Gardner Dozois - Year's Best Sci Fi 20th Annual

Also by Gardner Dozois

ANTHOLOGIES

A DAY IN THELIFE

ANOTHERWORLD

BESTSCIENCEFICTIONSTORIES OF THEYEAR, #6–10

THEBEST OFISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

TIME-TRAVELERS FROMISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

TRANSCENDENTALTALES FROMISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

ISAACASIMOV’SALIENS

ISAACASIMOV’SMARS

ISAACASIMOV’SSFLITE

ISAACASIMOV’SWAR

ROADSNOTTAKEN(with Stanley Schmidt)

THEYEAR’SBESTSCIENCEFICTION, #1–19

FUTUREEARTHS:UNDERAFRICANSKIES (with Mike Resnick)

FUTUREEARTHS:UNDERSOUTHAMERICANSKIES (with Mike Resnick)

RIPPER! (with Susan Casper)

MODERNCLASSICS OFSCIENCEFICTION

MODERNCLASSICSHORTNOVELS OFSCIENCEFICTION

MODERNCLASSICS OFFANTASY

KILLINGMESOFTLY

DYINGFORIT

THEGOODOLDSTUFF

THEGOODNEWSTUFF

EXPLORERS

THEFURTHESTHORIZON

WORLDMAKERS

SUPERMEN

COEDITED WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS

ISAACASIMOV’SPLANETEARTH

ISAACASIMOV’SROBOTS

ISAACASIMOV’SVALENTINES

ISAACASIMOV’SSKINDEEP

ISAACASIMOV’SGHOSTS

ISAACASIMOV’SVAMPIRES

ISAACASIMOV’SMOONS

ISAACASIMOV’SCHRISTMAS

ISAACASIMOV’SCAMELOT

ISAACASIMOV’SWEREWOLVES

ISAACASIMOV’SSOLARSYSTEM

ISAACASIMOV’SDETECTIVES

ISAACASIMOV’SCYBERDREAMS

COEDITED WITH JACK DANN

ALIENS!

UNICORNS!

MAGICATS!

MAGICATS2!

BESTIARY!

MERMAIDS!

SORCERERS!

DEMONS!

DOGTALES!

SEASERPENTS!

DINOSAURS!

LITTLE PEOPLE!

DRAGONS!

HORSES!

UNICORNS2

INVADERS!

ANGELS!

DINOSAURSII

HACKERS

TIMEGATES

CLONES

NANOTECH

IMMORTALS

FUTURE SPORTS

BEYOND FLESH

FICTION

STRANGERS

THEVISIBLEMAN(collection)

NIGHTMAREBLUE(with George Alec Effinger)

SLOWDANCINGTHROUGHTIME(with Jack ann, Michael Swanwick, Susan Casper and Jack C.

Haldeman II)

THEPEACEMAKER

GEODESICDREAMS(collection)

STRANGEDAYS:FABULOUSJOURNEYS WITHGARDNERDOZOIS (collection)

NONFICTION

THEFICTION OFJAMESTIPTREE,JR .

www.ebookyes.com

reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

ISBN 0-312-71062-3

FIRST EDITION: JULY 2003

Acknowledgment is made for Permission to

Reprint the following Materials

Science Fiction , May 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Susan Ann Protter.

published electronically on SCI FICTION, May 8, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Science Fiction , March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , April 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Science Fiction , July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Fantasy & Science Fiction , March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Fiction , June 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Fantasy & Science Fiction , September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

2002 by Ian McDonald. First published inMars Probes (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther. Reprinted by

permission of the author.

Science Fiction , October/November 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

June/July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published inAsimov’s Science Fiction , October/November 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

(PS Publishing). Reprinted by permission of the author.

inAsimov’s Science Fiction , April 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Science Fiction and Fact , December 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

electronically in SCI FICTION, August 28, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inAsimov’s Science Fiction , September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agents,

The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

October 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inBlack Projects, White Knights (Golden Gryphon). Reprinted by permission of the author and the

author’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

electronically on SCI FICTION, November 13, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

electronically onStrange Horizons , April 1, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published electronically onThe Infinite Matrix , May 8, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

chapbook,Turquoise Days (Golden Gryphon). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Breathmoss •Ian R. MacLeod

The Most Famous Little Girl in the World •Nancy Kress

The Passenger •Paul McAuley

The Political Officer •Charles Coleman Finlay

Lambing Season •Molly Gloss

Coelacanths •Robert Reed

Presence •Maureen F. McHugh

Halo •Charles Stross

In Paradise •Bruce Sterling

The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars •Ian McDonald

Stories for Men •John Kessel

To Become a Warrior •Chris Beckett

The Clear Blue Seas of Luna •Gregory Benford

V.A.O. •Geoff Ryman

Winters are Hard •Steven Popkes

At the Money •Richard Wadholm

Agent Provocateur •Alexander Irvine

Singleton •Greg Egan

Slow Life •Michael Swanwick

A Flock of Birds •James Van Pelt

The Potter of Bones •Eleanor Arnason

The Whisper of Disks •John Meaney

The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing •Kage Baker

The Millennium Party •Walter Jon Williams

Turquoise Days •Alastair Reynolds

Honorable Mentions: 2002

acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Ellen

Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, David Pringle, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Mark Watson,

Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Paul Frazier, Mark R. Kelly, Mark Watson, Gary

Turner, Marty Halpern, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Byron R. Tetrick, Richard Freeborn, Robert Silverberg,

Cory Doctorow, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross, Craig Engler, Linn Prentis, Vaughne Lee Hansen,

Jed Hartman, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Susan Marie Groppi, Patrick Swenson, Tom Vander Neut, Andy

Cox, Steve Pendergrast, Laura Ann Gilman, Alastair Reynolds, Warren Lapine, Shawna McCarthy,

David Hartwell, Darrell Schweitzer, Robert Sawyer, Jennifer A. Hall, and special thanks to my own

editor, Marc Resnick.

Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazineLocus [Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305,

Oakland, CA 94661, $49 for a one-year subscription (twelve issues) via second class; credit card

orders (510) 339-9198] was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the Summation;Locus

Online (www.locusmag.com), edited by Mark Kelly, has also become a key reference source. Thanks

are also due to the editors ofScience Fiction Chronicle (DNA Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 2988,

Radford, VA 24143-2988, $45 for a one-year/ twelve-issue subscription via second class) was also

used as a reference source throughout.

summation: 2002

Although critics continued to talk about the “Death of Science Fiction” throughout 2002 (some of them

with ill-disguised longing), the unpalatable fact (for them) is that science fictiondidn’t die this year, and

doesn’t even look particularly sick. In fact, sales for many genre titles were brisk, and not only were

there not fewer books published this year than last, several new book lines were added that swelled the

total and are going to swell it more next year (and this isn’t even counting print-on-demand titles and

books sold as electronic downloads from internet Web sites, things much more difficult to keep track of

than traditionally printed-and-distributed books). Nor, to my eyes anyway, was there any noticeable

fall-off in literary quality. Sure, there’s plenty of crap out there on the bookstore shelves, just as there’s

always been. But there’salso more quality SF of many different flavors and varieties (to say nothing of the

equally diverse range of quality fantasy titles) available out there this year than any one person is going to

be able to read, unless they make a full-time job out of doing so (even the professional reviewers have

difficulty keeping up!). In fact, an incredibly wide spectrum of good SF and fantasy, both new titles and

formerly long-out-of-print older books, are probably more readily available to the average reader

now—in many different forms and formats—than at any other time in history. All of which indicate to me

that nailing the coffin-lid shut on the genre, smearing ashes on your face, and trotting out the obituaries

might be just abit premature.

In fact, 2002 was a rather quiet year in the genre market. There were few major changes this year. The

slowing economy has yet to hit the genre too hard (knock on wood), although there are signs of possible

trouble ahead for conglomerates, such as AOL–Time Warner and Bertelsmann; the difficulties are on

high corporate levels and not directly caused by anything happening on the genre level, although they may

eventually impact it. There were even some signs of expansion: Five Star Books added a vigorous new

SF line, with the emphasis on short-story collections edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor added a new

Young Adult science fiction and fantasy line, Starscape, and by early in 2003 had added asecond YA

mass-market line, Tor Teen; Tor is also planning to start a “paranormal romance” line, as yet unnamed, in

2004; Penguin Putnam started a new line of science fiction and fantasy books, Firebird, aimed at young

readers; Del Rey introduced a new YA line, Imagine; and HarperCollins started Children’s and YA Eos

in the beginning of 2003.

Although all of this sudden interest in producing books for young adults is, of course, attributable to the

immense success of theHarry Potter novels, it pleases me to see it, especially in science fiction, since

novels aimed at the young adult market more-or-less ceased to exist (or at least became very thin on the

ground) after the high days of the Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein “juvenile” novels of the ’50s and

’60s. This was short-sighted of science fiction publishers; I think that one reason why fantasy may have

had an edge in popularity over science fiction in the last few decades is that fantasy has continued its

tradition of easily findable, high-quality YA work—giving young readers somewhere tostart , somewhere

to become hooked on the form, before they eventually move up to reading more challenging adult-level

work—while SF largely abandoned that whole share of the audience. Ironically, the much despised

media novels, such asStar Trek andStar Wars books, may have been one of the few things left to play

this role to a limited extent for potential new SF readers during the last twenty years, a service that

they’ve hardly received any credit for from critics. Good new non-media-specific YA SF would, I think,

do an even better job of funneling young new readers directly into the core of the genre, and, with luck,

some of those readers might stick around when they get older. The operative word here, though, is

“good.” Most of the deliberate attempts to create YA SF novels in the past few years have produced

only dull, pompous, and condescending books, usually stuffed to the gunwales with didactic libertarian

propaganda. This isn’t going to do it for kids raised on MTV, CGI-drenched movies, and computer

games. You need something that will be as exciting to kids in the Oughts as Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels

were to kids in the ’50s. And, frankly, rather than being as safe and politically correct as possible, a whiff

of nonconformist rebellion and outlaw danger wouldn’t hurt either. So let’s hope that these new YA lines

will help. If SF as a genre can find stuff that kids are actuallyeager to read, rather than having it

prescribed for them medicinally, then that will go a long way to assuring that there are people around who

still want to read the stuff even in the middle decades of the new century ahead.

2002 was another tough year in the magazine market, but at least the overall losses in circulation were

relatively small as opposed to the huge plunges we’ve seen in other years, and there were small gains to

partially balance off the loses—although these varied from magazine to magazine, so thatAsimov’s

Science Fiction gained in subscriptions but lost in newsstand sales, whileThe Magazine of Fantasy and

Science Fiction lost subscriptions but gained in newsstand sales, and so forth.

Last year I went into great detail explaining the publishing factors that were battering the whole magazine

industry, regardless of genre, far beyond the boundaries of the science fiction field, including former

mega-sellers such asPlayboy andTV Guide , and some of the technical reasons why things might not be

quite as bad in the SF magazine world as they appeared to be—and, as I’d feared going in, it was largely

a waste of time, as I still spent the rest of the year fielding questions in interviews and convention panels

about the “Death of Science Fiction” as indicated by declining magazine circulation and listening to

remarks about how the editors must be buying the wrong kinds of stories or the circulations wouldn’t be

going down. I can’t summon the strength to go through all that again (read the Summation forThe Year’s

Best Science Fiction, Nineteenth Annual Collection , if you’d like to see the arguments). So I’ll settle for

mentioning that while it’s tough to put too positive a spin on the situation in the current SF magazine

market, and, of course, no magazine editor is happy to see his overall circulation decline, one factor that

is often overlooked is that while circulation decreased by small amounts at most magazines this

year,sell-through , the number of magazines that must be put out in the marketplace to sell one,

hasincreased , increased dramatically in some cases—atAsimov’s , sell-through was up to a record 56%

last year; atAnalog , sell-through was up to a record 55%; and atThe Magazine of Fantasy and Science

Fiction , sell-through was up to 37%. This is a factor that goes straight to the profitability of a magazine.

To achieve a 35% sell-through, for instance, means that three times as many magazines are printed and

put on the newsstands as actuallysell : if you can cut-back on the number of unsold copies you have to

put out there in order to actually sell one, your sell-through increases, and you save a lot of money in

production costs by not having to print and distribute as many “extra” copies that no one is going to buy.

This is one of the hidden factors, along with how cheap digest-sized magazines are to produce in the first

place, that is, so far anyway, helping to keep the SF magazine market afloat.

If you had a 100% sell-through, you wouldn’t print any more copies of an issue than you were actually

going to sell—and you’d probably be a subscription-only magazine, where they know in advance exactly

how many copies of an issue they need to print. It may well be that the SF magazines, the digest

magazines in particular, are eventually going to go this route, as newsstands themselves dwindle in

numbers, and the ones that are still around become ever more reluctant to display fiction

magazines—especially digest-sized magazines that don’t really fit into the physical format of most

newsstands very well. And most of the digests could probably survive as subscription-only magazines,

considering how much newsstand sales have fallen off over the last ten years anyway (the same problem

being faced by many other magazines, not just genre magazines). The problem is that the purpose of

putting more copies out on the newsstand than you expect to sell in the first place is that the extra copies

act asadvertising , tempting potential new subscribers into picking them up. If you only print as many

copies as your existent subscriber-base, nobody ever chances across a copy somewhere of a magazine

they might not even have known existed until that moment, and that makes it hard to gainnew

subscribers—and eventually your subscription-base is eroded away, as old subscribers die or fall away

and are not replaced by new ones.

Can use of the Internet, supplemented by distribution to bookstores rather than to newsstands, solve the

advertising/promotional problem of attracting new subscribers that used to be solved by putting extra

copies out on the newsstand? No one yet knows—but most of the magazine editors I know are giving it

their best shot.

As use of Internet Web sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions is becoming

increasingly important, I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites:Asimov’s site

is at www.asimovs.com.Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com.The Magazine of Fantasy & Science

Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf/.Interzone ’s site is at www.sfsite.com/interzone/.Realms of

Fantasy doesn’t have a Web site per se, although contentfrom it can be found on www.scifi.now.com

The amount of activity varies widely from site to site, but theimportant thing about all of the sites is that

you cansubscribe to the magazines there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no

stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post-office required. And you can subscribe from overseas just

as easily as you can from the United States, something that was formerly difficult-to-impossible. Internet

sites such as Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com) and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com ), which sell

electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, are also

becoming important.

At any rate, to get down to hard figures,Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 1.7 loss in overall

circulation in 2002, gaining 504 in subscriptions, but losing 1,078 in newsstand sales.Analog Science

Fiction & Fact registered a 2.4% loss in overall circulation in 2002, gaining 490 in newsstand sales but

losing 1,504 in subscriptions.The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered an 10.1% loss in

overall circulation, gaining 374 in newsstand sales, but losing 3,038 in subscriptions.Interzone held steady

at a circulation of about 4,000 copies, as it has for several years, more or less evenly split between

subscriptions and newsstand sales. No circulation figures forRealms of Fantasy were available.

The lively little Scottish SF magazineSpectrum SF has published so much good professional-quality work

over the last three years, including good stories this year by Colin p. Davies, Eric Brown, Chris Lawson,

Adam Roberts, and the serialization of Charles Stross’s novelThe Atrocity Archive , that I’m listing it

here with the professional magazines, rather than in the semiprozine section, where its circulation by rights

ought to put it. Unfortunately, not all is well atSpectrum SF ; they managed to produce only two out of a

scheduled four issues this year, and in the most recent issue, editor Paul Fraser announced that in the

future, due to financial difficulties and constraints on his time,Spectrum SF is going to be an “occasional”

magazine, cut-back from its quarterly schedule to appearing perhaps a couple of times a year. I’m not

sure how much practical difference this really makes, since the magazine never came remotely close to

keeping its schedule anyway, but it would be a shame if Fraser became even more discouraged and

threw in the towel altogether. So everyone, write lots of encouraging letters to Paul, with even-more

encouraging subscription money folded inside, because science fiction needs as many markets of this

caliber as it can get; this little magazine publishes a disproportionate share of the year’s good fiction every

year, and it would be a shame to lose it.

A new British magazine started up this year,3SF , edited by Liz Holliday, the former editor ofOdyssey

magazine, which died several years back. The first issue was released in2002. It’s a nice-looking

magazine, with a range of interviews, book reviews, media reviews, and interesting articles on such

offbeat topics as alternate history and the fate of English political refugees in eleventh-century Russia. The

weakest part of the magazine to date, in fact, is the fiction—issue one features solid talents such as

Richard Parks, Jay Lake, and Lawrence Watt-Evans, but nothing here rises much above

average-competent, certainly nowhere near the level of the first-rate stuff that has been appearing

inSpectrum SF . Let’s hope they can bring the quality of the fiction up in subsequent issues; certainly they

have some very talented writers announced as appearing in upcoming issues: a good sign. We should all

wish them well, as the field really does need as many viable short-fiction markets as it can get.

Subscription addresses follow:The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box

3447, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, annual subscription—$38.97 in U.S.;Asimov’s Science Fiction , Dell

Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO, 80322-4033—$39.97 for annual subscription in

U.S.,Analog Science Fiction and Fact , Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO,

80323—$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.;Interzone , 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL,

United Kingdom—$60.00 for an airmail one year (twelve issues) subscription;Realms of Fantasy ,

Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA, 17703—$16.95 for an annual

subscription in the U.S.;Spectrum SF , Spectrum Publishing, P.O. Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR,

United Kingdom—17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum

Publishing”;3SF , Big Engine Co., Ltd, P.O. Box 185, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 1GR—$45.00 for a

six-issue (one year) overseas subscription, or subscribe online at www.3SFmag.co.uk. Note that many

of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various Web sites.

The internet scene evolves with such lightning speed, with new e-magazines and internet sites of general

interest being born and dying in what seems a blink of the eye, that it remains possible that everything I

say about it here will be obsolete by the time this book makes it into print and gets out on a bookshelf

somewhere where you can buy it. The only way you can be sure to keep up with the online world is to

check out what’s happening there yourself, and keep checking frequently.

Once again this year, one of the major players in the whole genre short-fiction market, not just the online

segment of it, was Hugo-winner Ellen Datlow’sSci Fiction page on the internet

(www.scifi.com/scifiction/), a fiction site within the larger umbrella of The Sci-Fi Channel site, which

published (or “published,” if you insist) a lot of the year’s best fiction, including stories by Nancy Kress,

Robert Reed, Alex Irvine, Paul McAuley, Steven Popkes, James Van Pelt, Terry Bisson, and others.

The site also features classic reprints, and a different original short-short story by Michael Swanwick

every week.

AlthoughSci Fiction is no doubt your best bet on the Internet for good short fiction, it’s not the only place

to look. Eileen Gunn’sThe Infinite Matrix page (www.infinite matrix.net) also published literate and quirky

fiction of high quality this year by Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Michael

Swanwick, Walter Jon Williams, John Kessel, Maureen F. McHugh, Neal Barrett, Jr., John Varley, and

others. The site also features a weblog from Bruce Sterling, a daily feature by Terry Bisson, a series of

short-shorts from Richard Kadrey and the indefatigable Michael Swanwick, reviews by John Clute, and

other neat stuff. (How long it will survive is, alas, another question; they’re running low on money again,

after a grant from an unnamed benefactor keep them going throughout 2002, and have resorted to trying

Public Television–style campaign-drives, offering offbeat prizes in return for contributions; let’s hope it

works!) TheStrange Horizons site (www.strangehorizons.com) is also worth checking out; as well as

reprints, reviews, and articles, they run lots of original science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, and mild horror

stories—I tend to like their fantasy better than their science fiction, but they published good stories of all

sorts this year by Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ellen Klages, Tim Pratt, Ruth Nestvold, Greg Van Eekhout,

Michael J. Jasper, Karen L. Abrahamson, and others. Another site where professional-quality stories can

be found is atOceans of the Mind (www.trantor publications.com/oceans.htm), where they’ll sell you an

electronic download of one of their four annual issues as a PDF file to be read on your home computer

or PDA; they ran good stories last year by Richard Paul Russo, Ryck Neube, John Alfred Taylor,

Michelle Sabara, among others, and an additional point in their favor is that most of the stuff seems to be

core science fiction (for some reason, original science fiction is relatively hard to find on the Internet,

although you can find slipstream and horror by the ton; in fact, slipstream and horror (particularly horror)

seem to be the Internet default-setting, as far as original short fiction is concerned). Another promising

site,Future Orbits (www.futureorbits.com), which ran on the same principal asOceans of the Mind , died

this year after only having been introduced last year, showing you how quickly things can turnover in the

online world.

A site calledRevolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), also publishes some original fiction, although the

bulk of its space is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, essays, and interviews; the

quality of the fiction has been uneven, but some quite interesting stuff has appeared there this year,

including stories by Steven Utley, David Hutchinson, and Chris Nakashima-Brown. Short science fiction

stories have even been turning uponSalon (www.salon.com) of all places, which has so far published two

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