The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Summation: 2017

Like last year, 2017 was another relatively quiet year in the SF publishing world, once the reverberations from last year’s restructuring of Penguin Random House, which had included mergers with Berkley, Putnam, and Dutton, had mostly settled down, although aftershocks and consequences will probably be felt for some time to come.

Penguin Random House phased out their Roc imprint, while Hachette axed Weinstein Books in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Amanda Ridout resigned as CEO of Head of Zeus, replaced by Anthony Cheetham. Tim Hely Hutchinson retired as CEO of Hachette UK, replaced by David Shelley. Jane Friedman stepped down as board chair and executive publisher of Open Road Integrated Media. Emma Coode left her position as editorial director of Voyager. Navah Wolfe was promoted to senior editor at Saga Press. Jennifer Heddle was promoted to executive director at Disney/Lucasfilm Publishing. Brit Hvide was promoted to senior editor at Orbit. Sam Bradbury joined Hodder as an editor. Nancy Miller was promoted to associate publisher at Bloomsbury, and Mary Kate Castellani was promoted to executive editor at Bloomsbury Children’s, with Hali Baumstein promoted to associate editor. Kaelyn Considine joined Parvus Press as an editor. Lucille Rettino joined Tom Doherty Associates as vice president of marketing and publicity. David Pomerico was promoted to executive director of publicity for Tor, Forge, Tor Teen, and Starscape.

The year 2017 was again fairly stable in the professional print magazine market; the magazines didn’t register spectacular gains, but neither did they suffer the precipitous decline in subscriptions and circulation of some other years.

Asimov’s Science Fiction had a strong year this year, their first as a bimonthly publication after years of publishing ten issues a year, publishing good work by Rich Larson, Ray Nayler, Harry Turtledove, Suzanne Palmer, Ian McHugh, R. Garcia y Robertson, Michael Swanwick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Carrie Vaughn, Tom Purdom, Damien Broderick, and others. As usual, their SF was considerably stronger than their fantasy, usually the reverse of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 4.2 percent gain in overall circulation, up to 18,043 copies. There were 7,627 print subscriptions and 8,155 digital subscriptions, for a total of 15,782, up from 2016’s 15,269. Newsstand sales were up to 2,261 from 2016’s 2,044. Sell-through rose to 39 percent, up from 2016’s at 37 percent. Sheila Williams completed her fourteenth year as Asimov’s editor.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact; also in its first year as a bimonthly magazine, had good work by Michael F. Flynn, Alec Nevala-Lee, Bill Johnson, Maggie Clark, Rich Larson, Joe Pitkin, James Van Pelt, and others. Analog registered a 2.7 percent loss in overall circulation, down to 18,278 from 2016’s 18,800. There were 12,249 print subscriptions, and 6,029 digital subscriptions. Newsstand sales were down slightly to 2,711 from 2016’s 2,773. Sell-through fell to 38 percent from 2016’s 43 percent. Editor Trevor Quachri completed his fourth full year as editor, and is doing a good job of widening the definition of what’s usually thought of as “an Analog story,” and bringing new writers into the magazine.

It will be interesting to see what affect, if any, the switch to bimonthly format has next year on the sales figures for Asimov’s and Analog.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had a stronger than usual year for science fiction, publishing good work by R. S. Benedict, Michael Swanwick, Samuel R. Delany, Matthew Hughes, Rachel Pollack, Kelly Jennings, Larry Niven, Robert Reed, Naomi Kritzer, and others. F&SF registered a 7.3 loss in overall circulation from 10,055 to 9,322. Subscriptions dropped slightly from 7,247 to 6,935, with 2,387 copies sold on the newsstands as compared to 2016’s 2,808; sell-through was 25 percent. Since digital sales figures for F&SF are not available since they switched to Kindle subscriptions, there’s no way to be certain what the magazine’s overall circulation figures actually are. Charles Coleman Finlay completed his second full year as F&SF editor, having taken over from Gordon Van Gelder, who had edited the magazine for eighteen years, with the March/April 2015 issue. Van Gelder remains as the magazine’s owner and publisher, as he has been since 2014. Finlay is doing a good job of getting good stories by new authors into the magazine, and seems to be especially strengthening the quality of the magazine’s science fiction content.

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 had a weakish year in 2017, but still managed to publish good stuff by Sean McMullen, Malcom Devlin, Erica L. Satifka, T. R. Napper, Laura Mauro, and others. Exact circulation figures not available, but is guessed to be in the 2,000 copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes a 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 editor and publisher is Andy Cox.

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, the Nook, and other handheld readers.

With more and more of the print semiprozines departing to the digital realm, there isn’t a lot left of either the print fiction semiprozine market or the print critical magazine market. (It’s also getting a bit problematical to say which are print semiprozines and which are ezines, since some markets, like Galaxy’s Edge, are offering both print versions and electronic versions of their issues at the same time. I’m tempted to just merge the surviving print fiction and critical magazines into the section covering online publication, but for now I’ll keep it as a separate section.

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, again brought out three out of four scheduled issues; there have been rumors about them making the jump to digital format, but so far that hasn’t happened. There was only one issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Space and Time Magazine (whose future may be in doubt) managed two issues, and Neo-opsis managed two. There didn’t seem to be any issues of Ireland’s long-running Albedo One released this year. Australian semiprozines Aurealis and Andromeda Spaceways have departed the print realm for digital formats.

For general-interest print magazines about SF and fantasy, about the only one left is the venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensable source of news, information, and reviews, now in its fifty-first year of publication, operating 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 (www.thecz.com), a feminist magazine of reviews and critical essays, edited by Arrate Hidalgo, L. Timmel Duchamp, Nisi Shawl, and Kath Wilham, which published three issues in 2017. Most of the other surviving print critical magazines are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader, including the long-running British critical zine Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Vector.

Subscription addresses are: Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., 1933 Davis Street, Suite 297, San Leandro, CA 94577, $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.; On Spec, The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information, go to website www.onspec.ca; Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5, $25.00 for a three-issue subscription; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant Street, #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00 for four issues; 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 9845–2787.

The world of online-only electronic magazines now rivals—and often surpasses—the traditional print market as a place to find good new fiction.

The electronic magazine Clarkesworld (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), edited by Neil Clarke, had another very strong year, publishing first-rate work by Kelly Robson, Naomi Kritzer, Rich Larson, Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier, Jess Barber and Sara Saab, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Finbarr O’Reilly, and others. They also host monthly podcasts of stories drawn from each issue. Clarkesworld has won three Hugo Awards as best semiprozine. In 2014, Clarkesworld co-editor Sean Wallace, along with Jack Fisher, launched a new online horror magazine, The Dark Magazine (www.thedarkmagazine.com). Neil Clarke has also launched a monthly reprint ezine, Forever (forever-magazine.com).

Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, had a somewhat weak year, but still managed to publish good work by Indrapramit Das, Mari Ness, Cadwell Turnbull, Pat Murphy, Susan Palwick, Lina Rather, Greg Kurzawa, and others. Lightspeed won back-to-back Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine in 2014 and 2015. 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 Neilsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published a mix of SF, fantasy, dark fantasy, soft horror, and more unclassifiable stuff this year, with good work by Greg Egan, Linda Nagata, Stephen Baxter, Allen M. Steele, Jo Walton, Julianna Baggott, Lavie Tidhar, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. They also launched a new program, Tor.com Publishing, which brought out many of the year’s novellas in chapbook form.

An ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, published good stuff by Richard Parks, Stephen Case, Carrie Vaughn, Sarah Saab, Tony Pi, M. Bennardo, Marissa Lingen, Rose Lemberg, Kameron Hurley, Jeremy Sim, and others.

Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the internet, started in 2000. Niall Harrison stepped down as editor-in-chief, to be replaced by Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde. There wasn’t a lot of SF to be found in Strange Horizons this year, which seems to have swerved back to mostly slipstream, but they did publish interesting work by Ana Hurtado, Helena Bell, Iona Sharma, Su-Yee Lin, and others.

Newish magazine Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, which has won the best semiprozine Hugo two years in a row in 2016 and 2017, had entertaining stories by Naomi Kritzer, Sarah Pinsker, Sam J. Miller and Lara Elena Donnelly, Seanan McGuire, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Sarah Monette, N. K. Jemisin, Fran Wilde, Tina Connelly, and others.

Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, reached its fifth year of publication, and is still going strong; it’s available in various downloadable formats, although a print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue. They continued to publish entertaining original stuff this year, although the reprint stories here are still stronger than the original stories.

The quality of the fiction seemed to go up at Apex Magazine this year, (www.apex-magazine.com) which published good work by Rich Larson, Lavie Tidhar, Nisi Shawl, Tobias S. Buckell, S. B. Divya, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ken MacLeod, Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, having taken over the position last year.

Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by Rich Larson, James Van Pelt, Jon Rollins, Angus McIntyre. Jordan Taylor, and others, although little of it could be considered to be core science fictiton. Wendy S. Delmater, the former longtime editor, has returned to the helm, replacing Carmelo Rafala.

Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, published interesting work by Cat Sparks, Octavia Cade, Ken Brady, 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.

Other ezines that published worthwhile, if not often memorable stuff, included Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet; Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), now edited by Scott R. Roberts under the direction of Card himself; SF/fantasy ezine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, which publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year; Shimmer Magazine (www.shimmezine.com), edited by E. Catherine Tobler, which leans heavily toward fantasy, and GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), edited by Rashida J. Smith, which publishes one story a month.

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, round-table 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 (http://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.

Other newcomers include Omenana Magazine of Africa’s Speculative Fiction (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu; Persistent Visions (persistentvisionsmag.com), edited by Heather Shaw; Shoreline of Infinity (www.shorelineofinfinity.com), edited by Noel Chidwick; Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform),edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant; and Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction (www.fiyahlitmag.com), edited by Justina Ireland.

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 Fireside Magazine (firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White; Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com); Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); and Interfictions Online (interfictions.com), executive editor Delila Sherman, fiction editors Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron.

Original fiction is not the only thing available to be read on the internet, though. Lots of good reprint SF and fantasy can be found there as well, sites where you can access formerly published stories for free. Such sites include Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Beyond Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine; 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, collections, and anthologies, can either be bought or 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 Infinity Plus Books can also be ordered from the Infinity Plus site).

But beyond the search for good stories to read, there are plenty of other reasons for SF/fantasy fans to go on the internet. 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 website 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 Site (www.sfsite.com), although it’s no longer being regularly updated, SFRevu (www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope.com), Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld (www.sffworld.com), SFReader (forums.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; there is also The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, with similar articles about fantasy and fantasy writers. 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 general interest include: Ansible (news.ansible.co.uk/Ansible), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; Book View Café (www.bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors,” including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zittel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a website 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 (www.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), Far Fetched Fables (www.farfetchedfables.com), new companion to StarShipSofa, concentrating on fantasy, SF Signal Podcast (www.sfsignal.com), Pseudopod (www.pseudopod.org, podcasting mostly fantasy), Podcastle (www.podcastle.org), podcasting mostly fantasy, and Galactic Suburbia (galacticsuburbia.podbean.com). Clarkesworld routinely offers podcasts of stories from the ezine, and The Agony Column (agonycolumn.com) also hosts a weekly podcast. There’s also a site that podcasts nonfiction interviews and reviews, Dragon Page Cover to Cover (www.dragonpage.com).

Last year I mentioned that most of the stories I was seeing were of short-story length, with few long novelettes or novellas. Although perhaps most of this year’s stories were still of short-story length, this year saw a dramatic resurgence of novellas. By one count, there were more than eighty novellas published in the SF/fantasy/horror genres in 2017. Most of these were published as stand-alone chapbooks, and the ambitious new program from Tor.com Publishing can account for a lot of these chapbooks; there were also many released by a wide array of small presses, as Kickstarter projects, and in electronic formats. Industry stalwarts such as Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF continued to publish novellas as well, as they’ve always done, and even electronic magazines such as Clarkesworld, which had formerly had strict word limits, seem to be loosening up and increasing the length of stories that they’re willing to accept.

The odd result of this is that you have a lot of novellas on one end of the scale and a lot of short stories on the opposite end, with fewer novelettes in between. Perhaps, like the midlist in book publishing, novelettes are becoming marginalized. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the future.

There were a lot of original anthologies published in 2017. The SF anthologies divided up into two rough groups, the space opera/military SF anthologies (with the balance between the two forms varying from book to book), and the futurology anthologies, many of them with corporate or government sponsors, leading Jonathan Strahan to dub them “think-tank fiction.” The strongest original SF anthology of the year was Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Wars (Solaris), ostensibly a collection of military SF, although in some ways it’s actually a kind of stealth antiwar anthology, with character after character wrestling with doubts about the morality of the war and the orders they’ve been given and whether or not they should comply with them and sicke of the slaughter involved, particularly of civilians. The best stories here are Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon is Not a Battlefield” and Nancy Kress’s “Dear Sarah,” although there are also strong stories by Eleanor Arnason, Peter Watts, Rich Larson, Carrie Vaughn, An Owomoyela, Elizabeth Bear, David D. Levine, E. J. Swift, and others.

In this grouping, the next two strongest anthologies are probably Nick Gever’s Extrasolar—Postscripts 38 (PS Publishing) and John Joseph Adams’s Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies (Saga). Extrasolar’s premise is that its writers are going to take us on a “tour of the stars in our galactic neighborhood,” drawing on the knowledge about exotic stars and extrasolar planets derived from more than twenty years of observation by the Kepler telescope and other space telescopes, knowledge that paints a very different picture of what a solar system can be like than that which was gained by observing our own—and which has thrown new fuel on the fire of the debate about the Fermi paradox. As such, it fits a bit uneasily into the space opera/military SF grouping, although stories here by Alastair Reynolds, Aliette de Bodard, and others could easily be considered to be military SF. Best stories here, in addition to the above-mentioned Reynolds and de Bodard stories, are “Canoe,” by Nancy Kress and “The Residue of Fire,” by Robert Reed, although Extrasolar also featured strong work from Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jack McDevitt, Gregory Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Terry Dowling, Ian Watson, Lavie Tidhar, Ian R. MacLeod, and others. Cosmic Powers is much more of a space opera anthology, unsurprising in an anthology where the editor asked for stories in the spirit of the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy—and that’s pretty much exactly what he got. The best stories here are “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” by Tobias S. Buckell, “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun,” by Aliette de Bodard, “Golden Ring,” by Karl Schroeder, “The Chameleon’s Gloves,” by Yoon Ha Lee, and “Diamond and the World Breaker,” by Linda Nagata, there’s also strong work here by Seanan McGuire, Charlie Jane Anders, and Kameron Hurley, as well as reprints by Vylar Kaftan, Caroline M. Yoachim, and others. Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s Infinite Stars: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF (Titan) is the anthology in this grouping the most oriented toward military SF. A mixed original/reprint anthology, the best of the original stories here are Alastair Reynolds’s “Revolution Space: Night Passage” and Linda Nagata’s “Red: Region Five,” but there’s also good work here by Charles E. Gannon, David Weber, Jody Lynn Nye, David Drake, Jack Campbell, and Elizabeth Moon. Adding substantially to the value of Infinite Stars is a strong list of reprint stories by Poul Anderson, Cordwainer Smith, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, Lois McMaster Bujold, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Nnedi Okorafor, A. C. Crispin, and Anne McCaffrey,

Of the futurology/think tank anthologies (collections of near-future futurology stories dealing with technological change, often sponsored by writers assembled and commissioned for the task by some major corporation), the strongest was Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (Arizona State University), edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, a mixed fiction/nonfiction anthology about space futures from Arizona State University, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which featured strong stories by Carter Scholz, Madeline Ashby, Eileen Gunn, Vandana Singh, Ramez Naam, and Steven Barnes. Also strong is another mixed fiction/nonfiction anthology, Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World (Tor), edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts. Best of the original stories here are “Elephant on Table,” by Bruce Sterling, “First Presentation,” by Aliette de Bodard, and “Eminence,” by Karl Schroeder, but the anthology also features good work by Nancy Fulda, Jack Skillingstead, Gregory Benford, Cat Rambo, and Brenda Cooper. Good reprints in Chasing Shadows include work by Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Brin himself, and others. Another fairly strong futurology anthology is Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (Upper Rubber Boot), edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. Sunvault features strong stories by Lavie Tidhar, A. C. Wise, Nisi Shawl, Jess Barber, and Tyler Young, as well as reprints by Daniel José Older and Nick Wood.

Many of the year’s other think tank anthologies don’t have physical copies available, but are available online, including A Flight to the Future (seat 14c.com), edited by Kathryn Cramer, sponsored by an X Prize and by the Japanese airline company Ana; Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future (www.wired.com) Scott Dadich, editor in chief: Stories in the Stratosphere (Arizona State University), edited by Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn; and Megatech, sponsored by The Economist magazine, edited by Daniel Franklin. A subset of futurology anthologies is dystopian anthologies, and there were two this year, Global Dystopias (MIT Press), a special section of the Boston Review newspaper, edited by Junot Díaz, featuring strong if rather grim and brutal work by Charlie Jane Anders, Tananarive Due, and Maureen F. McHugh, and Welcome to Dystopia (O/R Books), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, a very near future anthology (with some stories set next year and few more than ten years on, concentrating mostly on negative results of President Trump’s policies), featuring worthwhile work by Geoff Ryman, Janis Ian, Ruth Nestvold, Marguerite Reed, Elizabeth Bourne, Paul Witcover, and others.

A bit harder to categorize are some of the year’s other anthologies. Children of a Different Sky (Kos Books), edited by Alma Alexander, is a mixed SF and fantasy anthology about refugees and immigrants, with part of the profits being donated to various charitable institutions that help refugees; there is good work here by Aliette de Bodard, Jacey Bedford, Brenda Cooper, Seanan McGuire, and others. Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Laska Media Group), edited by Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak, is a mixed SF/fantasy anthology featuring good stuff by S. B. Divya, Priya Sridhar, Tony Pi, Jeremy Szal, Amanda Sun, and others. Shadows & Reflections: Stories from the Worlds of Roger Zelazny (Positronic Publications), edited by Trent Zelazny and Warren Lapine, is a tribute anthology that offers other writers the chance to play with Roger Zelazny’s worlds and characters; good stuff here by Steven Brust, Gerald Hausman, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Sharianne Lewitt, and others.

There were only a few original fantasy anthologies this year. One of the most acclaimed was The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (Solaris), edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, which featured strong work by Helene Wecker, K. J. Parker, E. J. Swift, Nnedi Okorafor, Catherine Faris King, J. Y. Yang, Maria Dahvana Headley, and others. Noted without comment is The Book of Swords (Random House), edited by Gardner Dozois. Although there are streaks of darkness in it, the subject matter of Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-new Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow, tends to make the stories more whimsical than horrific, so I’m going to list it here in fantasy rather than horror; there are good stories here by Andy Duncan, Ysabeau S. Wilce, Richard Bowes, Seanan McGuire, Jane Yolen, Jeffrey Ford, Delia Sherman, and others.

I don’t pay close attention to the horror field, considering it out of my purview, but the original horror anthologies that got the most attention seemed to be Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology (Pegasus), edited by Ellen Datlow, and Haunted Nights (Anchor), edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton.

There were two shared-world anthologies this year, Missisippi Roll: A Wild Cards Novel (Tor), edited by George R. R. Martin, and Treemontaine (Saga), edited by Ellen Kushner.

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 33 (Galaxy), edited by David Farland, 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.

There were also a number of anthologies from Fiction River (www.fictionriver.com), which in 2013 launched a continuing series of original SF, fantasy, and mystery anthologies, with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith as overall series editors, and individual editions edited by various hands. This year, they published Pulse Pounders: Adrenaline (WMG), edited by Kevin J. Anderson; No Humans Allowed (WMG), edited by John Helfers; Feel the Fear (WMG), edited by Mark Leslie; Tavern Tales (WMG), edited by Kerrie L. Hughes; Editor’s Choice (WMG), edited by Mark Leslie; and Superpowers (WMG), edited by Rebecca Moesta. These can be purchased in Kindle versions from Amazon and other online vendors, or from the publisher at wmgpublishinginc.com.

These days to find up-to-date contact information for almost any publisher, however small, you can just Google it. Nevertheless, as a courtesy, I’m going to reproduce here the addresses I have for small presses that may have been mentioned in the various sections of the Summation. If any of them are out-of-date, quite possible, just Google the publisher.

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, 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; Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, www.fairwoodpress.com; 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, Australia, 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.arsenalpress.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.hadleyrillebooks.com; Suddenly Press, via suddenlypress@yahoo.com; Sandstone Press, P.O. Box 5725, One High St., Dingwall, Ross-shire, IV15 9WJ; Tropism Press, via www.tropismpress.com; SF Poetry Association/Dark Regions Press, via www.sfpoetry.com, checks to Helena Bell, SFPA Treasurer, 1225 West Freeman St., Apt. 12, Carbondale, IL 62401; DH Press, via diamondbookdistributors.com; Kurodahan Press, via website 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 coeurdelion.com.au; PARSECink, via www.parsecink.org; Robert J. Sawyer Books, via www.sfwriter.com/rjsbooks.htm; 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.twelfhplanetpress.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 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2017, down 6 percent from 2,858 titles in 2016. New titles were down 7 percent to 1,820 from 2016’s 1,957, while reprints dropped 3 percent to 874 titles from 2016’s 910. Hardcovers dropped by 5 percent to 883 titles from 2016’s record high of 856. Trade paperbacks dropped to 1,433 titles, down 7 percent from 2016’s 1,539. Mass-market paperbacks, the format facing the most competition from ebooks, continued to drop for the ninth year in a row, down 2 percent to 378 titles from 2016’s 385. The number of new SF novels was down 7 percent to 396 titles from 2016’s 425 titles. The number of new fantasy novels was down 6 percent to 694 titles from 2016’s 737, which climbed up 8 percent from 2015’s 682 titles, with 246 of those titles being YA fantasy novels. Horror novels were down 10 percent to 154 from 2016’s 171 titles. Paranormal romances rose to 122 titles from 2016’s 107, still down considerably from 2011’s 416 titles at the height of the paranormal romance boom.

It’s legitimate to say that 2017 saw a drop across all novel categories—but those drops were minor. Yet 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” is still an enormous number of books, probably more than some small-town libraries contain of books in general. Even if you consider only the 396 new SF titles, that’s still a lot of books, more than 2009’s total of 232 titles, and considerably larger than the total number of SF novels published in prior decades—probably more than most people are going to have time to read (or the desire to read, either). And these totals don’t count many ebooks, 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 those novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2017.

Luna: Wolf Moon, by Ian McDonald (Tor); Austral, by Paul McAuley (Gollancz); New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit); The House of Binding Thorns, by Aliette de Bodard (Ace); The Moon and the Other, by John Kessel (Saga); Tomorrow’s Kin, by Nancy Kress (Tor); Persepolis Rising (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; Convergence, by C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga), by John Crowley; The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Guomon (Heinemann), by Nick Harkaway; The Wrong Stars (Angry Robot), by Tim Pratt; The Stone in the Skull, by Elizabeth Bear (Tor); Akata Warrior, by Nndi Okorafor (Viking); Tool of War, by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown); The Real-Town Murders, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz); Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit); Quillifer, by Walter Jon Williams (Saga); The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit); Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris); The Uploaded, by Ferrett Steinmetz (Angry Robot); Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory (Knopf); Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn (John Joseph Adams); The Masacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz); The Man in the Tree, by Sage Walker (Tor); The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor); Cold Welcome, by Elizabeth Moon (Del Rey); Assassin’s Fate, by Robin Hobb (Del Ray); Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow (Tor); and Empire Games (Tor), by Charles Stross.

It’s worth noting that in spite of decades of fretting about how fantasy is going to drive all SF from the bookshelves, in the list above the McDonald, the McAuley, the Kessel, the Robinson, the Cherryh, the Corey, the Leckie, the Yoon Ha Lee, the Scalzi, the Baxter, and many others are pure-quill center-core SF.

For a long time, small presses published mostly short-story collections, but in recent years they’ve begun publishing novels as well. Novels by well-known authors published by small presses this year included: Mother Go, by James Patrick Kelly (Audible); The River Bank, by Kij Johnson (Small Beer Press); Infinity Engine, by Neal Asher (Night Shade); Fire, by Elizabeth Hand (PM Press); Upon This Rock: Book 1—First Contact, by David Marusek (A Stack of Firewood Press); The Last Good Man, by Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press); In Evil Times, by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan); and The Rift (Titan) by Nina Allan.

The year’s first novels included: The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen), Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz (Tor), The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss (Saga), Lotus Blue, by Cat Sparks (Talos), Tropic of Kansas, by Christopher Brown (Harper Voyager), Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck (Vintage), The City of Brass, by S. A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager), Amberlough, by Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor), Hunger Makes the Wolf, by Alex Wells (Angry Robot), Blackwing, by Ed McDonald (Gollancz), Wintersong, by S. Jae-Jones (Thomas Dunne Books), Found Audio, by N. J Cambell (Two Dollar Radio), Aberrant, by Marek Sindelka and translated by Nathan Fields (Twisted Spoon), Weave a Circle Round: A Novel, by Kari Maaren (Tor), The Tiger’s Daughter, by K. Arsenault Rivera (Tor), An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon (Akashic), All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai (Dutton), An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager), Ghost Garages, by Erin M. Hartshorn (Eimarra), Strange Practice, by Vivian Shaw (Orbit), The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden (Del Rey), The Prey of Gods, by Nicky Drayden (Harper Voyager), The Guns Above, by Robyn Bennis (Tor), An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, by Curtis Craddock (Tor), Knucklebones, by Marni Scofidio (PS Publishing), Starfire: A Red Peace, by Spencer Ellsworth (Tor), The Mercy of the Tide, by Keith Rosson (Meerkat), The Space Between the Stars, by Anne Corlett (Berkley), Three Years with the Rat: A Novel, by Jay Hosking (Thomas Dunne Books), and Witchy Eye, by D. J. Butler (Baen).

None of these seemed to draw any large amount of attention.

The few novel omnibuses available this year included: The Hainish Novels and Stories (Library of America), by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Dosadi Experiment and The Eyes of Heisenberg (Tor), by Frank Herbert; and Armageddon—2419 A.D and The Airlords of Han (Dover), by Philip Francis Nowlan.

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 ebooks 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.

Gollancz reissued Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, all by William Gibson; Tor reissued Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, From the Two Rivers: The Eye of the World, Part One, by Robert Jordan, Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi, Whiteout, by Sage Walker, Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and The Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction, by David G. Hartwell; Penguin Classics reissued Ice, by Anna Kavan; Baen reissued None But Man, by Gordon R. Dickson, Wolfling, by Gordon R. Dickson, Honor Among Enemies, by David Weber, and Borders of Infinity, by Lois McMaster Bujold; DAW reissued The Storm Lord, Anackire, The White Serpent, Night’s Sorceries, Redder than Blood, Delirium’s Mistress, and Delusion’s Master, all by Tanith Lee; Valancourt Books reissued One, by David Karp; Harper Classics reissued The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman; Dover reissued The Ant-Men, by Eric North, The Mindwarpers, by Eric Frank Russell, Eclipse, by John Shirley, The Ghost Pirates, by William Hope Hodgson, Worlds of the Imperium, by Keith Laumer, and In the Drift, by Michael Swanwick; Fairwood Press reissued Transfigurations, by Michael Bishop; Angry Robot reissued Infernal Devices, Fiendish Schemes, and released Grim Expectations, all by K. W. Jeter; Open Road reissued Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore; Pegasus reissued Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin; Chicago Review Press reissued Monday Starts on Saturday, by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky; CreateSpace reissued The Star Rover, by Jack London; Simon & Schuster reissued Gloriana: Or, the Unfulfill’d Queen, by Michael Moorcock and Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury; and Tachyon reissued The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip.

Many authors are now reissuing their old backtitles as ebooks, 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.

It was a weaker year in 2017 for short-story collections than 2016 had been, although there was still some good stuff.

The year’s best collections included: Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories (Fairwood), by Naomi Kritzer; Lost Among the Stars (WordFire), by Paul Di Filippo; Telling the Map: Stories (Small Beer), by Christopher Rowe; Wicked Wonders (Tachyon), by Ellen Klages; Norse Mythology (Norton), by Neil Gaiman; Dear Sweet Filthy World (Subterranean), by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Down and Out in Purgatory (Baen), by Tim Powers; Up the Rainbow: The Complete Short Fiction of Susan Casper (Fantastic Books); Concentration (PS Publishing), by Jack Dann; and Six Months, Three Days, Five Others (Tor.com Publishing), by Charlie Jane Anders.

Also good were: Totalitopia (PM Press), by John Crowley; Fire (PM Press), by Elizabeth Hand; The Overneath (Tachyon), by Peter S. Beagle; The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stories (Subterranean), by William Browning Spencer; Emerald Circus (Tachyon), by Jane Yolen; The Refrigerator Monologues (Saga), by Catherynne M. Valente; and Tender: Stories (Small Beer), by Sofia Samatar.

Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: The Man with the Speckled Eyes (Centipede), by R. A. Lafferty; Tanith By Choice (NewCon Publishing), by Tanith Lee; The Best of Bova, Volume III (Baen), by Ben Bova; The Thing in the Stone and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; Dusty Zebra and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales (Dover), by Margaret St. Clair; The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume One (Night Shade), edited by Seabury Quinn; The Devil’s Rosary: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume Two (Night Shade), edited by George A. Vanderburgh; The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” and Other Nautical Adventures (Night Shade), by William Hope Hodgson; The Ghost Pirates (Dover), by William Hope Hodgson; The Best of Richard Matheson (Penguin Classics), edited by Victor LaValle; The Last Heiroglyph: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 5 (Night Shade); Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Baen), by Poul Anderson; First-Person Singularities: Stories (Three Rooms), by Robert Silverberg, and The Hainish Novels and Stories (Library of America), by Ursula K. Le Guin. (The Hainish Novels and Stories comes in two volumes, one an omnibus of Le Guin’s Hainish novels and the other a collection of her Hainish stories, but the story part alone is probably the strongest short-story collection of the year.)

As usual, small presses 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.

Also as usual, the most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are the various best of the year anthologies, the number of which continues to fluctuate. David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF series was lost with the tragic death of its editor in 2016. There was no edition this year of The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera (Baen), edited by David Afsharirad, but a new volume has been announced for June 2018. There also didn’t seem to be a volume this year of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and this series may have died. There was a new best series launched this year, Best of British Science Fiction 2016 (NewCon Press), edited by Donna Scott, but since it covers 2016 rather than 2017, we can’t count it here. Continuing best series include: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), this volume edited by Charles Yu, with the overall series editor being John Joseph Adams; Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Four (Undertow), edited by Helen Marshall, series editor Michael Kelly; The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Neil Clarke The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its thirty-fifth annual collection; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2017 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton; The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Nine (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2017 (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Best New Horror, Number 27 (Drugstore Indian), edited by Stephen Jones.

That means that this year’s science fiction was covered by two dedicated best of the year anthologies, my own and the Clarke, plus four separate half anthologies, the science fiction halves of the Strahan, Horton, and Yu books, which in theory adds up to one and a half additional anthologies (in practice, of course, the contents of those books probably won’t divide that neatly, with exactly half with their coverage going to each genre, and there’ll likely to be more of one thing than another). There is no dedicated fantasy anthology anymore, fantasy only being covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan, Horton, and Yu books. Horror is now being covered by two dedicated volumes, the Datlow and the Jones, and the “horror” half of Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. It’s hard to tell where The Year’s Best Weird Fiction fits in, “weird fiction” being a term that could fit anything, depending on the whim of the editor; it’s possible that it may have some fantasy in it, but I suspect that it will lean toward horror instead. The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a defacto “best of the year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 (Pyr), edited by Julie E. Czerneda. More specialized best of the year anthologies are Wilde Stories 2017 (Lethe Press), edited by Steve Berman, and Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Bogi Takács.

There was no really prominent single title in the stand-alone reprint anthology market this year. The best of the stand-alone reprint antholgies were probably Galactic Empires (Night Shade), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Best of Subterranean (Subterranean Press), edited by William Schafer. More reprint SF anthologies included Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade (Baen), edited by William Ledbetter, If This Goes Wrong… (Baen), edited by Hank Davis, Go Forth and Multiply: Twelve Tales of Repopulation (Surinam Turtle Press), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, and Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction (Bloomsbury), edited by Michael Sims. Other reprint anthologies, all fantasy, included Swords Against Darkness (Prime) and New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps (Night Shade), both edited by Paula Guran, The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight (Firkin Press), edited by Scott H. Andrews, and The New Voices of Fantasy (Tachyon), edited by Peter S. Beagle.

The genre-oriented nonfiction was somewhat weak this year. There were a lot of biographies, autobiographies, and critical studies of SF writers, including: A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison (NESFA Press), by Nat Segaloff; Not So Good a Gay Man: A Memoir (Tor), by Frank M. Robinson; Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction (McFarland), by James Gunn; J. G. Ballard (University of Illinois Press), by D. Harlan Wilson; Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler (Twelfth Planet); edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal; Saving the World Through Science Fiction: James Gunn, Writer, Teacher and Scholar (McFarland), by Michael R. Page; Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building (McFarland), by Audrey Isabel Taylor; Iain M. Banks (University of Illinois Press), by Paul Kincaid; and The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford University Press), by Edmund Gordon.

Of these, by far the most attention, and the most controversy, was generated by A Lit Fuse.

Most of the rest of the year’s genre-oriented nonfiction books were more academically oriented, or else overviews of the field: Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics (Springer), by Russell Blackford; Gender Identity and Sexuality in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Luna), by Francesca T. Barbini; Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Aqueduct) by Liz Bourke; Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings (Bloomsbury Academic), by Rob Latham; Celestrial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press), by Nathaniel Isaacson; Science Fiction: A Literary History (British Library), by Roger Luckhurst; and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (University Press of Mississippi), by Isiah Lavender.

It was also a weak year for art books. As usual, your best bet here is a sort of a best of the year anthology for fantastic art: Spectrum 24: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Flesk), edited by John Fleskes. Also out in 2017 were Line of Beauty: The Art of Wendy Pini (Flesk), by Richard and Wendy Peni; The Art of the Pulps: An Illustrated History (IDW), edited by Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse, and Robert Weinberg; The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist (Titan), by Craig Hodgetts and Syd Mead; Familiars/Flora & Fauna/Viscera (Flesk), by J.A.W. Cooper; Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation (Disney Editions), by Mindy Johnson; Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok—The Art of the Movie (Marvel Universe), edited by Jeff Youngquist; Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Imaginarium (Gollancz), by Paul Kidby; Classic Storybook Fables (Artisan), by Scott Gustafson; Norse Myths: Tales of Odin, Thor, and Loki (Candlewick Studio), by Kevin Crossley-Holland and illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love; Celtic Faeries: The Secret Kingdom (Goblin’s Way), by Jean-Baptiste Monge; Infected by Art, Volume 5 (ArtOrder), edited by Todd Spoor and Bill Cox; David Wiesner and the Art of Wordless Storytelling (Santa Barbara Museum of Art), by Eik Kahng, Ellen Keiter, Katherine Roeder, and David Wiesner; and The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Kaladesh (Viz), by James Wyatt.

According to the Box Office Mojo site (www.boxofficemojo.com), for the second year in a row, all ten of the year’s ten top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (if you’re willing to count animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films”). Not only were all of the top ten movies genre films of one sort or another, but by my count, although I may have missed a few, seventeen out of the top twenty, and forty out of the one hundred top-grossing movies were genre films. In the past eighteen years, genre films have been number one at the box office sixteen out of eighteen times, with the only exceptions being American Sniper in 2014 and Saving Private Ryan in 1998. This year, you have to go down to the twelfth and fourteenth places on the list before you run into any non-genre films, The Fate of the Furious and Dunkirk respectively.

This year’s number one on the list of top ten box-office champs, in spite of a lot of controversy over it in social media, is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which racked up a worldwide box-office total of $1, 331,832.651 (and that’s before the profits from DVD sales, action figures, lunch boxes, T-shirts, and other kinds of accessories kick in, it’s worth noting).

Disney Studios obviously had a good year, with a stake in many of the year’s other top ten movies. Number two on the top ten list, for instance, is Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast.

Superhero movies, which seemed a bit down last year, made a strong resurgence in 2017. Warner Brothers’s Wonder Woman finished in third place, but there were also a number of Marvel movies as well, in which Disney also has a stake—Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which finished in fifth place, Spider-Man: Homecoming, which finished in sixth place, and Thor: Ragnarok, which finished in eighth place. Other superhero movies made it on to the top ten list as well: Logan (featuring Marvel character Wolverine, but not made by Marvel Studios) in eleventh place, and Warner Brothers’s Justice League, in tenth place.

Animated film Despicable Me 3 took ninth place on the top ten list, and other animated films showed up in the top twenty list, such as Coco, in thirteenth place, The LEGO Batman Movie, in sixteenth place, and The Boss Baby, in seventeenth place.

Horror movie It, based on the novel by Stephen King, took seventh place on the top ten list.

The most critically acclaimed of 2017’s genre films were probably Logan, an autumnal farewell to the character of Wolverine, Wonder Woman, the highest-earning DC superhero movie to date, which seems to have successfully started a new franchise, and The Shape of Water, an unacknowledged sequel of sorts to the old horror movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Critical opinion and fan reaction was sharply split on Blade Runner 2049, the long-awaited sequel to the original Blade Runner, with some calling it the best genre movie of the year, although it underperformed at the box office, only managing to come in at thirty-fourth place in the top one hundred list.

Other attempts to establish new franchises or reboot old ones also failed, with the ambitious space opera Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets coming in at sixty-sixth place in the top hundred list, the long-anticipated The Dark Tower, drawn from a series of novels by Stephen King, taking fifty-fifth place, a reboot of The Mummy franchise (one of the most critically savaged movies of the year) coming in at fortieth place, and a reboot of Power Rangers finishing at thirty-seventh place.

Coming up in 2018 is another flood of genre movies of one sort or another, including a slew of superhero movies. The most anticipatory buzz is probably being generated by Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther, although there’s also a movie about the early life of Han Solo, Solo: A Star Wars Story; a sequel to The Incredibles, The Incredibles 2; a sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald; a sequel to Pacific Rim, Pacific Rim Uprising; a reboot of Tomb Raider; a film version of Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time; another X-Men movie, X-Men: Dark Phoenix and another Jurassic World movie, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; a sequel to Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp; and a reboot of Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Returns (I’m kind of hoping that Mary Poppins is played by Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy, but I wouldn’t count on it). There will also be attempts to establish new franchises with Ready Player One, Mortal Engines, and Annihilation.

There are so many genre shows of one sort or another on television these days (after decades when there were few or none of them) that it’s becoming difficult to find a show that isn’t a genre show. As there are almost a hundred of them now available in one form or another, I’m obviously going to be able to list only some of the more prominent ones; my apologies if I miss your favorites.

HBO’s A Game of Thrones, based on the best-selling fantasy series by George R. R. Martin, is still the most prestigious and successful fantasy show on television, but its last season has been postponed until 2019, so you’ll have to wait until then to see who ultimately gets to sit on the Iron Throne. The Handmaid’s Tale was a huge critical success, as was American Gods, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, although the abrupt departure of the series’ showrunners has left the second season of American Gods in doubt. There will be another season of the also critically acclaimed series Westworld, a complex and tricky series version of the old SF movie of the same name, as well as new seasons of The Man in the High Castle, based on the Hugo-winning alternate history novel by Philip K. Dick, The Magicians, based on the best-selling novel by Lev Grossman, and Outlander, based on a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon.

The Expanse, based on a series of space opera novels by James S. A. Corey, is about the closest thing to “hard science fiction” available on television, and one of the few series that can be counted as SF rather than superhero shows or fantasy, along with Westworld. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. mixes SF concepts with the superhero stuff, especially in the last couple of seasons, featuring androids, cyborgs, rogue A.I.s, virtual reality worlds, alternate history scenarios, alien invasions, visits to other planets, and other SF tropes; the entire current season so far, for instance, has taken place on a space station far in the future, after Earth has been destroyed. A new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery, and a semisatiric Star Trek clone, The Orville, have been established, and both have their enthusiastic supporters, although I didn’t warm to either of them very much. Anthology show Black Mirror sometimes features SF storylines, and there’s a new series called Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams that I haven’t caught up with. Other SF shows, coming up later in the year, include Altered Carbon and Stargate Origins, and a miniseries version of George R. R. Martin’s novella Nightflyers.

An area that didn’t even exist a few years ago, more and more shows are becoming available only as streaming video from servers such as Amazon, Netflix, Roku, and Hulu, and it’s clear that the floodgates are only just starting to swing open for this form of entertainment delivery, with Disney and others promising to stream shows of their own. An early pioneer in this area, Marvel Studios has already established four solid hits with Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher (Iron Fist was widely critically savaged and less successful, as was a superhero team-up show, The Defenders, largely because of the presence in it of the charisma-less Iron Fist). Meanwhile, in case anybody had any doubt that this is the golden age of television superhero shows, a solid block of superhero shows has been established on regular television by DC, including Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Gotham, and Black Lightning,with Krypton, a show set on Superman’s home planet before it was destroyed, coming up later this year. Other superhero shows, largely featuring characters from Marvel Comics, include Legion, The Runaways, Inhumans, and The Gifted.

Of the flood of other genre shows that hit the air in the last few years, still surviving (I think, it’s sometimes hard to tell) are: Once Upon a Time, Grimm, Sleepy Hollow, Stranger Things, The Librarians, The 100, Ash vs Evil Dead, Dark Matter, Lucifer, The Good Place, Killjoys, and Star Wars Rebels. The reaction to the reboot of The X-Files, now in its second season, has been largely unenthusiastic, and its future may be in doubt.

Perennial favorites such as Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, and The Simpsons continue to roll on as usual, with Doctor Who generating controversy over the selection of a woman to play the next doctor.

Of the upcoming shows, the most buzz seems to be being generated by the return of Star Trek to television, with a new series, Star Trek: Discovery. Some excitement is also being generated by the revival of Twin Peaks and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Also ahead are miniseries versions of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys, and miniseries versions of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Len Deighton’s SS-GB, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Cycle, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War continue to be rumored—although how many of these promised shows actually show up is anyone’s guess.

Upcoming are TV versions of Galaxy Quest and a reboot of Lost in Space, both of which I’m pretty sure are going to prove to be bad ideas, paticularly the Galaxy Quest remake.

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention, Worldcon 75, was held in Helsinki, Finland, from August 9th to August 13th, 2017. The 2017 Hugo Awards, presented at Worldcon 75, were: Best Novel, The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin; Best Novella, “Every Heart a Doorway,” by Seanan McGuire; Best Novelette, “The Tomato Thief,” by Ursula Vernon; Best Short Story, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” by Amal El-Mohtar; Best Graphic Story, Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda; Best Related Work, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, Liz Gorinsky; Best Professional Editor, Short Form, Ellen Datlow; Best Professional Artist, Julie Dillon; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Arrival; Best Semiprozine, Uncanny; Best Fanzine, Lady Business; Best Fancast, Tea and Jeopardy; Best Fan Writer, Abigail Nussbaum; Best Fan Artist, Elizabeth Leggett; Best Series, The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Ada Palmer.

The 2016 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 2017, were: Best Novel, All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders; Best Novella, “Every Heart a Doorway,” by Seanan McGuire; Best Novelette, “The Long Fall Up,” by William Ledbetter; Best Short Story, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” by Amal El-Mohtar; Ray Bradbury Award, Arrival; the Andre Norton Award to Arabella of Mars, by David D. Levine; the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award to Toni Weisskopf and Peggy Rae Sapienza; the Kevin O’ Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award to Jim Fiscus; and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award to Jane Yolen.

The 2017 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet on November 5, 2017, at the Wyndham Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, during the Forty-third Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, by Claire North; Best Long Fiction, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson; Best Short Fiction, “Das Steingeschöpf,” by G. V. Anderson; Best Collection, A Natural History of Hell, by Jeffrey Ford; Best Anthology, Dreaming in the Dark, edited by Jack Dann; Best Artist, Jeffrey Alan Love; Special Award (Professional), to Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn for Children’s Fantasy in Literature: An Introduction; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Neile Graham, for fostering excellence in the genre through her role as Workshop Director, Clarion West. Plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to Terry Brooks and Marina Warner.

The 2016 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers Association on April 29, 2017, during StokerCon 2017, in a gala aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, were: Superior Achievement in a Novel, The Fisherman, by John Langan; Superior Achievment in a First Novel, Haven, by Tom Deady; Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel, Snowed, by Maria Alexander; Superior Achievement in Long Fiction, The Winter Box, by Tim Waggoner; Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, “The Crawl Space,” by Joyce Carol Oates; Superior Achievment in a Fiction Collection, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, by Joyce Carol Oates; Superior Achievement in an Anthology, Borderlands 6, edited by Oliva F. Monteleone and Thomas F. Monteleone; Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin; Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection, Brothel, by Stephanie M. Wytovich; Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe, by James Chambers; Superior Achievment in a Screenplay, The Witch.

The 2016 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by: Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar.

The 2016 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by: “The Future is Blue,” by Catherynne M. Valente.

The 2017 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to: The Mercy Journals, by Claudia Casper.

The 2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by: The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.

The 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by: When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore.

The 2017 Sidewise Award for Alternate History went to (Long Form): Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters and (Short Form): “Treasure Fleet,” by Daniel M. Bensen and “What If the Jewish State Had Been Established in East Africa,” by Adam Rovner (tie).

Dead in 2017 or early 2018 were:

URSULA K. LE GUIN, 88, winner of six Nebula Awards, including SFWA’s Grand Master Award, four Hugos, three World Fantasy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and three James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Awards, perhaps the best SF writer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, author of such classic novels as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, the fantasy Earthsea series, and others, much of whose best work is collected in the recent omnibus The Hainish Novels and Stories; BRIAN W. ALDISS, 92, one of the giants of twentieth-century science fiction, winner of SFWA’s Grand Master Award, author, anthologist, critic, and genre historian, author of many novels and short stories, among them classics such as The Long Afternoon of Earth, Non-stop, The Malacia Tapestry, Greybeard, and the Helliconia trilogy; JERRY POURNELLE, 84, Campbell Award winner, technical writer and SF author, best known to genre audiences for his collaborative novels with Larry Niven, such as The Mote in God’s Eye and Footfall, although he also wrote solo novels such as A Spaceship for the King and The Mercenary, as well as a long-running column for computer magazine Byte; WILLIAM SANDERS, 75, SF, mystery, fantasy, and Alternate History author, winner of two Sidewise Awards for alternate history, whose numerous and critically acclaimed short stories were collected in East of the Sun and West of Fort Smith, author as well of novels such as Journey to Fusang and The Wild Blue and Gray, as well as many mystery novels, and nonfiction historical study Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians: 1539–1543; EDWARD BRYANT, 71, winner of two Nebula Awards, prolific short story writer whose short stories were collected in Cinnabar, Particle Theory, Predators and Other Stories, and others, a friend for many years; SUSAN CASPER, 69, anthologist and SF/fantasy/horror writer, co-editor of Ripper!, whose many short stories were posthumously collected in Up the Rainbow: The Complete Short Fiction of Susan Casper, wife and companion for forty-seven years of SF editor Gardner Dozois; LEN WEIN, 69, a giant of the comics industry, co-creator of Wolverine, Swamp Thing, Storm, and many other comics characters, husband of photographer and fan Christine Valada, a friend for many years; BERNIE WRIGHTSON, 68, famous comics and horror illustrator, co-creator of Swamp Thing; KIT REED, 85, prolific SF writer whose novels include Armed Camps, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, The Night Children, Where, and Mormama, and whose numerous stories were collected in Mister Da V. and Other Stories, The Attack of the Giant Baby, The Story Until Now, and others; JULIAN MAY, 86, SF writer, author of The Many-Colored Land, The Golden Torc, The Nonborn King, Jack the Bodiless, Orion Arm, Conqueror’s Moon, and many other novels; author and scientist YOJI KONDO, 84, who wrote SF as ERIC KOTANI, author of the Island Worlds series (written with John Maddox Roberts), Act of God, The Island Worlds, and Between the Stars, as well as nonfiction such as Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generation Space Ships; COLIN DEXTER, 86, famous British mystery writer, best known for his long-running series about the cases of Inspector Morse, which inspired a series of the same name on British television, as well as two series spun-off from the original series later on; J. P. DONLEAVY, 91, Irish American writer, best known for his novel The Ginger Man; GRANIA DAVIS, 73, author and anthologist, author of The Rainbow Annals and Moonbird, perhaps best known in the genre for co-editing posthumous collections of the short work of her late husband, Avram Davidson, such as The Avram Davidson Treasury, a friend; HILARY BAILEY, 80, British author and editor, co-edited Volume 7 of the New Worlds anthology series with Charles Platt, perhaps best known for her story “The Fall of Frenchy Steiner”; WILLIAM PETER BLATTY, 89, horror writer, author of The Exorcist; JEFF CARLSON, 47, SF author of Plague Year, Plague War, and Plague Zone; MARIE JOKOBER, 75, Canadian author of historical, SF, and fantasy fiction; MUSTAFA IBN ALI KANSO, 57, Arab Brazilian SF writer; NANCY WILLARD, 80, who wrote more than seventy books of fiction and poetry, some SF; PAULA FOX, 93, children’s book writer; ANNE R. DICK, 90, writer and poet, widow of the late Philip K. Dick; MIKE LEVY, 66, SF scholar, founder of British critical zine Foundation; JOHN HURT, 77, acclaimed movie actor, known for his roles in A Man for All Seasons, Alien, 1984, The Elephant Man, and, most recently, as Ollivander the wand maker in the Harry Potter films; HARRY DEAN STANTON, 91, movie actor known for his roles in Alien, Escape from New York, and Paris, Texas; BILL PAXTON, 61, actor, best known for his roles in Aliens, Titanic, Twister, Apollo 13, and television’s Big Love; MARTIN LANDAU, 89, television and movie actor, known for his roles in the original Mission: Impossible and the movie Ed Wood; ROBERT HARDY, 91, actor best known for playing Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies; ADAM WEST, 88, famous as television’s Batman in the 1960s; ROGER MOORE, 89, played James Bond in seven James Bond films, also known as TV’s The Saint; POWERS BOOTHE, 68, actor, best known for his roles in television’s Deadwood and as the villainous head of Hydra in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; MIGUEL FERRER, 61, known for his roles in television’s Twin Peaks and NCIS: Los Angeles; JERRY LEWIS, 91, comedian and actor once famous as half of the Martin and Lewis comedy duo with Dean Martin, also made solo movies such as the original The Nutty Professor NELSAN ELLIS, 39, famous for his role as Lafayette Reynold’s in HBO’s True Blood; RICHARD HATCH, 71, star of the original Battlestar Galactica, also had a role in the remake; STEPHEN FURST, 63, actor, best known for his role as Flounder in Animal House; BARBARA HALE, 94, who played Perry Mason’s secretary Della Street in the original Perry Mason TV series, as well as in all the many Perry Mason TV movies that followed; IRWIN COREY, 102, comedian, known as “the world’s foremost authority”; NEIL FINGLETON, 36, known as the giant Mag the Mighty on HBO’s Game of Thrones; JUNE FORAY, 99, voice actor who provided the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel as well as many other animated characters; PETER SALLIS, 96, voice actor who provided the voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit; JONATHAN DEMME, 73, writer, director, and producer of The Silence of the Lambs; GEORGE A. ROMERO, 77, filmmaker, best known for Night of the Living Dead; TOBE HOOPER, 74, director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist; scientist, fan, folksinger JORDIN KARE, 60; bookseller and fan DWAIN KAISER, 69; British con runner and fan MIKE DICKINSON, 69; JOAN LEE, 93, wife of comics industry giant Stan Lee.

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