The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year. Volume 5

In the Australian winter of 1985 I was still at university, pursuing a fairly useless if interesting degree during the day while spending most of my waking hours engaged in an excited, breathless and far more useful discovery of the science fiction field. It was during that time that I encountered my first “best of the year” anthology, a sprawling selection of stories that the editor opened with a careful assessment of how things were going wrong in SF, or might be. A boon of some kind, he reported, was possibly coming to an end and there was real fear that bad times might be coming: sales were unreliable, advances were headed south and, in all likelihood, the publishing world would end quite soon.

Gardner Dozois, for it was he writing in the first of his The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (now in its twenty-eighth year), followed that assessment with two dozen stories—from established writers like Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson, alongside an incredible array of writers I’d never heard of like Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson—which rather seemed to make those gloomy assessments irrelevant. How could a field that was producing stories like “Cicada Queen,” “Hardfought,” “Carrion Comfort” and “Black Air” be anything other than healthy?

I could appreciate then, as I do now, that he was talking about the health of the publishing industry as it was experienced by writers , rather than the state of the art of SF and fantasy writing as it was experienced by readers , but I still did wonder at the time how the caution of the introduction reconciled with the optimism of the story selection.

I was confronted with this myself when, unexpectedly, in the summer of 1997I found myself drafting an introduction to The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy with my co-editor Jeremy G. Byrne and falling into exactly the same kind of assessment, talking about the publishing business rather than the art. I’ve now sat down on sixteen separate occasions, both by myself and with others, and I still struggle to balance the urge to talk about the state of the publishing business rather than focus on the year in short fiction, probably because of a simple but fundamental problem: the year in short fiction is barely done and in many ways is too close to meaningfully assess, even as I attempt to do just that.

It would be easy to describe the rather shaky state that SF and fantasy finds itself in as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close as uneasy. Advances are down, sales (especially for short fiction) are down, the midlist (where many fine writers made their livings) is almost completely a thing of the past, booksellers are in trouble and short fiction outlets of all kinds seem to be struggling financially.

As has been the case in the past, large publishers consolidated, reducing staff and focusing on new opportunities. Random House merged Ballantine and Bantam Dell, HarperCollins rebranded Eos and Voyager, HarperCollins sold its new Angry Robot imprint, as did Games Workshop its Solaris Books imprint. The major North American book chains struggled, with reports popping up throughout the year of both Borders and Barnes & Noble being in various kinds of financial trouble. And magazine Realms of Fantasy , having closed and been rescued in 2009, was sold and rescued again late in 2010.

This was also the year when eBook publishing really took off. Early in the year publishers publicly slugged it out with Amazon over eBook pricing, but that was quickly swept aside when Apple released its iPad in April. Apple sold three million devices in less than three months, and went on to sell more than eight million during the year. Those eight million new, very high profile e-readers were soon joined by new, cheaper iterations of the Kindle, the Nook and others. E-readers seemed to become a desirable thing to own, the next “it” gadget, and eBook sales increased accordingly, with some publishers saying as year’s end approached that eBooks accounted for as much as twenty percent of sales.

That was reflected in the decision by mass market publisher Dorchester to move from traditionally printed books to digital-only editions in August. Perhaps more interesting for SF and fantasy, though, was the comparatively quiet announcement that same month that Gollancz, one of the most respected and important SF imprints in the field, had quietly appointed its first digital publisher. There have been some whispers as to what this might mean for the future, and it’s something I for one will be watching with great interest.

But what of the art of short SF and fantasy? How is that doing? I can imagine you asking. Well, as I’ve been saying for close to a decade now, it has become almost impossible to keep track of all of the original short fiction published each year. I don’t have the February issue of Locus to hand, but when I last looked they’d reported close to 3,500 new stories had been published in their most recent year of accounting, and I’ve long felt that underestimated numbers by a factor of four or five. New stories were published in anthologies, collections, magazines (whether printed on paper or presented with pixels) and pamphlets; they came from publishers of all sizes, and they came every single day. One publisher even launched a service that, rather mind-bogglingly, offered a new story every working day (that’s 220 per year, or more than the combined output of Asimov’s , Analog , F&SF , Realms of Fantasy and Interzone ). Year’s best editors whimpered.

While in recent years anthologies seemed to be providing most of our best short fiction, this year the field seemed to level out with a wide variety of venues producing some excellent work, but no single source really dominating. Unlike 2009, though, I probably found more stories I liked in magazines with almost two-thirds of the contents of this book coming from one periodical or another, and just a third coming from the pages of anthologies.

We are early enough in the digital era that we still find ourselves bound, it seems, to discuss whether magazines appear in print or online. This isn’t a particularly useful distinction given that at the end of the day a magazine is a magazine and an issue is an issue. That said, the majority of the stories from magazines that I liked came from online sources. Last year Tor.com had a particularly strong year, but this year it was Subterranean that dominated. Editor Bill Schafer produced a terrific mix of fantasy, oddball SF and other stuff, including major stories by Rachel Swirsky, Peter S. Beagle, K. J. Parker, Hannu Rajaniemi and many more. He also reprinted excellent long novellas originally published in book form from the likes of Lucius Shepard and Ted Chiang. It was, on balance, the best single source of top notch fiction in 2010. Veteran Strange Horizons , which picked up its first World Fantasy Award in October, also had a very strong year with fine stories from the likes of John Kessel, Lavie Tidhar, Sandra McDonald, Meghan McCarron and Theodora Goss. Comparative newcomer Apex SF had what was probably its best year yet, publishing some good work including two marvelous fantasies by Ian Tregillis and Theodora Goss. Clarkesworld , which after Tor.com , was easily the best online magazine of 2009, justifiably picked up the Hugo in August and had another strong (if slightly less dominant) year publishing excellent work by Peter Watts, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Catherynne M. Valente and others. Newcomer Lightspeed , under the able editorship of John Joseph Adams, also began to find its feet across its first half-dozen issues, publishing a terrific story by Genevieve Valentine, and some fine work by Ted Kosmatka, Carol Emshwiller and others.

Of the print magazines, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine had the best year producing terrific work by established regulars like Robert Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Geoffrey A. Landis and Kij Johnson, alongside newer writers like Sara Genge and Felicity Shoulders. Editor Sheila Williams doesn’t really get enough credit for the efforts she’s put in over recent years to broaden and re-define Asimov’s but it definitely showed this year. Gordon Van Gelder’s Fantasy & Science Fiction had another solid year, with strong stories by Bruce Sterling, Paul Park, John Kessel, Steven Popkes, Ian R. Macleod and newcomer Alexandra Duncan. It remains a reliable source of good fiction. Interzone also had a good year, producing two excellent stories by Jim Hawkins, who returned to the magazine with his second and third sales after a thirty-year hiatus. There were many other print magazines published, but these were the ones that struck me as the best.

If anthologies weren’t quite as dominant in 2010, that’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of them and that they didn’t contain a lot of fine fiction. I should probably note the caveat here that I edited several anthologies in 2010 myself, so I offer without comment SF anthology Godlike Machines , fantasy anthologies Swords and Dark Magic (edited with Lou Anders), Legends of Australian Fantasy (edited with Jack Dann) and Wings of Fire (edited with Marianne S. Jablon). All contain work I think deserves your attention. The best original fantasy anthology of the year was Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black’s immensely enjoyable Zombies vs. Unicorns , which featured excellent work by Diana Peterfreund, Sarah Rees Brennan, Scott Westerfeld, Meg Cabot, Alaya Dawn Johnson and others. If you buy only one original fantasy anthology of the year, this should be it. I was frankly surprised at the quality of Full Moon City, a werewolf anthology that featured terrific stories from the likes of Holly Black, Peter S. Beagle and Gene Wolfe. Well worth your attention was the latest from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Beastly Bride , which included strong work from Christopher Barzak, Ellen Kushner and Peter S. Beagle. More tangential to this book, Datlow also edited a strong anthology of ghost stories, Haunted Legends , with Nick Mamatas, which featured good work by Jeffrey Ford, Caitlín R. Kiernan and Joe R. Lansdale. Also worth mention is John Joseph Adams’s The Way of the Wizard , which includes good work by Nnedi Okorafor, Genevieve Valentine and others.

There were, frankly, very few SF anthologies published this year. After my own Godlike Machines , the best of these was Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern’s Is Anybody Out There? , which had an excellent story from Pat Cadigan and very good work from Alexander Irvine and others. 2010 also seemed to have more high profile “bestseller” anthologies than we’ve seen for a while. Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio delivered Stories , while Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin edited Warriors and Songs of Love and Death . All three were mixed genre, and often the non-genre stories were the highlights. Although it was somewhat uneven, the best of these anthologies was Stories, which had outstanding stories by Elizabeth Hand and editor Gaiman, alongside fine work from Joe R. Lansdale, Jeffrey Ford and Tim Powers. Warriors featured strong work from Joe Haldeman, Howard Waldrop and both editors Dozois and Martin, while Songs of Love and Death had good work from Carrie Vaughn, Neil Gaiman and others. 2010 saw the World Science Fiction Convention travel to Australia and a number of strong anthologies were published by Australian small presses to coincide with the event. Easily the best of these was Alisa Krasnostein’s Sprawl , a suburban fantasy anthology from Twelfth Planet Press which featured excellent work by Peter M. Ball, Angela Slatter, Thoraiya Dyer and others. Also of interest were Tehani Wesseley’s Worlds Next Door and Liz Grzyb’s Scary Kisses .

I could go on and talk about reprint anthologies, collections and such but I’m running long as it is, so instead I’ll simply say it was another fine year and let you get to reading the wonderful stories that feature in this year’s book. As always, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed compiling them. See you next year!

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Australia

November 2010