Doomsayers continued to predict the imminent demise of science fiction throughout 1997, some of them even seeming to look forward to it with gloomy, headshaking, I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn’t-listen-to-me relish; but, although there were cutbacks—some of them serious ones—it seems to me that the actual numbers and the actual real-world situation do not justify these sorts of gloomy predications. To modify the words of Mark Twain, the Death of Science Fiction has been greatly exaggerated.
The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for more than a decade now in fact did not happen in 1997. In spite of cutbacks and even some failing or faltering imprints (and new imprints, some of them quite major, were being added even as old ones disappeared), science fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror remain large and various genres, with almost a thousand “books of interest” to the three fields published in 1997, according to the newsmagazine Locus, and science fiction and fantasy books were still making a lot of money for a lot of different publishers (although the market is changing and evolving, with mass-market titles declining and trade paperback titles on the rise). Artistically and creatively, the field has never been in better shape, with an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors producing an amazing spectrum of first-rate work, ranging all the way from the hardest of hard science fiction through wild baroque Space Opera and sociological near-future speculation to fantasy of a dozen different sorts, with uncountable hybrids of all those sorts of stories (and with other genres as well, including the historical novel, the mystery, and even the Western novel!) filling in the interstices. In terms of there being first-class work of many different sorts available to be read, this is the Golden Age, nor are we out of it!
As usual, there were many contradictory omens out there to be read, and it is entirely possible to read the very same signs and make either pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the future, depending on what evidence you look at and what weight you arbitrarily decide to give it.
There were certainly plenty of Bad Omens around to look at. Original books declined by nearly 100 titles in 1997 compared to 1996, which, in turn, had had 130 fewer original books than 1995, a drop of over 17 percent in two years; the magazine market was still precarious; and mass-market continued to shrink. HarperCollins cancelled 106 books, about 7 percent of the 1,600 trade books they published last year; TSR Inc. fell deeply in debt and was sold to Wizards of the Coast Inc.; Wired Books, the publishing arm of Wired magazine, was
reported to have lost $35 million dollars, scuttling their plans to launch an imprint of SF titles (or at least putting it on hold); and there were cutbacks elsewhere as well. You could read these omens and draw quite a gloomy picture of the future, and many commentators did just that.
On the other hand, while mass-market continued to shrink, trade paperbacks and hardcovers were growing more frequent, and while some companies were struggling financially and/or contracting, Avon, under the direction of Lou Aronica, is launching an ambitious new genre line called Eos (replacing the old AvoNova imprint), HarperPrism is increasing the number of titles it produces, and Simon & Schuster UK is launching another ambitious new SF line, Earthlight, under the editorship of John Jerrold. Jim Turner was dismissed from his long-held job at Arkham House last year, but bounced back by launching a new small-press imprint of his own, Golden Gryphon Press, and Stephe Pagel also launched a new small-press imprint, Meisha Merlin Publishing. You can draw a different set of conclusions from these facts, and forecast a quite different sort of future.
Then there are things that can be viewed as either positive or negative, depending on which spin you put on it. Random House UK sold its SF/fantasy imprint, Legend, to Little, Brown UK, publisher of the Orbit SF line; Legend will be absorbed into Orbit, under the editorial direction of Tim Holman, with Colin Murray staying on as editorial consultant and Lisa Rogers joining the editorial team. The downbeat take on this is that there’s now one genre line where there once were two, but since the Legend backlist will be reissued as Orbit books, it’s quite possible that the end result of this will be that more genre titles will eventually see print than they did before. Similarly, although TSR Inc. died as an independent entity, the absorption of its output into Wizards of the Coast Inc. may eventually result in more overall titles being published in that area as well. And you’ll notice that even really severe cutbacks, on an almost unprecedented level, still leaves HarperCollins a very large company even after the cuts (and most of those cuts weren’t SF titles anyway).
Then there were other developments whose ultimate ramifications are impossible as yet to predict at all, one way or the other.
We got a break from the usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs in 1997, a year in which there were few if any significant changes, as far as which editor was working where. Once again, however, there were some major changes at the very top levels of publishing houses, the consequences of which—which could prove to be either positive or negative—may take years to work themselves out. Elaine Koster left Penguin Putnam, where she was president and publisher of Dutton, Plume, and Signet, to become a literary agent. Clare Ferraro, former senior VP and publisher of Ballantine, took over as president of Dutton and Plume, but not Signet. David Shanks, the president of Putnam and Berkley, took on the additional job of president of Signet. Judith M. Curr, former senior VP and editor-in chief, will become publisher at Signet. Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House, resigned to become editorial director and vicechairman of Mort Zuckerman’s Publication Group. He was replaced by Ann Godoff, former executive VP, who also retained her former title of editor-in-chief
of Randon House. Random House executive VP Jane Friedman became president and CEO of HarperCollins, replacing Anthea Disney, who became chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s News America. And HarperCollins (UK) deputy managing director Malcolm Edwards moved to Orion to become managing director and publisher.
So I’m not willing to read memorial services over the grave of the genre just yet. Science fiction has plenty of problems, sure, from the decline of the midlist (which has driven many authors into writing media novels in order to survive) to the general unavailability of backlist titles as opposed to the way it was in the Old Days, from the way new authors can find their careers deadlocked by the refusal of chain-store buyers to order books from anyone whose first few titles didn’t do geometrically increasing business (a system that, if it had been in place back then, would have insured that you’d never have heard of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, all of whom built a following slowly over a number of years) to the alarming tendency of some publishers to think that they can assure “sure sales” by publishing nothing but media tie-in novels (apparently realizing that just publishing media novels is not a sure enough sure-thing, some publishers have now progressed to publishing media tie-in novels by media celebrities). What’s next? How about media tie-in novels by famous serial killers? I can see it now: Star Trek Bloodbath, by Charles Manson—but science fiction also has a lot of vitality and staying power, and, for all its problems, it’s far from down for the count yet.
As I’ve said here before, even if a deeper recession is ahead (and I’m not at all sure that it is), I find it unlikely that any recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or sales, unless it’s a recession so big that most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. And as Gordon Van Gelder recently said, in an editorial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, commenting on a critic’s lament that there’s nothing but crap to be found on the shelves in the SF sections of bookstores: “Back in 1960, he wouldn’t have been so distressed by the SF section of the story because it didn’t exist back then. Remember please that SF specialty shops like A Change of Hobbit in L.A. and The SF Shop in New York were founded in the 1970s because SF could be so hard to find … . Personally, I think there’s more good SF getting published nowadays than most people have time to read, there are plenty of interesting new writers coming into the field, and lots of the field’s veterans are producing top-flight work. So what’s this talk about SF dying?” I also wholeheartedly agree with Warren Lapine, who, in an editorial in the Spring 1998 issue of Absolute Magnitude, said: “It’s time that everyone in Science Fiction got off their collective asses and stopped whining about the future. Are you worried about magazines? Then subscribe to a couple of them. Are you worried about books? Then buy a few of them.” I was in an on-line real-time conference a couple of weeks ago, talking—typing?—to a woman who said that she was extremely worried that all of the science fiction magazines were going to die, and who then went on to add that she goes down to Borders bookstore every month, faithfully reads all the science fiction magazines while having coffee and croissants, and then puts them all back on the shelf and leaves the store! And I thought to myself in
amazement, Lady, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. Next time, skip the croissants, take out your wallet, and actually buy the goddamned magazines before you read them! Similarly, don’t wait for that novel you’ve been wanting to read to hit the used-book store, buy it now, while the royalties will not only do the author some good, but will actually help to keep the entire mechanism of the science fiction publishing industry in operation.
Of course, none of this may be enough. Gordon and Warren and I may all be whistling past the graveyard. Only time will tell.
But my own prediction is that science fiction as a viable genre will survive at least well into the next century—and perhaps for considerably longer than that.
It was another bad year in the magazine market, although some of the turbulence caused by the recent chaos in the domestic distribution network—when bigger distributors abruptly swallowed up the small independent distributors—has quieted a bit, with things settling down (for the moment, at least) to somewhere closer to a rest state. The print magazines that survived the storm are working on adopting various bailing strategies to deal with the water they shipped (adjusting their “draw,” for instance—sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine’s efficiency, and thereby lowering costs, and so increasing profitability), and nervously eyeing the new storm clouds—in the form of new hikes in paper costs coming up next year.
To move from the world of overheated metaphor to the world of cold figures, all the science fiction magazines suffered further drops in their circulation figures in 1997. About the only cheerful thing that can be said about this fact is that it was not as precipitous a drop as had been registered the year before, when the distribution network problems really began to bite deep, and that a few of the magazines are actually beginning to creep up again, although minusculely, in newsstand sales. Still, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age all registered the lowest circulation figures in their respective histories. Even the fantasy magazine Realms of Fantasy, the only magazine to show a gain in circulation in 1996, was down some, although only by a measly 0.5 percent. Asimov’s lost about 3,700 in subscriptions but gained about 360 in newsstand sales, for a 7.4-percent loss in overall circulation. Analog lost about 6,230 in subscriptions and another 38 in newsstand sales, for a 10.5-percent loss in overall circulation. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 6,730 in subscriptions but gained about 800 newsstand sales, for a 13.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,590 in subscriptions and about another 2,220 in newsstand sales, for a 14.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy lost about 151 in subscriptions and about another 100 in newsstand sales, for a barely perceptible 0.5-percent loss in overall circulation—basically, they’re holding steady.
This is probably not as dire as it looks. For instance, one of the traditional advantages that has always helped the digest magazines to survive is that they’re so cheap to produce in the first place that you don’t have to sell very many of
them to make a profit. I’m willing to bet that most of these magazines are still profitable, in spite of declining circulation.
Still, it’s hard to deny that things are dicier these days than they were ten years ago, especially in the area of newsstand sales. There are so few distributors left now that it’s a buyer’s market, and the distributors know that very well. The few surviving distributors often charge much-higher fees for carrying titles or ask for greatly increased “discounts,” both higher than many SF magazines can easily afford to pay; some distributors also set “subscription caps,” refusing to even handle magazines with a circulation below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. Many newsstand managers have also become pickier, sometimes refusing to display magazines that fall below a certain circulation figure—again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines. The result of all this is that it’s harder to find genre magazines on newsstands, with some carrying a lot fewer copies of each title than before, and many newsstands not carrying them at all.
This is not as serious as it looks either, in the short-term, anyway. Most SF magazines are subscription-driven, and always have been, with newsstand sales a considerably lower percentage of overall sales than subscription sales, so they could get by without newsstand sales if they had to—for a while. Declining newsstand sales hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers, casual newsstand browsers who might pick up the magazine and read it on a whim, but who, with luck, might like what they see enough to eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new subscribers, a magazine’s circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a percentage of the old subscribers, until eventually the magazine becomes inviable. So one of the biggest problems facing magazines these days is to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the newsstand. One way to do this may be with a greatly increased presence on the Internet, which, if things go well, might enable the magazines to get around the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. I expect that this will become an increasingly important outlet in days to come and may be what saves the magazines in the long term—if anything can.
At the beginning of 1998, Penny Press announced that all of their fiction magazines, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, will change size, starting with the June 1998 issue. The new format will add a little over an inch in height and about a quarter inch in width to each issue of Asimov’s or Analog; the page count will drop from 160 pages to 144 pages for regular issues, and from 288 pages to 240 for double issues, although the larger pages will allow Asimov’s and Analog to use about 10 percent more material per issue. The hope is that the increase in size will increase the visibility of the magazines on the newsstands (where, at the moment, digest-sized titles tend to get lost because other, larger magazines are shuffled in front of them), and increase their attractiveness as a product to distributors, who seem to favor larger-format magazines over digest-sized magazines these days. This marks the end of an era; for almost
fifty years now, there have always been at least three digest-sized SF magazines on the newsstands (although which three changed as time went by), but now The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction stands alone as the only true digest magazine left in the genre.
The other significant change for Asimov’s and Analog was the establishment in early 1998 of Internet Web sites for both magazines; Asimov’s’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog’s is at http://www.analogsf.com, both sites sponsored by SF Site. Both sites feature story excerpts, book reviews, essays, and other similar features; and live interviews, “chats,” and other on-line-only features are planned for the near future. More significantly, perhaps, you can subscribe to both magazines electronically, on-line, by giving a credit card number and clicking a few buttons, and this feature is already bringing in new subscribers, particularly from other parts of the world where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems (Asimov’s, for instance, has already picked up new subscribers from France, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and even the United Arab Emirates).
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction completed its first year under new editor Gordon Van Gelder, although most of the material that appeared there this year was probably part of the extensive inventory left behind by former editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A favorite literary parlor game this year was to try to pick out which stories in the magazine had been bought by Gordon and which by Kris, with even one of the Locus columnists joining in with speculations as to what inferences about “new directions” for the magazine you could draw from the stuff in the June issue, the first one with Gordon’s name on the masthead. Gordon merely smiles like a Cheshire cat and refuses to answer these questions, but I suspect that most of the speculations to date have been wrong. It’ll be interesting to see how the magazine does change in coming months, and in which directions, as Kris’s inventory finally runs out. Gordon has brought new science columnists Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty in to supplement Gregory Benford, and the book reviews seem to be rotating on an irregular basis among Robert K. J. Killheffer, Michelle West, Elizabeth Hand, and Douglas E. Winter, with a review column by Charles de Lint also in most issues, occasionally a review column by Gordon himself, and Paul Di Filippo (who is doing critical columns for Asimov’s, F&SF, and Science Fiction Age all at the same time, which may be a genre first!) contributing quirky metafictional literarily oriented comic pieces from time to time. F&SF changed its Web site; the new one at www.fsfmag.com had not gone up in time for me to report on it for this book.
The British magazine Interzone completed its seventh full year as a monthly publication. Circulation went down very slightly this year, but remained more or less the same as last year—disapingly, no major gains, but at least no catastrophic drops either. Interzone is one of the most reliable places to find first-rate fiction in the entire magazine market, with the literary quality of the stories consistently high, and it’s one of the magazines that you really should subscribe to, especially as it is almost impossible to find Interzone on newsstands or in bookstores on the American side of the Atlantic. To miss it is to miss some
of the best stuff available anywhere today. Interzone also has a Web site (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm), although there’s not really much there—you can subscribe to the magazine there, though, which is perhaps the salient .
Science Fiction Age successfully completed their fifth full year of publication. Although overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped again in 1997, by a substantial 14 percent, the magazine seems in general to be successful and profitable, with editor Scott Edelman attributing the drop in circulation to readers switching subscriptions to Science Fiction Age’s companion magazines, Realms of Fantasy and the media magazine Sci-Fi Entertainment, as well as to the newly purchased media magazine Sci-Fi Universe (both media magazines are also edited by Edelman). As Edelman s out, this gives Sovereign Media four successful genre titles where before they had only one (Science Fiction Age itself, the first magazine published by Sovereign), and that that is worth siphoning off some of the original magazine’s subscription base. (It’s a good argument, but one that will look a little thin if Science Fiction Age’s circulation continues to drop in the future.) Artistically, Science Fiction Age had its best year yet, publishing some very strong stories, and for the second year in a row was a more reliable source for good core science fiction overall than was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which still published more fantasy and soft horror stories this year than they did good SF stories.
Tomorrow Speculative Fiction is now an “on-line electronic magazine” called Tomorrow SF, and is reviewed below. Aboriginal Science Fiction, reported to be dead in 1995, came back to life in 1996; it managed only one issue in 1997, but published another one just after the beginning of the year in 1998.
Realms of Fantasy is a companion magazine to Science Fiction Age, a slick, large-size, full-color magazine very similar in format to its older sister, except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction. They completed their third full year of publication in 1997. Under the editorship of Shawna McCarthy, Realms of Fantasy has quickly established itself as by far the best of the all-fantasy magazines (the other, the much longer-established Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine—in its tenth year of publication in 1997—comes nowhere near it in terms of literary quality or consistency); in fact, the best stories from Realms of Fantasy are rivaled for craft and sophistication only by the best of the fantasy stories published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, a magazine that publishes both fantasy and mild horror, had fallen into silence, publishing no issue in 1997, and was being said to likely be dead, but in early 1998 it was announced that DNA Publications, who also publish the SF fiction semiprozine Absolute Magnitude (see below), will be reviving the magazine under its original title—which it lost when its license lapsed—Weird Tales; Darrell Schweitzer and George Scithers will stay on as the magazine’s editors.
A promising newcomer to the magazine market is a full-size, full-color British magazine called Odyssey, which published one practice issue and one real issue in 1997. This is a nice-looking magazine, although the interior layout is a touch chaotic and confusing; and it ran some good stuff by Brian Stableford, Jeff
Hecht, and others, although in my opinion they should concentrate on actual science fiction and stay away from the gaming fiction, horror, and fantasy (which tends to be weak here, as it also is in Interzone). They also need to forge an identity for themselves other than “not Interzone,” a positive, strong identity and flavor of their own. At the moment, the magazine could go in any of a half-dozen directions, and it’s hard to tell in which of them it’s more likely to go. If it goes in the right direction, though, it could be a quite valuable addition to the magazine scene, and I wish them well.
It was also announced early in 1998 that Amazing Stories, reported to have died back in 1994, will rise yet again from the grave, something it has done several times in its seventy-year-plus existence. This time Amazing Stories will be brought out in a full-size, full-color format by Wizards of the Coast Inc., who recently bought TSR Inc., Amazing’s former owner. The new version will feature media fiction as well as more traditional science fiction, with several Star Trek stories in each issue, and will be edited by the editor of the former incarnation, Kim Mohan. It’s scheduled to be launched at the 1998 Worldcon in Baltimore.
We should mention in passing that short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, as usual, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Playboy.
(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, annual subscription $25.97 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323-4625, $33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60.00 for an airmail one year, twelve issues, subscription; Analog, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323, $33.97 for annual subsciption in U.S.; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $21.50 for four issues; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; Odyssey, Partizan Press 816-816, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 3NH, United Kingdom, $35 for a five-issue subscription, $75 for a twelve-issue subsciption.)
The promise of “on-line electronic publication” remained largely unfulfilled in 1997—there aren’t really that many good, professional-level science fiction stories being published on-line at the moment, although I did find two stories I liked this year that were published only as phosphor dots on an “on-line magazine,” one from Omni Online and one from Eidolon: SF Online, that we’re bringing to you in print form for the first time anywhere in this anthology. But this whole area is growing so fast, with changes coming so rapidly and new Web sites springing up so rapidly, that the potential here is enormous, and I can’t help but feel that this market will end up being a very significant one before we’re too many years into the next century. The SF community on the Web, in particular, is growing and expanding with dizzying speed, growing even as you watch it, and is not only getting larger, but is also (perhaps more importantly) growing more interconnected, forging links from site to site, with traffic moving easily between them, growing toward becoming a real community—and a community
with no physical boundaries, since it’s just as easy to click yourself to a site on the other side of the Atlantic or on the other side of the world as it is to click to one next door. This growth and evolution of a tightly interconected on-line SF community is a development that may prove to have significant consequences in the not-too-distant future. So even though this whole area at the moment probably produces less worthwhile fiction annually than a couple of good anthologies or a few good issues of a top-level professional print magazine, it’s worth keeping an eye on this developing market, and even taking a closer look at it.
As has been true for a couple of years now, your best bet for finding good online-only science fiction, stories published only in electronic format, would be to go to Omni Online (http://www.omnimag.com), where the stories are selected by veteran editor Ellen Datlow, longtime fiction editor of the now-defunct print version of Omni. To date, Omni Online “publishes” the best fiction I’ve been able to find on the Web, including this year’s strong stories by Simon Ings, Brian Stableford, Paul Park, Michael Bishop, Michael Kandel, and others, but it seemed to publish fewer stories this year than last; and with the recent death of Omni founder Kathy Keeton, a strong supporter of the Omni Online concept, some insiders have speculated that perhaps General Media is losing interest in the Omni site and that it may be in danger of being closed down. This conjecture has been officially denied, though, and I hope that the Omni site stays up and running, as, at the moment, it is the most reliable place I know of on the Internet to find professional-level SF, fantasy, and horror. (There’s other stuff there as well: nonfiction pieces, interviews, reviews, a place where you can “walk” through a virtual representation of the Titanic, and so on, and they also do regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or “chats” with various prominent authors.)
A new innovation there this year are “round-robin” stories, written by four authors in collaboration, each writing a section in turn, and cycling in that fashion until the story is done. “Round-robin” stories rarely hold up well against “real” stories, since usually some of the pieces don’t really match very well, and these don’t either, but they’re fun and much better-executed than stories of this sort usually are. Authors who participated in the round-robins this year included Pat Cadigan, Maureen F. McHugh, Terry Bisson, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Murphy, Jonathan Lethem, and others, so at the very least, they offered you a rare opportunity to watch top creative talents at play.
The only other “on-line magazine” that really rivals Omni Online as a fairly reliable place in which to find good professional-level SF is Tomorrow SF (http://www.tomorrowsf.com), edited by veteran editor Algis Budrys, the on-line reincarnation of another former print magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. This is also a very interesting and worthwhile site, although the fiction here is not quite as strongly to my taste as that of the Omni site, something that was true of their respective print incarnations as well. Still, the stuff here is always solidly professional, and they published (“posted?” “promulgated?”) good work this year by Kandis Elliot, Michael H. Payne, Robert Reed, Paul Janvier, K. D. Wentworth, and others. Tomorrow SF is also engaged in an experiment that, if successful, could have profound implications for the whole electronic publishing area. Starting
last year, they “published” the first three on-line issues of Tomorrow SF for free; then, this year, they have begun charging a “subscription fee” for access to the Web site, hoping that the audience will have been hooked enough by the free samples that they will continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. The wise money is betting that this will not work, the argument being that so much stuff is available to be read for free on the Internet—oceans and oceans of it, in fact—that nobody is going to pay to access a site; they’ll just click to a site where they can read something for free instead. I’m not entirely convinced by this argument, however. It’s true that there are oceans and oceans of free fiction available on the Internet, but most of it is dreadful, slush-pile quality at best, and if Budrys has sufficiently convinced a large-enough proportion of the audience that he can winnow out the chaff and find the Good Stuff for them, they may well be willing to pay so that they don’t have to wade through all the crap themselves. This has been the function of the editor from the beginning of the print fiction industry after all, and people buy print magazines for the very same reason: because of the implicit promise that the editor has gone out into the wilderness of prose and hunted down and bagged and brought back for them tasty morsels of fiction they’ll enjoy consuming, and I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for an on-line magazine as well. The question then becomes, has Budrys succeeded in so convincing a large-enough portion of the potential audience to actually keep him in business? The jury’s still out on that question so far. But if Tomorrow SF can succeed in getting readers in significant numbers to pay to access the site, it could have a big effect on the shape of genre publishing on-line.
Another interesting experiment on which the jury’s still out is taking place at Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://www.tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of stories for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. The fees are small, less than fifty cents per story in most cases, and although the wise money is sneering at this concept as well, I think that this setup could actually work if they got some Bigger Name authors involved in the project. At the moment, most of the writers you can access here are writers who don’t have large reputations or avid followings (who are willing to take a chance on a screwy concept like this because they have little to lose), and that may make it harder for this experiment to succeed as fully as it otherwise might.
The quality of the fiction falls off quickly after these sites, although there are a few new contenders this year. Most of these sites are still in their infancy, however, and not working entirely up to speed as yet; most are also associated with existent print magazines. Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.midnight.com.au/eidolon/) offers information about back issues of Eidolon magazine and about Eidolon authors and about the Australian professional scene in general, as well as reprint stories from previous issues, available to be read on-line or downloaded. They are also promising to publish a good amount of original on-line-only fiction in the future, though at the moment the only such story available is one by Sean Williams and Simon Brown—and that one was good enough to make it
into this anthology. Aurealis, the other Australian semiprozine, also has a site (http://www.aurealis.hl.net) with similar kinds of features available, although so far they’ve announced no plans for original fiction. I’ve already mentioned the Asimov’s (http://asimovs.com/) and Analog (http://analogsf.com/) sites. Both sites are currently running teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, as well as book reviews, critical essays, and so forth, and I plan to start running a certain amount of original on-line-only fiction on the Asimov’s site as soon as I can arrange to do so, as well as live interactive author interviews and chats. Another interesting site is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a large selection of reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, critical essays, and so forth. They too promise to begin running a good deal of original on-line-only fiction in the near future, and (as far as I can tell, anyway; it would be helpful, with this and other sites, if they’d label more clearly what’s a reprint and what isn’t) already have some excerpts from as yet unpublished novels. Terra Incognita (http://www.netaxs.com/~incognit), Century (http://www.supranet.net/century/) and the two Canadian semiprozines On Spec (http://www.icomm.ca/onspec/) and TransVersions (http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/harlow/transversions/) also have Web sites, although not terribly active ones. Talebones (http://www.nventure.com/talebones) is another interesting site, although oriented toward horror and dark fantasy rather than SF. Longer-established sites that are worth keeping an eye on, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven, include InterText (http://www.etext.org/Zines/InterText/), and E-Scape (http://www.interink.com/escape.html).
While you’re on-line, don’t forget to check out some of the genre-related sites that don’t publish fiction. Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifiweekly.com), which has been around long enough to be venerable by on-line standards, is a good place to start, a lively general-interest site, with SF-related news, reviews of other SF sites of interest, and lots of media, gaming, and book reviews (including an occasional column by John Clute), as well as links to many genre-related sites. Also valuable as a home-away-from-home for genre readers is SFF NET (http//www.sff.net), which features dozens of home pages for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats,” and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine Index 1984–1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web page at http://www.sfwa.org/sfw.
There are some new contenders in this area this year as well. The newszine Locus now has an on-line version up and running, Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), and it’s quickly become one of my most frequent stops on
the Internet, in part because of the rapidity with which breaking news gets posted there, and for the other reviews and features, but mostly to browse Mark Kelly’s comments about recent short fiction, which are similar to the contents of his column in the print Locus, but with some additional perspectives not available in the print edition. Another ambitious new site, which has quickly become one of my favorite destinations while Web-surfing, is SF Site (www.sfsite.com/), which, in addition to hosting the Asimov’s and Analog sites, and having lots of links to other genre-related sites of interest, also features extensive review sections, and is perhaps more oriented toward print literature (as opposed to media and gaming stuff) than is Science Fiction Weekly. SF Site has also just started carrying a short-fiction review column by Dave Truesdale of the print semiprozine Tangent, which is one of the few places on-line other than Locus Online where you can find genre short fiction being reviewed on a regularly scheduled basis. And for a refreshingly iconoclastic and often funny slant on genre-oriented news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the on-line version of his fanzine Ansible (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/ansible/). Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New York Review of Science Fiction (http://eebs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html), Nova Express (http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), SF Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), and Tangent (http://www.sff.net/tangent/), but most of these sites are fairly inactive.
Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GEnie, Delphi (which also now has a Web site, http://www.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, with GEnie having perhaps the largest and most active such community. Most of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, as does SFF NET—the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I’m most familiar, and which gives you the opportunity to schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. It starts every Wednesday at about 10:00 P.M. EST.
It was a bad year in the semiprozine market, particularly in the fiction semiprozines, although even as old titles falter, new titles appear on the horizon to replace them—or try to anyway. Some of the proposed new titles look promising, but the odds are greatly against any new magazine succeeding in the current market and under the current distribution system, I fear, particularly an undercapitalized magazine, and that description fits most semiprozines. Those long odds don’t seem to discourage people enough to stop them from trying though.
There was no issue of Century published in 1997, just as they didn’t publish their last three scheduled issues in 1996; and although the editor was claiming as recently as a couple of weeks ago that Century would eventually rise again from the ashes, he was assuring me of exactly the same thing at the end of 1996, so at this I’m skeptical. Century was the most promising fiction semiprozine launch of the ’90s, but for the moment, I’m afraid that I have to consider it dead; they’ll have to Show Me that I’m wrong by actually publishing an issue
before I change my mind, and even then I’d think they’d have to show they can publish on something approaching a regular schedule before they’d entirely regain the trust of their subscribers. I’m going to continue to list their subscription address here, in case you want to take a chance on them, but at this in time I can’t in good faith recommend that you subscribe, since there’s at least a decent chance you’ll never see anything in return for the money. There was also no issue of Crank!, another eclectic and literarily sophisticated fiction semiprozine, published this year, although one is promised for early in 1998; let’s hope they can hold it together and not follow Century into the black hole that seems to claim most ambitious fiction semiprozines these days.
The two fiction semiprozines that seem closest to making it up into the ranks of the professional magazines, and which do get some nationwide distribution on the newsstands, are Absolute Magnitude: The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction. These are both slick, professional-looking, full-size magazines with full-color covers, both of them—especially Absolute Magnitude, which often has very spiffy covers—frequently looking better than any of the professional magazines, including Science Fiction Age. What’s on the inside is a lot more uneven, however, and the fiction in both magazines ranges from good to awful, with little overall consistency of quality; neither magazine had a particularly good year in 1997 in fact—both being easily outstripped in the quality of the fiction they published even by much-less prominent semiprozines such as Terra Incognita and Tales of the Unanticipated—although there were interesting stories by Barry B. Longyear, William F. Wu, and others in Absolute Magnitude and interesting stories by Paul Di Filippo, Don D’Ammassa, and others in Pirate Writings.
Absolute Magnitude seems to have had a slight edge in overall quality over Pirate Writings this year, although other years it has been the other way around. Pirate Writings does get more variety by publishing mystery and generalized adventure stories as well as science fiction, but they also make the mistake of devoting a section of the magazine to “short-short” stories, almost all of which have been dreadful (there are very few good “short-short” stories published in any given year, and so far Pirate Writings has not managed to find any of them—not really surprising, since often there are none published at all). The nonfiction is also uneven in both magazines, but Absolute Magnitude has an edge here because Allen Steele’s regular column is solid and interesting; Pirate Writings, on the other hand, loses s for publishing the “Surreal World” column, which really should be called “Credulous World” instead, as it reverentially trots out one old woo-woo chestnut—like the Philadelphia Experiment or the Men in Black—after another: there’s already too much of this crap floating around in the SF readership, and I don’t like to see it encouraged. Both magazines could stand to improve the quality of their book reviews.
Both magazines continued to struggle with their production schedules this year, with Pirate Writings managing three issues out of their scheduled four and Absolute Magnitude managing two out of their scheduled four. Absolute Magnitude also went through internal upheavals this year, with the rest of the business partners involved in the magazine pulling out of the partnership, leaving
Warren Lapine as both editor and sole publisher. Lapine swears that the magazine will continue, though, and I tend to believe him, especially as Lapine has recently expanded his empire to include Dreams of Decadence, an all-vampire fiction magazine, and is in the process of reviving Weird Tales. I wish both of these magazines well, and they deserve to survive and prosper, but they also need to work harder to improve, especially in the area of making the quality of their fiction more consistant.
The three longest-established fiction semiprozines now are two Australian magazines, Aurealis and Eidolon, and a Canadian magazine, On Spec. Eidolon was strong again in 1997—not quite as strong as it had been in 1996, but strong enough to prove itself the best of the three magazines once again this year, publishing strong fiction by Dirk Strasser, Simon Brown, Sean Williams, Rosaleen Love, Russell Blackford, and others, and publishing a collaboration by Sean Williams and Simon Brown on their Eidolon Online site that was one of the year’s best stories. Perhaps this is a reflection of the recent boom in Australian science fiction, where they appear to be enjoying an upsurge of creative energy and artistic excitement. Aurealis also had a good year, publishing strong fiction by Peter Friend, Rick Kennett, Michael Pryor, and others. As opposed to the Australian magazines, the Canadian magazine On Spec seems to have gone into a bit of a slump for the last couple of years, and little of really exceptional quality appeared there in 1997, although they did publish interesting work by Derryl Murphy, Steven R. Laker, Ursula Pflug, and others. The idea that Canadian science fiction should be gray, depressing, dystopian, and set in the near-future, that these somehow are defining national characteristics, looks like it’s growing toward codification in recent years, but it seems like a curiously self-limiting set of indicators to choose, and much of the Canadian stuff seems pale and bloodless when contrasted to the more vigorous and exuberant (although sometimes rawer) Australians. Perhaps part of the problem is that On Spec is edited by a collective, rather than by a single editor who could impose his or her personality powerfully on the magazine. Still, On Spec has published a lot of interesting stuff over the years and has helped to find and develop a lot of new writers, so it is worth your support. All three of these magazines have been around long enough to be considered fairly stable and reliable, as such things are judged in the semiprozine market, and all have good track records for delivering interesting and unusual fiction, so they’re good bets for your subscription money; odds are they they will all be around and producing issues next year. Eidolon and Aurealis managed only two issues out of a scheduled four this year, while the more-reliably-published On Spec brought out all four of its scheduled issues.
Of the other fiction semiprozines, the most interesting of the American newcomers was probably Terra Incognita, which published some of the best stuff to be found in the semiprozine market this year, including good, high-end professional-level stories by Timons Esaias, Terry McGarry, Brian Stableford, and others, including a couple that made my shortlist of stuff to consider for this anthology. On the other hand, they only managed to produce one issue in 1997, so they’ll have to increase their reliability before they really become a contender, and their self-imposed restriction of publishing only stories that take place on
Earth still strikes me as being too limiting—seems to me that to survive and prosper, a magazine must publish any really first-rate fiction it can find, whether it’s set on Earth or Mars or inside a black hole or wherever. Still, Terra Incongnita is a very promising magazine, well worth keeping an eye on. Good professional-quality work was also being published this year in the long-established Tales of the Unanticipated, which managed two issues this year, featuring strong work by R. Neube, Stephen Dedman, Martha A. Hood, Gerard Daniel Hourarner, Neil Gaiman, H. Courreges Le Blanc, Robert J. Levy, and others.
Also worth checking out, although not quite at the level of the above two magazines yet, is a promising new Canadian magazine called TransVersions, which seems to be publishing livelier stuff than On Spec has managed of late. Non-Stop Science Fiction Magazine (somewhat clumsily subtitled Ultra Dystopias of Future & Fantasy Utopias) reappeared in a new, somewhat smaller (although still larger than digest-sized) format this year, and managed one issue out of a scheduled four. Non-Stop is still a brash, swaggering, boastful magazine, proud of its in-your-face arrogance, that doesn’t quite live up to the self-congratulatory claims it makes for itself, although there is some interesting stuff here, and at least the magazine can’t be accused of being dull or stuffy. There’s worthwhile fiction (although no actual science fiction) here by Barry N. Malzberg and Paul Di Filippo, but, as was true the last time they published an issue, the nonfiction here is considerably more interesting than the fiction, including an interview with Vernor Vinge (listed as “Vernon” Vinge on the contents page) and intriguing essays by Paul Di Filippo and Charles Platt. In England, The Third Alternative seems to be one of the most prominent semiprozines at the moment, and Back Brain Recluse is still going strong, although both of these magazines tend toward literary surrealism and horror rather than core science fiction, and may be too far out on the edge for some readers. A confusingly named Irish semiprozine called Albedo I (which leads to issues being listed as, say, Albedo I # 14) is very crudely printed and ameteurish-looking compared to the above magazines and also leans toward literary surrealism; but it also published some interesting professional-level work this year by Brain Stableford, Ian McDonald, and others. Space & Time, which tends more toward fantasy, in spite of its title, had one issue this year (with interesting work by Bill Eakin, Don D’Ammassa, Don Webb, Sue Storm, and others), as did Xizquli. Adventures of Sword & Sorcery continued to publish, up to issue four now (featuring, I notice, a story from the ubiquitous Stephen Baxter!), but I didn’t see it. If there were issues of Plot Magazine or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, I didn’t see them. Keen Science Fiction officially died, and I believe that Argonaut Science Fiction and Next Phase are also dead.
Promised for next year is a SF fiction semiprozine called Age of Wonder, which is already announcing that its premiere issue will feature stories by Gregory Benford and Stephen Baxter—sounds pretty promising.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, in fact I try to keep them away from my door with crucifixes and holy water, but Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge still seems to be a lively little magazine, and it’s broadening out to include a fair amount of science fiction in its editorial mix as well as fantasy
and horror, a development I welcome. It published interesting stuff by Amy Sterling Casil, Leslie What, and others this year. The highly respected Cemetery Dance seems to be back in full swing again after a long hiatus caused by the ill-health of the editor. I suspect that there were issues of Aberrations out this year, but, if so, I didn’t see them. The Urbanite published two issues, featuring work somewhere on the borderline of horror and surrealism. I saw no issues of Death-realm or Grue this year, although I didn’t look for them exhaustively, either.
Turning to the critical magazines, Charles N. Brown’s Locus and Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle, as always, remain your best bet among that subclass of semiprozines known as “newszines,” and are your best resource if you’re looking for publishing news and/or an overview of what’s happening in the genre. (SF Chronicle seems back on track again, after missing several issues last year due to health problems on the part of editor and publisher Andy Porter, and it’s a good to see them back.) The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, completed its ninth full year of publication, once again not only publishing its scheduled twelves issues but publishing them all on time; that it can do this year after year in a field where most other criticalzines are lucky if they can manage to bring out one issue out of four is something of a small miracle and may lead some other semiprozine editors to wonder if Hartwell has signed a pact with the devil. The reliability of its publishing schedule is not all that The New York Review of Science Fiction has going for it, not by any means. It has always been eclectic and interesting, but in the last year or two I’ve been finding it more interesting than ever before, publishing not only the usual reviews and critical articles but playful bits of metafiction by Michael Swanwick, “Read This” lists of recommended books by various authors, and fascinating items such as Avram Davidson’s exchange of letters with Philip K. Dick.
Once again, there was only one issue of Steve Brown’s SF Eye and of Lawrence Person’s Nova Express in 1997, something that’s been true for several years in a row now—both magazines are insightful, intriguing, and entertaining, when you can find them, but take their publishing schedule with a large grain of salt; perhaps Nova Express should follow SF Eye’s lead and stop claiming to be a quarterly publication. It’s already hard to imagine how the field would get by without David A. Truesdale’s Tangent, which has become such an institution in the genre after only a few years that it seems like it has always been around. In a field where almost no short fiction gets reviewed, with the emphasis in almost every other review source on novels, Tangent performs an invaluable service for the genre by providing a place where interested readers can find reviews of most of the year’s short fiction—something that can be found almost nowhere else except for Mark Kelly’s review column in Locus. Tangent is also doing yeoman service for the field by becoming deeply involved in helping to assemble a recommended reading list for the yearly Sturgeon Award, and although the quality of the criticism here is still uneven, the coverage is remarkably complete, reviewing stories from obscure sources that probably never get reviewed anywhere else, including very minor semiprozines and on-line “electronic magazines.” Truesdale’s energy and fannish cheerfulness have made Tangent popular enough that I would not be at all surprised to see a Hugo win in the magazine’s future.
This year Dave has expanded his empire into the Virtual World as well, contributing a short-fiction review column for SF.Site that’s one of the few places on-line where short fiction is regularly reviewed, other than the reprint of Mark Kelly’s column on Locus Online. Speculations, which features writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market news, is a useful resource for young or would-be authors, although the general reading public may be less interested.
(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $53.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202-0056, $42.00 for one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $31.00 per year, 12 issues; SF Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $12.50 for one year; Nova Express, White Car Publications, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Tangent, 5779 Norfleet, Raytown, MO 64133, $20 for one year, four issues; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite 109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; 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 1110, New York, NY 10159-1110, $12 for four issues; Century, P.O. Box 259270, Madison, WI 53715-0270, $27 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis: The Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea 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 4-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Albedo 1, Tachyon Productions at Albedo 1, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co. Dublin, Ireland, 4 issues for $24 U.S., make checks payable to Albedo 1; 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; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CBG 2LB, UK, £10 for a four-issue subscription; Xizquil, order from Uncle River/Xizquil, Blue Route, Box 90, Blue, Arizona, 85922, $11 for a three-issue subscription; Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Pirate Writings Publishing, Subscriptions, P.O. Box 329, Brightwaters, NY 11718-0329, $15 for one year (four issues), all checks payable to “Pirate Writings Publishing”; Absolute Magnitude: The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, P.O Box 13, Greenfield, MA 01302, four issues for $14, all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; 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”; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Thirteenth Moon Magazine, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA 94107, $24 for four issues; PLOT Magazine,
Calypso Publishing, PO Box 1351, Sugar Land, Texas 77487-1351, four issues for $14, “make checks payable to Calypso Publishing”; The Urbanite: Surreal & Lively & Bizarre, Urban Legend Press, P.O. Box 4737, Davenport, IA 52808, $13.50 for three issues, “all checks or money orders payable to Urban Legend Press”; Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 SE 250th P1. #104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237; Grue Magazine, Hell’s Kitchen Productions, Box 370, Times Square Stn., New York, NY 10108, $14 for three issues; Aberrations, P.O. Box 460430, San Francisco, CA 94146, $31 for 12 issues; Deathrealm, 2210 Wilcox Drive, Greensboro, NC 27405, $15.95 for four issues; Adventures of Sword & Sorcery, Double Star Press, P.O. Box 285, Xenia, OH 45385, $15.95 for four issues.)
It was a weak year for original anthologies, especially in science fiction, where there were few original anthologies published at all, and most of them that did come out were seriously flawed. (Things were somewhat better in fantasy, where there were several good—if no really outstanding—original anthologies published.) Unlike last year, most of the original SF anthologies of 1997 were published either in mass-market paperback or in trade paperback, with only one hardcover I can think of, so it would have at least been cheaper for someone to buy them all—although since, as usual, the bulk of them were theme anthologies with only one or two good stories apiece (if that many), it still doesn’t seem like a very cost-effective way to find good short fiction. Still, it seems to me that you’d be better off subscribing to some of the SF magazines instead, where you’re much more likely to find a consistent level of literary quality—but, of course, since I’m a magazine editor myself, you can, if you’d like, pretty much discount that opinion.
One of the most interesting anthologies of the year will probably end up being seen by almost nobody in the SF community, especially on this side of the Atlantic. This is a very odd item called Future Histories, edited by Stephen McClelland, and published (sort of) in Britian. Subtitled Award-Winning Science Fiction Writers Predict Twenty Tomorrows for Communications, it was comissioned and paid for by Nokia, the communications corporation, and was published in a private printing as a subscription premium for subscribers to a Horizon House Publications trade journal called Telecommunications Magazine. Only six thousand copies were printed, none of them are available for sale (the book doesn’t even have a cover price on it), it’s not available in bookstores, you can’t mail order it, and apparently there’s no intention of doing either a regular trade edition in England or an American edition—one of the authors in the book let me borrow an author’s copy or I wouldn’t have been able to read it either. In spite of all the above, practically guaranteed to make the stories in the book vanish without a trace, unseen by anybody in the SF reading audience, there are some very Big Names associated with this project, an example of how much Money—by our standards; probably coffee-and-doughnuts money for them—Nokia threw at this project, supposedly paying close to three thousand
dollars per item, minimum. The book is about evenly split between fiction and nonfiction, with some very well-known people contributing both. The sad part, considering how invisibily it’s been published, is that Future Histories contains some pretty good stuff, and, in fact, is the best original SF anthology of the year, by a good margin.
The best stories here, in my opinion, are David Marusek’s “Getting to Know You”—his Future History, the same here as in “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy,” gets more chewy and interesting and multifaceted the more I see of it-and Nancy Kress’s “Steamship Soldier on the Information Front.” A step below them would be Stephen Baxter’s “Glass Earth, Inc.” and Paul J. McAuley’s “Back Door Man.” There’s nothing really bad here, though, and every story in the book is worth reading. The anthology also includes stories by Pat Murphy, Brian Stableford, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Benford. The weakest story is probably the one by Stephen McClelland himself—not surprising, since it’s his first fiction sale—and even that has of interest. The book also contains nonfiction articles by Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Alexander Besher, Mariko Ohara, Vernor Vinge, Nicholas Negroponte, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.
Considering that all of these stories are ostensibly about the future of the communications industry, I suppose it’s inevitable that many of them seem to share a vision about what the future is going to be like. One detail common to most of them is that in the next century most people are going to stay inside all the time, telecommuting, talking to each other only on-line, living inside elaborate Virtual Reality setups, taking Virtual Reality vacations, and so forth, to the degree that the real streets outside are mostly deserted, nobody around, shops closed and boarded up, and so forth; Stephen Baxter even specifically invokes “The Machine Stops” in his story. I must say that I find this future to be disspiriting and somewhat depressing. Even Gibson’s strcetwise hacker-cowboys went out to a bar and had a drink every once in a while. (They also screwed in person, in the flesh, as opposed to the nearly universal assumption here that only Virtual Reality cybersex will exist in the future.)
I’m not sure that I entirely believe in this future, although no doubt bits and pieces of it will come to pass. For one thing, it seems like a very middle-class view of the future, ignoring—as, indeed, does most science fiction—the question of what all the poor people are going to be doing while “everybody” is leading this Maximum Urban Cocooned existence. Are all the poor people going to have Virtual Reality cocoons too? Who’s picking up the garbage? Who’s sweeping the streets? Who’s fixing the plumbing? It’s like a future where only the Eloi are around; no Morlocks. A mistake that much science fiction makes is to assume that social change affects everyone to the same degree at the same time—which isn’t the way it usually works. There are people living within fifty miles of my apartment in Philadelphia who don’t have electricity or indoor plumbing; there are people living within a thousand miles or so of here, in rural Mexico, say, who are living a hand-farming subsistance kind of life not really different from the one their ancestors were living hundreds or even thousands of years back. For that matter, while I’m sitting here in my Urban Cocoon, enjoying the air-conditioning
and communicating instantly with other ghostly residents of the Virtual World, there’s almost certainly somebody within a ten-block radius of my apartment sleeping on a hot-air vent—and that person is enjoying no more of the fruits of modern high-tech civilization than he would be if he were living alone in the desert as a hermit.
The being that the present is not at a uniform level of social development, so I doubt that the future is going to be like that either. I wonder, in fact, if, in the future, we’re going to see people living at a Stone Age level—or living the way most of us in the West do now, for that matter—side by side with people living such a high-tech existence, at such a level of technological sophistication, that they’re nearly incomprehensible to us. But the different levels of technological sophistication will be layered throughout society, like the layers in nougat, the whole spectrum from Stone Age to Incomprehensibly Advanced Singularity Folk existing side by side at the same time; it won’t be all one uniform layer, Virtual Reality Cocoons all the way down, as it is in most of the societies described here.
It also seemed clear to me that—with the exception of David Marusek, and, to some extent, Brian Stableford—most of the authors here wouldn’t really want to live in the futures that they’re predicting; a faint air of distaste for this Bright New Utopian Cyberfuture comes across clearly if sometimes almost subliminally in several of these stories, with Stephen Baxter even postulating that young people several generations down the line will end up rebelling against and rejecting this information culture and will instead want to go outside and actually do things, in the real world, in the obsolete flesh.
Considering all this, you have to wonder how much of an advertisement for the glorious Future of Communications this book actually is—and wonder whether Nokia is really getting its money’s worth or not … or at least if it’s really getting what it thought it was paying for.
A very curious project. This is what publishing would be like if it was run by major corporations—and those corporations didn’t give a damn whether what they published made any money or not. By all means, read the book—if you can find it!
New Worlds, edited by David Garnett, is a continuation by American publisher White Wolf of the English original anthology series that was dropped by Gollancz a couple of years ago after a four-book run … which in turn was a resurrection of an older anthology series from the ’70s … which in turn was a manifestation in anthology form of the original long-running British magazine called New Worlds, which at one time in the middle and late ’60s, under editor Michael Moorcock (who is still listed on the present book as “Consulting Editor”), was the flagship of the British New Wave, and is at least the spiritual ancestor of the current-day magazine Interzone. New Worlds has had a long and complex publishing history, as you can see, “dying”—or at least lying quiescent—for long periods of time before being reborn in some new form, and I’d like to think that this new American edition signals yet another rebirth of the series, a series that, in its most recent Garnett-edited incarnation, at the very least has always been provocative and interesting to read, and which sometimes
has published some very good stuff indeed. Science fiction as a genre could certainly use another good, continuing, original anthology series, especially as such series, once common, have in recent years dwindled almost to the of extinction. And this volume is advertised as the start of a new annual series of New Worlds anthologies—but scuttlebutt in professional circles has quoted David Garnett as saying recently that he’s no longer going to be editing New Worlds … and that, plus the financial shakiness of White Wolf in the last couple of years, where overextension and cash-flow problems have caused the cancellation of many proposed titles, combine to make me wonder if this is the only volume of New Worlds we’ll actually see (in its current incarnation, anyway!). It would be a shame if that was true, for the field needs all the markets for short fiction it can get if it’s going to continue to survive and grow, especially intellectually prestigious showcases such as New Worlds; let’s hope that I’m being too pessimistic, and that another volume of New Worlds does indeed come out next year.
Considering the five New Worlds anthologies edited by Garnett together—the four Gollancz volumes and the current White Wolf volume—this volume of New Worlds is neither the best of the lot nor the worst, falling somewhere in the middle in terms of overall quality, although perhaps closer to the high end than the low end. It’s an uneven anthology, featuring some excellent work as well as more routine stuff, some of it rather dull, although little here is actively bad, and almost everything is at least worth reading. For the most part, the best stuff here is the most unclassifiable stuff, the stories that blur the lines between several different genres; the most routine and lackluster stories here are the ones that are the most clearly identifiable as core science fiction—which probably tells us something about where Garnett’s interest really lies. The best stories here, by a considerable margin, are unclassifiables: Howard Waldrop’s rich and antic “Heart of Whitenesse” (sort of a combination of Alternate History, historical fantasy, and a literary joke that equates Christopher Marlowe with Philip Marlowe … in addition to the playful echoes of Conrad and others) and Michael Moorcock’s bitter, sly, and eloquent “London Bone” (which, with its evocation of the lives of small-time hustlers and con men operating at the periphery of London’s upscale art-and-antiques circles, might not have looked out-of-place in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, except for being set slightly in the future—and except for the fact that London Bone itself is Moorcock’s own cunning and evocative invention). Next best would be Kim Newman’s retelling of a Shanelike parable of persecution and oppression and the response it draws from an exsoldier who finds himself reluctantly drawn into the role of protector of an embattled rural family in an Alternate World England—this is vivid and emotionally powerful, although the historical changes that produced this Alternate World might be hard for an American reader, who’s not familiar enough with real British history, to pinpoint; I’m not sure I spotted all of them myself.
A step down from there, Pat Cadigan gives us an amusing, although overlong, cyberjoke story in “The Emperor’s New Reality”; William Gibson contributes an ambitious experiment in evoking a society of the homeless simply by describing in obsessive detail the things to be found in their shanty cardboard “houses,”
in “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City”—the relentless accumulation of detail here has a certain fascination, but the “story” itself, completely without plot or characters, is too abstract and dry to be more than a literary finger exercise; and in “The White Stuff” Peter F. Hamilton and Graham Joyce give us an intriguing look at how society might be totally transformed by the quiet, street-level introduction of new technology … although since that new technology amounts to “a magic stuff that can do anything” (the origins of which are never explained, although there are unrealized hints throughout that the origin is going to turn out to be of significance), this scenario lacks some of the sharpness and relevance it might have had if the technology had been more believable. Somewhere in the middle, not really bad but not really exciting either, are Eric Brown’s “Ferryman,” which sets up an interesting conflict and then backs away from it on the very last page, Ian Watson’s “A Day Without Dad,” which has an intriguing central idea that the author doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with, and Andrew Stephenson’s “The Pact,” a pleasant if predictable read that could have appeared and done yeoman service in any issue of any SF magazine over the last ten years without arousing either unusual praise or remarkable censure.
Everything below that level didn’t work for me to one degree or another, for one reason or another. No doubt some critics will find Brian W. Aldiss’s “Death, Shit, Love, Transfiguration” to be a brilliant cutting-edge work, but it struck me as self-indulgent and not terribly interesting. Noel K. Hannan’s “A Night on the Town” has no need to be science fiction at all, not really needing its—unconvincing—futuristic setting to tell a story that could just as easily be told about a naive rich kid venturing into present-day Harlem or East L.A. Garry Kilworth’s “Attack of the Charlie Chaplins” is a slight one-joke story that is milked for far more pages than it ought to be. Christine Manby’s “For Life” is too arch, too long, and too familiar (it’s the one about the future society where men are kept as pets and sex toys). And Graham Charnock’s “A Night on Bare Mountain” shows you what happens when you cross the typical New Worlds story from the magazine version’s old glory days with cyberpunk; reading it is like wading through glue.
So, an uneven anthology—but I think that, on balance, there’s more than enough worthwhile stuff here (including a few stories of a sort you’re unlikely to find anywhere else) to make New Worlds worth its $12.99 cover price … and to make me hope that the series continues next year.
Free Space (Tor), edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, is a hardcover libertarian shared-world anthology, seventeen original stories set in a complex Future History chronology worked out by Linaweaver and some others, two poems, and a very-slightly rewritten version of Greg Benford’s 1995 story “The Worm in the Well,” here called “Early Bird” instead. The contributors range from those you’d expect to find here, such as Dafydd ab Hugh, L. Neil Smith, and Poul Anderson, to odder fish such as Ray Bradbury and William F. Buckley Jr. Oddly, nowhere on the front or back covers is the word “libertarian” mentioned, with only a passing reference to the Libertarian Futurist Society buried in the copy on the inside flap, and this coyness about coming right out and saying what the anthology is makes me wonder if Tor was reluctant to
mention libertarianism on the cover—which in turn makes me wonder who they think the audience is for this book, and if they were afraid that advertising this as a libertarian anthology would repulse more readers than it would attract; why publish it in the first place then? And by not clearly marking it, aren’t you taking a certain chance of missing some of the very audience most likely to buy it in the first place?
I don’t intend to discuss the validity or real-world feasibility of the political positions put forth in the book, but only to discuss how well the stories in the anthology work as fiction. Unfortunately, the bulk of them don’t work very well as fiction—and so, it seems to me, are probably not working all that effectively as propaganda either; I can’t see many people who aren’t already libertarians having their Eyes Opened and their opinions changed by this anthology, and so the book mostly is “preaching to the choir,” something that is often true of liberal books with a political agenda—such as Lewis Shiner’s antiwar anthology When the Music’s Over—as well. Little chance that any teenager is going to stay awake through most of these stories long enough to be infected with any dangerous political memes.
Most of the stories here are pretty lame, full of two-dimensional cardboard characters spouting rhetoric, and often rather dull, clogged with polemic, with what little plot there is frequently coming to a halt so that one character or another can deliver a political rant, or to let big blocky chunks of infodump go lumbering by, or so that one character can lecture another one at length about basic facts of their society that both of them should already know. Even old pro Poul Anderson lets the didactic balance of his story get dangerously out of whack in places, with paragraphs that should clearly come supplied with a sign that flashes “Author’s Message!” above the type, although he’s too much of a veteran entertainer to fail to tell a moderately absorbing human story at the same time, unlike a few of his younger colleagues. Some of the other authors also strike a workable balance between entertainment and polemics. Leaving John Barnes’s story aside for the moment (more on that below), the best story in the anthology, by a good margin, is probably James P. Hogan’s “Madam Butterfly,” a slyly entertaining look at the hidden connectors, some of them quite subtle, that tie all of our lives together and often tip the balance of destiny one way or the other. The next best story here would be William F. Wu’s “Kwan Tingui,” a nicely crafted and nicely felt piece that carries a freight of genuine human emotion lacking in many of the other stories (my only objection to the Wu story would be to mention that it could have taken place fundamentally unchanged back on Earth in any number of historic settings, without needing to be told as science fiction at all; still, there’s no reason why it couldn’t validly be told in a science fictional setting too). Other stories worth reading here include the Benford reprint, Robert J. Sawyer’s “The Hand You’re Dealt,” Arthur Byron Cover’s “The Performance of a Lifetime,” and the aforementioned Poul Anderson story, “Tyranny.”
In some ways the most substantial story in the book, and certainly the strangest, is John Barnes’s “Between Shepherds and Kings.” This is an odd story, a metafiction piece dealing with an author—who we are clearly supposed to identify
with Barnes himself, although how much Barnes himself is actually like this is open to question—who is being asked to write a story for this very anthology by people named “Brad” and “Dafydd”; while Brad and Dafydd sit in the author’s living room and explain the anthology’s elaborate Future History to him, the author gets slowly potted while silently trying—and failing—to come up with a story idea that would rationalize all the unexamined and often mutually contradictory assumptions behind that future history. Reviewers have called this story “Malzbergian,” with excellent justification, but it actually reminds me more of a C. M. Kornbluth story called “The Only Thing We Learn”; there is a bitter self-mocking edge to the portrayal of the “author” that seems more like Kornbluth than like Malzberg to me. This is by far the most “subversive” story in the anthology, although what it subverts are the libertarian assumptions that drive the rest of the book—as the author comes up with and then discards one plot scenario after another, he makes hash out of one after the other of the basic assumptions upon which the anthology’s Future History is based, even questioning the fundamental idea that a free-trading capitalist space-dwelling society would be possible in the first place (there’s a milder example of such subversion also to be found in Arthur Byron Cover’s story, which seems to demonstrate that the freedom to do as you please without regard for anyone else might eventually lead to the destruction—or at least the severe endangerment—of human society itself). The editors are to be complimented for guts, for publishing a story that effectively cuts the ground out from under every other story in the book, but it is an odd decision, and Barnes’s story is sharply different from anything else here, as if it had somehow wandered into the anthology from some other fictive universe altogether.
You probably could have gotten $5.99’ worth of entertainment out of this book, if it had been published as a mass-market paperback, but at $24.95, I cannot in good faith recommend it. A curious marketing decision by Tor, one of serveral they made in the anthology market this year.
Alternate Tyrants, edited by Mike Resnick (Tor), is more substantial and somber in tone than some of the other recent Resnick Alternate Whatever anthologies have been—perhaps because thinking about the idea of tyranny got the authors in a more solemn mood in the first place. There are fewer stories here that postulate the wildly improbable if not impossible (and often downright silly) scenarios that filled books like Alternate Warriors or Alternate Outlaws (“Suppose Mother Teresa formed an outlaw gang during the Depression with Einstein and Albert Schweitzer!”); the most improbable stuff here is “Suppose A1 Capone became President of the United States!” and “Suppose Buddy Holly became President of the United States!” (a close variant of the story from another, older Resnick anthology, By Any Other Name, which asked “Suppose Elvis Presley became President of the United States!”—and, in fact, in the current story, Buddy Holly follows Elvis into office!). There’s less of that sort of thing here, and more stories that feature scenarios which, although unlikely, actually could happen—the most ingenious of which is to be found in Michelle Sagara’s story—and so function a lot better as Alternate History stories than do most of the
more “playful” stories, the more extreme examples of which are, in my opinion, just fantasy stories with all-star celebrity casts rather than valid science fiction.
The best story here is clearly Maureen F. McHugh’s “The Lincoln Train,” and it’s a pity that this anthology was delayed for so long that the story has to appear here as a reprint rather than as an original … although you could argue that the anthology’s loss was McHugh’s gain, since I doubt she would have won a Hugo with this story if it had appeared here first rather than in F&SF. (And, of course, the story contributes to the strength of the anthology even as a reprint.) Next to “The Lincoln Train,” the strongest stories here are Gregory Feeley’s “The Crab Lice,” Frank M. Robinson’s “Causes,” and Michelle Sagara’s “The Sword in the Stone,” with the Feeley story easily carrying off the title of most inventive and imaginative story in the book that doesn’t fall into the trap of third-rate-Howard-Waldrop-without-the-spark-of-genius-gosh-isn’t-this-really-kind-of-silly Historical Gonzoism. There’s also other good work here by Adrienne Gormley, Karawynn Long, Richard A. Lupoff, Lyn Nichols, and others.
Alternate Tyrants is probably the most substantial of this sequence since at least Alternate Kennedys, one of the first two titles—which makes it all the more ironic that Tor has already given up on the series (it’s clear, in fact, that they only issued this one reluctantly, after delaying it for several years) and that this will be the last of them. I do think that this series became tired toward the end of its life, locked into a sequence of diminishing returns, with the last couple of volumes especially weak—but in an odd way, I’ll miss them, nevertheless … and it’s always sad to see an anthology series die, especially these days when there are so few of them left.
All the other Resnick Alternate anthologies were mass-market paperbacks, but this one has been issued as a more-expensive trade paperback instead—which seems like an odd decision, to raise the cover price on the latest installment of a series of anthologies that you’re already complaining don’t sell well enough (which you’d think would encourage even fewer people to buy it), but apparently the idea is that the profit margin on a trade paperback is higher than that on a mass-market, being not much more expensive to produce.
The Return of the Dinosaurs, an original anthology edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), strikes me as somewhat weaker than the book to which it’s a sequel, 1993’s Dinosaur Fantastic. I can’t be too self-righteous about this, since I’ve edited two dinosaur anthologies myself and would probably edit another one if asked, but there is a feeling to much of the material here that this ground may have been gone over too many times and is becoming played out. Whatever the truth of that, there’s less here that’s really innovative, and less of substance, than there was in Dinosaur Fantastic. Many of the authors, in fact, dodge the issue, not really writing about dinosaurs—the living, or onceliving, animals—at all in any central way, but instead do joke stories full of comic talking dinosaurs who perform the same kind of anachronistic Dino Shtick, satirically mimicking human behavior, that should be familiar to anyone who ever caught an episode of the old TV sitcom Dinosaurs; some of this material is supposed to amuse by its presumption—the pope converting the dinosaurs to
Christianity, for instance—but, as in the Resnick Alternate anthologies, this self-conscious “outrageousness” makes for thin stories and usually doesn’t involve any true innovation or breadth of imagination, no matter how Wild and Crazy the juxtapositions of images become. Other authors come close to ignoring the ostensible theme altogether. There are two pieces of fan fiction here, one of them David Gerrold’s insufferably coy “The Feathered Mastodon,” which features Resnick himself as a main character; the other piece, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Stomping Mad,” is actually one of the more entertaining stories in the anthology—but its rationale for being included here (it takes place at a Jurassic Park media convention) is slim enough to be almost subliminal.
There is some good material here. The best story in the anthology by a good margin—although nowhere near the top of her form—is Maureen F. McHugh’s “Down on the Farm,” a clever story about moral choices and the running of bureaucratic mazes, weakened somewhat by a hurried ending. Next best would be Gene Wolfe’s sly fabulation “Petting Zoo,” which also features a talking dinosaur (although not one who does comic Dino Shtick) and which could almost be a children’s story in mood, although its gentle tone is deceptive, and there is a sting in the story’s ‘tail.’ Other worthwhile stories here include Bud Sparhawk’s “Fierce Embrace,” Michelle Sagara West’s “Flight,” Robert J. Sawyer’s “Forever,” the aforementioned Kristine Kathryn Rusch story, and Susan Shwartz’s “Drawing Out Leviathan.”
All in all, I think you can probably get $5.99’ worth of entertainment out of this anthology—but I’m glad that they didn’t decide to do this one as a more expensive trade paperback.
Black Mist and Other Japanese Futures, edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Ferrell (DAW), is, as the title indicates, a collection of stories—five novellas—set in Japanese-dominated futures (none of them, oddly, are written by Japanese authors—for that, you have to see the reprint anthology Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories). The two best stories here, Pat Cadigan’s “Tea from an Empty Cup” and Richard A. Lupoff’s “Black Mist,” are actually reprint stories, having appeared electronically on Omni Online all the way back in 1995, although no acknowledgment of that fact is made anywhere in the book. Of the rest of the stories, the best is Jack Dann and Janeen Webb’s intriguingly detailed although somewhat too-picaresque “Niagra Falling,” followed by Patric Helmaan’s earnest, engrossing, but probably overlong “Thirteen Views of Higher Edo” (“Patric Helmaan” is almost certainly a pseudonym, and I think I know for whom; but since I have no direct evidence, I’ll keep my mouth shut about it). The book is rounded off by Paul Levinson’s deliberately controversial “A Medal for Harry,” which tries hard to be offensive and succeeds, but which is also at the same time rather silly, an effect I don’t think the author was trying for intentionally.
It’s hard even to tell what’s the ostensible theme of Destination Unknown, edited by Peter Crowther (White Wolf), even after you’ve read the jacket copy and the Guest Introduction—“fabulous worlds” perhaps, or “locations rich and strange and bizarre” is about as close as you can get. Oddly, then, considering all that, few of the stories here evoke any particularly strong sense of place or
are particularly adroit in their use of local color, nor—with a few exceptions—are the places they take us to all that rich and strange and bizarre.
In terms of overall literary quality, this is a fairly good anthology, quiet, low-key, competent, with few outright stinkers but also few stories that will linger long in your mind after you’ve put the book down. The bulk of the stuff here is quiet horror, very mild indeed by today’s standards, of a peculiar subvariety that might almost be called English Cozy Horror; I actually respond better to this sort of thing than I do to most splatterpunk/Maximum Gross-Out horror, but it’s not considered hip today, and I doubt that the horror establishment will take much—if any—notice of the stuff here.
There are two pretty good science fiction (or at least science-fantasy) stories here, the two strongest stories in the book, both of them more “rich and strange and bizarre” than most of the other stories in the anthology, and evoking a stronger sense of place—Ian McDonald’s “The Five O’ Clock Whistle” and Terry Dowling’s “The Maiden Death” are evocative, mood-heavy, style-rich (and slightly overwritten) stories haunted by ghosts and echoes of (respectively) Bradbury’s Mars and Ballard’s Vermilion Sands. The anthology also contains interesting work by Ian Watson, Lisa Tuttle, Kathleen Ann Goonan, R. A. Lafferty, and others.
First Contact, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff (DAW), seems to have been infected by the Friviolity Plague that affects so many of these DAW anthologies. There’s some pleasant minor work here, but the emphasis is definitely on the word “minor,” with most of the authors choosing to go for joke stories rather than attempting anything substantial or particularly imaginative with the theme. It’s a sad state of affairs when the year’s movies and TV shows come up with more original and inventive twists on the theme of First Contact than does an anthology of stories by nineteen working SF writers, but that’s just about the case here. The best stories are by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jack C. Haldeman II, Gordon Eklund, and Peter Crowther.
Two offbeat items are the British anthologies Decalog 4: Re: Generations, edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards (Virgin), and Decalog 5: Wonders, edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore (Virgin). The Decalog series apparently started out as media-oriented anthologies, with at least one of them consisting of Dr. Who stories, but by this point in time they’ve moved away from media fiction and are publishing some solid core science fiction as well. Decalog 5 is particularly interesting, with a first-rate story by Stephen Baxter (who appeared in practically every genre market in existence this year, plus a few nongenre ones! … or so it seemed anyway), and good work by Dominic Green, Ian Watson, and Jeanne Cavelos, although Decalog 4 was also interesting, with good work by Alex Stewart, Ben Jeapes, and Liz Holiday. (These anthologies may be somewhat difficult for American readers to find too—but, if it’s any consolation, at least nowhere near as difficult as finding Future Histories would be!)
An interesting anthology that we missed last year is David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination, edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner (HarperPrism), an eclectic anthology that mixes science fiction, fantasy, mild horror, and hybrids
of these forms of various sorts, and which features strong, powerfully imaginative work by Robert Silverberg, Greg Bear, Peter S. Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, and others. This is one of the better anthologies of the last couple of years, in fact, and probably worth its hardcover price of $23.00, although by now I think that it’s also available in a mass-market edition as well. Another eclectic mixed anthology that we missed last year was the British anthology Lethal Kisses, 19 Stories of Sex, Horror and Revenge, edited by Ellen Datlow (Millennium Orion), which, in spite of the title, contains a strong SF story by Pat Cadigan, an unclassifiably strange story on the borderland of literary surrealism by Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann, and good near-mainstream stories with no real fantastic element at all by Pat Murphy and Jonathan Lethem, as well as the expected erotic horror stuff by writers such as Simon Ings, Michael Marshall Smith, David J. Schow, A. R. Morlan, and others.
Spec-Lit, Speculative Fiction, No. 1, edited by Phyllis Eisenstein, is the first of a projected series of anthologies that collects student work from Eisenstein’s writing class at Columbia College in Chicago—this doesn’t sound very promising, I know, but the standard of work turns out to be surprisingly high, and if there’s nothing really first-rate here, there is competent professional-level work by George Alan, Tom Traub, Sam Weller, and others (for Spec-Lit, No. 1, send $6.95 to Fiction Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605-1996; make checks payable to Columbia College Chicago). Similar ground is covered in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XIII, edited by Dave Wolverton (Bridge), which, as usual, presents novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.
There was another small-press anthology out late this year, Alternate Skiffy, edited by Mike Resnick and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, but it didn’t arrive here in time to make my copy deadline, so I’ll save consideration of it for next year.
There seemed to be few shared-world anthologies this year. The few I saw included: Star Wars: Tales from the Empire, edited by Peter Schweighoffer (Bantam Spectra); Highwaymen: Robbers and Rogues, by Jennifer Roberson (DAW); Swords of Ice and Other Tales of Valdemar, edited by Mercedes Lackey (DAW); More Than Honor (Baen), stories set in the “Honor Harrington” universe; and Bolos 4: Last Stand, edited by Bill Fawcett (Baen).
People are waiting impatiently for Starlight 2, which should be one of the big anthologies of 1998. There’s also a big original SF anthology of stories by Australian writers being put together by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb that we’ll be keeping an eye out for, and it’ll be interesting to see if an edition of George Zebrowski’s long-delayed anthology series Synergy actually is published by White Wolf in 1998 … and/or another edition of New Worlds. Other than those, there are no other SF original anthology series even potentially in the works, as far as I know. A “hard science” anthology of original stories about space habitats, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, originally scheduled to come out in late 1997 or early 1998, has now been pushed back into mid-1999. And, of course, there’s another flock of Greenberg-edited theme anthologies on the horizon as well.
There were some good fantasy anthologies this year, although none as preeminent or dominating as such big fantasy anthologies of recent years as Immortal Unicorn or After the King. With the exception of the nearly-impossible-to-find Future Histories, the overall level of quality of the stories in the fantasy anthologies—or at least in the best of them—was higher than the overall level of the science fiction anthologies too, a sad commentary on the SF original anthology field.
The best fantasy anthology of the year was probably The Horns of Elfland, edited by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Donald G. Keller (Roc), an anthology of music-themed stories similar to last year’s Space Opera, although on the whole it covers the territory better than Space Opera did (although lacking the Peter S. Beagle novella that was the king piece of that anthology, and the main reason to buy it). The Horns of Elfland is an eclectic anthology, perhaps too much so for some readers tastes, especially in the kinds of music it covers—there’s little or nothing in the book about rock ‘n’ roll, for instance, and although the most typical kind of music dealt with here is Celtic music of one sort or another (if you had to pick background music to play while you read that would be the most representative of the overall mood of the book, your best bet would probably be someone like Enya or De Danann), there are also stories featuring opera, English bell ringing, church choir shape-note singing, bawdy house piano music, rap, and Cajun music. The stories themselves are similarly eclectic, mixing several types of fantasy, mainstream, and very mild horror; the dominant literary mood here is quiet, low-key, lyrical in a hushed sort of way—much the same as the music of Enya, in fact. Oddly, the very best stories here, Terri Windling’s “The Color of Angels,” Susan Palwick’s “Aïda in the Park,” and Lucy Sussex’s “Merlusine,” either have no fantastic element at all, or, in the case of the Windling, a fantastic element so muted and in-the-background as to be almost subliminal. The fantastic elements in the rest of the stories are also usually somewhat muted—there are few obvious Wonders here, with locations mostly restricted to present-day settings, and magic often kept well in the background—although the overall line-by-line level of literary craftsmanship in the book is extremely high. The anthology also contains good work by Gene Wolfe, Roz Kaveney, Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth A. Wein, Jane Emerson, and others.
The Magic is a little bit more upfront in another of the year’s best fantasy anthologies, Black Swan, White Raven, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Avon), the latest in their long and acclaimed series of anthologies of retold fairy tales. This is also a mixed anthology of fantasy and horror, although there seems to be less horror than in some of the other books in the series, which is why I’m considering it in the fantasy section rather than the horror section. The fantastic elements here are usually a good deal less muted and subliminal than in The Horns of Elfland; although some of these stories are quiet lyrical fantasies, most are painted in brighter primary colors, and there are only a few modern settings, most of the fantasy stories pretty clearly taking place in Fairy Tale Territory. What horror there is here is a good deal stronger and sharper as well (although still mild by the gory standards of today’s most extreme work), and there’s more humor, including a story by Midori Snyder that manages to be both
funny and strongly erotic at the same time, a rare combination. There are good stories by John Crowley, Nancy Kress, Jane Yolen, Harvey Jacobs, Gregory Frost, Esther M. Friesner, Susanna Clarke, Karen Joy Fowler, and others, including the above-mentioned Midori Synder story.
The year’s other prominent fantasy anthology is Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (White Wolf Borealis). Ostensibly an anthology of gay-themed stories in which “queer writers write fantasy for the first time, and genre writers explore queer characters,” many of the stories really don’t deal centrally with homosexual themes at all, instead turning out to be stories whose central characters just happen to be gay, with no great emphasis placed on this fact and no great fuss made about it—which makes this book a lot less polemic-heavy and angst-laden than some books aimed at the gay audience. There’s a fair range of different kinds of fantasy offered here as well—there’s also a strong science fiction story, Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Frost Painting”—although Bending the Landscape: Fantasy tends to shade off on one end of its spectrum more toward magic realism or literary surrealism of various sorts than does the stuff in Black Swan, White Raven or even The Horns of Elfland. The best work here includes the above-mentioned story by Carolyn Ives Gilman, as well as stories by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, Holly Wade Matter, M. W. Keiper, Robin Wayne Bailey, Leslie What, Kim Antieau, and others. This is the first book in a projected anthology series, but the series has been dropped by White Wolf—it will be continued in 1998 by Overlook Press.
Other fantasy anthologies this year included a big mixed original and reprint anthology of Arthurian stories, The Chronicles of the Round Table, edited by Mike Ashley (Carroll & Graf), which featured interesting work by old Arthur hands such as Parke Godwin and Phyllis Ann Karr, as well as by authors you don’t usually associate with Arthuriana, such as Eliot Fintushel and Brian Stableford; Swords and Sorceress XV, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley (DAW); and several anthologies of competent but largely unexceptional work, including Elf Fantastic (DAW) and Wizard Fantastic (DAW), both edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Tarot Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Lawrence Schimel (DAW), and Zodiac Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and A. R. Morlan (DAW).
I don’t follow the horror field closely these days, but it seemed as if the most prominent original horror anthologies of the year probably included Revelations, edited by Douglas E. Winter (HarperPrism); Love in Vein II, edited by Poppy Z. Brite and Martin H. Greenberg (HarperPrism); Dark Terrors 3, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton (Gollancz); The Mammoth Book of Dracula, edited by Stephen Jones (Robinson/Raven); Gothic Ghosts, edited by Wendy Webb and Charles Grant (Tor); and Wild Women, edited by Melissa Mia Hall (Carroll & Graf). Noted without comment is an anthology of erotic ghost stories, Dying For It, edited by Gardner Dozois (HarperPrism).
Some associational anthologies that may well be of interest to genre readers are a series of fat mystery anthologies edited by Mike Ashley, all from Carroll & Graf, many of which feature stories by familiar genre writers such as Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter (the prolific Baxter is in most of them, in fact!), Kim
Newman, Phyllis Ann Karr, Darrell Schweitzer, Patricia A. McKillip, Michael Moorcock, David Langford, John Maddox Roberts, and others. Some of the stories even have slight fantastic elements, and the historical mysteries may appeal to Alternate History buffs as well. The anthologies include: Classical Whodunnits; The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits; Shakespearean Whodunnits; and The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures. Even further out on the edge in some ways are two memorial anthologies about Famous Dead Celebrities, both of which feature some work with fantastic elements and use the work of genre authors: a Marilyn Monroe anthology, Marilyn: Shades of Blonde, edited by Carol Nelson Douglas (Forge), which features work by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Peter Crowther, Melissa Mia Hall, and Janet Berliner and George Guthridge; and a James Dean anthology, Mondo James Dean, edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody (St. Martin’s), which features work by Lewis Shiner and Jack C. Haldeman II.
The novel market didn’t seem quite as hard-hit in 1997 as it was being predicted that it would be in 1996. There were cutbacks—with HarperCollins cancelling over 100 previously contracted-for novels, for instance—but elsewhere the field actually seemed to be expanding, with HarperPrism growing and Avon announcing a major and ambitious new SF line, Eos, for 1998. Mass-market paperback originals continued to dwindle, part of a trend that has persisted and even accelerated for the past couple of years; but, at the same time, there were more trade paperback editions than ever before—with many books that would have been done in mass-market a few years ago now being done as trade paperbacks instead—so it tends to even out. There also seem to be more original hardcovers now than ever before; there are now more original novels being published in hardcover than in mass-market paperback format, something that would have been inconceivable even ten years ago.
According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 999 original books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1997, as opposed to 1,121 such books in 1996, a drop of 11 percent in original titles (on the other hand, according to Locus, there was a 15 percent increase in reprint titles over 1996, 817 to 1996’s 708, bringing the overall total of books of interest to the field, original and reprint, to 1,816 as opposed to 1996’s 1,829, only a 1 percent drop overall). The drop in original titles is scary, but, on the other hand, it’s not nearly as bad as some of last year’s through-the-floor-total-bust scenarios had predicted that it would be. The number of new SF novels was down, with 229 novels published as opposed to 253 in 1996; fantasy was down slightly, with 220 novels published as opposed to 224 in 1996; and horror suffered another substantial drop, with 106 novels published as opposed to 122 in 1996 and 193 in 1995. These are not insignificant losses, but neither are they catastrophic—as yet, anyway. Unless the totals continue to drop, and, in fact, the drop accelerates precipitously, the forecast of imminent death for the genre may turn out to have been premature (at least for the immediate future).
It’s obviously just about impossible for any one individual to read and review
all the new novels published every year, or even a significant fraction of them, even if you restricted yourself to the science fiction novels alone. For somebody like me, who has enormous amounts of short material to read, both for Asimov’s and for this anthology, it’s flat-out impossible, and I don’t even really try to keep up with everything anymore.
As usual, therefore, I haven’t read a lot of novels this year; of those I have seen, I would recommend: Jack Faust, Michael Swanwick (Avon); Diaspora, Greg Egan (HarperPrism); Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman (Ace); Corrupting Dr. Nice, John Kessel (Tor); City on Fire, Walter Jon Williams (HarperPrism); Slant, Greg Bear (Tor); Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson (Voyager); Earthling, Tony Daniel (Tor), and Mississippi Blues, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor).
Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1997 include: 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke (Del Rey); The Fleet of Stars, Poul Anderson (Tor); Titan, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); Destiny’s Road, Larry Niven (Tor); God’s Fires, Patricia Anthony (Ace); The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons (Bantam Spectra); The Siege of Eternity, Frederik Pohl (Tor); The Reality Dysfunction, Peter F. Hamilton (Warner Aspect); The Sorcerers of Majipoor , Robert Silverberg (HarperPrism); Glimmering, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Stephen King (Donald Grant); Winter Tides, James P. Blaylock (Ace); Eternity Road, Jack McDevitt (HarperPrism); The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss (Tor); The Calcutta Chromosome, Amitav Ghosh (Avon); How Few Remain, Harry Turtledove (Del Rey); Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Charles Sheffield (Bantam Spectra); The Black Sun, Jack Williamson (Tor); Someone to Watch over Me, Tricia Sullivan (Bantam Spectra); Earthquake Weather, Tim Powers (Tor); The Moon and the Sun, Vonda N. Mclntyre (Pocket); Widowmaker Reborn, Mike Resnick (Bantam); The White Abacus, Damien Broderick (Avon); Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel (Warner Aspect); Secret Passages, Paul Preuss (Tor); A King of Infinite Space, Allen Steele (HarperPrism); Freeware, Rudy Rucker (Avon); Deception Well, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Fortress on the Sun, Paul Cook (Roc); Carlucci’s Heart, Richard Paul Russo (Ace); The Night Watch, Sean Stewart (Ace); Reckoning Infinity, John Stith (Tor); The Still, David Feintuch (Warner Aspect); Bug Park, James P. Hogan (Baen); The Stars Dispose, Michaela Roessner (Tor); Chimera’s Cradle, Brian Stableford (Legend); The Gaia Websters, Kim Antieau (Roc); and Faraday’s Orphans, N. Lee Wood (Ace).
Special mention should be made of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s posthumously published Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (Bantam Spectra), which was completed by Terry Bisson after Miller’s death, although by far the bulk of the text was written by Miller himself. This may not have quite the impact of Miller’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, but it certainly qualifies as a minor masterpiece of sorts, one of the best novels of the year, and a fitting capstone to Miller’s distinguished career—it’s a shame he didn’t live to see it in print. Note should also be taken of Roger Zelazny’s Donnerjack (Avon), which was completed by Jane Lindskold after Zelazny’s death.
It was a fairly strong year for first novels. The most impressive ones I saw were In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker (Harcourt Brace), and The Great Wheel,
by Ian R. MacLeod (Harcourt Brace). Other good first novels included: The Art of Arrow Cutting, Stephen Dedman (Tor); Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey (Tor); Waking Beauty, Paul Witcover(HarperPrism); Expendable, James Alan Gardner (AvoNova); Mars Underground, William K. Hartmann (Tor); Lightpaths , Howard V. Hendrix (Ace); The Seraphim Rising, Elizabeth De Vos (Roc); The Seventh Heart, Marina Fitch (Ace), Polymorph, Scott Westerfeld (Roc), and Lives of the Monster Dogs, Kirsten Bakis (Farrar, Straus). For the second time in recent years, Harcourt Brace strongly dominated the first novel field this year, as it did in 1993–1994 when it published acclaimed first novels by Patricia Anthony and Jonathan Lethem—a tribute to the shrewd judgment of editor Michael Kandel. Tor, Ace, Roc, and DAW all published a fair number of first novels this year as well, and are to be commended for it, as are all publishers who are willing to take a chance on unknown writers with no track record—a risky business, but one that’s vital to the continued evolution and health of the genre.
An interesting small-press item was a first novel by one of SF’s most prolific and most eclectic short-story writers, Paul Di Filippo’s Ciphers, available in a hardcover edition from Cambrian Publications and a trade paperback edition from Permeable Press (Cambrian Publications, Box 112170, Campbell, CA 94114, $60 for the hardcover edition; Permeable Press, 47 Noe St #4, San Francisco, CA 94114, $16.95 for the trade paperback edition). Novels out on the fringes of the field that may be of interest to genre readers included two near-mainstream novels with (sometimes almost subliminal) traces of fantastic elements, American Gothic (St. Martin’s), by Harvey Jacobs—the more overtly fantastic of the two—and Signs of Life (St. Martin’s), by M. John Harrison, and an odd novel by Stepan Chapman that occupies the border territory between SF and literary surrealism, The Troika (The Ministry of Whimsy Press, P.O. Box 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315, $14.99). Associational mysteries last year included Bad Eye Blues by Neal Barrett, Jr. (Kensington) and Soma Blues by Robert Sheckley (Forge).
It looked like a good year for novels to me, even judging solely by the ones I had time to read, and many of the others were well-received as well. For those who still repeat the oft-heard remark about how nobody writes “real” centercore science fiction anymore, it should be noted that in the above list, most of the titles would have to be considered to be real, actual, sure-enough science fiction by any even remotely reasonable definition (even excluding the several fantasy novels and the more ambiguous cases, such as Williams’s City on Fire or Swanwick’s Jack Faust, which could be taken as either fantasy or SF, depending how you squint at them), and a number of them are hard SF, as hard and rigorous as it has ever been written by anyone anywhere (Egan’s Diaspora, for instance, as only one example). In fact, it seems to me that the percentage of really hard-core “hard SF” has gone up sharply in recent years, as has the percentage of wide-screen, Technicolor, baroque Space Opera, stuff reminiscent of the old “Superscience” days of the ’30s, but written to suit the aesthetic and stylistic tastes of the ’90s. There’s more “real” SF of several different flavors and styles around these days than ever before, if you open your eyes up and look for it—as well as vigorous hybrids of SF with fantasy, horror, the historical novel,
the mystery, and several other forms. Far from being dead, the field is, artistically at least, richer and wider and more varied than it has ever been, with good work being done by writers in every possible subvariety and subgenre you can name—all out there to be found, in spite of the pressure of competition for bookstore rack space by media tie-in and gaming and other associational novels.
As usual, there seem to be no strong favorites here for the major awards, although perhaps Haldeman’s Forever Peace might have a shot at the Hugo. Thanks to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, most of the books up for the Nebula Award are actually novels from the previous year, making the winner even harder to call. Tor, HarperPrism, and Bantam Spectra all had strong years.
Long out-of-print classics seem to be coming back into print with greater frequency these days than in years past, an encouraging sign; an even more encouraging sign is that some of this reissuing is being done by regular trade houses, such as Tor and Bantam and Del Rey, rather than leaving this area to the small presses, as was too-often true during the last ten years or so. Reissues of classic novels this year included: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (Bantam Spectra), perhaps the classic After-the-Bomb novel; Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore (Del Rey), one of the earliest Alternate History novels, and still one of the best; The Demon Princes, Volumes One and Two, by Jack Vance (Tor), assembling the five “Demon Princes” novels, some of the most exciting and evocative hybrids of science fiction and the mystery novel ever written; Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick (Ace), one of the earliest and best of the cyberpunk novels; Three in Time (White Wolf), an omnibus volume that gathers three classic time-travel novels, by Poul Anderson, Wilson Tucker, and Chad Oliver; The Final Encyclopedia, Volume One, by Gordon R. Dickson (Tor), the first half of one of Dickson’s major novels; and Triplanetary by Edward E. “Doc” Smith (Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951, $15), the first of the “Lensman” novels (and, for you Alternative Media fans, quite probably the inspiration for the comic book hero Green Lantern), classic space adventure from a time before the term “Space Opera” had even been invented. Buy them now, while you can, before they disappear into oblivion again.
It was another pretty good year for short-story collections, including once again a number of good retrospective collections that make excellent but long-out-of-print work available, and which ought to be in the library of every serious science fiction reader.
The best collections of the year included: Voyages by Starlight, Ian R. MacLeod (Arkham House); Axiomatic, Greg Egan (HarperPrism); Think Like a Dinosaur, James Patrick Kelly (Golden Gryphon); The Pure Product, John Kessel (Tor); Vacuum Diagrams, Stephen Baxter (Voyager); Giant Bones, Peter S. Beagle (Roc); Going Home Again, Howard Waldrop (Eidolon Publications); Ghost Seas, Steven Utley (Ticonderoga Publications); Eating Memories, Patricia Anthony (First Books/Old Earth Books); A Geography of Unknown Lands, Michael Swanwick (Tiger Eyes Press); Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories, Lucius Shepard (Millennium); and Fractal Paisleys, Paul Di Filippo (Four Walls Eight
Windows). Among the year’s other top collections were: The Forest of Time and Other Stories, Michael Flynn (Tor); The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzche and Other Odd Acquaintances, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon); Slippage, Harlan Ellison (Houghton Mifflin); Fabulous Harbours, Michael Moorcock (Avon); Exorcisms and Ectasies, Karl Edward Wagner (Fedogan & Bremer); The Arbitrary Placement of Walls, Martha Soukup (Dreamhaven), and From the End of the Twentieth Century, John M. Ford (NESFA Press).
Special mention should be made of several excellent retrospective collections that returned long-unavailable work by dead (and in danger of being forgotten) authors to print. This year’s retrospective collections feature the work of three authors who practically reinvented the science fiction short story in the ’50s, expanding its boundaries and greatly extending its range, using it as a tool to do kinds of work that had never been attempted in the field before. Without these authors, modern science fiction as we know it would not exist—and so these are collections that belong in every library: His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Stories of C. M. Kornbluth (NESFA Press), which lives up to its name by returning almost all of the short work of this brilliant craftsman to print; Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage), which features the best work of a writer still unmatched for daring, ambition, gall, pyrotechnics, and sheer chutzpah; and Thunder and Roses: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IV, (North Atlantic Books), which features some of the best work by one of science fiction’s best stylists, and so, almost by definition, some of the best work of the last half-century.
Fantasy fans might also enjoy a mass-market release of Tales from Watership Down, by Richard Adams (Avon), a return to the milieu of the bestselling fantasy classic Watership Down.
As usual, small-press publishers such as NESFA Press, Golden Gryphon, Tachyon, Arkham House, Eidolon Publications, and others, were responsible for publishing the bulk of the year’s best short-story collections, although it’s encouraging to see a fair number of titles from trade publishers such as Tor, Roc, Vintage, and HarperPrism.
(With the exception of books by White Wolf and Four Walls Eight Windows, very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail order is your best bet, and so I’m going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203, $27 for His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Stories of C. M. Kornbluth, $21 for From the End of the Twentieth Century, by John M. Ford; Golden Gryphon Press, 364 West Country Lane, Collinsville, IL 62234, $22.95 for Think Like a Dinosaur, by James Patrick Kelly; Arkham House, Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583, $21.95 for Voyages by Starlight, by Ian R. MacLeod; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701, $25 for Thunder and Roses: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IV; Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6006, $A19.95 for Going Home Again; Ticonderoga Publications, P.O. Box 407, Nedlands, WA 6009 Australia, $A16.95 postage included, checks or M.O. in Australian dollars payable to Russell Farr,
for Ghost Seas, by Steven Utley; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA, 94107, $14 for The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzche and Other Odd Acquaintances, by Peter S. Beagle; Fedogan & Bremer, 603 Washington Avenue, SE #77, Minneapolis MN 55415, $32.00 for Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner; Tiger Eyes Press, P.O. Box 172, Lemoyne, PA 17043, $25 in hardcover, $12 in trade paperback, for A Geography of Unknown Lands, by Michael Swanwick; DreamHaven Books, 912 West Lake St., Minneapolis, NM 55408, $25 for The Arbitrary Placement of Walls, by Martha Soukup.)
The reprint anthology field seemed at least a bit stronger this year than last year, with several good values, although the overall number of reprint anthologies still seems to be lower than it was a few years back.
The best bets for your money in this category, as usual, were the various Best of the Year anthologies and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 31, edited by Pamela Sargent (Harcourt Brace); this year there was also a new volume collecting recent Hugo Award-winning stories, The New Hugo Winners lV, edited by Gregory Benford (Baen). Science fiction is now being covered by two Best of the Year anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year’s Best SF series, edited by David G. Hartwell (HarperPrism), now up to its third volume. Since Hartwell’s anthology is a direct competitor to this volume, it would be inappropriate (and suspect) to review it, but the field is certainly wide enough for there to be more than one best anthology, and the parallax provided by comparing Hartwell’s slant on what was the year’s best fiction to my own slant is interesting, and probably valuable. Besides, since Hartwell will almost certainly like stories that I didn’t, and vice versa, having two volumes gives more authors a chance to be showcased every year, something I’m sure both of us welcome, since no anthology can be big enough or comprehensive enough to include all the worthwhile SF of various different varieties that comes out in the course of a year. Again in 1997, there were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones (Robinson), now up to volume 8, and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (St. Martin’s), this year up to its Tenth Annual Collection. Surprisingly, considering the fantasy boom that is underway in the novel category and the success of Realms of Fantasy magazine, fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology. This year saw the start of a new Best of the Year series, a somewhat more specialized one, The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume 1 (HarperCollins Australia Voyager), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne. Although restricted to original fiction published in Australia, this book has a somewhat wider purview, including both science fiction and fantasy as well as horror and some harder-to-classify stuff, and features good work by Greg Egan, Terry Dowling, Cherry Wilder, Jack Dann, Stephen Dedman, and others.
Turning away from the anthology series, there were several good retrospective
anthologies this year that provided essential historical overviews and were good buys for your money. The Science Fiction Century, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor), is one of a series of big—and controversial—retrospective anthologies, such as Age of Wonder and The Ascent of Wonder that Hartwell has been editing in the last few years; this one, an overview of the evolution of the field over the last hundred years, is even more controversial than the others, because of Hartwell’s decision not to use the work of authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, and others—again, as in other years, this is an argument that will bother critics and scholars far more than it does readers, who, regardless of whether they agree with Hartwell’s aesthetic choices and polemics or disagree with them, will still receive a fat anthology filled with first-rate stories by many other first-rate authors at a price that makes it, pound for pound, one of the year’s best reading bargains. Another excellent retrospective, although it limits itself to covering a much shorter span of time than does Hartwell’s anthology, is the similarly titled A Century of Science Fiction 1950–1959 (MJF Books), edited by Robert Silverberg. This is the first volume in a projected series of anthologies that were supposed to cover the last forty-some years of science fiction, focusing on one decade at a time, but the series has apparently died along with publisher Donald I. Fine, and so this will probably be the first and last such volume we get—a real loss to the field, since Silverberg’s historical notes here are almost as good as his selection of stories, quite a compliment when you’re talking about a book that contains such classics as Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attractions,” Poul Anderson’s “Call Me Joe,” C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm,” and Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” as well as fourteen other stories almost in the same class. Plus the anthology as a whole presents about as good an overview of ’50s science fiction as you’re going to get anywhere. What a pity we won’t get to see the rest of the series, covering subsequent decades! An overview of a somewhat different sort, covering the recent—and often rapid—evolution of British science fiction instead, is to be found in The Best of Interzone, edited by David Pringle (St. Martin’s), a book that will be all the more valuable to American readers because much of the material here will be unknown to many of them, as is largely, alas, the first-rate British magazine from which they are drawn. The anthology contains good-to-excellent work by Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan, Ian R. MacLeod, Brian Stableford, Nicola Griffith, Eugene Byrne, Stephen Baxter, Chris Beckett, Ben Jeapes, and others, many of them not well-known on this side of the Atlantic, as well as work by visiting Americans such as Paul Di Filippo, Paul Park, Timons Esaias, and Thomas M. Disch. Although a best from Interzone anthology was long overdue, I can’t help but wonder if a best from Absolute Magnitude anthology is not perhaps a bit premature, considering that the magazine itself has only been in existence for a few years, but, nevertheless, that’s just what you get with Absolute Magnitude, edited by Warren Lapine and Stephen Pagel (Tor); and although the stories here come nowhere near the level of quality of the best stuff from the Interzone anthology, there is solid, enjoyable work here by Hal Clement, Janet Kagan, Barry Longyear, Allen Steele, Don D’Ammassa, and others. Ackermanthology, edited by Forrest J. Ackerman (General Publishing Group),
provides an overview of SF largely centered on older work. An overview of an entirely different SF tradition is provided in Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg (Barricade Books).
Other reprint SF anthologies this year included Sci-Fi Private Eye, edited by Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW), a good solid reprint anthology featuring good work by Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Tom Reamy, Robert Silverberg, and others; Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written (Carroll & Graf), edited by Bill Alder Jr., didn’t quite live up to its overheated title, still it provided excellent work by Connie Willis, Steven Utley, John W. Campbell, Geoffrey A. Landis, Larry Niven, Jack McDevitt, and others; similar territory was covered just as well in Tales in Time, edited by Peter Crowther (White Wolf Borealis), which featured first-rate work by James Tiptree, Jr., Harlan Ellison, Ian Watson, Jack Finney, Ray Bradbury, and others. Noted without comment are Timegates, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace); Isaac Asimov’s Moons, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace); and Isaac Asimov’s Christmas, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace).
There were some good reprint fantasy anthologies this year, a sort of anthology that has become moderately rare these days: An overview of modern fantasy fiction is provided in Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s), noted without comment. Similar territory is also covered in Treasures of Fantasy, edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (HarperPrism), and A Magic Lover’s Treasure of the Fantastic, edited by Margaret Weis (Aspect). Another overview, more limited in scope but more comprehensive within the period it covers, is provided by A Century of Fantasy 1980–1989 edited by Robert Silverberg (MJF Books), another excellent Silverberg anthology, similar in concept to his A Century of Science Fiction discussed above, featuring first-rate work by Joe Haldeman, Charles de Lint, Roger Zelazny, and others. A good anthology of comic fantasy is The Wizard of Odd, edited by Peter Haining (Ace), and some good fantasy stories about dragons are collected in Dragons: The Greatest Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (MJF Books).
Reprint anthologies are also somewhat rare in horror, where most of the anthologies are originals, but this year we had A Century of Horror 1970–1979, edited by David Drake (MJF Books), the start of another promising but probably doomed anthology series; Girls’ Night Out: Twenty-Nine Female Vampire Stories, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert E. Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble); Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor); Southern Blood: Vampire Stories from the American South (Cumberland House, 432-433 Harding Industrial Park Drive, Nashville TN, 37211 $12.95); 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert E. Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble); Haunted Houses: The Greatest Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (MJF Books); and Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror, edited by John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg (Barnes & Noble).
Odd but enjoyable items from smaller presses include Strange Kaddish (Aardwolf Publishing), edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, an
anthology of Jewish science fiction featuring work by Harlan Ellison, Shira Daemon, Neil Gaiman, and others, and Girls for the Slime God (Obscura Press), edited by Mike Resnick, featuring old-fashioned hairy-chested pulp adventure SF stories by Henry Kuttner, a story parodying them in a genial way by Isaac Asimov, and a nonfiction look back at the sort of pulp magazines where Bug-Eyed Lobster Men were always carrying beautiful half-naked women off for purposes either dietary or romantic (or both), by William Knoles. (Aardwolf Publishing, 45 Park Place South, Suite 270, Morristown, NJ 07960, $9.95 for Strange Kaddish; Wunzenzierohs Publishing, P.O. Box 1992, Ames, IA 50010-1992, $15 plus $3 postage for Girls for the Slime God.)
The big news in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field this year was undoubtedly the publication of John Clute and John Grant’s mammoth The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (St. Martin’s Press), a massive and exhaustively comprehensive reference book that, along with its companion volume, 1993’s The Encycopedia of Science Fiction, will form the cornerstones of genre scholarship for decades to come. These are invaluable reference tools for anyone who is interested in the rapidly evolving and expanding field of modern fantasy and belong in every serious reader’s library. Like its predecessor, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is expensive, but it’s also worth every penny you spend on it. This was a good year in general for fantasy reference books in fact and critical studies about fantasy, especially if you count in David Pringle’s St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, which was published late last year. Discovering Classic Fantasy, by Darrell Schweitzer (Borgo), was a useful guide to some of the old masters of fantasy, while there were several books that took a closer look at some of them, such as A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, by S. T. Joshi (Borgo); Bram Stoker’s Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (Norton); and Defending Middle-Earth, by Patrick Curry (St. Martin’s). Industry was a more generalized critical study of a specific fantasy form. Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1992–1995, edited by Hal W. Hall (Library Unlimited), was a useful reference work for both genres. There were two valuable books of insightful, articulate, and often highly opinionated essays about SF and SF-related topics: Reflections and Refractions, by Robert Silverberg (Underwood), and Outposts: Literatures of Milieux, by Algis Budrys (Borgo Press). A similar book, similarly articulate, that casts its net a bit wider is Rubber Dinosaurs and Wooden Elephants: Essays on Literature, Film, and History (Borgo Press), by L. Sprague De Camp. Critical overviews of SF as a genre could be found in a reissue of a somewhat expanded version of one of the cornerstone books of SF criticism, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (Advent), as well as in Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars, by Brooks Landon (Twayne), and Islands in the Sky, by Gary Westfahl (Borgo Press), while literary studies of specific SF authors were available in Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition), by James Gunn (Scarecrow); Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, by Yvonne Howell (Peter Lang); and “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard,
by Roger Luckhurst (St. Martin’s). Books for the SF witer include Time Travel by Paul J. Nahin (Writer’s Digest), Space Travel by Ben Bova with Anthony R. Lewis (Writer’s Digest), and a new edition of Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction (St. Martin’s).
The art book field this year was dominated by Vincent Di Fate’s huge and comprehensive retrospective look at science fiction art, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art (Penguin Studio). This is by far the best and the most complete overview of SF art that has ever been published, easily superseding earlier retrospectives, such as Brian Aldiss’s Science Fiction Art or Anthony Frewin’s One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration—if you’re only going to buy one SF art book this year, then without question Di Fate’s book should be the one you buy. Another valuable overview of what’s happening in the current SF and fantasy art scene is provided in Spectrum IV: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy Burnett, Arnie Fenner, and Jim Loehr (Underwood Books), the latest edition of a sort of Best of the Year series that compiles the year’s fantastic art. There seemed to be few major art collections this year, although there were still a few substantial ones, including Knightsbridge: The Art of Keith Parkinson (FPG); Michael Whelan’s Something in My Eye: Excursions into Fear, edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner (Mark V. Ziesing); and H. R. Giger’s www.HRGiger.com (Taschen). Heavily illustrated SF books this year, with the art sometimes making up a larger percentage of the book than the text, included Stephen King’s The Dark Tower IV: Wizards and Glass (Donald Grant), illustrated by Dave McKean, and Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin!” Said the Tick Tock Man (Underwood), illustrated by Rick Berry.
A valuable retrospective on the art of illustrated children’s books, a field that shares an elusive border with fantasy art, is A Treasury of Great Children’s Book Illustrators, by Susan E. Meyer (Harry N. Abrams). Illustrated children’s books this year that will probably appeal to fans of fantasy art include The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese and Other Tales of the Far North by Howard Norman, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon (Harcourt Brace), The Veil of Snows, by Mark Helprin, illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (Viking Ariel), and Rapunzel, by Paul O. Zelinsky (Dutton).
There were only a few general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year, none of them really exceptional, although most of them were worthwhile. An interesting if rather formidably opaque and polemic-drenched volume is Digital Delirium, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (St. Martin’s). This is a collection of essays about the future of the Internet and the “digital world” in general and the effect it’s all going to have on human society and even human evolution, much of it so extreme that the authors seem—to put it bluntly—to be nuts, although it’s hard to say from the perspective of the present whether or not there might also turn out to have been nuggets of visionary wisdom buried in this mud slide of passionate rhetoric. Among this crew of wild-eyed, arm-waving digital mystics, science fiction’s own Bruce Sterling comes off as the voice of Reason, Moderation, and Caution, warning that events in the digital world don’t always have the impact on the real world that digital visionaries assume they’re going to have. Similar territory is covered, in a more level-headed and
less didactic way, in the nonfiction half of the anthology Future Histories, edited by Stephen McClelland (Horizon House), which features essays about the Internet, the “future of communications,” and related topics by authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Nicholas Negroponte, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, and others.
Most SF fans love dinosaurs, and so most of them will probably be interested in Dinosaur Lives, by John R. Horner and Edwin Dobb (HarperCollins), which takes us to the front lines and gives us a look at some of the more recent battles going on in that highly contentious science, paleontology, where even the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a deadly strike by an asteroid or comet, probably the most sacrosanct scientific theory of the last ten years, is now coming under attack by critics armed with alternative theories of their own. Most SF fans also share at least a passing interest in astronomy, and so will probably appreciate Planet Quest, the Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, by Ken Croswell (The Free Press), a comprehensive—if a bit dry—look at just what the title says it’s about, a subject that would have been science fiction rather than science fact only a few years ago. The Whole Shebang, a State-of the-Universe(s) Report (Simon & Schuster), by Timothy Ferris, is a good layman’s overview of some of the classic problems in cosmology and quantum physics, of obvious applicability to the genre. Michael Palin’s Full Circle (St. Martin’s), a travel book tied to his recent BBC travel series, is not even remotely justifiable as a “genre-related” book, but, like Palin’s other travel narratives, Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole, does offer sort of a vaguely SF-ish kick in the inside perspective it provides into various societies and cultures around the world, many of them extremely different from our familiar Western culture, and so I’ll offer that—and the fact that it was one of the more enjoyable nonfiction books I read this year (plus the fact that it was a slow year in this category)—as my weak rationale for mentioning it here.
This year saw an unprecedented parade of SF Big-Screen, Big-Budget, A-Release, Special Effects-Heavy Spectaculars—a few of which were actually worth watching.
More of these Big-Budget, Special Effects–laden giants are on the way for next year, most budgeted somewhere in the range of 60 million dollars and up; it’s quite possible that it will turn out that more money was spent making SF movies for the 1997 and 1998 seasons than has ever before been spent on SF as a film genre. The unanswered question is, is SF as a film genre making money? In an overall sense, is the genre of the SF film returning the vast amount of money that the studios are sinking into it? Some of these Special Effects Extravaganzas have done spectacularly well at the box office—but others seem to have failed, and many that were expected to perform well have seemingly turned in lukewarm performances as moneymakers (this whole question of whether or not a film has made money is complicated these days by the effect of later foreign and videotape sales of the movie, a factor that has helped some notorious box-office bombs earn-out down the road).
If the overall sense of the industry is that SF movies are making money, then we can expect to see the stream of such movies continuing into the next century; otherwise, the stream may eventually run dry, as it did after other SF films of the period were unable to match the great success of the Star Wars movies.
The biggest hit of the year, of course, and already one of the highest-earning movies of all time in spite of also being the most expensive-to-produce movie ever, is Titanic, which some people are urging be considered a SF film because it’s a movie about the uses and misuses of technology (and because it has REALLY NEAT special effects)—but that stretches the definition of a SF film beyond any useful limits, I think, and I’m not willing to go that far myself (although it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to see Titanic show up on next year’s Hugo ballot anyway).
Stepping down a bit from Titanic’s lofty level—although still immensely profitable, especially when you consider that it was relatively inexpensive for one of these Special Effects-heavy movies—we come to the surprise hit of the year, Men in Black, a good-natured, amiable, unpretentious, and occasionally surprisingly intelligent action-comedy about an ultrasecret government organization set up to protect Earth from “the scum of the galaxy,” the alien criminals and terrorists who live among us in secret, along with more law-abiding, decent-citizen-type alien immigrants and alien refugees. This movie works some of the same territory as last year’s Independence Day, including the widely accepted belief that a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the ’50s and was captured by the military and that the government has been covering up continued contact with alien races ever since. In an amazingly adroit bit of aesthetic tightrope walking, Men in Black manages to take this idea seriously enough to draw power from it and make some sharp fun of it at the very same time. The special effects are good, of course, including some of the best and most diverse “alien costumes” seen since the original Star Wars, but the real draw here is another relaxed, assured, brash, effortlessly amusing, and totally self-confident star turn by Will Smith—who surely has Bankable Megastar of the late ’90s written all over him by now—supported admirably by a deadpan but sardonic just-the-facts-ma’am performance by Tommy Lee Jones, and a wonderful portrayal—done mostly with body language—of a menacing Alien Bug stuffed into an ill-fitting Human Suit, scary and very funny at the same time, by Vincent D’Onofrio. This may not have been the best SF movie of the year, but it was certainly the one that was the most fun to watch.
I also enjoyed two of the year’s other Big-Screen Spectaculars, although not as much as Men in Black, The Fifth Element and—to a lesser extent—The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Both were worth seeing, if only for the special effects, and, in the case of The Fifth Element, the bizarre and imaginative costuming and set dressing, although it must be admitted up front that both movies were Very Dumb to one extent or another (perhaps less of an offense in The Fifth Element, which is clearly intending to be Very Dumb in a few places). Both were fast-paced, however, and enjoyable if you disengaged your frontal lobes and didn’t ask too many embarrassing questions.
The Fifth Element was the funnier and more enjoyable of the two, a richly
colored, headlong, flatout, wildly extravagant Space Opera that didn’t make a lick of sense but didn’t really need to. This is by far the most successful attempt yet to translate the aesthetics of that specialized, and largely French, form of the comic book known as “comix”—one of Moebius’s strips from Metal Hurlant, say—to the movie screen, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses of that form; the film does a credible job of catching the kind of wild imagery and bizarre juxtapositions that are the heart of that kind of comix, an even better job than did Barbarella, since the makers of The Fifth Element have a much bigger budget and thirty years’ worth of advancement in special effects technology with which to work.
(For another excellent example of French film aesthetics—which are definitely not American aesthetics—in the SF/fantasy/comix area, check out The City of Lost Children, a wonderful movie from a couple of years back that I caught up with recently, a weird but effective mélange of children’s fantasy, surrealism, Metal Hurlant-style comix, noir cinema, and French-tinged cyberpunk; in spite of the stylish and unrelieved grimness of the surreal/noir setting, the movie is often quite funny, and, in the end, surprisingly touching and sweet.)
Once you realized that The Fifth Element was not really a science fiction movie at all, but rather a filmed version of a comix (a realization that hit me early on, and was certainly inescapable by the time it came to the border of the Terran System, and it’s a physical line drawn through space by a row of floating beacons), you could relax and stop trying to sort a coherent plot out of it all, and stop worrying about logical inconsistences and scientific plausibility (although many genre fans and critics apparently could not). “Comix” don’t make a lick of sense either, of course, when viewed from the sober, rational, right-brained perspective of traditional science fiction, and seem in fact to take it as a mark of pride that they don’t. The premiere French comix artist, Jean Giraud (known as Moebius), actually worked on The Fifth Element, and in many ways it’s his movie, with images from his comix—and complete plot lines, including dialogue—running through it from beginning to end, including such unmistakable Moebius touches as the ponderous and benign alien creatures in turtle-shaped space suits who appear at the beginning of the movie and the sequence where the alien Diva, whose singing is so overwhelmingly effective that it reaches across almost all racial barriers, is giving a concert attended by many different alien races, a story line taken directly from a Metal Hurlant strip. I must say that it all looks great, up on the big screen in full color, and moving around too, a testimony to the sheer power of Moebius’s imagery and a treat for the eye, whether it makes any sense or not. The special effects are good, but I enjoyed the costuming, the lavish set dressing, and the mind-bogglingly immense (and largely CGI-created) sets the most. The story line is serviceable as long as you don’t mind extremely unlikely coincidences and huge holes in the plot logic, and it does have the advantage of being frequently played for as many laughs as it can get. The actors are okay, with Bruce Willis doing his beard-stubble-and-torn-T-shirt-reluctant-action-hero Die Hard routine, and being upstaged effortlessly by the female lead, Milla Jovovich, who is quite good, speaking the “divine language” babble, which makes up a good part of her dialogue, convincingly
enough to make it sound like a real language, and looking very nice, mostly out of the minimal costuming they give her.
Much the same sort of thing—entertaining, but check your forebrain at the door—could be said about The Lost World: Jurassic Park. For what it’s worth, it’s actually a better movie than Jurassic Park was in some ways—although lacking the first-time impact of the dinosaur effects that the first movie enjoyed—with the humans actually figuring out how to escape from the dinosaurs on their own, rather than being rescued at the last minute by a disappointing Deus-Ex-Tyrannosaurus ending, which was my major objection to Jurassic Park. Here, instead, they beat the dinos using their wits and skill at improvising on the run (literally), which, for me, makes for a much more satisfying movie (some of the characters rely on their own ingenuity, at least; the supposed “professional hunters,” by comparison, react with incredible stupidity and incompetence instead, but then, of course, they are only in the movie to serve as cannon fodder—or perhaps Dino Chow would be a better term—in the first place). There are no great surprises here plotwise, of course, it’s all pretty predictable—but the movie does manage to crank up a good deal of suspense in several scenes and edges out Jurassic Park on that score as well.
In a way, though, of course, none of that matters—people went to see The Lost World for the same reason they went to see Jurassic Park: for the dinosaurs. They weren’t disappointed either: the special effects here are an order of magnitude better even than in Jurassic Park; it’s almost frightening how fast the whole CGI field is evolving, seeming to go through a quantum jump every three or four years. They used a combination of full-sized robot models, traditional stop-motion model animation, and CGI animation for Jurassic Park; but here they largely went with just the CGI stuff instead, and not only are the effects better, with the dinosaurs doing much more complex stuff more believably than in the first movie, but the effects cost a lot less than the effects for the first movie had. If I were a movie actor, I think I’d feel a cold wind blowing, since we surely can’t be more than ten years away (and maybe considerably less) from the CGI people being able to create a movie totally without human actors that will be indistinguishable from a movie with human actors. Already, Steven Speilberg has been quoted as saying that he didn’t need a Big Name Bankable Star for The Lost World, and he was right. Why pay $50 million for Mel Gibson, when you can whomp up a bunch of dinosaurs in your computer instead? How long it will be before you can whomp up Mel Gibson in your computer? I’m willing to bet that in ten years, if not in five years, the magnificent effects here are going to look crude.
I wonder if we’re going to hit a time when wonderful Special Effects will be so cheap and so common and so widespread that having them in your movie won’t be enough to get people to come to see it anymore? If, instead, the Great Special Effects being a given, you’ll have to start putting things like a great story and great characters and great dialogue and actually intriguing ideas in it in order to lure an audience into the theater. That would make for a nice change, wouldn’t it?
We actually had a movie this year that tried for something like the above
ideal, that rare creature, a serious-minded Big-Budget SF movie, a movie that tried to combine expensive production values and great special effects with a serious adult plot, complex and sophisticated conceptualization, and well-rounded human characters. It wasn’t entirely successful in achieving that goal, of course, but movies that even try are rare enough that it deserves to be applauded for making an earnest effort in that direction.
I’m talking, of course, about Contact, a film that tried hard to be the kind of intelligent, serious, adult, thinking-man’s SF movie that genre fans have been saying for years they want to see, but which seem to arouse little real heat or enthusiasm within the genre for all that. The trouble may be in the source material, Carl Sagan’s best-selling novel to which the film was reasonably faithful. The novel Contact was more widely appreciated outside the genre than inside it, where it was commonly regarded as new wine in an old bottle, or perhaps even old wine in an old bottle, and I suspect the same is true for the movie, for the same reasons.
Outside the genre, to audiences who were not already long-familiar with the basic concepts being examined here, Contact may well have played as a stunningly effective and mind-blowing film. Inside the genre, the familiarity of the material lessened the movie’s impact, although it was nice to see that material being treated with respect and a reasonable amount of intelligence for a change (one glaring exception: none of the scientists seemed to be able to refute the idea, raised by skeptical bureaucrats, that the alien transmission could have been faked by a satellite in Earth orbit, although triangulation would quickly rule out that possibility; in fact, the whole “Inquisition” sequence toward the end of the movie was lame—perhaps the weakest part of the plot—at least once you got beyond the extreme improbability that they would pick the heroine as the “test pilot” for the alien machine under any circumstances).
Jodie Foster turns in a marvelous performance as the emotionally crippled scientist obsessed with making contact with alien intelligences, and the movie has much to recommend it, including the fact that it raises issues (although, having raised them, it doesn’t then go on to examine them in any really complex way) about the relationship of science and religion that have rarely been raised in any main-line commercial movie—but my admiration for it remained largely theoretical. While actually watching it, I found it faintly dull, although I struggled throughout with the guilty feeling that I somehow ought to be enjoying it more than I actually was.
Gattaca, another earnest, fairly intelligent, serious-minded SF movie, performed poorly at the box office, and didn’t arouse much enthusiasm within the genre either—which makes me wonder how much disparity there is between what we say we want in a movie and what we actually do want.
Back in Big-Screen Spectacular territory, Starship Troopers, based (very) loosely on the famous SF novel by Robert A. Heinlein, was another substantial box-office success and did arouse a good deal of enthusiasm within the genre, although it also aroused at least as much controversy, with Heinlein fans seeming to be divided about evenly between liking it and loathing it. Several parents that I know, dragged to the theater by their teenage children, have commented that
audiences of kids watching Starship Troopers looked as if they were intently playing a video game, bouncing and jerking and bobbing in their seats as if operating an invisible joystick, and Starship Troopers does seem to be more like a video game than a movie in some respects, with both the strengths and the weaknesses of that form. Most of the polemic arguments at the heart of Heinlein’s book were lost in translation from one medium to another (although there was much ink spilled over the “fascist” subtext of the film, which may possibly have been the director’s hidden sardonic take on the libertarian politics of the original novel, enabling him to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at the same time by making a big ultraviolent gore-splattered “heroic” war movie whose heros are then slyly identified with the Nazis, so that he can claim the movie “really” delivers an antiwar message instead), but the movie was fast-paced and stylish and intense and violent enough that few viewers really cared. (It was also reasonably intelligent for an ultraviolent action movie of this sort, as long as you ignored questions such as, Why in the world would they be fighting the Bugs mostly with small arms, the equivalent of today’s M-16 rifle? As one combat veteran of my acquaintance put it, “We had weapons on the squad level in Vietnam that could have made Bug-flavored mincemeat of those critters, and a squadron of Cobra helicopters could have swept the entire planet clean.” You’ll also notice that, unlike in Heinlein’s novel, the Bugs don’t get weapons and technology of their own to fight back with … )
Not all of the year’s Big-Budget, Big-Ticket SF movies were commercial successes, by any mean. Kevin Costner’s Civilization-Struggling-to-Reestablish-Itself-After-the-Atomic-War saga, The Postman, was a major disappointment at the box office and may well have been the most critically savaged genre movie of the year, widely panned for being boring and sententious, a filmed love letter from Kevin Costner to himself, with one critic referring to it mockingly as “Dances with Mailmen”; it’s worth noting, though, that the author of the book from which the film was drawn, David Brin, went so far as to take out an ad in a major newspaper defending it, so he apparently thought it had done a reasonable job of translating his novel to the screen—so that may mean that if you liked the book, you might well like the movie too. Event Horizon looked as if it was going to be a hard-science movie, but instead turned out to be a gruesome, blood-spattered, supernatural horror thriller in deep-space disguise and quickly disappeared from theaters. Batman and Robin, with George Clooney assuming the mask and cowl from Val Kilmer, was a major bomb, and may have sunk the whole Batman franchise.
Deep Rising, which some wag characterized as Alien set on the Titanic, with a giant squidlike creature playing the part of the alien, quickly sank at the box office. Anaconda, another Alien-like movie, with a giant snake standing in for the alien, also quickly slithered out of town. Volcano and Dante’s Peak, disaster movies calculated to capitalize on the success of 1996’s Twister, fizzled; and Hard Rain, an odd cross between a disaster movie and a crime thriller, with a robbery taking place during a major flood, was a box-office disappointment as well. I’m not sure how Kull the Conqueror, a version of the old Robert E. Howard story, starring Kevin Sorbo, TV’s Hercules, did at the box office, but, for what
it’s worth, it was in town barely long enough for the guy at the candy counter to finish making the popcorn. Somewhat more successful, although more marginal, were the paranoid thriller The Game and a horror movie based on an old story by Donald A. Wollheim, Mimic.
Still on the horizon: a Big-Screen version of the old TV show Lost in Space that plays it seriously rather than for camp laughs; a very big-budget version of Godzilla; a film version of Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere; the long-promised new SF movie by Stanley Kubrick; the new Star Trek movie; and the first of the new Star Wars “prequels.”
Turning to television, there seemed to be few big new stories here, although SF/ fantasy shows came and went so fast that I was unable even to catch up with a few of them—such as The Visitor and Roar—before they were already gone. Most of them seemed to be no great loss, and I suspect that many of the new shows that are hanging on, such as The Sentinel and Three, will soon be gone as well, and will also be no great loss. Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict seems to be doing better than these shows in the ratings, and may be around for a while, but I don’t much like it either.
The big winner this year seemed to be Babylon 5, which not only survived to get the go-ahead for a fifth season that had been seriously in doubt last year, but which struck a deal to get all of its old shows from prior seasons rerun in chronological order on another network, a deal that can only increase its ratings success, probably broadening the audience considerably beyond the present core of devoted B5 fanatics; in fact, initial reports on the ratings of the rerun of the Babylon 5 pilot episode indicate that they were substantial.
So, ironically, Babylon 5 seems to have won—or at least survived—its direct head-to-head battle with its hated rival Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show with a very similar concept that, with the weight of the mighty Star Trek franchise behind it, was originally expected to crush Babylon 5 easily and sweep it from the airwaves. Not only hasn’t that happened, but—also ironically—B5 fans are committed to the series with the kind of devotion and evangelistic fervor and intense enthusiasm that hasn’t been seen since the days of the original Star Trek series; I strongly suspect, for instance, that nothing other than a Babylon 5 episode has even a remote chance of winning a Best Dramatic Prentation Hugo for the next few years. I must admit that I myself still don’t understand all the enthusiasm for B5, since every time I sample an episode, I’m struck by the mediocre-to-terrible dialogue, the leaden direction, and the wooden acting, but I can’t deny that I’m distinctly in the minority here. (B5 fans keep telling me that if only I’d watch enough episodes, I’d learn to like it; but when I was in the army, people told me that if I ate liver and onions enough, I’d learn to like that, too, and it didn’t work—so I’m skeptical.)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to have shored up its ratings by the addition to the cast of the extremely popular character Worf from the parent show Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s still not the success, either artistically or in the ratings, that the old show was during its prime period. How it’s doing in
comparison to Babylon 5, I don’t have the figures to determine, but neither show seems in any immediate danger of being canceled. Star Trek: Voyager is still struggling, and appears to be not all that popular even with core Star Trek fans, although the recent addition of a Cute Borg Babe to the cast seems to have helped some in the ratings.
The X-Files remains popular, having reached the point of Cult Coolness, where famous authors are clamoring to write for it, with recent scripts by Celebrity Guest Writers such as William Gibson and Tom Maddox and Stephen King. Third Rock from the Sun is also still popular, while Lois and Clark appears to have ended its run. Sliders died a well-deserved death, but, fear not, it has already been resurrected in the Vallhala of Old SF/Fantasy TV Shows, the Sci-Fi Channel. Early Edition and Lost on Earth both died, if anyone really cares, and so far have not even made it on to the Sci-Fi Channel.
Xena: Warrior Princess is more popular than ever, now a bigger hit than its parent show, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, a fact that Hercules star Kevin Sorbo has grumbled about in several interviews. Xena is so successful, in fact, that along with recent shows such as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and La Femme Nikita it seems to be forming a new television subgenre of shows where Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt, a subgenre which, for perhaps the first time in history, is bringing rednecks, college students, lesbians, and postmodernist intellectuals together as the viewing audience for the same TV shows. (So BWKMB shows could be a real unifying force in our society. Can a political coalition be far behind?) A legion of cheap-copy clone shows such as The New Adventures of Robin Hood, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and The Adventures of Sinbad, are trying to use the Hercules/Xena formula, but with noticeably less success. At their best, Hercules and Xena remain good cheesy fun, and have the benefit of not taking themselves terribly seriously, although after you watch for a while, the story lines get a bit repetitive; as long as there’s enough head-bashing and butt-kicking, though, spiced with a sprinkling of anachronistic postmodern jokes, nobody seems to mind. (I sometimes worry that watching Xena—supposedly from ancient Greece—meet Julius Caesar or point out the direction of the Inn at Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph will really screw up the next generation’s sense of history, but friends assure me that only outmoded dinosaurs like me are concerned about historical accuracy; this is postmodernism, where everything is supposed to be jumbled together in a bouillabaisse, the more eclectic the mix the better. Still hope the kids crack a book before settling down to a history exam though … )
Highlander: The Series has gone markedly downhill in the last couple of seasons, particularly this season, adding a whole slew of extraneous fantasy elements, such as demons, not called for by the initial premise, and it’s clear that this series is on its last legs; this was a pretty good Junk Food show in its day, but it shows all the signs of being a tired series, and its day is past. It came as no surprise to me to hear that Highlander is officially scheduled to end this season, with the possibility of Adrian Paul going on to star in at least one new Highlander movie being dangled as consolation to desolate fans. Die-hard Highlander enthusiasts can also console themselves with the information that a Highlander
spin-off series is in the works, starring a female immortal this time, the intention reportedly being to produce a show as much like Xena as possible. (How imaginative! Especially as this is a goal no doubt being pursued by a dozen other producers right about now.)
The most popular new Cult Show of the year, though, one which may even be able to rival Xena in popularity, was undoubtedly the animated series South Park, which runs on Comedy Central—already buzzwords and phrases from the show such as “They killed Kenny!” have spread everywhere through the culture, just as “Sock it to me!” and “Wild and Crazy Guys!” did in their days. This show does have some genuinely funny moments in it, but its deliberate gross-out humor at its grossest, prides itself not only on being non-PC but on having something to offend everybody—I still can’t believe some of the stuff they’ve gotten away with, like having Jesus Christ reduced to doing a minor cable-access phone-in show, or fighting Satan in a bout carried on Pay for View—and is definitely not for the Easily Offended. There are many satirical fantastic elements here, from a plague of flesh-eating zombies to rampaging clones to a victim of an alien anal probe growing an eighty-foot satellite dish out of his butt. A recent episode satirizing Japanese monster movies featured a one-hundred-foot-tall Barbra Streisand stomping on the town.
The 55th World Science Fiction Convention, LoneStarCon2, was held in San Antonio, Texas, from August 28 to September 1, and drew an estimated attendance of 4,416, making it the smallest U.S. worldcon in fifteen years, smaller than last year’s L.A. worldcon by more than 2,200 people. The 1997 Hugo Awards, presented at LoneStarCon2, were: Best Novel, Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Best Novella, “Blood of the Dragon,” by George R. R. Martin; Best Novelette, “Bicycle Repairman,” by Bruce Sterling; Best Short Story, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society … ,” by Connie Willis; Best NonFiction, Time & Chance, by L. Sprague de Camp; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation, Babylon 5: Severed Dreams; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Dick and Nicki Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, William Rotsler; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Michael A. Burstein.
The 1996 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 19, 1997, were: Best Novel, Slow River, by Nicola Griffith; Best Novella, “Da Vinci Rising,” by Jack Dann; Best Novelette, “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea,” by Bruce Holland Rogers; Best Short Story, “A Birthday,” by Esther M. Friesner; plus the Grand Master award to Jack Vance.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Third Annual World Fantasy Convention in London, England, on November 2, 1997, were: Best Novel, Godmother Night, by Rachel Pollack; Best Novella, “A City in Winter,” by Mark Helprin; Best Short Fiction, “Thirteen Phantasms,” by James P. Blaylock; Best Collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, by Jonathan
Lethem; Best Anthology, Starlight 1, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden; Best Artist, Moebius; Special Award (Professional), to Michael J. Weldon for The Psychotronic Video Guide; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Barbara & Christopher Roden for Ash-Tree Press; plus a special convention award to Hugh B. Cave and a Life Achievement Award to Madeleine L’Engle.
The 1997 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on June 21, were: Best Novel, The Green Mile, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, Crota, by Owl Goingback; Best Collection, The Nightmare Factory, by Thomas Ligotti; Best Long Fiction, “The Red Tower,” by Thomas Ligotti; Best Short Story, “Metalica,” by P. D. Cacek; plus a Life Achievement Award to Ira Levin and to Forrest J. Ackerman.
The 1996 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Fairyland, by Paul J. McAuley.
The 1996 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” by Nancy Kress.
The 1996 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter.
The 1996 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh.
The 1996 James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell and “Mountain Ways,” by Ursula K. Le Guin (tie), plus a Special Award to Angela Carter.
Dead in 1997 or early 1998 were: Judith Merril, 74, writer, critic, and anthologist, author of The Tomorrow People and the famous story “That Only a Mother,” best known for her long-running and extremely influential series of Best of the Year anthologies, which helped shape literary tastes in the field from the early ’50s all the way to the late ’60s; William Rotsler, 71, author and artist, Nebula and Hugo-winner, best known as a writer for the novel Patron of the Arts, best known as an artist for the inexhaustible flood of fannish cartoons, donated for free, that filled the genre’s fanzines and semiprozines for more than thirty years; George Turner, 80, prominent Australian SF author and critic, sometimes known as “the Grandmaster of Australian Science Fiction,” winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, author of such well-known novels as The Drowning Towers, Beloved Son, Genetic Soldier, and The Destiny Makers; William S. Burroughs, 83, experimental novelist of the Beat Generation whose novels such as Nova Express, Naked Lunch, and The Ticket That Exploded were enormously influential both on the New Wave authors of the ’60s such as J. G. Ballad and on the later cyberpunk authors of the ’80s such as William Gibson, as well as in the artistic community at large; Sam Moskowitz, 76, SF historian, scholar, and anthologist, as well as an early SF convention fan and organizer, best known for his history of the early days of SF fandom, The Immortal Storm, as well as for his pioneering collections of biographical pieces about SF authors, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction and Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science
Fiction; Donald R. Bensen, 70, editor and anthologist, one-time SF editor at Pyramid, Ballantine, and Dell, editor of two of the most important early fantasy anthologies, The Unknown and The Unknown Five, and who, for those anthologies as well as the long out-of-print fantasy work by writers such as L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and many others, that he brought back into print as Pyramid editor at a time when almost no fantasy work was being published elsewhere, can be seen as one of the unsung and forgotten progenitors of the whole modern fantasy revival; G. Harry Stine, 69, longtime science columnist for Analog and an engineer who had worked on missile programs at White Sands Proving Grounds, author of nonfiction books such as The Third Industrial Revolution and Living in Space, and who also wrote SF as Lec Correy; H. B. Fyfe, 80, veteran author who wrote mostly for Astounding, author of the classic story “Moonwalk,” and many others; Charles V. De Vet, 85, veteran SF writer, best known as the author of the novel Second Game; Donald I. Fine, 75, publisher, founder of Arbor House and Donald I. Fine Books; Kathy Keeton, 58, publisher and editor, founder of the highly influential Omni magazine; Carl Jacobi, 89, veteran pulp writer; Amos Tutola, 77, Nigerian writer whose work drew upon Yoruba folktales, best-known for the book The Palm-Wine Drinkard; Kathy Acker, 49?, performance artist and experimental writer, another strong influence on the cyberpunks as well as on writers such as Lucius Shepard and others; Martin Caidin, 69, thriller writer and occasional SF writer, author of The Long Night and Almost Midnight, best-known for the space thriller Marooned; Mervyn Wall, 88, Irish fantasy writer, author of The Unfortunate Fursey; Owen Barfield, 99, writer, member of the Oxford writers group The Inklings, which included J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis; Elisabeth Gille, 59, French publisher, translator, and writer; William Rushton, 59, British humorist and SF writer; H. R. Percy, 76, Canadian SF writer; Andres Donatovich Sinyavskij, 71, Russian SF writer and critic; Vsevolod Aleksandrovich Revich, 69, Russian SF writer and critic; Tong Enzhong, 62, Chinese SF writer; Alan Harrington, 78, author of The Immortalist; Daniel P. Mannix, 85, author of the children’s fantasy The Secret of the Elms; Caroline MacDonald, 48, New Zealand-born author of young-adult fantasy and SF; Mike Baker, 31, horror writer and editor; Lou Stathis, 44, editor, writer, journalist, and critic, former associate editor of Heavy Metal magazine; Terry Nation, 66, British scriptwriter, best known for creating the race of archvillains, the Daleks, on the British TV show Dr. Who; Clyde Tombaugh, 90, well-known astronomer, discoverer of the planet Pluto; James Stewart, 89, world-famous film actor, whose many movies included roles in three well-known fantasy films, Harvey, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Bell, Book, and Candle; Burgess Meredith, 88, film and television actor, perhaps best known to genre audiences for his role as The Penguin on the mid-’60s Batman TV series; Paul Edwin Zimmer, 54, author, brother of SF and fantasy writer Marion Zimmer Bradley; Brian Burgess, longtime British fan; Phil Rogers, 72, longtime British fan and organizer; Tom Perry, well-known fan and SF researcher; Ted Pauls, 54, fanzine editor, book dealer, and longtime convention fan; Seth Goldberg, 44, fanzine and convention fan; Billie Lindsay Madle, 78, wife of long-time fan and SF scholar Robert A. Madle; Ingrid Zieruhut, 64, longtime friend and business
partner of SF writer Andre Norton; Erin Louisa Card, newborn daughter of SF writer Orson Scott Card; Ruth Eisen Ferman, 88, widow of former F&SF publisher Joseph W. Ferman and mother of current F&SF publisher Edward L. Ferman; Peter Joseph Stampfel II, 84, father of SF editor Peter Stampfel; Jean Brust, 76, mother of SF and fantasy writer Steven Brust; Margaret Aldiss, 64, wife of SF writer Brian Aldiss, and Dorothy Dozois, 82, mother of SF editor Gardner Dozois.