Gardner Dozois - Year's Best Sci Fi 18th Annual

The Year’s Best Science Fiction

Also by Gardner Dozois

ANTHOLOGIES

ADAY IN THELIFE

ANOTHERWORLD

BESTSCIENCEFICTIONSTORIES OF THEYEAR #6–10

THEBEST OFISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

TIME-TRAVELLERS FROMISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

TRANSCENDENTALTALES FROMISAACASIMOV’SSCIENCEFICTIONMAGAZINE

ISAACASIMOV’SALIENS

ISAACASIMOV’SMARS

ISAACASIMOV’SSF LITE

ISAACASIMOV’SWAR

ROADSNOTTAKEN

(WITHSTANLEYSCHMIDT)

THEYEAR’SBESTSCIENCEFICTION, #1–17

FUTUREEARTHS:UNDERAFRICANSKIES

(WITHMIKERESNICK)

FUTUREEARTHS:UNDERSOUTHAMERICANSKIES

(WITHMIKERESNICK)

RIPPER! (WITHSUSANCASPER)

MODERNCLASSICSOF SCIENCEFICTION

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!

MAGICATS 2

BESTIARY!

MERMAIDS!

SORCERERS!

DEMONS!

DOGTALES!

SEASERPENTS!

DINOSAURS!

LITTLE PEOPLE!

DRAGONS!

HORSES!

UNICORNS 2

INVADERS!

ANGELS!

DINOSAURS II

HACKERS

TIMEGATES

CLONES

NANOTECH

IMMORTALS

FICTION

STRANGERS

THEVISIBLEMAN (COLLECTION)

NIGHTMAREBLUE

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SLOWDANCINGTHROUGHTIME

(WITHJACKDANN,MICHAELSWANWICK,SUSANCASPER, ANDJACKC. HALDEMANII)

THEPEACEMAKER

GEODESICDREAMS (COLLECTION)

NONFICTION

THEFICTION OFJAMESTIPTREE,JR.

www.ebookyes.com

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 0-312-70372-4

FIRST EDITION: AUGUST 2001

Grateful Acknowledgment is Made for Permission to Reprint

the Following Material:

Fiction Age, January 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published inThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the

author and the author’s agents, The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

Fiction, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

(Harcourt), edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inAsimov’s Science Fiction, May 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

electronically on SCI FICTION, June 22. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inInterzone, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published inTales of Old Earth (Tachyon). Reprinted by permission of the author.

inAsimov’s Science Fiction, August 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inSpectrum SF 1 . Reprinted by permission of the author.

Science Fiction . March 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Science Fiction and Fact, December 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inAsimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Fiction, July 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published inAnalog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2000. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

SF 3 . Reprinted by permission of the author.

on SCI FICTION, September 6. Reprinted by permission of the author.

inVanishing Acts (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

published inNature, 11 September 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

chapbook,Tendeléo’s Story (PS Publishing). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Summation: 2000

The Juniper Tree •John Kessel

Antibodies •Charles Stross

The Birthday of the World •Ursula K. Le Guin

Savior •Nancy Kress

Reef •Paul J. McAuley

Going After Bobo •Susan Palwick

Crux •Albert E. Cowdrey

The Cure for Everything •Severna Park

The Suspect Genome •Peter F. Hamilton

The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O •Michael Swanwick

Radiant Green Star •Lucius Shepard

Great Wall of Mars •Alastair Reynolds

Milo and Sylvie •Eliot Fintushel

Snowball in Hell •Brian Stableford

On the Orion Line •Stephen Baxter

Oracle •Greg Egan

Obsidian Harvest •Rick Cook & Ernest Hogan

Patient Zero •Tananarive Due

A Colder War •Charles Stross

The Real World •Steven Utley

The Thing About Benny •M. Shayne Bell

The Great Goodbye •Robert Charles Wilson

Tendeléo’s Story •Ian McDonald

Honorable Mentions: 2000

Acknowledgments

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

Datlow, Craig Engler, Peter Crowther, Paul Frazer, Mark R. Kelly, Gordon Van Gelder, David Pringle,

Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Michael Swanwick, Jim Allen, Vaughne Lee Hansen,

Jed Hartman, Gavin J. Grant, Jeff VanderMeer, Betsy Mitchell, Warren Lapine, Chris Lawson, David G.

Hartwell, Darrell Schweitzer, Charles C. Ryan, and special thanks to my own editor, Bryan Cholfin.

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

Oakland, CA 94661, $46 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 Andrew Porter, whose magazineScience 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: 2000

Well, the millennium is definitely at hand (cue the swell of ominous, Apocalyptic music in the

background), and even calendar purists can no longer deny that we’re living in the twenty-first century.

It’ll probably be hard to convey to younger readers a sense of how downrightstrange that seems to old

fogies like me. For most of my life, the twenty-first century was THE FUTURE, that unimaginably distant

territory in which most science fiction stories took place; now I find myselfliving there, in the remote,

glittering FUTURE…(which somehowfeels different than you thought it would, more mundane and less

goshwow fantastical, once you’re actually rubbing up against it, in spite of technological innovations all

around us that would have dropped the jaw of anybody in 1950—a lesson many SF writers and

futurologists could usefully learn). To paraphrase Mark Twain, I wish the new century well, although I

doubt I’ll get to see all that much of it—but it’s notmy century. My century was theprevious one.

But the twentieth century is gone, taking its freight of unprecedented and unanticipated horrors and

wonders with it, and even dinosaurian refugees from that century, like me, must learn to lookahead , not

back. We cango ahead, if we’re lucky, for a while anyway—but back there’s no returning.

The temptation to try to predict what the new century ahead is going to be like is almost irresistible, and

I’ll succumb to that temptation here and there in the pages that follow, but what makes me hesitant to

really give in to it is realizing howpoor a job prognosticators at the beginning of the twentieth century did

peering ahead at what lay in store forthem . In almost every case, even those who thought that they were

being wildly daring and outrageous in their predications fell far short of whatactually happened, missing

both the marvels and the miseries, the triumphs and the tragedies, the unimaginable progress and the

equally unimaginable atrocities that waited ahead. For someone standing in 1901 and peering ahead,

these things were literallyunimaginable ; it was beyond the power of the human imagination to predict or

fully appreciate how radical the changes that lay ahead really would be, changes that would come to alter

almost out of recognition every aspect of the nineteenth-century world, sweeping it aside and replacing it

with a new world instead. And I suspect that people at the beginning of the twenty-second century—if

thereare any people, as we understand the term, still around by then—will look back attoday’s

predictions of what the twenty-first century is going to be like with similar amusement (if not outright

scorn) at how naive and limitedour imaginations turned out to be. So then, let’s mostly content ourselves

with taking a look at 2000, which is safely past, and thus can be confidently examined with 20/20

hindsight.

It was a pretty quiet year, for the most part. Once again, the science fiction genre didn’t die, much to the

disappointment of some commentators. In fact, the genre seems to be fairly stable at the moment

commercially (knock wood!); artistically, even taking into account all of the tie-ins and media and

gaming-associated books that crowd the shelves, there are still considerablymore science fiction novels

of quality being published now than were being published in, say, 1975 (including a few that would

probably not have beenallowed to be published at all back then), in a very wide range of styles and

moods, by a spectrum of writers ranging from Golden Age giants to Young Turks with one book under

their belts—quite probably more quality material (including a wide range of short work) than any one

reader is going to be able toread in the course of one year, unless they make a full-time job of it. The last

couple of years have been dominated by Merger Mania, but this year the corporations were mainly

quiescent, like huge snakes digesting the goats they’d swallowed; there were no major changes in

publishing, at the genre level, anyway, except in the troubled magazine market—no print SF lines lost or

gained. (Most of the major action, both positive and negative, was in the online market, about which see

more below.) There were no major changes in editorial personnel this year either, although last year saw

a vigorous round of the traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs, with several Big-Time players

leaving the scene (most of whom have yet to return in any significant way).

Most of the serious action this year was going on behind the scenes, like the legal battle over

Napster—at first glance, something far removed from the SF world…but not really, eh?, as I strongly

suspect that if you want a good model for the problems that the book-publishing business is going to

encounter tomorrow, you take a look at the problems that the music industry is dealing withtoday .

(Already, the Science Fiction Writers of America is embroiled in a legal battle with pirate Web sites, with

Harlan Ellison—good for you, Harlan!—being one of those leading the rush to the battlements…although

I suspect that as yet we’ve only seen some very early skirmishes in what’s going to be a long and bloody

war.) The turmoil in the stock market over the faltering dot.com market—with many big Internet players

failing to meet expectations by huge margins and being forced to close up shop, and possible major

trouble ahead forecast for others, like the online book-selling (and everythingelse -selling) superservice

Amazon.com—also cast a long shadow into the SF world.

Major changes are looming over the publishing world like thunderheads coming up over the horizon,

fundamental changes in the way that books reach the general reading public. This year you could hear

those storms of change growling and rumbling off in the distance, mostly as yet producing only occasional

gusts of wind and fitful bursts of rain, but not too many commentators would deny that those stormsare

going to break sooner or later—although you’ll hear a wide range of predictions of how severe the

weather is going to get, from soak-your-clothes-to-your-skin downpours to barely-wet-your-lawn

passing showers. Print-on-demand publishers are appearing like mayflies—as are online sites that sell

downloads to PCs, portable handheld computers, and other electronic text-readers—and they may turn

out to have thelife span of mayflies, too…but it’s a good bet that there will be others coming along behind

them to replace those that falter and fall by the wayside. And just behind these are marching other waves

of change: new generations of better and more sophisticated handheld computers and electronic

text-readers of all sorts (some of which may already be in stores by the time you read these words);

print-on-demand systems in most major bookstores that can print most books in their extensive

catalogues for you right on the spot, while you wait, “electronic paper”; genuinely reprogrammable

“e-books” that will look and feel as much like print books as possible, and be as easy to carry around

(even today, you can call into the Internet with a wireless modem and get new novels or stories

downloaded into your handheld, as easily as making a phone call). And, no doubt, behind these changes

there’ll be comingother innovations and technologies that will end up having a major effect on the

publishing world, stuff we haven’t evenheard of yet.

None but the most wild-eyed prognosticators believe that all this is going to make print books, or regular

trade publishers, or bookstores that exist in the physical world, disappear (that’s not going to happen in

the foreseeable future, and likely will never happen at all). But itis going to mean big readjustments in

market share, something that’s already happening, and which isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

Although cyber-optimists of the “Print books will be extinct by 2004! With Internet shopping, nobody

will ever bother leaving their homes again!” sort may have been a bit too giddy, those semi-Luddites who

have spent the last few months smugly anticipating the forecast demise of Amazon.com (proving that all

this Internet stuff was “just a fad”) are probably going to be disappointed as well. Amazon.com may (or

may not) die, but there will still be online booksellers. That’s not going to change, not now; too many

people have become accustomed to the ease of ordering books online, one of the most rapidly growing

areas in the whole book-selling industry, andsomebody will appear to take up the slack and provide that

service for them, even if Amazon.com and all the other present online booksellers went down. Books will

continue to be produced and sold online, in one form or another, in oneway or another, no matter how

the fortunes of an individual publisher rise or fall; the technology is just too easy and too seductivenot to

use, and sooner or later somebody will figure out a reliable way to make money doing so. Although it

may not be the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of starry-eyed would-be dot.com millionaires, the High

Road to Effortless Business Success, the Internet is not going away. It—or its successor

technologies—will be a part of our lives (probably an ever-more-integral, indispensable, and yet

taken-for-granted and-largely-ignored part) for the foreseeable future, and for our children’s future as

well. Barring all-out war, an asteroid strike, a universally potent pestilence, environmental collapse, or

some other disaster that sends civilization reeling back to the Dark Ages or worse, things arenot going to

go back to The Way They Were. The clock cannot be turned back, once you set it ticking—your only

option is to smash the clock altogether.

So fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy decade. But it just might—with luck—end up taking

us to some places worth going to.

It was another bad year in the magazine market, with sales down again almost across the board (in areas

far outside the genre, as well), and with only a few hopeful notes to be found here and there.

There were two major losses in the magazine market in 2000, the demise ofScience Fiction Age (which

happened early enough in 2000 that we covered it inlast year’s anthology) and then, toward the end of

the year, the death ofAmazing Stories —which was axed in its recent incarnation as a glossy mixed

SF/media magazine soon after parent company Wizards of the Coast was sold to Hasbro (Hasbro also

axed its card-gaming magazine,Top Deck ; apparently a severe slump in the card-gaming market was

responsible for both decisions). This was perhaps not quite as much of a hammer blow to the market as

the cancellation ofScience Fiction Age , sinceAmazing Stories in its current version was less central and

important to the genre thanScience Fiction Age had become, but it still sent shock waves through the

field. There was a flicker of hope late in the year, as the online siteGalaxyOnLine announced that they

were going to buyAmazing Stories and reinvent it as an online site selling versions of the magazine in CD

format, but this deal fell through whenGalaxyOnLine itself died (see below).Amazing Stories has died and

then come miraculously back to life several times in the twenty-five years I’ve been editing Best of the

Year anthologies, but this may finally be the end of the line for the grand old magazine, which has existed

in one form or another (with occasional breaks in continuity), since 1926. (On the other hand, I’ve said

that before, only to watch the magazine rise from the ashes again, so we’ll just have to wait and see, and

hope thatAmazing Stories can somehow pull off the Lazarus trick one more time. That probably wouldn’t

be the way to bet it, though.)

The other big change in the magazine market this year is potentially positive: late in the year,The

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was bought by its current editor, Gordon Van Gelder, from its

longtime owner and publisher, Edward L. Ferman. If Gordon can cope with the extra work and

problems that will come with assuming the role of publisher as well, and if he has deep enough pockets to

weather any financial setbacks that might be caused by the transition, then this might well giveF&SF a

new lease on life—the Fermans were getting near retirement age, and there has been speculation as to

what would happen to the magazine when they did retire. Without someone like Gordon willing to

assume the stewardship of the magazine, a big job, it might well have died. Now it has a decent chance

of surviving, for as long as Gordon can keep it going, anyway.

The news in the rest of the magazine market was no more cheerful than it has been for the last several

years. Overall sales were down almost everywhere, withAsimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science

Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , andRealms of Fantasy reaching all-time

lows (sales were down across the entire range of the magazine market, in fact, far beyond genre

boundaries—it shows up more noticeably with the genre magazines because their initial audience bases

were lower to begin with).Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 12.3% loss in overall circulation in

2000, 3,348 in subscriptions, and 1062 in newsstand sales.Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a

7.5% loss in overall circulation in 2000, 1461 in subscriptions, and 2,435 in newsstand sales.The

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered an 8.1% loss in overall circulation, 1,294 in

subscriptions, and 1,360 in newsstand sales.Realms of Fantasy registered a 12.1% loss in overall

circulation, rising 2,313 in subscriptions, but dropping by 7,157 in newsstand sales. As it has for several

years, now,Interzone held steady at a circulation of about 4,000 copies, more or less evenly split

between subscriptions and newsstand sales.

I’ve mentioned before that these figures probably look worse than they actually are. Most of the

subscriptions that have been lost, to date, are not of the core subscribers who regularly renew their

subscriptions at full rate, the most profitable subscribers for a magazine, but rather Publishers Clearing

House-style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, which can actually cost more to fulfill than they actually

bring in in revenue. The good news, then, is that the core subscribers who do remain seem loyal,

dedicated, and, according to surveys, enthusiastic about the product that they’re receiving. Helping also

to keep the digest-size or near-digest-size magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF) profitable in spite of

declining circulation, is the fact that they’re so cheap toproduce in the first place that you don’t have to

sell very many of them to make a profit, the advantage that has kept digestsize magazines alive for

decades when more expensive-to-produce magazines, which need to sell a far greater number of copies

in order to be profitable, have faltered and died. Nevertheless, this continued decline in circulation is

distressing, and if the slide continueslong enough, must ultimately threaten the existence of these

magazines; without at least a trickle of new subscribers coming in, you can’t counterbalance the inevitable

attrition of your subscriber base due to death and circumstance, and sooner or later you’re left with no

subscribers at all, or at least not enough to keep the magazine in the black.

One mildly hopeful note is that in the last couple of years most of the SF magazines are pulling in at least

a trickle of new subscribers over the Internet from audiences that probably haven’t been tapped much by

them before, including people who had probably never heard of the magazines before coming across

them online (most people, even many habitual science fiction readers, have no idea that the SF

magazines—which receive no advertising or promotion at all, in most cases—even exist), and people

from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe

because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical

problems.Asimov’s, Analog , andF&SF have also all made deals with PeanutPress

(http://www.peanutpress.com) that enables readers to download electronic versions of the magazines into

Palm Pilot handheld computers, with the choice of either buying an electronic “subscription,” or of buying

them individually on an issue-by-issue basis, and a small but steady flow of new subscribers drawn from

new audiences is coming in from this source as well.

With today’s chaotic newsstand situation, which keeps most SF magazines off most newsstands, I have a

feeling that if anything is going to save the magazines, it’ll be the use of the Internet as a promotional tool,

using Web sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions, and so I’m going to list the

URLs for those magazines that have Web sites:Asimov’s site is at http://www.asimovs.com.Analog’s site

is at http://www.analogsf.com.The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/.Interzone ’s site is at http://www.sfsite.com/interzone/. (Realms of

Fantasydoesn’t have a Web site per se, although contentfrom it can be found on

scifi.now.com…although you could surf the whole site and be hard-pressed to find even a mention of the

magazine’s name; if you persist, though, you can eventually find a place to subscribe to it online.) The

amount of activity varies on these sites, with theAsimov’s andAnalog sites perhaps the busiest and

theInterzone site perhaps the least active, 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. It would be hard for us to make it any

easier for you.

All of these magazines (and a half dozen others) deserve your support. One of the best things you can do

to ensure that short science fiction remains alive and plentiful in the market is to subscribe to whatever

magazine you like best. In fact, subscribe to as many of them as you can—it’ll still turn out to be a better

reading bargain, more fiction of reliable quality for less money, than buying the year’s hitor-miss crop of

original anthologies could possibly supply. Do itnow , while you’re thinking about it, and while it still has a

chance to help. If you’re a fan of short SF, as someone reading this book presumably is, and youdon’t

bother to do it, you’re taking a chance that there could be a lot less short SF around to enjoy in the

future.

There were another couple of upbeat notes in this troubled market this year. The year 2000 saw a very

impressive and promising debut made by a new Scottish SF magazine,Spectrum SF , edited by Paul

Fraser, which published four issues in 2000. By rights, since the circulation is still low, this should be

mentioned in the semiprozine section, but asSpectrum SF was not only totally professional in content, but

veryhigh-end professional at that, featuring two of the year’s best stories, by Charles Stross and Alastair

Reynolds, as well as good work by Jack Deighton, Eric Brown, Garry Kilworth, Mary Soon Lee, and

others, and the serialization of the late Keith Roberts’s as-yet-otherwise-unpublished last novel,Drek

Yarman , that I’m going to go ahead and list it here in the professional section instead, and you can send

me complaining letters about that if you want.Spectrum SF was certainly the most promising debut of a

British magazine sinceInterzone —and, likeInterzone , one that’s especially welcome to me because it’s

one of the few British magazines to concentrate on core science fiction; most British magazines emphasize

slipstream and/or horror instead. Fraser clearly doesn’t have a lot of money to work with—this is

obviously a labor of love—so let’s hope that he can build a subscription base quickly before he runs out

of funds, cash, and hope, since this is a tasty little magazine that deserves to survive, and another

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