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Like everyone else in this small, incestuous field, I have conflicts of interest, and it’s only fair to admit to them upfront. I’ve done books, and am in the midst of doing others, in collaboration with Jack Dann, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Strahan, and have collaborated in the past with people such as Mike Resnick and Sheila Williams. I’ve had close decades-long friendships with people like Joe Haldeman, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, and Ellen Datlow. And in the course of a forty-year career, I’ve worked with almost every writer and editor in the business at one time or another. So feel free to take anything I say with a grain of salt, and, if you’d like, ascribe base motives to it. (I won’t review my own original anthologies; that’s stretching the reader’s willingness to give me the benefit of the doubt in my judgments too far.)

I have no intention of reviewing every issue of every magazine or e-zine—that’s what burns all short-fiction reviewers out sooner or later. I won’t be looking at things in chronological order; I’ll be skipping around and dealing with things as I come to them. Some issues of some publications won’t get reviewed at all. I intend only to mention stories I find exceptional, usually in a positive sense, more rarely in a negative one, and won’t bother to mention the rest of the stories in the issue that are unexceptional or average. I’ll review primarily science fiction stories, some fantasy stories, fewer slipstream stories (unless they’re really standouts), because that’s the way my own interests shake out.

We’ll see how long I last.

Since I’m playing catch-up here, let me start by saying that the stories I’ve been most impressed with this year include, but are not necessarily limited to, “The Ray Gun: A Love Story,” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s); “The Egg Man,” by Mary Rosenblum (Asimov’s); “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled,” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s); “Balancing Accounts,” James L. Cambias (F&SF); “Five Thrillers,” by Robert Reed (F&SF); “The 400-Million-Year Itch,” by Steven Utley (F&SF); “Shoggoths in Bloom,” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s); “Immortal Snake,” by Rachel Pollack (F&SF); “Crystal Nights,” by Greg Bear (Interzone); “The Man in the Mirror,” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Analog); “An Alien Heresy,” by S.P. Somtow (Asimov’s); “The House Left Empty,” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s); “An Almanac For the Alien Invaders,” Merrie Haskell (Asimov’s); and “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues,” by Gord Sellar (Asimov’s). (I haven’t gotten to the electronic magazines yet, but they will come.)

The best story in the June F&SF was “The Art of Alchemy,” by Ted Kosmatka—a cyberpunk/noir piece, not breaking any really new ground, but very well-done—although Rand B. Lee’s quirky fantasy “Litany” was also good. In the July F&SF, my favorite was “Poison Victory,” by Albert E. Cowdrey, a somber and powerful Alternate History story, one of several good ones this year. In the same issue, I also liked James L. Cambias’s “The Dinosaur Train,” although all you had to do was switch the word “dinosaur” for “elephant” and you’d have had a mainstream story, and Michael Blumlein’s novella “The Roberts,” although I thought that it was considerably too long for its weight. Stuff I liked best in the August Asimov’s was Ted Kosmatka’s “Divining Light,” which got a little too complicated really to hold together, Neal Barrett’s “Radio Station St. Jack,” although he’s covered the same Gonzo Apocalypse ground before to better effect, Jack Skillingstead’s “What You Are About to See,” and Carol Emshwiller’s surreal “Wilmer or Wesley”—although none of them knocked me completely over. The best story in the August F&SF, by a good margin, was Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Political Prisoner.” Comes a bit close to being a disguised mainstream gulag story, perhaps, but I thought there were enough speculative details to justify it as SF. And an enthralling, even emotionally grueling, read.

Don’t let the fact that it’s being published as a YA anthology put you off—The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, is one of the best SF anthologies of the year, everything in it fully of adult quality, and almost all of it center-core SF as well. Best stories here are probably Kelly Link’s novella “The Surfer,” which is, unusually for Link, real SF rather than slipstream/fantasy (not hard SF, Link will probably never write that, but genuine real undeniable SF nevertheless) and another of Ian McDonald’s gorgeously colored Future India stories, “The Dust Assassin,” but almost nothing here is really bad, and there are other good stories by Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, and others, including an atypical near-future story by Greg Egan, more openly political than his stuff usually is. The fact that several stories are told in the first person by teenage narrators, usually young girls, may make several of the stories seem a bit familiar if read one after the other (and is also the only real indication that this is a YA anthology), so space them out over time.

Another excellent anthology, one of several we’ve had this year, is Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders. Most Alternate History stories are SF (particularly those that add a time-travel element), but we’ve already seen a fair amount of Alternate History Fantasy in the last few years (it’s an Alternate World, but in it griffins or giants are real, or magic works), and now we’ve got Alternate History Mystery, producing a book that’s a lot of fun; most of the stories would fall under the Alternate History Mystery SF heading, I guess (including one with crosstime travel), rather than the Alternate History Mystery Fantasy heading, since although there’s a couple of fairly wild alternate possibilities here, there’s none with griffins or where magic works. The best stories in the book are Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “G-Men” and Paul Park’s “The Blood of Peter Francisco,” although there’s also first-rate stuff by Kage Baker, Mary Rosenblum, S.M. Stirling, Pat Cadigan, Theodore Judson, Chris Roberson, and others. (Be warned that John Meaney’s “Via Vortex,” although also good, features one of the most horrific modes of travel I’ve ever run across.) The most likely Alternate, as it requires the fewest changes from our own time-line, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s story; the least likely is probably Mike Resnick and Eric Flint’s story, even more so than Chris Roberson’s story with its crosstime-traveling zeppelins.

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

Some good solid stories in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II, edited by George Mann, which is more even in quality than the first volume—none of the stories are as bad as the worst of the stories in the first one...but then again, none of the stories are as good as the best of the good stories were. The best stories here, in my opinion, were “The Eyes of God,” by Peter Watts, “Sunworld,” by Eric Brown, “Evil Robot Monkey,” by Mary Robinette Kowal, “Book, Theatre, and Wheel,” by Karl Schroeder, and “Shining Armour,” by Dominic Green. If I had to narrow it down to only two picks, it would be “Evil Robot Monkey” and “Shining Armour.” Green’s “Shining Armour” is one of at least two stories this year that are clearly influenced by anime (there were several stories obviously inspired by MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, but that’s not quite the same thing).

Thomas R. Dulski’s “Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink in the Can” is the most interesting story in the April Analog, but....

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...it’s not a science fiction story. Although it uses SF motifs such as UFOs and aliens and alien abduction, by the end of the story, all of these have proved to be fake, and there’s actually no science fiction content here at all; in the fashion of Dave Truesdale’s bete noir, “What They Didn’t See,” it’s a straight mainstream story that smells a bit like science fiction because it’s had some familiar SF motifs rubbed against it but not actually put in the story, like the drinks they used to sell in McDougal Street clubs in the ‘60s that had been flavored with rum extract to make the tourists think they actually had rum in them.

This is unusual for Analog. In spite of their claim to run nothing but science fiction, I’ve run into a number of stories there before that proved to ultimately be fantasy, but it’s rare to run into a story that isn’t either science fiction or fantasy.

 

Best story in the September F&SF was Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Arkfall.” It’s a bit claustrophobic, not surprising for a story set under a miles-thick cap of ice in the dark and nearly lifeless waters of an alien planet, and this is quite probably a deliberate choice on the author’s part. The protagonist is also annoyingly passive, drifting through life as she drifts endlessly through the planet’s oceans in her Arkship, making no hard decisions of her own until almost the end of the story, but considering the nature of the society she comes from, that’s quite likely deliberate too. The odd passive society here, where it’s considered much too pushy and self aggrandizing to even refer to yourself in the first person, is interesting, as are the living cellular ships in which they drift aimlessly around the planet, unable even to steer. The issue also contains a sly bit of metafiction by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn about a self-help program for writers that takes things to extremes, “Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!” Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pump Six” takes us to a future so unrelievedly bleak that it’s almost stylized; I preferred 2006’s “Yellow Card Man,” which, while also bleak, seemed to be much more likely as a future that we might actually have waiting somewhere in front of us. Rand B. Lee’s “Picnic on Pentecost” has some interesting imagery, but is overwritten.

Read the much-hyped “Mundane SF” issue of Interzone, and on the whole wasn’t terrifically impressed. The Geoff Ryman, the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and the Anil Menon stories were all good stories, and wouldn’t have looked out-of-place in any other issue of Interzone (best of the three is the Ryman, about the complications of romance in a extremely Plugged In world), but as a canon-forming exercise, or something that would clearly demonstrate the strengths of Mundane SF, overall it was not all that impressive. The major concept in play here is that someday just about everyone will live in total Virtual Reality surrounds—something that was a Startling New Idea in 1983, but today, not so much. Other stories feature the idea that sea-levels will rise to swallow much of what today is dry land—again, not a startlingly new idea. The sea-level-rising idea makes Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s story SF, but not by much; it reads much like a fantasy, with some SF details relating to catastrophic climate change in the background—and the idea of a world that has been knocked back technologically to something that aesthetically feels like a fantasy world is hardly a new one either. Anil Menon’s poignant culture-shock story could just as well be happening today as in the future. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on in Elisabeth Vonarburg’s story, but if it’s a technology that allows someone to be switched from one Alternate Reality to another (it could also be another total Virtual Reality surround whose details are being manipulated; hard to be sure), I fail to see why that is any less improbable than a Faster Than Light drive. Lavie Tidhar’s story isn’t SF at all, which I suppose is one way of getting around the problem. Considered just as an issue of the magazine, without the polemical freight loaded on to it, it’s full of pleasant, if unexceptional, reading—but the Mundane boys are going to have to do better than this if they really want to sway anybody.

Ironically, the issue features interviews with Greg Egan and Alastair Reynolds, writers about as far removed from the Mundane aesthetic as it is possible to get.

The much-anticipated Tor website, Tor.com, has opened, and seems to be poised to become a major SF nexus on the internet, part blog, part community meeting ground, with reviews, achieves of art, and comics—as well as what concerns us here, original stories posted free on the site. There are three of them here so far, and Tor.com has put its best foot forward with them; they’re all first-rate stories by major authors. Most substantial of the three is probably Cory Doctorow’s “The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away,” a bleak and emotionally powerful story about the Big Brotherish 24-hour-a-day constant-surveillance society that doesn’t seem all that far away, that is almost here, in fact. This society seems an all-too-plausible future; it’s hard to see what could stop it from arriving, and Cory doesn’t really provide any hopeful tips for keeping it at bay or frustrating it once it arrives. John Scalzi provides a welcome change of pace with the not-bleak-at-all “After the Coup,” a story of a soldier pressed into reluctant service as an interstellar diplomat that is a lot of fun, and that reminds me quite a bit of one of Keith Laumer’s old Retief stories, although perhaps a bit less openly satiric (the boss’s name would probably have been “Windbag” or something similar in the Retief story). Also a lot of fun is Charles Stross’s “Down on the Farm,” one of his Laundry series crossing the spy story with Eldritch Horrors that are much like a Love Child of Len Deighton and H.P. Lovecraft.

If they can keep up this level of quality, Tor.com may well become one of the best places on the internet to look for quality SF and fantasy.

Best story in the July/August Analog, and one of the best in Analog so far this year, is a novella by veteran writer Dean McLaughlin, “Tenbrook of Mars.” The old-fashioned pacing here may annoy some newer readers—if Charles Stross was writing the story, I suspect that he would have torn through the first ten or twelve pages in a page and a half—but it does lend the story a certain gravitas, and leaves plenty of room for character development—and after all, the slowly emerging characterization of the protagonist, Tenbrook, is what the story is really all about. In other ways, it’s a classic Analog story of the competent, stubbornly honest engineer who must deal with incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt politicians and businessmen in order to get the job done, in this case, to somehow keep the staff of a Mars colony alive for years after a disastrous systems breakdown with no immediate hope of rescue; in that, it’s traditionally satisfying, although I saw the final twist coming a long way ahead, and could have done without it; too neat. The logic of Paul Carlson’s “Shotgun Seat” strikes me as a bit shaky—why bother to build humanoid robots to drive trucks when the AI built into the truck could probably do the job with a little fiddling with control systems?—but the background here, the world of the long-haul, big-rig trucker, is one rarely seen in SF, and makes this an absorbing read. Michael F. Flynn also sets up a classic scenario in “Sand and Iron,” an alien complex of some sort (crashed spaceship? deserted city/building?) uncovered on a desolate alien world by a party of near-castaways, but although the alien artifacts the landing party discovers are nicely enigmatic, somehow the story fails to deliver a lot of heat or suspense, in spite of a life-or-death chase at the end, and the story remains oddly uninvolving.

Clarkesworld is an internet site that, in addition to reviews and other features, publishes two short stories a month. The stories are usually elegant and well-crafted, many of them quite surreal, sometimes a bit perverse—mostly slipstream and fantasy, some horror, the occasional SF story. My favorites here last year were stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Elizabeth Bear. So far, my favorite this year is Jay Lake’s autumnal “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black,” an actual SF piece, although Jeff Ford’s “After Moreau,” a revisionist postmodern take on the Wells’s classic, is quite good too, and there are also good stories here by Tim Pratt, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Stephen Dedman, and others. Ironically for an online magazine that has no real physical existence, the covers are quite striking, some of the best I’ve seen in awhile. I particularly like the cover for Issue 19.

This is what the large-size Asimov’s should look like, but probably won’t.

The most enjoyable story in the September Asimov’s is Stephen Baxter’s “The Ice War,” which plays out an intriguing Alternate History variant of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds scenario, more than a hundred years earlier, peopled with well-drawn portraits of real historical personages such as Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe. The cynically logical, ruthless, and yet somehow endearing voice of the narrator, who reluctantly gets involved in humanity’s defense against his will and against his own better judgment, is a delight. Also good is Mary Rosenblum’s “Horse Racing,” which with its picture of people’s lives being manipulated unbeknownst to them behind the scenes by social engineers who have goals of their own in mind, reminds me strongly of C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Adventurer”—except without Kornbluth’s cynical conclusion that such manipulation must invariably go wrong and produce results that dismay the social engineers themselves. Steven Utley’s “Slug Hell” is an exquisitely written slice-of-life character study, but has no science fiction element other than the fact that it’s taking place in the Silurian Age, and, in fact, could just as well be taking place in a New Jersey saltmarsh or a Louisiana swamp without it making any significant difference to the story—I prefer the Silurian Tales where they engage more directly with the SF subject matter, and feel less like disguised mainstream stories. William Barton’s “In the Age of the Quiet Sun” is bitter and grim, like most of his stuff, and really breaks no new ground for him, but somehow Barton’s passion and love for the dream of space travel and exploration comes through anyway, and helps to cut the grimness in a welcome manner. Ian Creasey’s “Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone” offers an interesting twist on the familiar theme of downloading someone’s personality into a computer, and does generate a sense of how awful it would be to have a nagging, domineering relative living in your pocket forever with no chance of respite—but the daughter in the end comes across as rather whiney and petty, which kind of undercuts the effectiveness; surely it would have been enough for her to just refuse to allow her “mother” access to her home, and stick to that, without going on to effectively “murder” her. Robert R. Chase’s “Soldier of the Singularity” features an abrupt 180-degree-turn surprise plot twist that I for one found unconvincing.

Interesting that there have been two stories within a month (the other being Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Arkfall”) featuring people feeling guilty that they don’t really like being stuck caring for aging relatives—an indication of the graying of the SF writer population, perhaps, who may now be dealing with that very problem in real life.

Another good anthology, not quite at the top of the heap with the year’s best anthologies to date such as Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift, Lou Anders’s Sideways in Crime, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II, but still full of solid, enjoyable work, is Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams. Best story here by a substantial margin, and one of the best of the year, is Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words,” which explores the unexpected social consequence of genetic engineering, but there is also good work to be had here from Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Mark Budz, Tobias Buckell, and others

Like last year’s Foundation 100, which was looking for hopeful human futures, and didn’t find many of them, Seeds of Change, which sought stories that would inspire people to plant “Seeds of Change” that would change the future for the better, ends up instead featuring stories whose future scenarios are actually rather glum, with little real prospect that they’re going to change for the better. SF writers in the Oughts seem to have trouble imagining positive futures, unable to look beyond the bleak present that they’re mired in. That doesn’t bode well for either SF or society in general, since it’s always seemed to me that one of the jobs of science fiction was to imagine viable human futures that might actually be good to live in, and hope to conjure them into existence by the imagining, much as the writers of the ‘40s and ‘50s helped conjure up the space program by dreaming it with such fierce intensity that it inspired others to make it real.