrism); Kaleidoscope Century, John Barnes (Tor); Testament, Valerie J. Freireich (Roc); An Exaltation of Larks, Robert Reed (Tor); Amnesia Moon, Jonathan Lethem (Harcourt Brace); The Terminal Experiment, Robert J. Sawyer (HarperPrism); Invader, C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Flux, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); The Weight, Allen Steele (Legend); Gaia’s Toys, Rebecca Ore (Tor); The Killing Star, Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski (Morrow AvoNova); Brightness Reef, David Brin (Bantam Spectra); The Golden Nineties, Lisa Mason (Bantam Spectra); The Tower of Beowulf, Parke Godwin (Morrow); From Time to Time, Jack Finney (Simon & Schuster); Archangel, Mike Conner (Tor); Flowerdust, Gwyneth Jones (Tor); The Color of Distance, Amy Thomson (Ace); Kamikaze L’Amour, Richard Kadrey (St. Martin’s); Earthfall, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Vivia, Tanith Lee (Little, Brown); Challenger’s Hope, David Feintuch (Warner Aspect); Worldwar: Tilting the Balance, Harry Turtledove (Del Rey); The Silent Strength of Stones, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (AvoNova); A Sorcerer and a Gentleman, Elizabeth Willey (Tor); Mortal Remains, Christopher Evans (Gollancz); All the Bells on Earth, James P. Blaylock; Tech-Heaven, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Harvest the Fire, Poul Anderson (Tor); Mirrorsun Rising, Sean McMullen (Aphelion); and When Heaven Fell, William Barton (Warner).

(Allen Steele’s The Weight (Legend), Connie Willis’s Remake (Bantam), and Poul Anderson’s Harvest the Fire (Tor) are novellas published as individual books; they don’t really fit here, but then, they don’t really fit anywhere else, either, so, as they are being sold as individual books, I’ve decided to list them here under novels.)

Of those novels on the list above that I did have time to read, I’d recommend Paul J. McAuley’s Fairyland, Ian McDonald’s Evolution’s Shore, Mary Rosenblum’s The Stone Garden, and Nicola Griffith’s Slow River.

It seemed a somewhat weaker year for first novels than the last two years have been, with nothing receiving the degree of attention that Griffith’s Ammonite, Rosenblum’s The Drylands, and Anthony’s Cold Allies did in 1993, or that Goonan’s Queen City Jazz, Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music, or Noon’s Vurt did in 1994. The first novels that stirred up the most excitement and acclaim this year were probably Becoming Human, Valerie J. Freireich (Roc); Quasar, Jamil Nasir (Bantam Spectra); The Bohr Maker, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Humility Garden, Felicity Savage (Roc); and Legacies, Alison Sinclair (Millennium). Valerie J. Freireich and Linda Nagata repeated the trick pioneered by Mary Rosenblum and Patricia Anthony in 1993 by having well-received second novels (Freireich’s Testament and Nagata’s Tech-Heaven) published before the end of the year. Other first novels included: Primary Inversion, Catherine Asaro (Tor); Lethe, Tricia Sullivan (Bantam Spectra); Dead Girls, Richard Calder (St. Martin’s); The Printer’s Devil, Chico Kidd (Baen); Headcrash, Bruce Bethke (Warner Aspect); The Baker’s Boy, J. V. Jones (Warner Aspect); The Gatekeepers, Daniel Graham, Jr. (Baen); and The Shape-Changer’s Wife, Sharon Shinn (Ace). The Del Rey Discovery line, launched in 1993, does seem to have been allowed to die, which strikes me as sadly shortsighted—if you don’t develop new writers, you have nobody with whom to replace your current high-sellers when they die, or move on to some other publishing house able to offer them more money. I salute all those editors who are brave and/or farsighted enough to buy first novels, in spite of the seductive lure of sticking with established “sure-thing” authors instead; as can be seen from the list above, Bantam Spectra, Roc, and Warner Aspect published a respectable number of first novels this year.

There doesn’t seem to me to be a clear favorite here for the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the situation is complicated by SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, which allows books from previous years to compete for this year’s Nebula Award—and so, it’s anyone’s guess what will end up winning the major awards for 1995.

Bantam Spectra and Tor had strong years, and books from the newish HarperPrism line are beginning to show up on these lists with some regularity, making their mark in the collections and anthologies lists as well as the novel list.

It should be noted that in the list above the books by Benford, Baxter, Stephenson, Banks, Reed, Anderson, McAuley, Rosenblum, Griffith, Cherryh, McDonald, Sheffield, Sawyer, Pellegrino and Zebrowski, Steele, Freireich, Ore, and a number of others are clearly and unequivocally science fiction by any reasonable definition—and that a few, especially the Bear, the Benford, and at least one of the Baxters (Flux), are “hard” science fiction as hard as it has ever been, if not harder. I mention this to counter the often heard assertion, usually spoken in sour tones, that no “real” science fiction is being published anymore; to the contrary, plenty of unquestionably pure-quill core science fiction still comes out every year, and even a good deal of “hard science fiction” rigorous enough to satisfy the most exacting of purists.… In fact, I think that more of both is being published now than was the case a few years back (to say nothing of “soft science fiction,” “sociological science fiction,” “satirical science fiction,” “space opera,” “military science fiction,” and a number of other varieties, all of which are also being published in large numbers). At the same time, just as there were more good fantasy anthologies this year, it also seemed to me that there were more good fantasy novels—and vigorous and exciting hybrids continued to form all along the borderline between science fiction and fantasy as well. One such hybrid, the nascent subgenre of “hard fantasy,” to use Michael Swanwick’s term, represented last year by Swanwick’s own The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, was represented this year by a major new novel by Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan, which also mixed classic fantasy tropes with a gritty and particularly urban sensibility.

Some excellent novels appeared as associational or borderline items this year; in fact, some of the strongest novels of the year were to be found lurking on the outer edges of the field. One of the best of these was Jack Dann’s vivid and exotic The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci (Bantam), a fat and fanciful book that exists somewhere on the borderline between historical novel, alternate history, and fantasy, partaking of all three forms without being entirely dominated by any of them. Much the same could be said of Joe Haldeman’s 1968 (Morrow), Haldeman’s most substantial book in years, ostensibly a straight mainstream novel (and a harrowing one) about the Vietnam War and its distorting effect on our society, but one which, because it is told largely through the eyes of a devoted science fiction reader, is drenched with science fiction imagery and sensibilities, and which recasts several “memories” of combat in aesthetic modes borrowed from fantasy, horror, and science fiction, most notably (and with high irony) from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Similarly, S. P. Somtow’s rich and antic Jasmine Nights (St. Martin’s) is ostensibly a mainstream novel, but this thinly disguised fictionalized memoir of a boy growing up in Thailand in the fifties is so full of surreal touches and descriptions of the bizarre societal tropes produced by the head-on collision of Western and Eastern cultures that it provides much the same kind of “Sense of Wonder” as does a fictional tour of an alien world, and so will doubtless appeal to many genre readers … perhaps even more to them than it will to the standard mainstream literary audience. Three other novels that exist somewhere on the ambiguous borderline between the mainstream and the fantastic were William Browning Spencer’s sly and quirky Zod Wallop (St. Martin’s) and Résumé with Monsters (Permanent Press), and Jack Cady’s eloquent The Off Season (St. Martin’s). Judith Tarr’s Pillar of Fire (Forge) is a historical novel by a well-known fantasy writer, and One King’s Way (Tor), by Harry Harrison and John Holm, is, strictly speaking, an Alternate History novel, but one which reads closely enough to the historical novel mode that it could easily be taken for one by someone whose knowledge of history was a bit shaky. Associational historical Western novels by well-known SF writers, published late last year, included Wilderness (Tor), by Roger Zelazny and Gerald Hausman, The Cannibal Owl (Bantam), by Chad Oliver, and Journal of the Gun Years (Jove), by Richard Matheson. Mystery novels by SF writers this year included Death by Degrees (St. Martin’s), by Robin Scott Wilson, and Death on the Mississippi (Berkley), by Peter J. Heck.

There were several reissues of classic novels this year, and considering how fast things go out of print these days, and how long they stay out of print (several of the following novels have been out of print for decades), I’d advise you to go out right now and buy copies of them while you have a chance: Cordwainer Smith’s only SF novel, Norstrilia (NESFA Press), not quite up to the standards of the best of his short fiction, but still containing much that is rich and numinous and strange, and unavailable for years; Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (Del Rey), one of the classic “hard science” novels; Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (Vintage), one of Dick’s best, strange even for him; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (HarperPrism), sociological SF at its best; Frederik Pohl’s The Years of the City (Baen), intriguing near-future speculation; Larry Niven’s Flatlander (Del Rey), an omnibus edition of two early Niven novels; Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel (both Tor), omnibus volumes bringing Wolfe’s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun back into print; Jack Vance’s Emphyrio (Charles F. Miller), one of Vance’s best, and so, almost by definition, one of the best “alien world” adventures you can find; Jack Vance’s Alastor (Tor), an omnibus collection of three more classic Vance novels; Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn (Del Rey), one of the seminal fantasy novels; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Walker), simply one of the best SF novels ever written. Buy ’em while you can.

(Addresses follow for the small-press items that may be hard to find in bookstores: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $20.95 for Norstrilia; Permanent Press, Noyac Road, Sag Harbor, NY 11963, $22 for Résumé with Monsters; Charles F. Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601, $60 for Emphyrio.)

*   *   *

It was a moderately strong year for short-story collections, with several excellent ones, several good ones, and a few retrospective collections that probably belong in every library.

The two strongest collections of the year were certainly Four Ways To Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (HarperPrism) and Axiomatic, by Greg Egan (Millennium), both landmark collections of the sort that come along only a few times a decade. Both are strong enough, in very different ways, that it’s difficult to choose between them. If forced to it, I guess I would give an edge to Four Ways To Forgiveness, since this is Le Guin writing at the very top of her form, better than she’s written in years—in fact, if you consider Four Ways To Forgiveness to be a novel rather than a collection (which it is possible to do, since the story lines of the four novellas here share some important characters, and subtly intertwine at several key points), then I’d have to say that Four Ways To Forgiveness may well be the strongest science fiction book (as opposed to fantasy or some of her more-difficult-to-classify work) that Le Guin has produced since The Dispossessed. Considered in that light, it would become one of the best novels of 1995 … but I think that it’s more useful, and more in line with the author’s intentions, to consider it as a short-story collection instead. Whatever you classify it as, though, you’re missing some of the best work of one of SF’s true giants if you don’t buy it.

Australian Greg Egan may be the hottest new writer of the decade, and he demonstrates why in Axiomatic, my other candidate for best collection of the year. Egan’s writing lacks (as yet) the maturity and richness of Le Guin’s best work, and occasionally reads as though he’s producing a thinly fictionalized version of some scientific article he’s been excited by, rushing to recast the idea-content in story form without taking the time to let the idea mature or integrate as fiction … but this is a fault common to relatively young writers, and I see signs that he’s already beginning to outgrow it. What he does have going for him is the inventiveness and ingenuity of his ideas, and the uncompromising rigor and unflinching logic with which he works the implications of those ideas through to their ultimate conclusions. Egan may be doing some of the best thinking taking place in the genre today, and when he matches that thinking with a story, setting, and characters rich and fully developed enough to be worthy of it, as he does in the best of the work here, the result is spectacular, work that is genuinely on the Cutting Edge of the field. (There was another strong collection by Greg Egan this year, Our Lady of Chernobyl (MirrorDanse Books), about which all of the above remarks also apply—but since it was published by a small press in Australia, it’ll probably be much more difficult to find for the average reader than Axiomatic.)

Among the year’s other top collections were: Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler (Four Walls Eight Windows); Georgia on My Mind and Other Places, Charles Sheffield (Tor); Matter’s End, Gregory Benford (Bantam Spectra); and Common Clay, Brian W. Aldiss (St. Martin’s). Katharine Kerr’s Freezeframes (HarperPrism), like the Le Guin discussed above, can be considered either as a collection or a “mosaic novel”; either way, it contains some first-rate work. Kate Wilhelm’s A Flush of Shadows (St. Martin’s) is mostly a collection of mystery novellas, although several of them contain minor fantastic elements, and at least one of them is straightforward science fiction; all are written up to Wilhelm’s exactingly high standard. Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (Four Walls Eight Windows) is another novella collection, this one of baroque, wildly inventive, cartoonishly satirical, deliberately outrageous “steampunk” stories that juxtapose Victorian settings and characters with SF situations and tropes, with results that are sometimes forced and artificial, but often bright and funny as well. A similar kind of aesthetic (one pioneered in fact by Moorcock, who was doing this kind of thing long before any of the “steampunks” came on the scene) can be found in Michael Moorcock’s two stylish collections, Lunching with the Antichrist (Mark V. Ziesing) and Fabulous Harbours (Millennium). Another quirky item is Bibliomen, by Gene Wolfe (Broken Mirrors Press), described as “Twenty-two characters in search of a book,” a series of fictional bios with illustrations by Ian Miller. The work of one of the most popular of the field’s new writers is collected in The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians and A Conflagration Artist (Wildside Press), both by Bradley Denton; these just won a World Fantasy Award, but since you can only get them as a boxed set for seventy dollars, they may be beyond the resources of many readers. Other good collections included: Dealers in Light and Darkness, Cherry Wilder (Edgewood); Seven Tales and a Fable, Gwyneth Jones (Edgewood); and Ganglion and Other Stories, Wayne Wightman (Tachyon Publications). There were two good fantasy collections, The Panic Hand, Jonathan Carroll (HarperCollins UK) and The Ivory and the Horn, Charles de Lint (Tor), and two collections that mixed horror, fantasy, and SF, Cages, Ed Gorman (Deadline Press) and Strange Highways, Dean Koontz (Warner).

There were an unusually large number of good retrospective collections this year, allowing you capsule glimpses of a writer’s career in short fiction. The best was probably The Ultimate Egoist (North Atlantic Books), the first in an ambitious series of volumes that aims to return to print all of the short work of one of SF’s best short-story writers, Theodore Sturgeon. Similarly noteworthy is Ill Met in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber (White Wolf), the first of a handsomely produced omnibus series that intends to return all of Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories to print; since the Gray Mouser stories are one of the foundation stones of modern fantasy, influencing almost everything that came after them, these volumes are indispensable for any good library of the fantastic. There should also be a place in every complete library, though, for: Tales of Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith (Necronomicon Press); Gold, Isaac Asimov (HarperPrism), a retrospective of Isaac’s career that includes both fiction and nonfiction; Ingathering: the Complete People Stories, Zenna Henderson (NESFA Press); and Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus). Other retrospective collections, long unavailable but now back in print, that belong in every library are The Best of Lester Del Rey (Del Rey) and The Best of John W. Campbell (Del Rey).

An associational item is Atlantis: Three Tales (Wesleyan University Press), a collection of three excellent mainstream novellas by SF writer Samuel R. Delany. Delany fans will definitely want this one, as it’s some of his most substantial work in years.

Continuing a trend from last year, and reversing a previous trend that had applied for several years, most of the major collections this year were released by regular trade publishers rather than by small presses—although with a few of those publishers, the distinction is a fine one. Four Walls Eight Windows had a strong presence this year, but has since dissolved. HarperPrism and Millennium placed several books on the list, as did St. Martin’s Press, and White Wolf could well become a presence in this category. Among paperback publishers, Tor brought out the most collections again this year. The small presses continued to be important, especially in the area of retrospective collections; almost all of the year’s retrospective collections were from small presses, although Del Rey is to be commended as well for bringing some of its excellent “Best of” author collections back into print; I hope they reissue the rest of them, too. Edgewood showed up on the list, as did Mark V. Ziesing, NESFA Press, Necronomicon Press, Deadline Press, and several very small presses, such as Tachyon and MirrorDanse.

Since very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, mail order is your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia, $9.95 for Our Lady of Chernobyl, by Greg Egan; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701, $25 for The Ultimate Egoist, volume 1, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon; Necronomicon Press, Box 1304, Warwick, RI 02893, $11.95 plus $1.50 postage for Tales of Zothique, by Clark Ashton Smith; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $24.95 for Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson; Deadline Press, Box 2805, Apache Junction, AZ 85217, $35 for Cages, by Ed Gorman; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA 94107, $21 plus $2 handling for Ganglion & Other Stories, by Wayne Wightman; Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088, $60 for Lunching with the Antichrist, by Michael Moorcock; Broken Mirrors Press, P.O. Box 380473, Cambridge, MA 02338, $7.50 for Bibliomen, by Gene Wolfe; Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238, $9 for Dealers in Light and Darkness, by Cherry Wilder, $8 for Seven Tales and a Fable, by Gwyneth Jones; Wildside Press, 37 Fillmore Street, Newark, NJ 07105, $70 for The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians, by Bradley Denton, (available only as a boxed set with A Conflagration Artist, by Bradley Denton.)

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This was a somewhat quiet year in the reprint anthology market; certainly there seemed to be fewer of them than in some recent years. The current wisdom in publishing seems to be that it’s more desirable—hotter, sexier—to do theme anthologies as original anthologies rather than reprints. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always turn out to be true. The editor of a reprint anthology about, say space stations (or dinosaurs, or artichokes, or whatever) at least knows in advance the quality of the stories that he’s going to use, and so can assure the overall quality of the book; the editor of the original anthology in many cases must use what he can get by the time the deadline looms—even if what he can get turns out to be a bunch of mediocre stories that don’t handle the theme as well as classic reprints have in the past. The reprint anthology can usually provide a better examination of a specific theme, therefore, or at least one that is more even in overall quality—but as long as publishers remain convinced that readers are more likely to buy an original anthology than a reprint anthology, the reprint market will continue to shrink.

This year, as usual, some of the best bets for your money in this category were the various “Best of the Year” anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 29 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent. For some years now, science fiction has been being covered by only one “Best of the Year” anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand—but in 1996 there will be a new “Best” series covering science fiction as well, to be edited by David G. Hartwell. I won’t, of course, attempt to review it, for obvious reasons—but David’s taste is different enough from my own that I’m sure that he will produce a very different book from mine, and it will be interesting to see what stories impressed me that didn’t impress David, and vice versa. And surely an examination of the field and the year from a different aesthetic perspective will be a useful thing for the genre at large; the field is wide and various enough for there to be room for many different volumes, all representing different tastes and perspectives. As Karl Edward Wagner’s long-running Year’s Best Horror Stories died along with him last year, alas, this year there were only two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror, instead of three: an entry in a newer British series, The Best New Horror Volume Six (Carroll & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, and the Ellen Datlow half of a mammoth volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Eighth Annual Collection. More short fantasy is published every year, even factoring in the unfortunate death of the Xanadu anthology series, and I suspect that someone will launch an independent “Best” volume devoted to fantasy alone, but so far fantasy is still covered only by the Terri Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology.

There was no big, controversial retrospective anthology this year, such as The Norton Book of Science Fiction or The Ascent of Wonder, but, despite that, there were still some very good values in the retrospective “historical overview” anthology category. Like last year’s New Eves: SF about the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, most of the best retrospective anthologies this year detailed the contributions of women writers to the SF and fantasy genres. The two best such anthologies were Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent, an omnibus reissue of three well-known anthologies from the seventies, Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, and The New Women of Wonder, covering the period 1944 to 1978; and Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (Harcourt Brace), also edited by Pamela Sargent, which updates things by covering the period 1978 to 1993. Many of the same authors are featured here as in New Eves, but the overlap of stories is small, and these two volumes belong on the bookshelves of everyone with a serious interest in the development of the field. Much the same could be said about The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (Viking), edited by Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones—I’m a bit bothered by the fact that the editors make no distinction whatsoever between science fiction and fantasy, lumping it all in together as “fantasy,” but there’s lots of good reading here, too, and this is another worthwhile volume. In fact, all three anthologies provide a valuable historical perspective on the evolution of science fiction—and one not always discussed in depth in the standard histories of the genre, which, to date, have tended to be written by men.

There were some good reprint horror anthologies this year. The best of them explored the borders between genres, and featured SF as well as horror. Cthulhu 2000 (Arkham House), for instance, edited by Jim Turner, is a stylish and intelligent Lovecraftian anthology which, in addition to work by many of the writers you’d expect to find, also features work by writers who are usually not thought of as Lovecraftians, such as Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Esther M. Friesner, Bruce Sterling, and Joanna Russ. (These have been a good couple of years for Lovecraft fans: late last year there was another big anthology of Lovecraft-inspired new work, which we missed, Shadows over Innsmouth (Fedogan & Bremer), edited by Stephen Jones, and there have been a couple of other Lovecraft-oriented books this year as well.) Between Time and Terror (Roc), edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, which also contains much Lovecraftian work, is another book that explores the borderline between science fiction and horror, reprinting some vigorous hybrids of the two forms, including works by writers such as John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as more expected writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Clive Barker. Monsters of one sort or another also got a lot of coverage this year. There were two huge anthologies of stories about the Frankenstein monster, one mostly original, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (covered above), and one reprint, The Frankenstein Omnibus (Orion), edited by Peter Haining; at least a half dozen anthologies about vampires, most of them original anthologies; at least two anthologies about werewolves, Werewolves (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg (which is mostly original stories), and Tomorrow Bites (Baen), edited by Greg Cox and T. K. F. Weisskopf (contains one original story); and even an anthology about monsters from other cultures, Orphans of the Night (covered above).

Noted without comment are: Dinosaurs II (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Angels! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois; Isaac Asimov’s Skin Deep (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams; and Isaac Asimov’s Ghosts (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

Mention should probably be made here of an associational item, an anthology of humorous competitions (as in, come up with a future Burma Shave ad) and cartoons from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, called Oi, Robot (Mercury Press), edited by Edward L. Ferman.

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It was a somewhat quiet year as well in the SF-oriented nonfiction and reference-book field, with the most interesting items for the nonspecialist being follow-ups of one sort or another to 1993’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, perhaps the best one-volume SF reference work ever produced.

Of these follow-ups, perhaps the spiffiest, the most useful, and certainly the most fun to play with, was a CD-ROM, not a book: Grolier Science Fiction: The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Grolier Electronic Publishing; $35 from Grolier Electronic Publishing Inc., 90 Sherman Turnpike, Danbury CT 06816). Based on the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, the CD-ROM version has been expanded and updated with 25,000 words in new entries and 25,000 words’ worth of updates, plus the addition of lots of “multimedia” graphics: stills from movies, book covers, author photos, and so on, plus audio and video clips. Based as it is on the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, the CD-ROM is actually usable as a reference source and a research tool, unlike some of the similar CD-ROM projects offered in the last few years. Whether it’s any more useful than the print version is dubious; the spiffy graphics are mostly just entertaining embellishments, fancy icing on the cake of the print text, and don’t really add anything vital to the information you can get out of the old-fashioned book version. I suppose you can argue that the information is presented in a more easily storable form in the CD-ROM version, a slender disk rather than a very thick hardcover book.… (The book, however, is easier to “access,” and doesn’t require that you own an expensive computer system before you can use it.) The additional graphics are fun to play with, though—perhaps especially in those places where they haven’t quite worked all the bugs out of things (in the Gallery, for instance, try calling up the photos of Mike Resnick or Terry Pratchett and see what happens!). The other “follow-up” is Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley), by John Clute, which almost functions as an abridged or (very) simplified version of the original Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia, with a lot of very nice looking graphics added, the same kind of thing that decorates the Grolier CD-ROM—book covers, author photos, movie stills, etc. (no audio or video clips, of course). Of necessity, a lot of information is left out that was available in the original Encyclopedia, so this is far less valuable as a reference source or research tool, but it does provide an intelligently selected “time line” of the evolution of the science fiction field, so that a casual reader who dips into this book for a few moments is more likely to emerge with at least a sketchy capsule knowledge of some of the history of the genre than he probably would have gained by dipping at random into the much more comprehensive Encyclopedia. If you’ve already got the Clute and Nicholls volume, then you don’t really need this one, but it does make a stylish and handsome coffee-table book, and certainly does the job it’s intended to do a lot better than previous books of its type, for instance, Brian Ash’s 1977 The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which was so confusingly designed and poorly laid out as to be nearly incomprehensible and almost totally useless for any sort of research or reference work. Also of general interest will be a collection of letters by the late Isaac Asimov, put together by his brother just before his own death this year, Yours, Isaac Asimov (Doubleday), edited by Stanley Asimov.

Turning to the more specialized reference books, those more likely to be of interest to the scholar than to the average nonscholarly reader, prominent items in this category this year included: Anatomy of Wonder 4 (R.R. Bowker), edited by Neil Barron, an update of what is probably still the best bibliography of the field; The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, 2d ed. (Scolar Press), by David Pringle, another useful bibliography; the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed. (St. James), edited by Jay P. Pederson and Robert Reginald; British Science Fiction Paperbacks and Magazines 1949–1956 (Borgo), by Philip Harbottle and Stephen Holland; The Supernatural Index (Greenwood), by Mike Ashley and William G. Contento; and Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults, 4th ed. (R.R. Bowker), by Ruth Nadelman Lynn.

Among the critical books, the most flavorsome and interesting for the nonspecialist will probably be two books of stylish, controversial, and sometimes deliberately provocative essays by two well-known SF writers: The Detached Retina (Syracuse), by Brian W. Aldiss, and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (Indiana University Press), by Joanna Russ. Somewhat more abstract are Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (Routledge), by Damien Broderick, and Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors (Syracuse), edited by David Seed. There were a couple of additions to the ever-growing shelf of critical works about the late Philip K. Dick: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (Pantheon), edited by Lawrence Sutin, is probably the one that the Dick fan will want the most, consisting as it does of nonfiction pieces and fragments by Philip K. Dick himself, who saw “reality” from as strange a perspective as anyone ever has; the other, Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (Greenwood), edited by Samuel J. Umland, is heavier going, and will appeal mostly to scholars, specialists, and those who are really obsessed with Phil Dick. There was a literary biography/study, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Greenwood), by S. T. Joshi, and yet another study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Marina Warner.

There were again several good values in the art-book field this year, including Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton (Paper Tiger), Bob Eggleton; Electric Dreams: The Art of Barclay Shaw (Paper Tiger), Barclay Shaw; The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe (Morpheus), Wayne Barlowe; A Hannes Bok Showcase (Charles F. Miller), edited by Stephen D. Korshak; Stephen E. Fabian’s Women & Wonders (Charles F. Miller), Stephen E. Fabian; a sequel to the immensely popular Dinotopia, called Dinotopia: The World Beneath (Turner), by James Gurney; and a sort of “Best of the Year” compilation of last year’s fantastic art, Spectrum II: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Burnett and Arnie Fenner. As can be seen, Paper Tiger and Charles F. Miller are bringing out the bulk of the interesting work in this area.

Turning to the general genre-related nonfiction field, there was a good deal of interesting stuff this year, some of it perhaps further out on the periphery than some readers will be willing to go; I’m willing to bet, though, that most of it will be of interest to most genre readers. The Private Life of Plants (Princeton), by David Attenborough, for instance, shows the plants of our own world to be far stranger than most of the alien life-forms invented by science fiction writers, and there are probably a dozen story ideas lurking in this fascinating book’s descriptions of the intricate and sometimes downright amazing survival strategies utilized by plants around the world. The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (Grosset/Putnam), by James Burke and Robert Ornstein, will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Burke’s famous Connections series, being another shrewd examination of the ways that our societies are shaped by technology and by cultural assumptions, sometimes in subtle and surprising ways. The Seven Wonders of the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (Henry Holt), by John and Elizabeth Romer, is a bit further removed from genre concerns, but will certainly be of interest to that large portion of the genre audience interested in history and alternate history, especially as it largely concerns itself with the technologies and engineering logistics used in creating ancient Wonders such as the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes. On a different note, many genre readers will find it worthwhile to pick up The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (Andrews and McMeel), by Bill Watterson, especially now that the original comic strip has died; at its best, Calvin and Hobbes was not only one of the most brilliant and funny comic strips of modern times, but it was also the strip that ventured most often and most successfully into genre territory, as Calvin imagines himself to be a rampaging dinosaur or an intrepid spaceman battling wonderfully drawn Bug Eyed Monsters … who usually turn out to really be his grade-school teacher. This is a strip I’ll miss, as it brought a richness of imagination and a subtlety of touch to a milieu usually lacking in both qualities these days.

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Nineteen ninety-five was a decent year at the box office for genre films, with a fair number of midlevel hits, although no blockbusters on the scale of The Lion King or Jurassic Park. Artistically, it was a mixed year, with some good movies and some real stinkers … although if you take a careful look at what are usually listed just as “genre films,” and break them down by actual type, you’ll find that, like last year, there were many more good fantasy movies than there were good science fiction movies.

In terms of artistic quality, the best science fiction movie of the year wasn’t even a science fiction movie. The box-office smash Apollo 13 is technically not a science fiction movie because, of course, the events that it describes are not science fiction, but instead are based on something that actually happened (you knew this, of course, right? I hope you did, anyway). In spite of this inconvenient fact, don’t be surprised to see Apollo 13 show up on next year’s Hugo ballot for Best Dramatic presentation, and very probably win, too … because, in spite of the fact that it’s not SF, it catches the spirit and the mind-set behind science fiction better than anything has in years, and does a better job overall of giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the space program than the movie version of The Right Stuff, and I’ve yet to meet an SF fan—most of whom are still space-flight enthusiasts, after all—who didn’t love it. Besides, disregarding everything else, those rockets in space look great—and it’s amazing how much of a jolt of Sense of Wonder those images can still evoke, even though they’re images not of imaginary futures but of an era that is over and receding rapidly into the only dimly remembered past. Spaceships are still very potent stuff symbolically, speaking without words to some dream that lives in the back of the skull—it’s too bad that NASA has not been able to figure out some viable way to use that dream to inspire the public into supporting the space program. (Instead, NASA has accomplished the amazing feat of making space travel dull … but that’s an essay for another place than here.)

Once you get beyond Apollo 13 (if you consider it to be a genre film in the first place), it wasn’t really much of a year for SF films in terms of either artistic or box-office success. Johnny Mnemonic was a flop at the box office, but it was not as bad as most critics said it was (it may have been the most critically savaged movie of the year); in fact, although it was seriously flawed, Johnny Mnemonic may have been the most artistically successful real science fiction movie of the year. At least it tried to appeal to an intelligent, adult audience, with a literate script by William Gibson Himself and some good set-dressing and special effects, especially the stunning computer-interface sequences. It wasn’t very well directed, though, and the zombielike performance by Keanu Reeves in the title role probably was the final nail in its coffin. The much-discussed Waterworld, the most expensive movie ever made, turned out to be a standard action film, with boat chases standing in for the usual car chases, lots of shooting, and some very silly rubber science. It’s hard to see on the screen just why this movie had to cost $175 million; it’s no more spectacular than other big-budget special-effects-laden let’s-blow-up-lots-of-things action thrillers, such as the Die Hard movies or the Lethal Weapon movies, and, in fact, is less impressive than some of the best of the action thrillers, being less effective, for instance, than last year’s less grandiose and much less expensive Speed. Even though it was the tenth highest-grossing movie of the year, earning more than $88 million, Waterworld didn’t even come close to earning back its immense budget, although it may yet reach a small profit when overseas, TV, and videocassette sales are added into the total. Judge Dredd was an overblown and disappointing version of the cult ultraviolent British comix; almost as expensive as Waterworld at $100 million, it did considerably worse at the box office, perhaps an indication of the fading star-power of Sylvester Stallone. Congo was a recycling of King Solomon’s Mines (and, in spite of its immensely larger budget, managed to look more like it was shot on a soundstage than the earlier movie did!) with some coy postmodern touches added, featuring an embarrassingly bad performance by a good actor, Tim Curry, who now qualifies for admittance to the Ludicrous Accent Hall of Fame, along with Robert Shaw (what was that accent he had in Jaws, anyway?). Species takes a genuine and even rather sophisticated SF idea (one lifted uncredited from print SF writers, of course, most notably Fred Hoyle) and then, disappointingly, uses it merely for a platform for another Alien clone, turning into just another monster-on-the-rampage-among-us movie. Similarly, The Net takes an idea that was Cutting Edge SF just a few years back—how computer manipulation of worldwide data banks can turn someone into an invisible nonperson, effectively wiping them from existence—and uses it as a platform from which to launch a fairly standard Hitchcockian chase-thriller of Mistaken Identity, the sort where an innocent person must unravel a mystery while on the run from relentlessly pursuing killers and the cops. The computer hacker elements don’t really add anything vital to a formula that goes at least as far back as North by Northwest, merely becoming a new kind of McGuffin, but considered as a thriller, The Net is not a bad one at all, with some good suspense, and a good performance by Sandra Bullock … whose character actually solves the mystery and outwits the bad guys all by herself, instead of standing by wringing her hands and moaning while a handsome male hero resolves everything with a climactic fistfight with the villain—that alone is reason enough to see the movie! The computer hacker/Mean Streets–cyberpunk territory was also covered by Virtuosity, Hackers, and Strange Days, none of which did very well at the box office, with Strange Days, which had been expected to be a Major Motion Picture, especially disappointing. Outbreak was obviously inspired by last year’s harrowing nonfiction book The Hot Zone, but the producers evidently felt that the prospect of everyone in the United States being killed by an outbreak of an Ebola-like virus was not scary enough, and decided to spice things up with some helicopter chases instead. It’s hard to know where to list Batman Forever—it’s obviously more a fantasy than it is a science fiction movie, but it has no overt supernatural element. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year, although I’m not entirely sure why. Val Kilmer, though somewhat stolid, is at least less inappropriate as Batman than—give me a break—Michael Keaton (although he is upstaged effortlessly by Chris O’Donnell as Robin in every scene they play together), and Jim Carrey, who has made a career out of flamboyant overacting, was born to play a Batman supervillain (although it’s sad to see a good actor such as Tommy Lee Jones chewing the scenery right along with him); but the movie is confusingly directed, and shot so much like a rock video that it’s often impossible to tell what’s going on even during the fight scenes—a major drawback for an action movie. Still, there’s no arguing with success, and the success of Batman Forever ensures that there will be at least one more Batman movie, and probably several of them. Mortal Kombat is even further out on the edge of the genre than Batman Forever, being literally a live-action version of an arcade video game. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a big-screen version of a popular kid’s television show, and Tank Girl is a live-action version of a cult comix (Tank Girl is considered a cult movie in some circles … but apparently there weren’t enough cultists to keep it from sinking out of sight at the box office).

Right at the very end of the year, Terry Gilliam’s new film Twelve Monkeys was in some theaters in a limited release, but I never was able to catch up with it, and will have to save consideration of it for next year.

Not much of a year for SF movies, then, really, all in all. After the disappointing turnout for movies like Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Hackers, Strange Days, and The Net, the computer hacker/cyberpunk movie subgenre is probably dead in the water for the foreseeable future, so don’t expect to see the film version of Neuromancer anytime soon. I’d like to think that the failure (relative to costs, anyway) of grotesquely overblown special-effects-heavy blow-up-everything-in-sight SF movies such as Waterworld and Judge Dredd has taught the moviemakers a lesson—but probably it hasn’t. Still awaiting release at year’s end were most of the big-budget blockbuster Major SF Movies that we’ve been promised for several years now: the first film in the new Star Wars trilogy, the new Stanley Kubrick SF movie, the new Indiana Jones movie, the sequel to Jurassic Park, and so on. Also scheduled for next year or thereabouts is a new Star Trek: The Next Generation theatrical film; let’s hope it’s more artistically successful—better writing would certainly help, guys!—than last year’s disappointing Star Trek Generations.

There were some good fantasy movies. Toy Story, the first-ever completely computer-animated movie (and almost certainly not the last), was not only a technological marvel, but a stylishly told and fairly intelligent piece of storytelling that appealed to adults at least as much as it appealed to kids. For a talking-pig movie, Babe was treated with astonishing respect by the critics, was popular at the box office, and even made it into the Oscar nominees. The Secret of Roan Inish was an evocative and lyrically filmed fantasy, and The Indian in the Cupboard was an effective and respectful version of a well-known children’s book. Jumanji was somewhat muddled, but had some playful special effects and a certain exuberance. A Goofy Movie, a feature-length Goofy cartoon, was popular with kids, although not as palatable to adults as Toy Story. Even the charming The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain is clearly a fantasy of some sort, though it has no supernatural element whatsoever. (There were bad fantasy movies as well, of course, including a couple of the year’s highest-grossing movies: the overblown and somewhat distasteful Casper, and the animated feature Pocahontas, which was extremely dubious history even by Disney-movie standards—Pocahontas was only twelve when she met John Smith, didn’t marry him, and died very young in exile. And the movie was somewhat sappy to boot. Other bombs included what may, if he’s lucky, be the nadir of Eddie Murphy’s guttering career, A Vampire in Brooklyn, and the Mel Brooks comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It. I’m not going to bother to list all the horror movies, although there were a fair number of them, including big-budget Halloween and Candyman sequels.)

The film industry, then, is capable of making a good fantasy movie—but clearly has no idea, most of the time, how to make a good SF movie. Almost no SF movies make a genuine attempt to deal in an intelligent fashion with the idea-content of science fiction—instead, they typically concentrate on the special effects and the costuming and the set dressing, on flashy set pieces and big explosions, usually skimping even on basic story line, let alone the ideas behind the story. When was the last time you saw a real, core science fiction movie—not an engaging space fantasy such as Star Wars, or a disguised horror movie such as Alien, or an adventure-fantasy such as Raiders of the Lost Ark—that was presented in an intelligent and sophisticated enough manner that adults could appreciate it without making major allowances for it … let alone one that had some really intriguing or challenging conceptualization in it, some real sophistication of idea and theme? Some viewers would reach back to Blade Runner, others would have to go all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey … but, whichever you choose, it’s certainly been a long time.

Turning to television, there were as many or more genre shows than ever on the air, but most of them were not all that impressive. Star Trek: Voyager doesn’t seem to be establishing itself all that well (and has not improved much in quality since its premiere last year, already getting into recycling old plots from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to be struggling some in the ratings as well—according to TV Guide, less than half the twenty million viewers who were watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when it premiered are still watching it now. That’s still a pretty big audience, of course, about ten million viewers—but the other way to look at it, equally valid, is that another ten million viewers have stopped watching it since the show came on the air. For what it’s worth, most Star Trek fans I’ve talked to don’t like the two new shows anywhere near as much as they like Star Trek: The Next Generation—I feel that way myself—even if they do watch them … and a lot of them have stopped bothering to do so. A sign that there may be some unease in the Star Trek empire is that they keep trying to shore up the ratings of the new shows by bringing stars from Star Trek: TNG into them. The very popular character of Lieutenant Worf permanently joined the Deep Space Nine cast this year, for instance, and Q and Ryker from TNG have visited Star Trek: Voyager, in spite of the fact that the isolation of that show’s characters from the rest of the familiar Star Trek universe was supposed to be a plus creatively. In fact, there are signs that the producers are chafing against the (self-imposed) limitations of both shows: Deep Space Nine keeps coming up with lame scenarios to get its cast the hell out of their dull Space Shopping Mall, continually finding new excuses, however weak, to load them into spaceships and send them whizzing around the galaxy instead; and in spite of its premise of total isolation, Voyager is already exploiting every way possible to make contact with the familiar Star Trek universe, including flashbacks, time travel, and dream/alternate reality sequences, and clearly would be happy to be able to think up even more. In my opinion—and no, I don’t think that the producers of Star Trek have even the slightest interest in my opinion—what they ought to do is bite the bullet, admit (tacitly at least) that they’ve made a mistake, and do what they ought to have done in the first place: Star Trek: The Next Next Generation—smash the two shows together spectacularly in a multi-episode (and ratings-grabbing) extravaganza, blow up (perhaps literally) Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and jam the most popular cast members of both shows into a refurbished Starship Enterprise, along with willing and available Star Trek: TNG characters, such as Worf and Ryker. There’s not the remotest chance that they will actually do this, of course—for one thing, they’d lose the merchandising on the Deep Space Nine- and Voyager-related products and tie-ins—but a revamped Star Trek: The Next Generation would certainly generate more excitement than the new shows have managed to do so far, especially if the next TNG theatrical film is a big success. (As an indication of relative public-acceptance levels, can you imagine anyone wanting to go see a Deep Space Nine or Voyager theatrical film? No, neither can I—and apparently neither can they, either, because no such film has even been hinted at as a remote possibility.)

Elsewhere, Babylon 5 seems to be actually winning in its direct, head-to-head competition with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show extremely similar in concept and format, winning in the hearts of SF fans, at least, if not yet in the ratings—perhaps one reason why Deep Space Nine may be chafing to change its format. I must admit that I haven’t warmed all that much to Babylon 5 myself, but many media SF fans and even many print SF fans have, and the cult following for this show is growing continually, with Babylon 5 panels even at regular non-media-oriented SF conventions drawing overflowing audiences, and Babylon 5 conventions beginning to come into existence. Another cult show, The X-Files, on the verge of being canceled only a couple of years ago, now seems to be an immense success—although, predictably, now that it’s on top, connoisseurs are beginning to complain that It’s Not As Good As It Used To Be. As far as I can tell, Earth 2, SeaQuest DSV, Space Precinct, M.A.N.T.I.S., and Forever Knight have all died. I won’t miss any of them. I will miss Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Northern Exposure, which have also died (although Mystery Science Theater 3000 may be reborn in some alternate form), though both shows had grown stale, and were probably ready to go. I’ll miss Northern Exposure in particular, as it was perhaps the best show on network television during its first couple of seasons, particularly its wonderful first season—dismaying how little time it took the network “spin doctors” to run this once excellent series into the ground, replacing whimsy with angst, souring the characters, and spoiling their subtle relationships with one another, until, by the time the show ended, I was glad to see it put out of its misery. Lois and Clark survived another shaky season by the skin of its teeth, although its future is doubtful. Highlander seems as popular as ever, as far as I can tell, and is perhaps as immortal as its protagonist.

Of the new shows, the best is probably StrangeLuck, a quirky and intelligent show whose story editor and producer is SF writer Michael Cassutt, who formerly worked on the American TV version of Max Headroom. StrangeLuck may be too quirky for its own good, though—there’s no overt fantastic element here, just the fact that bizarre coincidences happen around the lead character all the time (hence the show’s title), and the occasional hint about his Mysterious Past, which may or may not somehow be responsible for his strange luck—and that may be too subtle for the television audience at large. StrangeLuck is reported to be struggling, and its future may be in doubt, although it’s a stylish and often funny show that deserves to survive. Third Rock from the Sun is an Alf retread that wastes some talented actors. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is fun in a cheesy, junk-food sort of way, if only to laugh at the really staggering lapses from anything resembling historical accuracy, and the unintentional anachronisms that abound. Deadly Games, which has already been canceled, was a show about computer-game figures coming to life, with Christopher Lloyd enjoyable as the main villain. The new Outer Limits is disappointing at best, and sometimes plain bad. Space: Above and Beyond is a World War II combat movie thinly disguised as an SF show, and takes itself with such unsmiling and portentous seriousness that it’s sometimes almost amusing.

Turn off the tube and go read a book, is my advice.

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The Fifty-third World Science Fiction Convention, Intersection, was held in Glasgow, Scotland, from August 24 to August 28, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,800. A pall was thrown over the proceedings for many of those in attendance by the death of John Brunner (see below) on the first night of the convention, the first time that a science fiction writer has died while attending a Worldcon; it’s a shame that this tragedy will probably turn out to be what the convention is chiefly remembered for in the annals of fannish history, but that seems likely. The 1995 Hugo Awards, presented at Intersection, were: Best Novel, Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold; Best Novella, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” by Mike Resnick; Best Novelette, “The Martian Child,” by David Gerrold; Best Short Story, “None So Blind,” by Joe Haldeman; Best Nonfiction, I. Asimov: A Memoir, by Isaac Asimov; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Jim Burns; Best Original Artwork, Brian Froud for Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book; Best Dramatic Presentation, “All Good Things,” from Star Trek: The Next Generation; Best Semiprozine, Interzone; Best Fanzine, Ansible, edited by David Langford; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Teddy Harvia; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Jeff Noon.

The 1994 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on April 22, 1995, were: Best Novel, Moving Mars, by Greg Bear; Best Novella, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” by Mike Resnick; Best Novelette, “The Martian Child,” by David Gerrold; Best Short Story, “A Defense of the Social Contracts,” by Martha Soukup; plus the Grand Master Award to Damon Knight.

The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-first Annual World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 29, 1995, were: Best Novel, Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow; Best Novella, “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” by Elizabeth Hand; Best Short Fiction, “The Man in the Black Suit,” by Stephen King; Best Collection, The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians and A Conflagration Artist, by Bradley Denton; Best Anthology, Little Deaths, edited by Ellen Datlow; Best Artist, Jacek Yerka; Special Award (Professional), to Ellen Datlow; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Bryan Cholfin, for Broken Mirrors Press and Crank!.

The 1995 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on June 10, were: Best Novel, Dead in the Water, by Nancy Holder; Best First Novel, Grave Markings, by Michael Arnzen; Best Collection, The Early Fears, by Robert Bloch; Best Long Fiction, “The Scent of Vinegar,” by Robert Bloch; Best Short Story (tie), “Cafe Endless: Spring Rain,” by Nancy Holder and “The Box,” by Jack Ketchum; plus a Life Achievement Award to Christopher Lee.

The 1994 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Permutation City, by Greg Egan.

The 1994 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “Forgiveness Day,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The 1994 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Mysterium, by Robert Charles Wilson.

The 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by Fools, by Pat Cadigan.

The 1994 Compton Crook Award was won by Dun’s Lady Jess, by Doranna Durgin.

The 1994 Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel went to Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem.

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This was yet another year of horrendous loss for the science fiction and fantasy genres. Dead in 1995 or early 1996 were: Walter M. Miller, Jr., 73, author of the classic, seminal, Hugo-winning SF novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as many influential stories during the fifties, one of which, “The Darfsteller,” won him another Hugo; British author John Brunner, 60, author of the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar, as well as many other acclaimed novels such as The Jagged Orbit, The Whole Man, The Squares of the City, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, and almost fifty more, including thrillers, mainstream novels, historical novels, and poetry collections; Roger Zelazny, 58, one of the giants of the New Wave era, who went on to become one of the most popular and beloved writers in the genre, multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, author of Lord of Light, This Immortal, Isle of the Dead and the multivolume Amber series, among many others; G. C. Edmonson, 73, author of the classic time-travel novel The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, as well as Chapayeca, one of the most undeservedly forgotten novels of the seventies, and the landmark collection Stranger Than You Think, among others; British writer Bob Shaw, 63, author of the classic story “Light of Other Days,” as well as The Ragged Astronauts, The Wooden Spaceship, A Wreath of Stars, and others; Ian Ballantine, 79, the publisher who practically invented the modern mass-market paperback as we know it, cofounder, along with his wife, Betty, of three major paperback companies, Penguin, Bantam, and Ballantine, a true giant of the publishing world; Elsie Wollheim, 85, wife of SF editor-publisher Donald A. Wollheim, and for many years executive vice president of the publishing house they created, DAW Books; Margaret St. Clair, 84, author of the well-known Sign of the Labrys, as well as Agent of the Unknown and The Dolphins of Altair, who also wrote a long sequence of sprightly and entertaining stories under the pseudonym of Idris Seabright; Kingsley Amis, 73, noted British writer and critic, author of Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, who also wrote a considerable body of SF, including The Alteration and The Anti-Death League, as well as being coeditor of the Spectrum series of SF anthologies, and producing one of the pioneer works of SF criticism, New Maps of Hell; Jack Finney, 84, World Fantasy Award winner, author of the classic time-travel novel Time and Again, one of the most loving and nostalgic looks at the past ever written, as well as Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Robertson Davies, 82, noted Canadian writer, many of whose books had fantastic elements, among them The Rebel Angels, The Cunning Man, and the acclaimed collection of ghost stories, High Spirits; Claude Avice, 70, French writer who produced many books under the name of Pierre Barbet; Christopher Hodder-Williams, 69, British writer, author of The Main Experiment and The Egg-Shaped Thing, among others; Mike McQuay, 45, author of Memories, Jitterbug, and Life-Keeper, among others; Kent R. Patterson, 53, short-story writer and frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Analog; Michael Ende, 65, German author of the children’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story; Abram Ruvimovich Palely, 101, prominent Russian SF writer; Charlotte Franke, 60, German author and editor; Kenneth Sterling, 74, writer for the early pulp magazines; Adam Wisniewski-Snerg, 58, Polish SF author; Stan Leventhal, 43, writer and editor; Janice Elliott, 63, author of The Summer People; Don Pendleton, 67, creator of one of the first of the men’s adventure series, describing the adventures of “the Executioner,” as well as other SF novels, mysteries, and Westerns; Terry Southern, 71, scriptwriter and novelist, author of Candy and The Magic Christian; Edith Pargeter, 82, who, as Ellis Peters, wrote, among other books, the long-running Brother Cadfael series of mystery novels, which seem to be almost as popular with fantasy fans as with mystery fans, perhaps because of their medieval setting; Patricia Highsmith, 74, noted mystery author who also wrote some short horror and SF; Elleston Trevor, 75, author of SF, suspense, novels, the best known of which probably was The Quiller Memorandum, part of a long-running series of spy novels written as Adam Hall; Robie Macauley, 76, former fiction editor of Playboy, where he encouraged the use of SF and fantasy in that magazine, also a former editor at Houghton Mifflin; Diane Cleaver, 53, editor and agent, former SF editor at Doubleday; Charles Monteith, 74, noted British publisher; Charles Scribner, Jr., 74, publisher and editor; Eric Garber, 40, anthologist; Philip E. Cleator, 86, founder of the British Interplanetary Society, and an early popularizer of space travel; Rudolph Zallinger, 75, scientific muralist, best known for his The Age of Reptiles mural, which, reprinted in Life, was many a child’s first exposure to dinosaurs; Peter Cook, 57, British comic actor and writer, one of the founders of the pioneering British comedy show Beyond the Fringe, also a star of such movies as The Bed-Sitting Room and The Wrong Box; Donald Pleasence, 75, film actor, perhaps best known to genre audiences for his role in Escape from New York, as well as for his portrayal of the evil Blofeld in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice; David Wayne, 81, film actor, perhaps best known to genre audiences for Portrait of Jennie and The Andromeda Strain, although he also had a recurring role on TV’s Batman series; Elizabeth Montgomery, 57, star of TV’s long-running sitcom Bewitched; Cy Endfield, 81, director of Zulu and the film version of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island; Arthur Lubin, 96, director of fantasy films such as Rhubard and The Incredible Mr. Limpet; Henry Horner, 84, director of Red Planet Mars; Patricia Casort Vardeman, 35, wife of SF writer Robert Vardeman; Evelyn Beheshti Hildebrant, 33, wife of SF writer Don H. DeBrandt; Benjamin Elgin, 29, son of SF writer Suzette Haden Elgin; Stanley Asimov, 66, well-known journalist, brother of the late SF writer Isaac Asimov, compiler of the recently released book of his brother’s letters, Yours, Isaac Asimov; Bessie Delany, 104, great-aunt of SF writer Samuel R. Delany, and coauthor, with her older sister, who survives her, of the best-selling book Having Our Say: the Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.