The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (4 page)

With
Jim Baen’s Universe
on the way out, the most important remaining site is probably Tor.com (www.tor.com). I once said that what we really needed was a Boing Boing that published science fiction as well, a place cool and eclectic enough to draw the Internet-savvy audience as well as the SF audience, and Tor. com, a website that regularly publishes SF, fantasy, and slipstream, as well as articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, and commentary, may fit that bill.
Tor.com
had another strong year in 2009, publishing a wide range of different kinds of stories (although they tend to lean a bit toward slipstream and steampunk) by Jo Walton, Harry Turtledove, Damien Broderick, Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, Kij Johnson, Ken Scholes, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, Rachel Swirsky, and others.

The long-running ezine
Strange Horizons
(www.strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, ran good work, a mixture of SF, fantasy, and slipstream, by Lavie Tidhar, Sandra McDonald, Elliott Bangs, Benjamin Crowell, Tim Pratt, Jennifer Linnaea, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Rachel Manija Brown, Cat Rambo, Leonard Richardson, and others.

Clarkesworld Magazine
(www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, ran good stuff this year, much of it SF, some fantasy or slipstream, by Kij Johnson, Gord Sellar, Jason K. Chapman, Lavie Tidhar, Sarah Monette, Tobias S. Buckell, Cat Rambo, and others.

Abyss & Apex
(www.abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, which seems to run more SF than many of the other sites, had good stuff by Samantha Henderson, Karl Bunker, Marie Brennan, Christopher Green, Paul Carlson, Ruth Nestvold, Richard A. Lovett, Bud Sparhawk, and others.

Apex Magazine
(www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online), edited by Jason Sizemore, featured good work, most of it fantasy or slipstream, by Theodora Goss, Ekaterina Sedia, Gord Sellar, Peter M. Ball, Aliette de Bodard, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and others.

Fantasy Magazine
(www.fantasy-magazine.com ), published by Sean Wallace and edited by Cat Rambo, had good work (almost all of it fantasy or slipstream, unsurprisingly enough, although there was one strong SF story by Lavie Tidhar) by Nancy Kress, Tanith Lee, Patricia Russo, Ruth Nestvold, Jay Lake, John Mantooth, and others.

Other than the stories selected by me for the issue I guest-edited, which I won’t mention,
Subterranean
(http://subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, had lots of good work, some of it first-rate, by Alexander C. Irvine, Garth Nix, Tim Pratt, James P. Blaylock, Kim Newman, Kris Nelscott, Lewis Shiner, and others.

The Australian popular-science magazine
Cosmos
(www.cosmosmagazine.com) runs a story per issue, usually SF, selected by fiction editor Damien Broderick, and also puts new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their website. They had a strong story by Karl Bunker this year, as well as interesting stuff by Craig DeLancey, Greg Mellor, Stuart Gibbon, V.G. Kemerer, and others.

The flamboyantly titled
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
(www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, had good work by Peter S. Beagle, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ian Creasey, Tim Pratt, Aliette de Bodard, Eugie Foster, Tony Pi, and others, including a number of stories, both reprint and original, by Card. Although they publish both SF and fantasy (rarely slipstream), they tend to lean toward fantasy, which tends to be of generally higher quality than their SF.

Ideomancer Speculative Fiction
(www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet and a large group of other editors that includes Elizabeth Bear and John Bowker, published good stuff by Steven Mohan, Jr., Swapna Kishore, and others.

A new ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
(www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, had a strong year, featuring good work by Aliette de Bodard, Rachel Swirsky, Ian McHugh, Richard Parks, Sarah L. Edwards, K.D. Wentworth, and others.

Shadow Unit
(www.shadowunit.org) is a website devoted to publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, something I find unexciting, but which has strongly impressed other critics, and which has drawn top people such as Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Emma Bull, and others.

A mix of science fact articles and fiction is available from the ezine
Futurismic
(http://futurismic.com) and from
Escape Velocity
(www. escapevelocitymagazine.com).

Book View Café
(www.bookviewcafe.com) is a consortium of over twenty professional authors, including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Anne Gilman, Sarah Zettel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a new website where work by them – mostly reprints, and some novel excerpts – is made available for free.

Another new fantasy-oriented site,
Heroic Fantasy Quarterly
(www. heroicfantasyquarterly.com), started up this year, as did an SF site selling downloads and PDFs (a model which didn’t work for
Aeon
),
M-Brane SF
(http://mbranesf.blogspot.com).

Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, and most of the stories are slipstream or literary surrealism. Sites that feature those, as well as fantasy (and, occasionally, some SF) include Rudy Rucker’s
Flurb
(www.flurb.net),
RevolutionSF
(www.revolutionsf com),
CoyoteWild
(www.coyotewildmag.com),
Heliotrope
(www.heliotropemag.com), and the somewhat less slipstreamish
Bewildering Stories
(www. bewilderingstories.com).

However, original fiction isn’t all that can be found on the Internet – there are a lot of good
reprint
SF and fantasy stories out there too, usually available for free. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free,
Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Jim Baen’s Universe
, and so on, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the ‘current issue.’ Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as
Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales
, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/ pg/), 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 (http://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 even greater range of reprint stories becomes available, though, if you’re willing to pay a small fee for them. Perhaps the best and the longest-established place to find such material is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise. com), where you can buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA, Kindle, or home computer; in addition to individual stories, you can also buy ‘fiction bundles’ here, which amount to electronic collections; as well as a selection of novels in several different genres – you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including
Asimov’s
,
Analog
,
F&SF
, and
Interzone
, in a number of different formats. A similar site is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com), where in addition to the fiction for sale, you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.

Finding fiction to read, though, is not the only reason for SF fans to go on the Internet. There are also 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 easily 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, obituaries, 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 – it’s rare when I don’t find myself accessing Locus Online several times a day. Other major general-interest sites include SF Site (www.sfsite.com), SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope. com), io9 (http://io9.com), Green Man Review (http://greenman review. com), The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld.com (www.sffworld.com), SFReader.com (www.sfreader.com), SFWatcher.com (www.sfwatcher.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogs-pot.com). One of the best of the general-interest sites, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, has unfortunately died. Another,
Science Fiction Weekly
, first merged with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a new site called Sci Fi Wire, and then transformed to Syfy (www.syfy.com) when its parent channel changed its name from the Sci Fi Channel to Syfy as well, dropping all its columnists and book reviews along the way to concentrate exclusively on media news and reviews – and thus making itself largely uninteresting to me. A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www. fantasticfiction.co.uk). Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of
Locus
, 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 (www.tangentonline. com), which had gone on a long hiatus but returned to active status in 2009 – ironically, just as its rival The Fix, launched by a former Tangent staffer, seems to have gone inactive. Other sites of interest include: SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Ansible (http://news.ansible. co.uk/), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine
Ansible;
and a number of sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed: Audible.com (www.audible.com), Escape Pod (http://escapepod.org), StarShipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com), and PodCastle (http://podcastle.org).

The much-heralded ‘New Golden Age’ of original anthologies may have reached its high-water mark in 2008, and even receded a bit. There were still plenty of anthologies out, especially from small presses and books available as downloads online, but several of the most prominent high-end original series, upon which many hopes were pinned, have died. Of the three much-talked-about original anthology series launched in 2007,
Fast Forward
, edited by Lou Anders,
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction
, edited by George Mann, and
Eclipse
, edited by Jonathan Strahan, only
Eclipse
survives at the end of the year. A shame, because both other series had a lot to recommend them.

The fact is, although many good individual stories were published, it was something of a lackluster year for original anthologies as a whole, with no clear-cut standouts. In terms of literary quality, judging the stories
as
stories, without taking genre classification into consideration, the strongest of the year’s anthologies was clearly
Eclipse Three
(Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan – I personally found it somewhat disappointing, though, that there was relatively little science fiction here, most of the contents being fantasy or slipstream. Best stories in
Eclipse Three
were by Maureen F. McHugh and Nicola Griffith, although there was also good stuff of various sorts by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Daniel Abraham, Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, and others.
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3
(Solaris), edited by George Mann, was mostly SF, and featured strong work by Paul Cornell, Warren Hammond, Alastair Reynolds, John Meaney, and others. There were two anthologies from DAW Books this year which are a cut above the usual DAW anthology product: a strong steampunk/alternate history anthology,
Other Earths
(DAW), edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake, which featured a standout story by Robert Charles Wilson, and good work by Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, Liz Williams, and others; and
We Think, Therefore We Are
(DAW), edited by Peter Crowther.
We Think, Therefore We Are
wasn’t as strong as past Crowther anthologies such as
Moon Shots
have been, but still featured interesting stuff by Chris Roberson, Keith Brooke, Patrick O’Leary, Robert Reed, and others.

A cut below this level, the strongest story in
Federations
(Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams, an anthology of stories inspired by
Star Trek
(which looked for work that ‘builds on those same tropes and traditions’), was by John C. Wright, but there was also good work by Mary Rosenblum, Allen Steele, Yoon Ha Lee, and others, as well as good reprint stories by Alastair Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, and others.
Clockwork Phoenix 2
, edited by Mike Allen, was mostly fantasy instead of science fiction, unlike the original volume, but had worthwhile stuff by Tanith Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ann Leckie, and others. Mike Ashley’s anthology with the somewhat overheated title
of The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF: The 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction
was mostly a reprint anthology, with strong reprints by Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, Terry Bisson, Geoffrey A. Landis, Alastair Reynolds, James Blish, and others, but did find room for intriguing original stuff by Robert Reed, Eric Brown, Adam Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, and others.