summation: 2014

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work may no longer be active.

 

It was a relatively quiet year in the SF publishing world. The big story, rumbling in the background throughout most of the year, was the battle between online retailer Amazon and publisher Hachette Book Group over the pricing of e-books, which got very public and very nasty, and drew authors and author organizations into it on one side or the other before the dispute was finally settled on November 13. Amazon also finally settled similar disputes with publishers Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.

Digital books, e-books, and physical print books continued to coexist, without either driving the other out of the marketplace, as some commentators have been predicting either gloomily or gleefully (depending on what side they were on; some digital enthusiasts have seemed downright happy about the idea that e-books were going to drive print books into extinction) for several years now. Instead, some kind of equilibrium seems to be being reached, with many readers buying both e-books and print books, choosing one format or the other to purchase depending on their needs and the circumstances; some readers even buy both e-book and print editions of the same title, something that almost nobody saw coming. Nor have online sellers like Amazon driven physical brick-and-mortar bookstores out of existence, another frequently heard prophecy during the last few years—a study released by Nielsen Market Research indicates that most books are still purchased in physical stores, especially chain stores, with online retailers accounting for just 41 percent of all new book sales. Physical brick-and-mortar bookstores also remain an important part of the process whereby readers discover new titles they’d like to purchase, with 12 percent of buyers surveyed saying that they learned about particular titles from seeing bookstore displays (another 10 percent heard about books via word of mouth, while 8 percent found books by browsing online).

Mass-market paperbacks were the sector hardest hit by the advent of e-books, but even they haven’t been driven into extinction; although sales of mass-market paperbacks dropped by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2013, the decline slowed to only 11 percent from 2013 to 2014, with sales actually remaining flat in some week-to-week comparisons, so it looks as if the mass-market sector is stabilizing, and probably will not be driven off the shelves, as some feared it would be. There are still plenty of people who prefer the inexpensive, easy-to-carry format, especially those who don’t read e-books.

Although nobody can deny that ebooks have become an important part of the market, and will remain so, print isn’t dead yet—nor is it likely to die, in my opinion.

Perhaps the most encouraging news of the year comes from a new Pew survey which shows that Americans in the sixteen to twenty-nine age group are reading more than older Americans. The report reveals that 88 percent of Americans under thirty read at least one book in the past year, compared to 79 percent for those over thirty. Younger teens read the most, with 46 percent of those aged sixteen to seventeen reporting that they read books (in both print and digital formats) on a daily basis. Compared to 40 percent of readers above age thirty, 43 percent of those eighteen to nineteen report reading books daily.

No information is available for non-Americans, but I’m willing to bet that those results are duplicated if not surpassed in many if not most other countries. So it turns out that the prophecy that the Internet was going to destroy literacy and the assertion that kids aren’t interested in reading anymore has been pretty much disproved as well (although the immense sales of the Harry Potter books should have disproved it a long time ago); if anything, widespread use of the Internet and easy availability of books (in all formats) in places where they were hard to find before seems to have increased literacy, and it looks like more people of all ages are reading more than they ever have before. That can only be hopeful news for those of us who work in the literary world, or for anybody who loves books and reading, for that matter.

In other news: Tor Books formed new SF imprint Tor.com, with Lee Harris, former editor of Angry Robot, as senior editor, Fritz Foy as publisher, and Irene Gallo as associate publisher. Simon & Schuster started a new SF imprint, Saga Press. Parent company Osprey Publishing Group discontinued YA imprint Strange Chemistry and crime-mystery imprint Exhibit A, and then sold SF imprint Angry Robot to American entrepreneur Etan Ilfeld. HarperCollins bought romance imprint Harlequin. Hodder & Stoughton bought Quercus, the independent UK publisher that includes SF/fantasy imprint Jo Fletcher Books. Open Road Integrated Media acquired e-publisher E-Reads. Lou Anders stepped down as editorial director and art director of Pyr, being replaced by Rene Sears. Paul Stevens left Tor and joined Quirk Books as an acquisitions editor. Gillian Redfearn was promoted to publishing director of Gollancz, with Jon Wood becoming managing director as well as Orion Group publisher. Sarah Shumway joined Bloomsbury Children’s Books as a senior editor. Jonathan Jao joined HarperCollins as vice-president and executive editor. Michael P. Huseby was named chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Vanessa Mobley was made executive editor at Little, Brown. Suzanne Donahue left her position as vice-president and associate publisher at Simon & Schuster.

After years of sometimes precipitous decline, it was another fairly stable year in the professional magazine market. Sales of electronic subscriptions to the magazines are continuing to creep up, as well as sales of individual electronic copies of each issue, and this is making a big difference to profitability.

Asimov’s Science Fiction had a somewhat weaker year than it had the year before, but still published good work by Allen M. Steele, Karl Bunker, Robert Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Derek Kunsken, Gord Sellar, Kara Dalkey, Jay O’Connell, Tim Sullivan, and others. As usual, their SF was considerably stronger than their fantasy, the reverse of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 12.5 percent loss in overall circulation, down to 20, 282 from 2013’s 23,192. Subscriptions were 17,987, down from 20,327; of that total, 9,347 were print subscriptions, while 8,640 were digital subscriptions, almost half the total, which shows how important digital subscriptions have become to these magazines. Newsstand sales were down to 2,295 copies from 2013’s 2,385. Sell-through fell from 39 percent to 35 percent. Sheila Williams completed her eleventh year as Asimov’s editor.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact had good work (and some of it somewhat atypical stuff for Analog; it’s encouraging to see new editor Trevor Quachri being bold enough to set his stamp on a long-running magazine). Lavie Tidhar, Timons Esaias, Michael F. Flynn, Alec Nevala-Lee, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Tony Ballantyne, Ken Liu, Craig DeLancey, C. W. Johnson, David D. Levine, and others all published good work. Analog registered a 9.3 percent loss in overall circulation, down to 24,709 from 2013’s 27,248. There were 21,456 subscriptions, down slightly from 2013’s 23,630; of this total, 15,282 were print subscriptions, while 6,174 were digital subscriptions. Newsstand sales were up slightly to 3,253 from 2013’s 3,235. Sell-through held steady at 41 percent. New editor Trevor Quachri completed his first full year as editor and 2014 marked the magazine’s eighty-fourth anniversary.

Once again, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was almost exactly the reverse of Asimov’s, with the fantasy published there being stronger than the science fiction—which there wasn’t a lot of this year. F&SF also had a weaker year than last year, but still published good work by Jérôme Cigut, Pavel Amnuel, Matthew Hughes, Robert Reed, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Paul M. Berger, Alex Irvine, Sandra McDonald, and others. F&SF registered a welcome 10.3 rise in overall circulation from 10,678 to 11,910. Subscriptions rose from 7,762 to 8,994; digital sales figures were not available. Newsstand sales stayed steady at 2,916. Sell-through rose from 23 percent to 28 percent. Gordon Van Gelder was in his eighteenth year as editor, and fourteenth year as owner and publisher in 2014. In early 2015, it was announced that writer Charles Coleman Finlay was taking over as F&SF’s active acquisitions editor, starting with the March/April 2015 issue. Van Gelder remains as publisher.

Interzone is technically not a “professional magazine,” by the definition of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), because of its low rates and circulation, but the literary quality of the work published there is so high that it would be ludicrous to omit it. Interzone was also a bit weaker this year than last year, but still published good work by D. J. Cockburn, Malcolm Devlin, James Van Pelt, Karl Bunker, John Grant, Suzanne Palmer, Gareth L. Powell, and others. Exact circulation figures are not available, but is guessed to be in the 2,000 copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but of a similar level of professional quality. Interzone and Black Static changed to a smaller trim size in 2011, but maintained their slick look, switching from the old 7 ¾"-by-10 ¾" saddle-stitched semigloss color cover sixty-four-page format to a 6 ½"-by-9 ¼" perfect-bound glossy color cover ninety-six-page format. The editors include publisher Andy Cox and Andrew Hedgecock.

If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, something that these days can be done with just the click of a few buttons, nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Amazon (www.amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible.

So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do, and there’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y., 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y., 10007-2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, N.J., 07030, annual subscription—$34.97 in the U.S, $44.97 overseas. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, 42.00 Pounds Sterling each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of 78.00 Pounds Sterling for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press.”

Most of these magazines are also available in various electronic formats through the Kindle, Nook, and other handheld readers.

*   *   *

There’s not a whole lot left of the print semiprozine market, although it may be a good sign that hopeful newcomers continue to appear.

One of these hopeful newcomers is a new SF magazine (available both in electronic formats and print copies), Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, which launched in 2013 and completed its first full year of publication in 2014. So far, the reprints, by people such as Nancy Kress, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Kij Johnson, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, of which there are four in every issue, have been stronger than the original stories, but there has been interesting work by Tobias S. Buckell, Lisa Tang Liu and Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, Tina Gower, Lou J. Berger, and others. A print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue.

Most of the older print semiprozines had trouble bringing out their scheduled issues, a common problem in that market. The Canadian On Spec, the longest-running of all the print fiction semiprozines, which is edited by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, only brought out three out of four published issues, and is reported to be thinking of switching to a digital online format. Another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, managed only two issues this year. There were two issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, in 2014, and two of Ireland’s long-running Albedo One. Space and Time Magazine managed three issues, and Flytrap and Neo-opsis managed one. We didn’t see an issue of the small British SF magazine Jupiter this year. Tales of the Talisman is going “on hiatus,” as are Science Fiction Trails and Steampunk Trails. Shimmer has transitioned to an online digital format, and long-running Australian semiprozine Aurealis has transitioned to a downloadable format. I saw nothing from the revamped version of Weird Tales this year, and suspect that it has died. Bull Spec has transitioned to digital format, and is no longer publishing fiction.

Most of the stuff published in the surviving print semiprozines this year was relatively minor, with better work appearing in the online magazines (see below).

With the departure of The New York Review of Science Fiction to the electronic world in mid-2012, there’s really little left of popular print critical magazine market, except for the venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, now in its forty-eighth year of publication. A multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensible source of news, information, and reviews, Locus survived the death of founder, publisher, and longtime editor Charles N. Brown and has continued strongly and successfully under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Jonathan Strahan, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, and many others.

One of the few other remaining popular critical print magazines is newcomer The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Nisi Shawl, a new feminist print magazine of reviews and critical essays, which published four issues in 2014. The most accessible of the other surviving print critical magazines—most of which are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader—is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation.

Subscription addresses are: Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $76.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; Foundation, Science Fiction Foundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in the U.S.A.; On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to Web site www.onspec.ca; Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $25.00 for a three-issue subscription; Albedo One, Albedo One Productions, 2, Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland, $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One” or pay by PayPal at www.albedo1.com; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, see Web site www.andromedaspaceways.com for subscription information; The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, subscription and single issues online at www.thecsz.com, $16 annually for a print subscription, print single issues $5, Electronic Subscription—PDF format—$10 per year, electronic single issue, $3, to order by check, make them payable to Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787.

*   *   *

The world of online-only electronic magazines now rivals the traditional print market as a place to find good new fiction—in fact, this year, your chances of finding good stories were probably a bit higher in the e-zine market than in the print market.

Subterranean Magazine (subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, is going out on a very strong year that featured good work by K. J. Parker, Rachel Swirsky, Chaz Brenchley, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kat Howard, Eleanor Arnason, Ellen Klages, Karen Joy Fowler, and others. I regret Schafer’s decision to close up shop to concentrate on his Subterranean book line, as the loss of Subterranean Magazine leaves a real hole in the genre market—especially as it was one of the few online markets that was willing to publish novellas and long novelettes. (Oddly, since they don’t have the practical word-length limitations that affect print magazines, little is published in the majority of electronic magazines that isn’t short story length or shorter. In the whole rest of the market, only Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies will occasionally publish novellas.)

The electronic magazine Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace also had a good year, publishing strong work by Michael Swanwick, Ken Liu, Susan Palwick, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Robert Reed, An Owomoyela, James Patrick Kelly, and others. They also host monthly podcasts of stories drawn from each issue. Clarkesworld has won three Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine. Last year, Clarkesworld coeditor Sean Wallace, along with Jack Fisher, launched a new online horror magazine, The Dark (thedarkmagazine.com).

Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, featured strong work by Carrie Vaughn, Matthew Hughes, Jessica Barber, Anaea Lay, Theodora Goss, Sunny Moraine, Sarah Pinsker, An Owomoyela, Rhonda Eikamp, Kris Millering, Linda Nagata, and others. Lightspeed won its first Hugo Award as Best Semiprozine this year. Late in 2013, a new electronic companion horror magazine, Nightmare (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by John Joseph Adams, was added to the Lightspeed stable.

Tor.com (www.tor.com), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published some first-class work by Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, Elizabeth Bear, Nicola Griffith, Jo Walton, Harry Turtledove, Bruce McAllister, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Veronica Schanoes, and others.

Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the Internet, started in 2000, had a change of editorial staff this year. Longtime editors Jed Hartman and Susan Marie Groppi stepped down in 2013; the new editor-in-chief there is Niall Harrison, with Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and An Owomoyela as fiction editors. This year, they had strong work by Indrapramit Das, Marissa Lingen, Rich Larson, Ann Leckie, Sunny Moraine, Malcolm Cross, Alyssa Wong, Sarah Brooks, and others.

Longtime print semiprozine Electric Velocipede, edited by John Klima, which had transitioned to online-only format, finally gave up the ghost late in 2013. There is a retrospective anthology this year, drawn from work published in the magazine, The Best of Electric Velocipede (Fairwood Press).

Apex Magazine (www.apex-magazine.com) had good work by Rich Larson, Marissa Lingen, Seth Dickinson, Caroline M. Yoachim, Sunny Moraine, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, replacing Sigrid Ellis, who took over from Lynne M. Thomas.

Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by Rich Larson, Fran Wilde, John C. Wright, Rati Mehrotra, and others. New editor Carmelo Rafala stepped down to be replaced by the former longtime editor, Wendy S. Delmater, who returned to the helm.

An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, ran good stuff by K. J. Parker, Richard Parks, Aliette de Bodard, Gregory Norman Bossert, Gemma Files, M. Bennardo, and others.

Long-running sword and sorcery print magazine Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill, transitioned into an electronic magazine in September of 2012 and can be found at www.blackgate.com. They no longer regularly run new fiction, although they will be regularly refreshing their nonfiction content, essays and reviews, and the occasional story will continue to appear.

The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos (www.cosmosmagazine.com) is not an SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their Web site). They seem to have published less fiction this year than before, but good stuff by Ken Liu, Sean Williams, Greg Mellor, and others appeared there this year. The fiction editor is SF writer Cat Sparks.

Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF, by Arkady Martine, Michael J. DeLuca, Maya Surya Pillay, and others.

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, ran interesting stuff from Alex Shvartsman, James Van Pelt, Bud Webster, Gareth D. Jones, and others.

SF/fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, many of these were not really up to professional standards, but there were some good stories here and there by Ken Liu, Eric Brown, James Van Pelt, Edoardo Albert, Marissa Lingen, Kelly Jennings, M. Bennardo, Anatoly Belilovsky, and others. Editors there are Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), now edited by Rashida J. Smith, taking over from Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Patricia Russo, A. C. Wise, Vanessa Fogg, Rachel Sobel, and others.

An audacious newcomer is Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, which launched in late 2014 with good work by Christopher Barzak, Amelia Beamer, Ken Liu, and others. Other newcomers are Straeon 1 (www.rampantloonmedia.com), edited by M. David Blake, Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform), edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant, Child of Words (www.bigpulp.com), edited by Bill Olver, and Omenana (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Mazi Nwonwu, as well as relative newcomers Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, Shimmer (www.shimmerzine.com), edited by Beth Wodzinski, which transitioned to digital format in 2014, and Crossed Genres (www.crossedgenres.com), edited by Bart R. Leib, Kay T. Holt, and Kelly Jennings.

The World SF Blog (worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, was a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also published news, links, roundtable discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.” The site is no longer being updated, but an extensive archive is still accessible there.

A similar site is International Speculative Fiction (internationalSF.wordpress.com), edited by Roberto Mendes.

Weird Fiction Review (weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

The (sort of) relaunch of Amazing Stories (amazingstoriesmag.com), edited by Steve Davidson, seems to be mostly a multicontributor blog, publishing reviews, interviews, and essays, but fiction only occasionally.

Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, with most magazines featuring slipstream or literary surrealism instead. Such sites include Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com), Fireside Magazine (www.firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White, Interfictions Online (interfictions.com), edited by Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron, and Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (www.newworlds.co.uk), edited by Roger Gray.

But in addition to original work, there’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy to be found on Internet. Sites where you can access formerly published stories for free include Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, and most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites as well, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), and a large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus (www.infinityplus.co.uk) and The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible (an extensive line of new Infinity Plus Books can also be ordered from the Infinity Plus site).

There are plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet, though, other than looking for SF stories to read. There are many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, where you can access an incredible amount of information—including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. The previously mentioned Tor.com is also one of the most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that, in addition to its fiction, regularly publishes articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, book “rereads” and episode-by-episode “rewatches” of television shows, as well as commentary on all the above. The long-running and eclectic The New York Review of Science Fiction has ceased print publication, but can be purchased in PDF, epub, mobi formats, and POD editions through Weightless Press (weightlessbooks.com; see also www.nyrsf.com for information). Other major general-interest sites include io9 (www.io9.com), SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com), SF Site (www.sfsite.com), although it’s no longer being regularly updated, SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.org.uk), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), The Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (www.bookotron.com/agony), SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (sfreader.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com). A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk). Another fantastic research site is the searchable online update of the Hugo-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sf-encyclopedia.com), where you can access almost four million words of information about SF writers, books, magazines, and genre themes. Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus and Locus Online, but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf.net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online (www.tangentonline.com). Other sites of interest include: Ansible (news.ansible.co.uk), the online version of multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Book View Café (www.bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors,” including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zettel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a Web site where work by them—mostly reprints, and some novel excerpts—is made available for free.

Sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed have also proliferated in recent years: at Audible (www.audible.com), Escape Pod (escapepod.org, podcasting mostly SF), SF Squeecast (sfsqueecast.com), The Coode Street Podcast (jonathanstrahan.podbean.com), The Drabblecast (www.drabblecast.org), StarShipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com), FarFetchedFables (www.farfetchedfables.com), new companion to StarShipSofa, concentrating on fantasy, SF Signal Podcast (www.sfsignal.com), Pseudopod (pseudopod.org), podcasting mostly fantasy, Podcastle (podcastle.org), podcasting mostly fantasy, and Galactic Suburbia (galacticsuburbia.podbean.com). Clarkesworld routinely offers podcasts of stories from the e-zine, and The Agony Column also hosts a weekly podcast. There’s also a site that podcasts nonfiction interviews and reviews, Dragon Page Cover to Cover (www.dragonpage.com).

*   *   *

2014 wasn’t a really strong year for short fiction overall—although, as usual, so much of it is now published in so many different mediums, from print to electronic to audiobooks, that it wasn’t hard to find a lot of good material to read if you looked around for it a bit.

This year, the best short SF was probably to be found in the original SF anthologies, of which there were several good ones available in 2014. The best of these were probably Reach for Infinity (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan—which featured strong work by Ian McDonald, Aliette de Bodard, Karl Schroeder, Ellen Klages, Alastair Reynolds, Pat Cadigan, and others—and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (Arizona State University), edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, which featured first-rate stuff by Cory Doctorow, Vandana Singh, Elizabeth Bear, Geoffrey A. Landis, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and others; Hieroglyph also features nonfiction essays and commentary on the stories by the authors as well as the fiction, and links to places on the Center for Science and the Imagination Web site (csi.asu.edu) where you can read extended discussions of the subject matter of the stories (and evaluations of its feasibility) by SF writers, scientists, engineers, and futurologists.

A step down from the top two, but still loaded with good material, were Upgraded (Wyrm Publishing), a cyborg anthology edited by Neil Clarke, and Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (Solaris), edited by Ian Whates. Upgraded featured good stories by Ken Liu, Peter Watts, Rich Larson, Elizabeth Bear, Greg Egan, and others, while Solaris Rising 3 had strong work by Aliette de Bodard, Adam Roberts, Gareth L. Powell, Chris Beckett, and others.

Coming in just under the top anthologies was Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Technology Review), edited by Bruce Sterling, which featured strong work by Lauren Beukes, Paul Graham Raven, William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Pat Cadigan, Warren Ellis, and others.

Also worthwhile, although not as strong overall as the anthologies listed above, were Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology’s Future (IEEE Spectrum), an e-book anthology edited by Stephen Cass, which featured a strong story by Greg Egan; War Stories: New Military Science Fiction (Apex Publications), edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, with good work by Ken Liu, Rich Larson, James L. Cambias, Linda Nagata, Yoon Ha Lee, Karin Lowachee, Keith Brooke, and others; The End Is Nigh (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), the first in an anthology trilogy of apocalyptic stories edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, with good work by Paolo Bacigalupi, Tananarive Due, Nancy Kress, Ken Liu, and others; The End Is Now (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), again edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, the sequel to The End Is Nigh, which also contains good work by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Langan, and others, although having the same authors do sequels to their stories in the previous volume may not have been the best idea, and produces a somewhat weaker book; and Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction (Tor), edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi, with good work by Aliette de Bodard, Jean-Louis Trudel, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Nancy Fulda, and others. Postscripts 32/33: Far Voyager (PS Publishing), edited by Nick Gevers, was not so much an SF anthology as a slipstream/fantasy/soft horror anthology with an occasional SF story in it, but they were good ones by Michael Swanwick, Ian Sales, Robert Reed, and others, with good non-SF work by Richard Calder, Paul Park, Andrew Hook, Angela Slatter, and others. Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox (NewCon Press), edited by Ian Whates, somewhat oddly didn’t feature many stories offering ingenious explanations of the Fermi paradox, but did feature solid work by David L. Clements, Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, Tricia Sullivan, Robert Reed, Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, Mercurio D. Rivera, and others. There were a number of anthologies from Fiction River, which last year launched a continuing series of original SF and fantasy anthologies, with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith as overall series editors, and individual editions edited by various hands; the best SF one this year was probably Moonscapes (Fiction River), edited by Dean Wesley Smith, but Universe Between (Fiction River), was also worth a look.

In addition to a cyborg anthology, there were two anthologies about robots, Robot Uprisings (Vintage), edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, and Bless Your Mechanical Heart (Evil Girlfriend Media), edited by Jennifer Brozek. Kaleidoscope (Twelfth Planet Press), edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios, was an anthology of YA SF stories, with an emphasis on cultural diversity.

Noted without comment is a big crossover anthology, Rogues, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

There were three tribute anthologies to the work of individual SF/fantasy authors: The Book of Silverberg (Subterranean Press), edited by Gardner Dozois and William K. Schafer; Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds (Subterranean Press), edited by Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois; and The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (Word Horde), edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele.

The best fantasy anthology of the year was Fearsome Magics: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy (Solaris) edited by Jonathan Strahan, the second time Strahan has pulled off the trick of having both the best SF anthology and the best fantasy anthology in the same year; Fearsome Magics featured strong work by K. J. Parker, Garth Nix, Justina Robson, Ellen Klages, Karin Tidbeck, and others. Another strong fantasy anthology was Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales (Candlewick Press), edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, with good stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Nalo Hopkinson, Holly Black, Kelly Link herself, and others. Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West (Titan Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, contains strong work by Elizabeth Bear, Ken Liu, Joe R. Lansdale, Alastair Reynolds, Tad Williams, Jeffrey Ford, Walter Jon Williams, and others.

Other original fantasy anthologies included Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic (Fantastic Books), edited by David Sklar and Sarah Avery; Fantastic Detectives (Fiction River), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and Fantasy for Good: A Charitable Anthology (Nightscape Press), edited by Jordan Ellinger and Richard Salter.

Hard to classify anthologies included The Mammoth Book of Gaslit Romance (Running Press), edited by Ekaterina Sedia; and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (Crossed Genres), edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, which featured stories set in historical periods between 1400 and the early 1900s.

The year’s prominent original horror anthologies included Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Horror (ChiZine Publications), edited by Ellen Datlow; Nightmare Carnival (Dark Horse), edited by Ellen Datlow; Games Creatures Play (Ace), edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner; The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Titan Books), edited by S. T. Joshi; Letters to Lovecraft: Eighteen Whispers to the Darkness (Stone Skin), edited by Jesse Bullington; Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic (Fedogan & Bremer), edited by S. T. Joshi; Shadows and Tall Trees, Volume 6 (ChiZine Publications), edited by Michael Kelly; and Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction (Prime Books), a mixed original and reprint anthology edited by Steve Berman. Dangerous Games (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Oliver, straddles the line between SF and horror.

Shared world anthologies included Lowball: A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel (Tor), edited by George R. R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass; No True Way (DAW), edited by Mercedes Lackey; Doctor Who: 11 Doctors, 11 Stories (Puffin), edited by the BBC; and Dead But Not Forgotten (Ace), edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner, an anthology of stories set in the world of Sookie Stackhouse.

Anthologies that provided an overview of what’s happening in fantastic literature in other countries included The Apex Book of World SF 3 (Apex Publications), edited by Lavie Tidhar, and Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan (Haikasoru), edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 30 (Galaxy Press), edited by Dave Wolverton, is the most recent in a long-running series featuring novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.

One interesting thing about this year’s short fiction is that it was easy to see SF’s new consensus future solidifying in dozens of stories from different anthologies and magazines: a linked-in, hooked-up continuous surveillance society, profoundly shaped by social media and the Internet, set in a world radically altered by climate change (but one where it hasn’t gone to civilization-destroying lengths), featuring autonomous drones, bioengineering, cybernetic implants, cyborgs of one degree or another of extremeness, wearable computers, the manipulation of emotions and memory (sometimes by external means), AIs, renewable energy, in which 3-D printing is being used to produce almost everything. Sometimes it features space travel, in which case near Earth space and the nearest reaches of the solar system are busy with human traffic and habitation, sometimes it doesn’t. Not that different, really from the cyberpunk future of the eighties, except for the increased emphasis on radical climate change and 3-D printing.

Ken Liu was easily the most prolific author at short lengths this year, being given a run for his money by Aliette de Bodard, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Lavie Tidhar, Rich Larson, and the always-ubiquitous Robert Reed.

(Finding individual pricings for all of the items from small presses mentioned in the Summation has become too time-intensive, and since several of the same small presses publish anthologies, novels, and short-story collections, it seems silly to repeat addresses for them in section after section. Therefore, I’m going to attempt to list here, in one place, all the addresses for small presses that have books mentioned here or there in the Summation, whether from the anthologies section, the novel section, or the short-story collection section, and, where known, their Web site addresses. That should make it easy enough for the reader to look up the individual price of any book mentioned that isn’t from a regular trade publisher; such books are less likely to be found in your average bookstore, or even in a chain superstore, and so will probably have to be mail-ordered. Many publishers seem to sell only online, through their Web sites, and some will only accept payment through PayPal. Many books, even from some of the smaller presses, are also available through Amazon.com. If you can’t find an address for a publisher, and it’s quite likely that I’ve missed some here, or failed to update them successfully, Google it. It shouldn’t be that difficult these days to find up-to-date contact information for almost any publisher, however small.)

Addresses: PS Publishing, Grosvener House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, West Yorkshire, HU18 1PG, England, UK, www.pspublishing.co.uk; Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802, www.goldengryphon.com; NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701–0809, www.nesfa.org; Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519, www.subterraneanpress.com; Old Earth Books, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211–0951, www.oldearthbooks.com; Tachyon Press, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107, www.tachyonpublications.com; Night Shade Books, 1470 NW Saltzman Road, Portland, OR 97229, www.nightshadebooks.com; Five Star Books, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901, www.galegroup.com/fivestar; NewCon Press, via www.newconpress.com; Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060, www.smallbeerpress.com; Locus Press, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661; Crescent Books, Mercat Press Ltd., 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, Scotland EH3 7AL, UK, www.crescentfiction.com; Wildside Press/Borgo Press, P.O. Box 301, Holicong, PA 18928–0301, or go to www.wildsidepress.com for pricing and ordering; Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc. and Tesseract Books, Ltd., P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada, www.edgewebsite.com; Aqueduct Press, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145–2787, www.aqueductpress.com; Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, www.phobosweb.com; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092, www.fairwoodpress.com; BenBella Books, 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 508, Dallas, TX 75206, www.benbellabooks.com; Darkside Press, 13320 27th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98125, www.darksidepress.com; Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, Royal Oak, MI 48073–1239, www.haffnerpress.com; North Atlantic Press, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701; Prime Books, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH 44735, www.primebooks.net; MonkeyBrain Books, 11204 Crossland Drive, Austin, TX 78726, www.monkeybrainbooks.com; Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, Order Dept., 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon NH 03766–1405, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress; Agog! Press, P.O. Box U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Austrailia, www.uow.ed.au/~rhood/agogpress; Wheatland Press, via www.wheatlandpress.com; MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia, www.tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse; Arsenal Pulp Press, 103–1014 Homer Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 2W9, www.arsenalpulp.com; DreamHaven Books, 912 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408; Elder Signs Press/Dimensions Books, order through www.dimensionsbooks.com; Chaosium, via www.chaosium.com; Spyre Books, P.O. Box 3005, Radford, VA 24143; SCIFI, Inc., P.O. Box 8442, Van Nuys, CA 91409–8442; Omnidawn Publishing, order through www.omnidawn.com; CSFG, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, via www.csfg.org.au/publishing/anthologies/the_outcast; Hadley Rille Books, via www.hrbpress.com/; Suddenly Press, via suddenlypress@yahoo.com; Sandstone Press, P.O. Box 5725, One High St., Dingwall, Ross-shire UK, IV15 9UG, http://sandstonepress.com; Tropism Press, via www.tropismpress.com; SF Poetry Association/Dark Regions Press, www.sfpoetry.com, send checks to Helena Bell, SFPA Treasurer, 1225 West Freeman St., Apt. 12, Carbondale, IL 62401; DH Press, via diamondbookdistributors.com; Kurodahan Press, via www.kurodahan.com; Ramble House, 443 Gladstone Blvd., Shreveport LA 71104; Interstitial Arts Foundation, via www.interstitialarts.org; Raw Dog Screaming, via www.rawdogscreaming.com; Three Legged Fox Books, 98 Hythe Road, Brighton, BN1 6JS, UK; Norilana Books, via www.norilana.com; coeur de lion, via http://coeurdelion.com.au; PARSECink, via www.parsecink.org; Robert J. Sawyer Books, via www.sfwriter.com/rjsbooks.htm; Rackstraw Press, via http://rackstrawpress; Candlewick, via www.candlewick.com; Zubaan, via www.zubaanbooks.com; Utter Tower, via www.threeleggedfox.co.uk; Spilt Milk Press, via www.electricvelocipede.com; Paper Golem, via www.papergolem.com; Galaxy Press, via www.galaxypress.com; Twelfth Planet Press, via www.twelfthplanetpress.com; Five Senses Press, via www.sensefive.com; Elastic Press, via www.elasticpress.com; Lethe Press, via www.lethepressbooks.com; Two Cranes Press, via www.twocranespress.com; Wordcraft of Oregon, via www.wordcraftoforegon.com; Down East, via www.downeast.com; ISFiC Press, 456 Douglas Ave., Elgin, IL 60120 or www.isficpress.com.

*   *   *

According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,459 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2014, down 7 percent from 2,643 titles in 2013. Overall new titles were down 5 percent to 1,750 from 2013’s 1,850, while reprints dropped 11 percent to 709 from 2013’s 793. Hardcover sales fell by 2 percent to 799 from 2013’s 819, while the number of trade paperbacks declined by 10 percent to 1,149 from 2013’s 1,280. The drop in mass-market paperbacks slowed a little, to 6 percent from 2013’s whopping 26 percent drop, going to 511 from 2013’s 544. The number of new SF novels was up to 367 titles from 2013’s 339. The number of new fantasy novels remained steady at 620 titles, same as last year. Horror novels were up slightly to 187 titles from 2013’s 181. Paranormal romances were down substantially to 148 titles from 2013’s 237 titles, leading some to speculate that the high-water mark of the big paranormal romance boom may have passed—although it should be noted that sometimes it’s a subjective call whether a particular novel should be pigeonholed as paranormal romance, fantasy, or horror.

The boom in Young Adult SF novels, especially dystopian and post-apocalyptic SF, slowed a bit, from making up 36 percent of the original SF novels total in 2013 to 31 percent in 2014, so perhaps that area is beginning to cool a bit as well. The 367 original SF novels also include 49 SF first novels, up from last year’s 38, 13 percent of the new SF total, up from last year’s 11 percent of the new SF total, down from 13 percent last year. Fantasy’s 620 original novels include 210 YA novels, down from 2013’s 233, from making up 36 percent of the new fantasy total to making up 34 percent; this includes sixty-three fantasy first novels, up from 2013’s fifty-seven, making up 10 percent of the fantasy total, up from 2013’s 9 percent.

This is still an enormous number of books, in spite of slight declines—far more than the entire combined total of genre titles only a few decades back. And these totals don’t count e-books, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, print-on-demand books, or self-published novels—all of which would swell the overall total by hundreds if counted.

As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2014.

Empress of the Sun (Jo Fletcher Books), by Ian McDonald; The Memory of Sky (Prime Books), by Robert Reed; Work Done for Hire (Ace), by Joe Haldeman; My Real Children (Tor), by Jo Walton; The Martian (Crown Publishers), by Andy Weir; Lockstep (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Cibola Burn (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; Ancillary Sword (Orbit), by Ann Leckie; Peacemaker (DAW), by C. J. Cherryh; Echopraxia (Tor), by Peter Watts; The Causal Angel (Tor), by Hannu Rajaniemi; War Dogs (Orbit), by Greg Bear; Dreams of the Golden Age (Tor), by Carrie Vaughn; Ultima (Orion/Gollancz), by Stephen Baxter; V-S Day (Ace), by Allen Steele; The Three-Body Problem (Tor), by Cixin Liu; A Man Lies Dreaming (Hodder & Stoughton), by Lavie Tidhar; Bête (Orion/Gollancz), by Adam Roberts; Lock In (Tor), by John Scalzi; The Silk Map (Pyr), by Chris Willrich; World of Trouble (Quirk Books), by Ben H. Winters; Written in My Own Heart’s Blood (Delacorte Press), by Diana Gabaldon; The Magician’s Land (Viking), by Lev Grossman; The Peripheral (Penguin/Putnam), by William Gibson; Fool’s Assassin (Ballantine Del Rey), by Robin Hobb; Dark Lightning (Ace), by John Varley; Dreamwalker (DAW), by C. S. Friedman; Ghost Train to New Orleans (Orbit), by Mur Lafferty; Lagoon (Hodder & Stoughton), by Nnedi Okorafor; Descent (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Broken Homes (DAW), by Ben Aaronovitch; Steles of the Sky (Tor), by Elizabeth Bear; Jupiter War (Tor UK), by Neal Asher; Strange Bodies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Marcel Theroux; The Judge of Ages (Tor), by John C. Wright; Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Jeff VanderMeer; Afterparty (Tor), by Daryl Gregory; California Bones (Tor), by Greg van Eekhout; The Rhesus Chart (Ace), by Charles Stross; All Those Vanished Engines (Tor), by Paul Park; Shipstar (Tor), by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven; Raising Steam (Doubleday UK), by Terry Pratchett; Half a King (Ballantine Del Rey), by Joe Abercrombie; The Severed Streets (Tor), by Paul Cornell; The Widow’s House (Orbit), by Daniel Abraham; The Doubt Factory (Little, Brown), by Paolo Bacigalupi; Hurricane Fever (Tor), by Tobias S. Buckell; The Long Mars (HarperCollins), by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter; Skin Game (Penguin/Roc), by Jim Butcher; Sleeping Late on Judgement Day (DAW), by Tad Williams; and Revival (Simon & Schuster), by Stephen King.

Small presses are active in the novel market these days, where once they published mostly collections and anthologies. Novels issued by small presses this year included: Beautiful Blood (Subterranean Press), by Lucius Shepard; The Arrows of Time (Skyhorse/Night Shade), by Greg Egan; One-Eyed Jack (Prime Books), by Elizabeth Bear; The Voyage of the Sable Keech (Skyhorse/Night Shade), by Neal Asher; Polity Agent (Skyhorse/Night Shade), by Neal Asher; The Line of Polity (Skyhorse/Night Shade), by Neal Asher; Hilldiggers (Skyhorse/Night Shade), by Neal Asher; We Are All Completely Fine (Tachyon Publications), by Daryl Gregory; Heirs of Grace (47 North), by Tim Pratt; Our Lady of the Islands (Per Aspera Press), by Shannon Page and Jay Lake; and The Madonna and the Starship (Tachyon Publications), by James Morrow.

Associational novels, non-SF novels by those associated with the field, included Voices from the Street (Orion/Gollancz), by Philip K. Dick; The Broken Bubble (Orion/Gollancz), by Philip K. Dick; Gather Yourselves Together (Orion/Gollancz), by Philip K. Dick; and Chernobyl (Tor), by Frederik Pohl.

The year’s first novels included: The Martian (Crown Publishers), by Andy Weir; Koko Takes a Holiday (Titan Books), by Kieran Shea; Unwrapped Sky (Tor), by Rjurik Davidson; The Ultra Thin Man (Tor), by Patrick Swenson; Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Little, Brown), by David Shafer; The Great Glass Sea (Grave Press), by Josh Weil; A Darkling Sea (Tor), by James L. Cambias; The Forever Watch (St. Martin’s Press), by David Ramirez; The Boost (Tor), by Stephen Baker; Black Moon (Hogarth), by Kenneth Calhoun; The Word Exchange (Doubleday), by Alena Graedon; Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Putnam), by Thomas Sweterlitsch; Barricade (Orion/Gollancz), by Jon Wallace; The Queen of the Tearling (HarperCollins), by Erika Johansen; Free Agent (Ace), by J. C. Nelson; The Quick (Random House), by Lauren Owen; American Craftsmen (Tor), by Tom Doyle; Traitor’s Blade (Jo Fletcher Books), by Sebastien de Castell; The Bees (HarperCollins), by Laline Paull; The Memory Garden (Sourcebooks Landmark), by Mary Rickert; The Waking Engine (Tor), by David Edison; Haxan (ChiZine Publications), by Kenneth Mark Hoover; and Invisible Beasts (Bellevue Literary Press), by Sharona Muir. Of these, by far the most successful, and the only bestseller, was The Martian, by Andy Weir, although Koko Takes a Holiday, by Kieran Shea, Unwrapped Sky, by Rjurik Davidson, and The Memory Garden, by Mary Rickert, got a fair number of reviews as well.

Good novella chapbooks in 2014 included Yesterday’s Kin (Tachyon Publications), by Nancy Kress; Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV (PS Publishing), by Eric Brown; The Ape Man’s Brother (Subterranean Press), by Joe R. Lansdale; The Slow Regard of Silent Things (DAW), by Patrick Rothfuss; Nobody’s Home (Subterranean Press), by Tim Powers; Of Whimsies and Noubles (PS Publishing), by Matthew Hughes; The Deep Woods (PS Publishing), by Tim Pratt; Sleep Donation (Atavist Books), by Karen Russell; Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (Subterranean Press), by John Scalzi; Equoid (Subterranean Press), by Charles Stross; and In the Lovecraft Museum (PS Publishing), by Steve Rasnic Tem.

Orion unleashed an unprecedented flood of novel omnibuses with its SF Gateway program this year, offering unprecedented access to long out-of-print material, including: Gregory Benford SF Gateway Omnibus: Artifact, Cosm, Eater, by Gregory Benford; Barrington J. Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis (two novels and one collection), by Barrington Bayley; John Brunner SF Gateway Omnibus: The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, The Traveller In Black, by John Brunner; Algis Budrys SF Gateway Omnibus: The Iron Thorn, Michaelmas, Hard Landing, by Algis Budrys; Carson of Venus SF Gateway Omnibus: Pirates of Venus, Lost on Venus, Carson of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Pat Cadigan SF Gateway Omnibus: Mindplayers, Fools, Tea from an Empty Cup, by Pat Cadigan; Jack L. Chalker SF Gateway Omnibus: Midnight at the Well of Souls, Spirits of Flux and Anchor, The Identity Matrix, by Jack L. Chalker; Hal Clement SF Gateway Omnibus: Iceworld, Cycle of Fire, Close to Critical, by Hal Clement; D. G. Compton SF Gateway Omnibus: Synthajoy, The Steel Crocodile, Ascendancies, by D. G. Compton; Edmund Cooper SF Gateway Omnibus: The Cloud Walker, All Fools’ Day, A Far Sunset, by Edmund Cooper; Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, A Tapestry of Time, by Richard Cowper; L. Sprague de Camp SF Gateway Omnibus: Lest Darkness Fall, Rogue Queen, The Tritonian Ring, by L. Sprague de Camp; Philip José Farmer SF Gateway Omnibus: The Maker of Universes, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Unreasoning Mask, by Philip José Farmer; Edmond Hamilton SF Gateway Omnibus: Captain Future and the Space Emperor, The Star Kings, The Weapon from Beyond, by Edmond Hamilton; Robert A. Heinlein SF Gateway Omnibus: The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein; Berserker SF Gateway Omnibus: Shadow of the Wolf, The Bull Chief, The Horned Warrior, by Robert Holdstock; Garry Kilworth SF Gateway Omnibus: The Roof of Voyaging, The Princely Flower, Land-of-Mists, by Garry Kilworth; Henry Kuttner SF Gateway Omnibus: Fury, Mutant, The Best of Henry Kuttner, by Henry Kuttner; C. L. Moore SF Gateway Omnibus: Shambleau, Northwest of Earth, Judgement Night, by C. L. Moore; Charles Sheffield SF Gateway Omnibus: Sight of Proteus, Summertide, Cold as Ice, by Charles Sheffield; Clifford D. Simak SF Gateway Omnibus: Time Is the Simplest Thing, Way Station, A Choice of Gods, by Clifford D. Simak; John Sladek SF Gateway Omnibus: The Reproductive System, The Muller-Fokker Effect, Tik-Tok, by John Sladek; Theodore Sturgeon SF Gateway Omnibus: The Dreaming Jewels, To Marry Medusa, Venus Plus X, by Theodore Sturgeon; E. C. Tubb SF Gateway Omnibus: Extra Man, The Space-Born, Fires of Satan, by E. C. Tubb; Jack Williamson SF Gateway Omnibus: The Legion of Space, The Humanoids, Terraforming Earth, Wonder’s Child (three novels and an autobiography), by Jack Williamson; and Connie Willis SF Gateway Omnibus: Lincoln’s Dreams, Passage, by Connie Willis. Other novel omnibuses included The Galactic Center Companion (Lucky Bat Books), by Gregory Benford; Upon a Sea of Stars (Baen Books—two novels and two collections), by A. Bertram Chandler; The Memory of Sky: A Great Ship Trilogy (Prime Books—three novels), by Robert Reed; Votan and Other Novels (Orion/Gollancz), by John James; Tales from the End of Time (Orion/Gollancz—a novel and two collections), by Michael Moorcock; The War Amongst the Angels (Orion/Gollancz—three novels), Elric: The Moonbeam Roads (Orion/Gollancz—three novels), by Michael Moorcock; and Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1976–1985 (Library of America), by Kurt Vonnegut.

Novel omnibuses are also frequently made available through the Science Fiction Book Club.

Not even counting print-on-demand books and the availability of out-of-print books as e-books or as electronic downloads from Internet sources, a lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Here’s some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably impossible:

In addition to the novel omnibuses already mentioned, Orion/Gollancz reissued The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest, Headlong, by Simon Ings, and Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock; Gollancz reissued Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner, A Case of Conscience, by James Blish, and The Phoenix and the Mirror, by Avram Davidson; Tor reissued Star Bridge, by James Gunn and Jack Williamson, Gaudeamus, by John Barnes, and Winter’s Heart and Knife of Dreams, both by Robert Jordon; Tor Teen reissued The Ice Dragon, by George R. R. Martin; Orb reissued Sethra Lavode, by Steven Brust; Baen reissued Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein and Secret of the Stars, by Andre Norton; Skyhorse/Night Shade Books reissued Sung in Blood, by Glen Cook, and Quarantine, Axiomatic, and Permutation City, all by Greg Egan; Subterranean Press reissued The Compleat Crow, by Brian Lumley; Chicago Review reissued Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; Harper Voyager reissued Metrophage, by Richard Kadrey; Roc reissued Science Fiction: 101: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction, by Robert Silverberg; Fairwood Press reissued Count Geiger’s Blues, by Michael Bishop.

Many authors are now reissuing their old back titles as e-books, either through a publisher or all by themselves, so many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all here. Before you conclude that something from an author’s backlist is unavailable, though, check with the Kindle and Nook stores, and with other online vendors.

*   *   *

2014 was a moderately strong year for short-story collections.

The year’s best collections included: Academic Exercises (Subterranean Press), by K. J. Parker; Unexpected Stories (Open Road Media), by Octavia E. Butler; Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection (Tor), by Jay Lake; The Very Best of Tad Williams (Tacyhon), by Tad Williams; Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas (Tachyon), by Bradley Denton; Questionable Practices: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Eileen Gunn; Black Gods Kiss (PS Publishing), by Lavie Tidhar; Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Ysabeau S. Wilce; Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies (Many Worlds Press), by Eleanor Arnason; and The Best of Ian Watson (PS Publishing), by Ian Watson.

Also good were: Tales of the Hidden World (Open Road Media), by Simon R. Green; Death at the Blue Elephant (Ticonderoga Publications), by Janeen Webb; New Frontiers: A Collection of Tales about the Past, the Present, and the Future (Tor), by Ben Bova; Young Woman in a Garden: Stories (Small Beer Press), by Delia Sherman; and Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Stories (Transworld/Doubleday UK), by Terry Pratchett.

Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume 6: A Bicycle Built for Brew (NESFA Press), by Poul Anderson; The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine (Subterranean Press), by Robert Silverberg; The Man Who Made Models: The Collected Short Fiction, Volume One (Centipede Press), by R. A. Lafferty; The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison (Subterranean Press), by Harlan Ellison; Tarzan the Untamed and Other Tales (Orion/Gollancz), by Edgar Rice Burroughs; The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Liveright/Norton) edited by Leslie S. Klinger; The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (Tor), by Frank Herbert; Jerry Cornelius: His Lives and His Times (Orion), by Michael Moorcock; The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (Penguin), by Clark Ashton Smith; and Minding the Stars: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Four (Subterranean Press), by Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. Damon Knight SF Gateway Omnibus: Far Out, In Deep, Off Centre, Turning On, by Damon Knight, is an omnibus of four short-story collections by Knight, making almost his entire output at short lengths available again. The SF Gateway omnibuses by Barrington Bailey, Michael Moorcock, Henry Kuttner, and Robert A. Heinlein also contain collections, as does the A. Bertram Chandler omnibus from Baen Books. There was also a reprint of quintessential retrospective Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Orion/Gollancz), by James Tiptree, Jr.

Again, small presses as usual dominated the list of short-story collections, with trade collections having become rare.

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

*   *   *

The most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are usually the various best of the year anthologies. We lost one series this year, with the death of David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF series (Tor), which ceased publication after eighteen volumes. That leaves science fiction being covered by one dedicated Best of the Year anthology, the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s Press, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its thirty-second annual collection, plus two separate half anthologies, the science fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan; and by the science fiction half of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2014 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton (in practice, of course, Strahan and Horton’s books probably won’t divide neatly in half with their coverage, and there’s likely to be more of one thing than another—but if you put the two halves together, I suppose you could say that SF is covered by two anthologies). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto “best of the year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2014 (Pyr), edited by Kij Johnson. There were three best of the year anthologies covering horror: The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Six (Skyhorse Publishing/Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 25 (A Herman Graf Book/Skyhorse Publishing), edited by Stephen Jones; and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2014 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. Since the distinction between “weird fiction” and “horror” seems a fine one to me, I suspect that newer series Year’s Best Weird Fiction (ChiZine Publications), this year edited by Laird Barron, should probably be counted for horror as well. Fantasy, which used to have several series devoted to it, is now only covered by the fantasy halves of the Stranhan and Horton anthologies, plus whatever stories fall under the “dark fantasy” part of Guran’s anthology, with no best series dedicated specifically to it. A more specialized best of the year anthology is Wilde Stories 2014: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Steve Berman.

The best stand-alone reprint anthology of the year was probably the retrospective anthology The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 (Tachyon Publications), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, which featured classics by Damon Knight, Robert A. Heinlein, Brian W. Aldiss, Jack Vance, R. A. Lafferty, Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepard, Maureen F. McHugh, Bruce Sterling, Robert Reed, Geoff Ryman, Elizabeth Hand, George Alec Effinger, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, and many others. Also strong was Space Opera (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton, with strong work by Ian McDonald, Greg Egan, Gwyneth Jones, David Moles, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Ian R. MacLeod, Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Novik, Yoon Ha Lee, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Alastair Reynolds, Lavie Tidhar, and others, and baseball SF/fantasy anthology Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural (Night Shade Books), edited by Rick Wilber, which features good work by Kim Stanley Robinson, Louise Marley, John Kessel, Bruce McAllister, Harry Turtledove, Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, Wilber himself, Karen Joy Fowler, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Cecilia Tan, W. P. Kinsella, and others.

Other good SF reprint anthologies included The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (Running Press), edited by Alex Dally Macfarlane; Time Travel: Recent Trips (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures (Running Press), edited by Sean Wallace; and The Best of Electric Velocipede (Fairwood Press), edited by John Klima.

There weren’t a lot of reprint fantasy anthologies this year, but there was Magic City: Recent Spells (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and The Mammoth Book of Warriors and Wizardry (Running Press), edited by Sean Wallace.

Prominent among the reprint horror anthologies were The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (Tachyon Publications), edited by Ellen Datlow; Lovecraft’s Monsters (Tachyon Publications), a mixed reprint/original anthology edited by Ellen Datlow; The Baen Big Book of Monsters (Baen Books), edited by Hank Davis; and Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson (Oxford University Press), an anthology of classic horror stories written between 1816 and 1912, edited by Darryl Jones.

*   *   *

It was a moderately strong year in the genre-oriented nonfiction category.

In spite of many flaws (including at times being too exhaustive), the book of the year in this category was probably Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948–1988: The Man Who Learned Better (Tor), by the late William H. Patterson, Jr., the second half of a massive Heinlein biography, the first half of which, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907–1948: Learning Curve (Tor) appeared in 2010, and which is likely to remain the standard Heinlein biography for the foreseeable future (to some extent because most of the sources that Patterson interviewed for his research are now dead). For some of you, particularly younger readers for whom Heinlein was not a seminal figure, this huge biography may contain more information about Heinlein than you really wanted to know, but for those of you who grew up reading Heinlein (and many of us cut our SF-reading teeth on his YA novels in the fifties and sixties), it’s a must-read, and held my interest even through the occasional dull patches. Another look at Heinlein through the focus of his fiction is provided in The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction (McFarland), by Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders.

Another intriguing look at the life of an SF author was a posthumously published autobiography, Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! (Tor), by—who else?—Harry Harrison. Other books about genre authors, or critical studies of their work, included Greg Egan (University of Illinois Press), by Karen Burnham; The Art of Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins), by Hayley Campbell; Ray Bradbury Unbound (University of Illinois Press), by Jonathan R. Eller; and Gregory Benford (University of Illinois Press), by George Slusser.

A critical study of an individual author (in fact, of one story by that author) is provided in a reprint of The American Shore: Mediations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—“Angouleme” (Wesleyan University Press), by Samuel R. Delany. Other critical overviews of the genre are to be found in What Makes This Book So Great (Tor), by Jo Walton; nonfiction anthology The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press), edited by Rob Latham; two books of collected reviews, Stay (Beccon Publications), by John Clute and Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews (Steel Quill), by Adam Roberts; Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (Lethe Press), by Hal Duncan; Call and Response (Beccon Publications), by Paul Kincaid; Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (Oxford University Press), by Brian Attebery; The Past That Might Have Been, the Future That May Come: Women Writing Fantastic Fiction, 1960s to the Present (McFarland), by Lauren J. Lacey; Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction (Aqueduct Press), by Sheila Finch; and Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Arthur B. Evans.

Writing nonfiction about fictional worlds is a peculiar notion, but there were a number of such “nonfiction guidebooks” this year, including The World of Ice and Fire (Bantam), by George R. R. Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson, which explores, with maps and the history of prominent families, the world of Martin’s Westeros, and several such books about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, including The Compleat Ankh-Morpork: City Guide (Random House/Doubleday), by Terry Pratchett, The Folklore of Discworld (Anchor Books/Random House), by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook (Transworld/Doubleday UK), a travel guide to the railroad network of Discworld, ostensibly written by fictional character “Mrs. Bradshaw,” and The Science of Discworld (Anchor Books/Random House), by Terry Pratchett with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. There was also a collection of nonfiction pieces by Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction (Doubleday), by Terry Pratchett.

Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, will be of interest to anyone concerned about the environment and how it has been portrayed in SF. Writers and those with ambitions to become writers might be interested in Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (McSweeney’s), by Cory Doctorow. Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy’s Greatest Science Fiction (Firefly Books), by Guy Haley, has lots of striking photographs, although “science fiction” is here construed to mean media SF, movies and TV shows, only.

Tolkien enthusiasts might want to get Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by J. R. R. Tolkien, collecting academic lectures Tolkien gave at Oxford about one of the first known fantasies in written literature; a bit, er, academic, but which sheds interesting light on Tolkien’s own later work.

There weren’t a lot of art books published in 2014, but there was some good stuff among them. In spite of a change of editors and publisher, your best bet as usual was probably the latest in a long-running “best of the year” series for fantastic art, Spectrum 21: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Flesk Publications), now edited by John Fleskes, taking over for former editors Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also good were: The Collectors’ Book of Virgil Finlay (American Fantasy Press), edited by Robert Weinberg, Douglas Ellis, and Robert T. Garcia, The Art of Jim Burns: Hyperluminal (Titan Books), by Jim Burns; The Art of Ian Miller (Titan Books), by Ian Miller and Tom Whyte; Dark Shepherd: The Art of Fred Gambino (Titan Books), by Fred Gambino; The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon (Titan Books), by John Harris; The Art of Greg Spalenka (Titan Books), by Greg Spalenka; and The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era (Zenith Press), by Ron Miller.

*   *   *

In both 2012 and 2013, according to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films. This year, 2014, before the release of American Sniper, all of the top ten box office champs were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”), with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes taking eleventh place and The Amazing Spider Man 2 taking twelfth place. You have to go all the way down to fourteenth place to find a nongenre film, 22 Jump Street—but then it’s followed by genre films in fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth place, with nongenre films not kicking in again until Gone Girl in eighteenth place. In all, sixteen out of the top twenty earners are genre films, with at least ten more scattered through the next eighty. Nor is this anything new; genre films have dominated the box office top ten for more than a decade—you have to go all the way back to 1998 to find a year when the year’s top earner was a nongenre film, Saving Private Ryan.

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that if it wasn’t for genre films, Hollywood would have gone broke long ago.

Unusually, two out of the top three earners were SF films (the top slots are usually taken by fantasy or superhero films)—Guardians of the Galaxy, a good-natured update of the classic space opera movie, was number two at the box office this year, earning a staggering $332,965,525 overall so far (and the DVD hasn’t even been released yet), with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 (certainly dystopian YA SF, practically a genre of its own these days) coming in first. To fill out the rest of the top ten, superhero films finished in third and ninth place (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past respectively), animated movies in fourth and tenth place (The LEGO Movie and Big Hero 6 respectively—although it would be possible to argue that Big Hero 6 was also a superhero movie), SF (even if junk SF) scoring again in seventh place (Transformers: Age of Extinction), and live-action fantasy films taking sixth and eighth place (The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies and Maleficent respectively).

None of the top ten were taken terribly seriously as “serious films” by critics or by the more intellectually inclined of the viewing audience, although The LEGO Movie got surprisingly good reviews for what amounted to a two-hour commercial for a toy company that you had to pay to watch. Transformers: Age of Extinction was probably the most badly reviewed of the top ten, although the most critically reviled big budget A-release movie of the year may have been an attempt to reinvent the biblical spectacular, Exodus: Gods and Kings, which also—with its 140 million dollar budget weighing it down—failed at the box office. Several new installments of franchise series also underperformed, among them Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Penguins of Madagascar, and Rio 2, and some attempt to start new franchises or revive old ones didn’t work either, including RoboCop, Dracula Untold, and Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

As did last year’s Man of Steel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, some of this year’s movies sharply divided their target demographic, with hordes of loyal fans spilling oceans of pixels arguing about whether movies such as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were or were not worthy of inclusion in their respective canons. This was perhaps most noticeable with the final Hobbit movie, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, which in spite of lots of scathing reviews and bad word of mouth among Tolkien fans, still easily managed to reach sixth place in the list of top box office earners, in spite of only being released in the middle of December—and no doubt it’s going to earn a lot more money in 2015, which is probably all that the producers really care about. SF film Interstellar, which is one of the few genre movies on this list with pretentions to being a “serious” dramatic movie dealing with serious issues, divided fans in a similarly extreme way, with reviews and word of mouth differing so sharply that you almost had to wonder if they were all seeing the same movie.

There are, unsurprisingly, lots more genre movies in the pipeline for release in 2015. The ones that seem to be generating the most buzz at this point seem to be the new Avengers movie, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the J. J. Abrams–directed Star Wars movie from Disney, which many of the hard-core Star Wars fans are already outraged by even though it hasn’t come out yet. Preemptive outrage, I guess.

*   *   *

There are now so many SF and fantasy shows on television, with the surviving shows from 2014 and the years before being joined by a torrent of new shows in 2015, that it’s become hard to keep track of them all.

Perennial favorites in recent years, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Doctor Who, continue to dominate the ratings, and shows like Supernatural, Teen Wolf, and The Vampire Diaries continue to hold on in spite of perhaps getting a bit long in the, er, tooth, while the once-wildly popular True Blood brought a disappointing season to a disappointing end and vanished from the airways. Long-running show Warehouse 13 also died. Of the genre shows that debuted in the last couple of years, Sleepy Hollow, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Once Upon a Time, Arrow, Falling Skies, Person of Interest (much more centrally a genre show than a thriller now that they’ve started to run a plotline about an emergent AI), The Originals, Resurrection, Under the Dome, Grimm (although it’s shaky in the ratings), Haven (ditto), Beauty and the Beast, and The 100 have survived, while, as far as I can tell (and it’s sometimes hard to be sure; Internet sites sometimes run contradictory reports), Almost Human, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Ravenswood, Believe, Star-Crossed, Witches of East End, Dracula, Continuum, The Neighbors, Revolution, Zero Hour, and The Tomorrow People have not. Of these shows, Sleepy Hollow, Arrow, and Person of Interest seem to be the strongest in the ratings. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is struggling in the ratings again, although the show is probably useful enough to Marvel/Disney as a promotional tool for whatever Marvel movie is coming along that it may survive anyway.

Of the new shows debuting in 2014, the most successful seems to be Gotham (a stylish noir take on what crime-drenched Gotham City was like when Batman was still a child, a concept that I wouldn’t have thought would work, but which is saved by good acting and moody Gothic, highly atmospheric set design and photography), The Flash (detailing the adventures of—oh, go ahead and guess!), and Outlander, based on the best-selling paranormal romance series by Diana Gabaldon. Constantine, based on a gritty magic-using comic book antihero, and The Librarians, based on the movie franchise about a secret society of librarians who fight evil with magic, seem to have also generated a fair amount of buzz, although it’s unclear how they’re doing in the ratings.

Coming up in 2015 are Agent Carter (a spin-off from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the animated Star Wars Rebels, 12 Monkeys, Ascension, Daredevil, Dark Matter, Galavant (a Monty Pythonesque musical comedy satirical take on knights and chivalry), iZombie, The Last Man on Earth, Scream, Sense8, Supergirl, Stitchers, The Expanse (based on the popular space opera series by James S. A. Corey), The Messengers, and The Whispers. Some of these will make it, many will not. Hard to guess which will be which at this point.

On the horizon are promised TV versions of Westworld, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Shannara based on Terry Brooks’s The Elfstones of Shannara, Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, and Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood cycle although many of these promised shows never actually show up. It’ll be interesting to see how many of these actually make it to the air.

Other returning shows are The Leftovers, Salem, Lost Girl, Bitten, Helix, Penny Dreadful, and Legends.

*   *   *

The 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon 3, was held in London, England, from August 14 to August 18, 2014. The 2014 Hugo Awards, presented at LonCon 3, were: Best Novel, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie; Best Novella, “Equoid,” by Charles Stross; Best Novelette, “The Lady Astronaut of Mars,” by Mary Robinette Kowal; Best Short Story, “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere,” by John Chu; Best Graphic Story, “Time,” by Randall Munroe; Best Related Work, “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative,” by Kameron Hurley; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, Ginjer Buchanan; Best Professional Editor, Short Form, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Julie Dillon; Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), Game of Thrones: “The Rains of Castamere”; Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), Gravity; Best Semiprozine, Lightspeed Magazine; Best Fanzine, A Dribble of Ink; Best Fancast, SF Signal Podcast; Best Fan Writer, Kameron Hurley; Best Fan Artist, Sarah Webb; plus the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer to Sofia Samatar.

The 2013 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the San Jose Marriot in San Jose, California, on May 17, 2014, were: Best Novel, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie; Best Novella, “The Weight of the Sunrise,” by Vylar Kaftan; Best Novelette, “The Waiting Stars,” by Aliette de Bodard; Best Short Story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” by Rachel Swirsky; Ray Bradbury Award, Gravity; the Andre Norton Award to Sister Mine, by Nalo Hopkinson; the Special Honoree Award to Frank M. Robinson; the Kevin O’ Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award to Michael Armstrong; and the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to Samuel R. Delany.

The 2014 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet on November 9, 2014, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, during the Fortieth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar; Best Novella, “Wakulla Springs,” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages; Best Short Fiction, “The Prayer of Ninety Cats,” by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Anthology, Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; Best Artist, Charles Vess; Special Award (Professional), to Irene Gallo, for art direction of Tor.com, and William K. Schafer, for Subterranean Press (tie); Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, and Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ellen Datlow and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

The 2013 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America on May 10, 2014, during the World Horror Convention at the Portland Doubletree Hotel in Portland, Oregon, were: Best Novel, Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King; Best First Novel, The Evolutionist, by Rena Mason; Best Young Adult Novel, Dog Days, by Joe McKinney; Best Long Fiction, “The Great Pity,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best Short Fiction, “Night Train to Paris,” by David Gerrold; Best Collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron; Best Anthology, After Death, edited by Eric J. Guignard; Best Nonfiction, Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction, by William F. Nolan; Best Poetry Collection, Four Elements, by Marge Simon, Rain Graves, Charlee Jacob, and Linda Addison; Graphic Novel, Alabaster: Wolves, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; Best Screenplay, The Walking Dead: “Welcome to the Tombs,” by Glen Mazzara; Specialty Press Award to Gray Friar Press; Richard Laymon (President’s Award) to J. G. Faherty; plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to Stephen Jones and R. L. Stine.

The 2014 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Strange Bodies, by Marcel Theroux.

The 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” by Sarah Pinsker.

The 2014 Philip K. Dick Award went to Countdown City, by Ben H. Winters.

The 2014 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie.

The 2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by Rupetta, by N. A. Sulway.

The 2013 Sidewise Award for Alternate History went to (Long Form): Surrounded by Enemies: What If Kennedy Survived Dallas? by Bryce Zabel and The Windsor Faction, by D. J. Taylor (tie); and (Short Form): “The Weight of the Sunrise,” by Vylar Kaftan.

*   *   *

Death struck the SF field heavily once again this year. Dead in 2014 or early 2015 were:

DANIEL KEYES, 86, Hugo and Edgar award winner, author of the classic story “Flowers for Algernon,” which later was expanded into a novel and made into the popular movie Charly, as well as novels The Touch and The Fifth Sally, author also of nonfiction books such as The Minds of Billy Milligan; LUCIUS SHEPARD, 70, renowned SF, fantasy, horror, and mainstream author, reviewer, and essayist, winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards, author of novels such as Life During Wartime, Green Eyes, Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, and A Handbook of American Prayer, as well as large amounts of acclaimed short fiction assembled in collections such as The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth, The Best of Lucius Shepard, and Five Autobiographies and a Fiction, a personal friend; JOSEPH E. LAKE, JR., 49, who wrote as JAY LAKE, winner of the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer in 2004, a hugely prolific author who in his tragically short life wrote acclaimed novels such as Green, Endurance, Kalimpura, Trial of Flowers, Madness of Flowers, and others, as well as many shorter stories that were collected in The Sky That Wraps, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, and others, a personal friend; FRANK M. ROBINSON, 87, author, editor, scholar of the pulp magazine era, author of The Glass Inferno, with Thomas N. Scortia, which was later made into the movie The Towering Inferno, as well as other novels such as The Power and The Dark Beyond the Stars, and pop culture books such as Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines; MARY STEWART, 97, best known in the field as the author of the Merlin series, Arthurian novels which included The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, and others, who also wrote many suspenseful romance novels such as Madam, Will You Talk?, Touch Not the Cat, and The Moon-Spinners; GRAHAM JOYCE, 59, acclaimed dark fantasist, twice winner of the World Fantasy Award, author of such novels as The Tooth Fairy, The Facts of Life, Some Kind of Fairy Tale, The Stormwatcher, House of Lost Dreams, and many others; GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, 87, Colombian author, a leading figure in magic realism and world literature, best known for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as books such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings; THOMAS BERGER, 89, writer best known for the eccentric Western Little Big Man, later made into a film, who also wrote genre-related novels such as Vital Parts and Adventures of the Artificial Woman; P. D. JAMES, 94, celebrated mystery writer, author of the long-running Adam Dalgliesh novels, whose one SF novel, The Children of Men, was made into a major motion picture; NADINE GORDIMER, 90, Nobel Prize–winning South African author and fierce critic of apartheid, whose many works include one SF novel, July’s People; Mind Parasites and The Space Vampires; MICHAEL SHEA, 67, horror and fantasy writer, winner of the World Fantasy Award, best known for the novel Nifft the Lean, whose many stories were collected in Polyphemus, The Autopsy and Other Tales, and others; ANDY ROBERTSON, 58, British editor and author, former assistant editor of Interzone, a leading expert on the works of fantasist William Hope Hodgson; ALAN RODGERS, 54, writer and editor, winner of the Bram Stoker Award, former editor of horror magazine Night Cry; HILBERT SCHENCK, 87, author of much nautically themed SF, including the novels At the Eye of the Ocean and A Rose for Armageddon, and stories collected in Wave Rider and Steam Bird; HAYDEN HOWARD, 89, SF author who published many stories in SF magazines as well as one novel, The Eskimo Invasion; MICHEL PARRY, 67, anthologist, horror/supernatural novelist; C. J. HENDERSON, 62, prolific author of fantasy, crime novels, and comics, including Patiently Waiting and Brooklyn Knight; STEPAN CHAPMAN, 63, best known for his Philip K. Dick Award–winning novel The Troika; MARK E. ROGERS, 61, writer, artist, and fan, best known for The Adventures of Samurai Cat graphic novel series; Australian SF writer PHILIPPA MADDERN, 61, scholar of late medieval English history and Australian medieval and early modern history, head of the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia; DONALD MOFFITT, 83, author of SF novels such as The Jupiter Theft, Genesis Quest, A Gathering of Stars, and others; J. F. GONZALEZ, 50, author or coauthor of more than fifteen novels, most of them supernatural horror; WALTER DEAN MYERS, 76, YA and children’s author, author of Fallen Angels, Shadow of the Red Moon, and others; JANRAE FRANK, 59, writer and editor; ROBERT CONROY, 76, winner of the Sidewise Award, author of Alternate History works such as 1942, 1862, Red Inferno, and Castro’s Bomb; AARON ALLSTON, 53, SF writer also known for Star Wars and gaming novels; JOEL LANE, 50, British author and editor; ANA MARÍA MATUTE, 88, noted Spanish author whose work sometimes contained fantastic elements; GEORGE C. WILLICK, 76, SF writer and fanzine editor; T. R. FEHRENBACH, 88, Texas historian and occasional SF writer; KIRBY McCAULEY, 72, at one time perhaps the most prominent agent in the SF/fantasy/horror fields, one of the founders of the World Fantasy Convention, editor of acclaimed horror anthologies Frights and Dark Forces, brother of SF agent Kay McCauley, a personal friend; ALICE K. TURNER, 75, longtime fiction editor of Playboy magazine, editor of the anthologies The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction, as well as the author of nonfiction book The History of Hell and coauthor, with Michael Andre-Driussi, of the critical study, Snake’s Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, a friend; MICHAEL ROY BURGESS, 65, who wrote as ROBERT REGINALD, author, editor, bibliographer, and publisher, author of such bibliographical studies as Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature; A Checklist, 1700–1974, with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II; WILLIAM H. PATTERSON, JR., 62, writer, critic, and expert on the works of Robert A. Heinlein, author of the two-part Heinlein biography Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1, 1907–1948: Learning Curve and Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume Two, 1948–1988: The Man Who Learned Better; GEORGE SLUSSER, 75, critic and scholar, cofounder and longtime curator of the Eaton Collection of SF books and manuscripts, author of critical studies such as Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land, The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gregory Benford; STU SHIFFMAN, 60, artist and longtime fan, winner of the Best Fan Artist Hugo in 1990; ROCKY WOOD, 55, Horror Writers Association President and Stephen King scholar; MATTHEW RICHELL, 41, Hachette Australia CEO and Hachette New Zealand chairman; world-famous Swiss artist H. R. GIGER, 74, an inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, best known to genre audiences for his work as a production artist on the movie Alien, as well as for art books such as H. R. Giger N.Y. City and H. R. Giger: Retrospective, 1964–1984; MARGOT ADLER, 68, longtime National Public Radio correspondent and broadcaster, creator of the SF/fantasy reading program Hour of the Wolf; ROBIN WILLIAMS, 63, world-famous comedian and movie and television actor, best known to genre audiences for roles in The Fisher King, Jumanji, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and, of course, as the alien Mork in television’s Mork and Mindy, although he may be best known to generations of children to come as the voice of the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin; JAMES GARNER, 86, movie and television actor whose genre connections are slender, mostly limited to the movies Space Cowboys and Fire in the Sky, but who is known to every boomer for his starring roles in the TV series Maverick and The Rockford Files; LAUREN BACALL, 89, world-famous film and stage actress, star of films such as To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo, another person with little direct genre connection, but someone who again will be known to every boomer; RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, 90, film actor, probably best known to genre audiences for his role in Jurassic Park, but also an award-winning director of such films as Gandhi; ROD TAYLOR, 84, film actor best known to genre audience for roles in The Time Machine and The Birds; producer and screenwriter BRIAN CLEMENS, 83, best known to genre audiences for his work on British TV series The Avengers; ELAINE STRITCH, 89, movie and television actor, best known to genre audiences for Cocoon: The Return and the TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun; ARLENE MARTEL, 78, TV actress, best known to genre audiences for her role as T’Pring in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek; ELIZABETH PEÑA, 55, movie and TV actress best known for her role in Lone Star, but perhaps best known to genre audiences for her voiceover work in The Incredibles, as well as roles in *batteries not included, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Invaders; TV and film art director ROBERT KINOSHITA, 100, who worked on designing Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, and the robot from TV’s Lost in Space; CATHERINE ALICE LENTA LANGFORD, 89, mother of SF writer and editor David Langford; GEORGE REYNOLDS, 95, father of SF editor and publisher Eric T. Reynolds; CHARLIE ROBINSON, 92, father of SF writer Spider Robinson; TERRI LUANNA da SILVA, 40, daughter of SF writer Spider Robinson; SARAH ELIZABETH WEBSTER, 69, sister of SF writer and anthologist Bud Webster; JOHN McANINLEY, 70, brother of artist and SF radio show host Susan McAninley.