4

Jim Baen’s Universe

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

Tor.com

Subterranean

Fantasy

Strange Horizons

Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction

Clarkesworld Magazine

Asimov’s, December

F&SF, December

Interzone 218

Interzone 219

Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, Lynne Jamneck, ed. (Lethe Press, 10 1-59021-101-4, $15.00, 216 pages). Book design by Toby Johnson.

Otherworldly Maine, Noreen Doyle, ed. (Down East, 978-0-89272-746-9, $15.95, 318 pages). Cover by Greg Mort.

 

With 2009 looming on the horizon as I type these words, let’s wrap up 2008 with a quick retrospective look at what some of the more prominent electronic magazines and websites (a form which becomes more important year by year to those wanting to keep up with the good short fiction being “published”) have featured this year.

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

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

The new Tor website, Tor.com (www.tor.com), a blog/community meeting ground that features lots of commentary and archives of comics and art in addition to original fiction, has quickly established itself as another important internet destination. Earlier this year, I reviewed first-rate stories featured there by Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Charles Stross. Since then, they’ve featured an excellent and highly atmospheric fantasy story by Jay Lake, “A Water Matter,” a clever postmodern revisitation of The Matter of Barsoom, sort of, “The Film-Makers of Mars,” by Geoff Ryman, and other good stories by Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, and Brandon Sanderson.

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

Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, features more slipstream and less SF than I’d like, but lots of good stuff continues to appear there nevertheless; best stories this year were “The Magician’s House,” by Meghan McCarron, “Called Out to Snow Crease Farm,” by Constance Cooper, and the amusing First Contact story, “The Gadgey,” by Alan Campbell, but there was also good work by A.M. Dellamonica, Bill Kte’pi, Deborah Coates, and others. The best stories this year in Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbell and Ilona Gordon, were “Angry Rose’s Lament,” by Cat Rambo, “Snatch Me Another,” by Mercurio D. Rivera, and “Troy and the Aliens,” by Ruth Nestvold, but Abyss and Apex also featured good stuff by Alan Smale, Marissa Lingen, Vylar Kaftan, and others. I reviewed Clarkesworld Magazine (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), which was edited by Nick Mamatas until July, when Sean Wallace took over, earlier this year, mentioning stories by Jay Lake, Jeff Ford, Tim Pratt, and others; since then, they’ve continued to publish good work, usually short and quirky, by Robert Reed, Eric M. Witchey, Don Webb, and others.

Turning back to the quaintly old-fashioned world of print, Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction have both been having good years, but both produced rather weak December issues. The best story by a good solid margin in the December Asimov’s is Tim Sullivan’s “Way Down East,” a poignant look at how the lives of some Maine lobstermen are affected in unexpected ways by a visit from an alien dignitary. Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Still on the Road,” written in the voice of Jack Kerovac, is more a slipstream story than an SF story, amusing but very slight. The rest of the stories are mostly concerned with music of some sort, rock n’ roll, Wagner, and are generally forgettable, including the lead story, David Ira Cleary’s “The Flowers of Nicosia.” Even Steven Utley’s “Perfect Everything” is, atypically for Utley, pretty forgettable. The best story in the December F&SF is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “A Skeptical Spirit,” a brisk and amusing story of a house haunted by a skeptical ghost whose glum presence drives all the other ghosts away, and the misadventures of the house’s owner in trying to exorcise it in order to attract a better class of resident spirit. Robert Reed’s “Leave” has an intriguing premise, as Reed’s stories almost always do, but the SF element is thin, and in a year where there have been a number of other good Reed stories produced, this only falls toward the middle of the pack. Wayne Wightman returns after more than a decade’s absence, but unfortunately the story he returns with, “A Different Country,” a semi-satirical political piece, is only so-so, rambling on for much too long. Eugene Mirabelli’s slipstreamish “Falling Angels” has a vivid opening scene that it then fails to do very much else with, and John Langan’s “How the Day Runs Down” is another of the year’s innumerable zombie stories, reprinted from the zombie anthology The Living Dead.

The best story in Interzone 218, and one of the best of the year, is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “His Master’s Voice,” a posthuman story (told by an intelligent dog) that is cranked up to about as high a bit-rate as it is possible to get without the story becoming totally incomprehensible (which it probably is, to some readers). The rest of the issue changes pace considerably, becoming slow, contemplative, melancholy. Three stories are devoted to work by Chris Beckett, the best of which is “Greenland,” a dismaying view of a decaying future England which is very powerful but also very bleak, delivering up more of a freight of depression than perhaps some readers are going to be willing to unload in these hard economic times when they’re probably already depressed. “Rat Island” is even more bleak and hopeless, enough so that it begins to seem almost stylized. “Poppyfields” is more contemplative, less bleak, but it’s SF only by courtesy, as a regular teenage runaway could easily have stood in for the dimension-shifting teenager here without changing anything of significance. Tim Lees’s “Corner of the Circle” is more wistfully autumnal than bleak, a boy’s reminiscence of his strange relationship with a vivid and peculiar woman in a New York City which is regularly visited by ships from the stars. The story I enjoyed the most in Interzone 219 was Aliette de Bodard’s “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn,” a cleverly worked-out mystery set in an Alternate History world that would have been perfectly at home in the Alternate History/Mystery cross-genre anthology Sideways in Crime, published earlier this year. Also good is Mercurio D. Rivera’s “The Fifth Zhi,” about a clone, one of a stream of clones sent on a suicide mission, who begins to wonder if the game is really worth the candle. The conceptualization in Gord Sellar’s “The Country of the Young” is fairly standard stuff, a woman trying to unravel the identity of a mystery man who has been altered by genetic engineering, but the milieu in which it’s set, a sympathetically described North Korea, is unusual for SF. Like his earlier Interzone story, Jason Sanford’s “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” seems to totter on the borderline between SF and surrealism; this one comes down perhaps a bit more firmly on the SF side and tells an emotionally involving story, although the science is pretty shaky.

The stories in Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, edited by Lynne Jamneck, wrestle back and forth between lesbian erotica and science fiction, some having more of one, some having more of the other, but there are several stories here where the ratio of SF to erotica is high enough that they strike me as perfectly legitimate SF stories, with a sexual element not particularly higher than that to be found in many other SF stories—these include stories by Nicola Griffith, Melissa Scott, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Gwyneth Jones, whose “The Voyage Out” is one of the best stories of the year, a compelling story of a woman sentenced to be literally thrust out into the unknown, in a more extreme high-tech form of the fate faced by those convicts once Transported to Australia.

Otherworldly Maine, edited by Noreen Doyle, is a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology which features strong reprints by Edgar Pangborn, Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, and others, as well as good original work by Gregory Feeley, Lee Allred, and Jessica Reisman. Gregory Feeley’s “Awskonomuk” is probably the best story here, although it really has no fantastic element at all.