Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual

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THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION:

FIFTEENTH ANNUAL COLLECTION

EDITED BY GARDNER DOZOIS

In memory of

my mother

Dorothy G. Dozois

and my father

Raymond G. Dozois

Rest in Peace

THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: FIFTEENTH ANNUAL

COLLECTION. Copyright 0 1998 by Gardner Dozois. All

rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

matter 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.

ISBN 0-312-18779-3

CONTENTS

Robert Silverberg … Beauty in the Night

Paul J. McAuley … Second Skin

Nancy Kress … Steamship Soldier on the Information Front

Greg Egan .. Reasons to be Cheerful

Stephen Baxter … Moon Six

Bill Johnson … We Will Drink a Fish Together. . .

Peter F. Hamilton … Escape Route

James Patrick Kelly .. Itsy Bitsy Spider

Alastair Reynolds … A Spy in Europa

William Sanders … The Undiscovered

Alan Brennert … Echoes

David Marusek … Getting To Know You

Gwyneth Jones … Balinese Dancer

Robert Reed … Marrow

Howard Waldrop … Heart of Whitenesse

Michael Swanwick … The Wisdom of Old Earth

Brian Stableford … The Pipes of Pan

G. David Nordley … Crossing Chao Meng Fu

Greg Egan … Yeyuka

Carolyn Ives Gilman … Frost Painting

Walter Jon Williams … Lethe

Geoffray A. Landis … Winter Fire

Ian R. MacLeod … Nevermore

Simon Ings … Open Veins

Ian McDonald … After Kerry

Sean Williams & Simon Brown … The Masque of Agamemnon

John Kessel … Gulliver at Home

Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malartrez … A Cold, Dry Cradle

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: first and foremost,

Susan Casper, for doing much of the thankless scut work involved in producing this anthology; Michael

Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Vaughns Lee Hansen, Sheila Williams, jared Goldman, David

Pringle, Jonathan Strahan, Charles C. Ryan, Nancy Kress, David G. Hartwell, Jack Dann, Janeen

Webb, Warren Lapine, Ed Mcfadden, Tom Piccirilli, Dave Truesdale, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown,

Liz Holliday, Darrell Schweitzer, Corin See, and special thanks to my own editor, Gordon Van Gelder.

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

13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $43.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit

card orders [510] 339-9198) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew

Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730,

Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $35.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $42.00 first class) was

also used as a reference source throughout.

Doomsayers continued to predict the imminent demise of science fiction throughout 1997, some of

them even seeming to look forward to it with gloomy, headshaking,

I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn't-listen-to-me relish; but, although there were cutbacks-some of them

serious ones-it seems to me that the actual numbers and the actual real-world situation do not justify

these sorts of gloomy predications. To modify the words of Mark Twain, the Death of Science Fiction

has been greatly exaggerated.

The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for

more than a decade now in fact did not happen in 1997. In spite of cutbacks and even some failing or

faltering imprints (and new imprints, some of them quite major, were being added even as old ones

disappeared), science fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror remain large and various genres,

with almost a thousand "books of interest" to the three fields published in 1997, according to the

newsmagazine Locus, and science fiction and fantasy books were still making a lot of money for a lot of

different publishers (although the market is changing and evolving, with mass-market titles declining and

trade paperback titles on the rise). Artistically and creatively, the field has never been in better shape,

with an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors producing an amazing spectrum of

first-rate work, ranging all the way from the hardest of hard science fiction through wild baroque Space

Opera and sociological near-future speculation to fantasy of a dozen different sorts, with uncountable

hybrids of all those sorts of stories (and with other genres as well, including the historical novel, the

mystery, and even the Western novel!) filling in the interstices. In terms of there being first-class work of

many different sorts available to be read, this is the Golden Age, nor are we out of it!

As usual, there were many contradictory omens out there to be read, and it is entirely possible to

read the very same signs and make either pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the future, depending

on what evidence you look at and what weight you arbitrarily decide to give it.

There were certainly plenty of Bad Omens around to look at. Original books declined by nearly 100

titles in 1997 compared to 1996, which, in turn, had had 130 fewer original books than 1995, a drop of

over 17 percent in two years; the magazine market was still precarious; and mass-market continued to

shrink. Harper collins cancelled 106 books, about 7 percent of the 1,600 trade books they published last

year; TSR Inc. fell deeply in debt and was sold to Wizards of the Coast Inc.; Wired Books, the

publishing arm of Wired magazine, was reported to have lost $35 million dollars, scuttling their plans to

launeb an imprint of SF titles (or at least putting it on hold); and there were cutbacks elsewhere as well.

You could read these omens and draw quite a gloomy picture of the future, and many commentators did

just that.

On the other hand, while mass-market continued to shrink, trade paperbacks and hardcovers were

growing more frequent, and while some companies were struggling financially and/or contracting, Avon,

under the direction of Lou Aronica, is launching an ambitious new genre line called Eos (replacing the old

Avonova imprint), Harperprism is increasing the number of titles it produces, and Simon & Schuster UK

is launching another ambitious new SF line, Earthlight, under the editorship of John Jerrold. Jim Turner

was dismissed from his long-held job at Arkham House last year, but bounced back by launching a new

small-press imprint of his own, Golden Gryphon Press, and Stephe Pagel also launched a new

small-press imprint, Meisha Merlin Publishing. You can draw a different set of conclusions from these

facts, and forecast a quite different sort of future.

Then there are things that can be viewed as either positive or negative, depending on which spin you

put on it. Random House UK sold its SF/fantasy imprint, Legend, to Little, Brown UK, publisher of the

Orbit SF line; Legend will be absorbed into Orbit, under the editorial direction of Tim Holman, with

Cohn Murray staying on as editorial consultant and Lisa Rogers joining the editorial team. The downbeat

take on this is that there's now one genre line where there once were two, but since the Legend backlist

will be reissued as Orbit books, it's quite possible that the end result of this will be that more genre titles

will eventually see print than they did before. Similarly, although TSR Inc. died as an independent entity,

the absorption of its output into Wizards of the Coast Inc. may eventually result in more overall titles

being published in that area as well. And you'll notice that even really severe cutbacks, on an almost

unprecedented level, still leaves Harper collins a very large company even after the cuts (and most of

those cuts weren't SF titles anyway).

Then there were other developments whose ultimate ramifications are impossible as yet to predict at

all, one way or the other.

We got a break from the usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs in 1997, a year in which there were

few if any significant changes, as far as which editor was working where. Once again, however, there

were some major changes at the very top levels of publishing houses, the consequences of which-which

could prove to be either positive or negative-may take years to work themselves out. Elaine Koster left

Penguin Putnam, where she was president and publisher of Dutton, Plume, and Signet, to become a

literary agent. Clare Ferraro, former senior VP and publisher of Ballantine, took over as president of

Dutton and Plume, but not Signet. David Shanks, the president of Putnam and Berkley, took on the

additional job of president of Signet. Judith M. Curr, former senior VP and editor-in chief, will become

publisher at Signet. Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House, resigned to become

editorial director and vice-chairman of Mort Zuckerman's Publication Group. He was replaced by Ann

Godoff, former executive VP, who also retained her former title of editor-in chief of Randon House.

Random House executive VP Jane Friedman became president and CEO of Harper collins, replacing

Anthea Disney, who became chairman of Rupert Murdoch's News America. And Harper collins (UK)

deputy managing director Malcolm Edwards moved to Orion to become managing director and

publisher.

So I'm not willing to read memorial services over the grave of the genre just yet. Science fiction has

plenty of problems, sure, from the decline of the midlist (which has driven many authors into writing

media novels in order to survive) to the general unavailability of backlist titles as opposed to the way it

was in the Old Days, from the way new authors can find their careers deadlocked by the refusal of

chain-store buyers to order books from anyone whose first few titles didn't do geometrically increasing

business (a system that, if it had been in place back then, would have insured that you'd never have heard

of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, all of whom built a following

slowly over a number of years) to the alarming tendency of some publishers to think that they can assure

"sure sales" by publishing nothing but media tie-in novels (apparently realizing that just publishing media

novels is not a sure enough sure-thing, some publishers have now progressed to publishing media tie-in

novels by media celebrities.) What's next? How about media tie-in novels by famous serial killers? I can

see it now: Star Trek Bloodbath, by Charles Manson-but science fiction also has a lot of vitality and

staying power, and, for all its problems, it's far from down for the count yet.

As I've said here before, even if a deeper recession is ahead (and I'm not at all sure that it is), I find it

unlikely that any recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or sales,

unless it's a recession so big that most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. And as Gordon

Van Gelder recently said, in an editorial in The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, commenting on a

critic's lament that there's nothing but crap to be found on the shelves in the SF sections of bookstores:

"Back in 1960, he wouldn't have been so distressed by the SF section of the story because it didn't exist

back then. Remember please that SF specialty shops like A Change of Hobbit in L.A. and The SF Shop

in New York were founded in the 1970s because SF could be so hard to find ... Personally, I think

there's more good SF getting published nowadays than most people have time to read, there are plenty

of interesting new writers coming into the field, and lots of the field's veterans are producing top-flight

work. So what's this talk about SF dying?" I also wholeheartedly agree with Warren Lapine, who, in an

editorial in the Spring 1998 issue of Absolute Magnitude, said: "It's time that everyone in Science Fiction

got off their collective asses and stopped whining about the future. Are you worried about magazines?

Then subscribe to a couple of them. Are you worried about books? Then buy a few of them." I was in an

on-line real-time conference a couple of weeks ago, talking-typing?-to a woman who said that she was

extremely worried that all of the science fiction magazines were going to die, and who then went on to

add that she goes down to Borders bookstore every month, faithfully reads all the science fiction

magazines while having coffee and croissants, and then puts them all back on the shelf and leaves the

store! And I thought to myself in amazement, Lady, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Next time, skip the croissants, take out your wallet, and actually buy the goddamned magazines before

you read them! Similarly, don't wait for that novel you've been wanting to read to hit the used-book

store, buy it now, while the royalties will not only do the author some good, but will actually help to keep

the entire mechanism of the science fiction publishing industry in operation.

Of course, none of this may be enough. Gordon and Warren and I may all be whistling past the

graveyard. Only time will tell.

But my own prediction is that science fiction as a viable genre will survive at least well into the next

century-and perhaps for considerably longer than that.

It was another bad year in the magazine market, although some of the turbulence caused by the

recent chaos in the domestic distribution network-when bigger distributors abruptly swallowed up the

small independent distributors-has quieted a bit, with things settling down (for the moment, at least) to

somewhere closer to a rest state. The print magazines that survived the storm are working on adopting

various bailing strategies to deal with the water they shipped (adjusting their "draw," for instance-sending

fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and

distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine's efficiency, and thereby lowering costs, and

so increasing profitability), and nervously eyeing the new storm clouds-in the form of new hikes in paper

costs coming up next year.

To move from the world of overheated metaphor to the world of cold figures, all the science fiction

magazines suffered further drops in their circulation figures in 1997. About the only cheerful thing that can

be said about this fact is that it was not as precipitous a drop as had been registered the year before,

when the distribution network problems really began to bite deep, and that a few of the magazines are

actually beginning to creep up again, although minusculely, in newsstand sales. Still, Asimov's Science

Fiction, Analog Science Fiction 6 Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy 6, Science Fiction, and Science Fiction

Age all registered the lowest circulation figures in their respective histories. Even the fantasy magazine

Realms of Fantasy, the only magazine to show a gain in circulation in 1996, was down some, although

only by a measly 0.5 percent. Asimov's lost about 3,700 in subscriptions but gained about 360 in

newsstand sales, for a 7.4-percent loss in overall circulation. Analog lost about 6,230 in subscriptions

and another 38 in newsstand sales, for a 10.5-percent loss in overall circulation. The Magazine of

Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 6,730 in subscriptions but gained about 800 newsstand sales, for a

13.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,590 in subscriptions and about

another 2,220 in newsstand sales, for a 14.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy lost

about 151 in subscriptions and about another 100 in newsstand sales, for a barely perceptible

0.5-percent loss in overall circulation-basically, they're holding steady.

This is probably not as dire as it looks. For instance, one of the traditional advantages that has always

helped the digest magazines to survive is that they're so cheap to produce in the first place that you don't

have to sell very many of them to make a profit. I'm willing to bet that most of these magazines are still

profitable, in spite of declining circulation.

Still, it's hard to deny that things are dicier these days than they were ten years ago, especially in the

area of newsstand sales. There are so few distributors left now that it's a buyer's market, and the

distributors know that very well. The few surviving distributors often charge much-higher fees for carrying

titles or ask for greatly increased "discounts," both higher than many SF magazines can easily afford to

pay; some distributors also set "subscription caps," refusing to even handle magazines with a circulation

below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. Many

newsstand managers have also become pickier, sometimes refusing to display magazines that fall below a

certain circulation figure-again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines. The result of all

this is that it's harder to find genre magazines on newsstands, with some carrying a lot fewer copies of

each title than before, and many newsstands not carrying them at all.

This is not as serious as it looks either, in the short-term, anyway. Most SF magazines are

subscription-driven, and always have been, with newsstand sales a considerably lower percentage of

overall sales than subscription sales, so they could get by without newsstand sales if they had to-for a

while. Declining newsstand sales hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers,

casual newsstand browsers who might pick up the magazine and read it on a whim, but who, with luck,

might like what they see enough to eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new

subscribers, a magazine's circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a percentage of

the old subscribers, until eventually the magazine becomes inviable. So one of the biggest problems facing

magazines these days is to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the

newsstand. One way to do this may be with a greatly increased presence on the Internet, which, if things

go well, might enable the magazines to get around the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of

potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. I expect that

this will become an increasingly important outlet in days to come and may be what saves the magazines in

the long term-if anything can.

At the beginning of 1998, Penny Press announced that all of their fiction magazines, Asimov's

Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred

Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, will change size, starting with the June 1998 issue. The new format will

add a little over an inch in height and about a quarter inch in width to each issue of Asimov's or Analog;

the page count will drop from 160 pages to 144 pages for regular issues, and from 288 pages to 240 for

double issues, although the larger pages will allow Asimov's and Analog to use about 10 percent more

material per issue. The hope is that the increase in size will increase the visibility of the magazines on the

newsstands (where, at the moment, digest-sized titles tend to get lost because other, larger magazines are

shuffled in front of them), and increase their attractiveness as a product to distributors, who seem to favor

larger-format magazines over digest-sized magazines these days. This marks the end of an era; for almost

fifty years now, there have always been at least three digest-sized SF magazines on the newsstands

(although which three changed as time went by), but now The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

stands alone as the only true digest magazine left in the genre.

The other significant change for Asimov's and Analog was the establishment in early 1998 of Internet

Web sites for both magazines; Asimov's's site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog's is at

http://www.analogsf.com, both sites sponsored by SF Site. Both sites feature story excerpts, book

reviews, essays, and other similar features; and live interviews, "chats," and other on-line-only features

are planned for the near future. More significantly, perhaps, you can subscribe to both magazines

electronically, on-line, by giving a credit card number and clicking a few buttons, and this feature is

already bringing in new subscribers, particularly 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 (Asimoy's, for instance, has already picked up new subscribers from

France, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and even the United Arab Emirates).

The Magazine offantasy 6 Science Fiction completed its first year under new editor Cordon Van

Gelder, although most of the material that appeared there this year was probably part of the extensive

inventory left behind by former editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A favorite literary parlor game this year

was to try to pick out which stories in the magazine had been bought by Gordon and which by Kris, with

even one of the Locus columnists joining in with speculations as to what inferences about "new directions"

for the magazine you could draw from the stuff in the June issue, the first one with Gordon's name on the

masthead. Gordon merely smiles like a Cheshire cat and refuses to answer these questions, but I suspect

that most of the speculations to date have been wrong. It'll be interesting to see how the magazine does

change in coming months, and in which directions, as Kris's inventory finally runs out. Cordon has

brought new science columnists Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty in to supplement Gregory Benford, and

the book reviews seem to be rotating on an irregular basis among Robert K. J. Killheffer, Michelle West,

Elizabeth Hand, and Douglas E. Winter, with a review column by Charles de Lint also in most issues,

occasionally a review column by Gordon himself, and Paul Di Filippo (who is doing critical columns for

Asimov's, F&SF, and Science Fiction Age all at the same time, which may be a genre first!) contributing

quirky metafictional literarily oriented comic pieces from time to time. F&SF changed its Web site; the

new one at w.fsfmag.com had not gone up in time for me to report on it for this book.

The British magazine Interzone completed its seventh full year as a monthly publication. Circulation

went down very slightly this year, but remained more or less the same as last year-disappointingly, no

major gains, but at least no catastrophic drops either. Interzone is one of the most reliable places to find

first-rate fiction in the entire magazine market, with the literary quality of the stories consistently high, and

it's one of the magazines that you really should subscribe to, especially as it is almost impossible to find

Interzone on newsstands or in bookstores on the American side of the Atlantic. To miss it is to miss some

of the best stuff available anywhere today. Interzone also has a Web site

(http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm), although there's not really much thereyou can subscribe

to the magazine there, though, which is perhaps the salient point.

Science Fiction Age successfully completed their fifth full year of publication. Although overall

circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped again in 1997, by a substantial 14 percent, the magazine

seems in general to be successful and profitable, with editor Scott Edelman attributing the drop in

circulation to readers switching subscriptions to Science Fiction Age's companion magazines, Realms of

Fantasy and the media magazine Sci-Fi Entertainment, as well as to the newly purchased media magazine

Sci-Fi Universe (both media magazines are also edited by Edelman). As Edelman points out, this gives

Sovereign Media four successful genre titles where before they had only one (Science Fiction Age itself,

the first magazine published by Sovereign), and that that is worth siphoning off some of the original

magazine's subscription base. (It's a good argument, but one that will look a little thin if Science Fiction

Age's circulation continues to drop in the future.) Artistically, Science Fiction Age had its best year yet,

publishing some very strong stories, and for the second year in a row was a more reliable source for

good core science fiction overall than was The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, which still

published more fantasy and soft horror stories this year than they did good SF stories.

Tomorrow Speculative Fiction is now an "on-line electronic magazine" called Tomorrow SF, and is

reviewed below. Aboriginal Science Fiction, reported to be dead in 1995, came back to life in 1996; it

managed only one issue in 1997, but published another one just after the beginning of the year in 1998.

Realms of Fantasy is a companion magazine to Science Fiction Age, a slick, large-size, full-color

magazine very similar in format to its older sister, except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction.

They completed their third full year of publication in 1997. Under the editorship of Shawna Mccarthy,

Realms of Fantasy has quickly established itself as by far the best of the all-fantasy magazines (the other,

the much longer-established Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine-in its tenth year of publication

in 1997-comes nowhere near it in terms of literary quality or consistency); in fact, the best stories from

Realms of Fantasy are rivaled for craft and sophistication only by the best of the fantasy stories published

by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction. Worlds of Fantasy and

Horror, a magazine that publishes both fantasy and mild horror, had fallen into silence, publishing no issue

in 1997, and was being said to likely be dead, but in early 1998 it was announced that DNA

Publications, who also publish the SF fiction semiprozine Absolute Magnitude (see below), will be

reviving the magazine under its original titlewhich it lost when its license lapsed-Weird Tales; Darrell

Schweitzer and George Scithers will stay on as the magazine's editors.

A promising newcomer to the magazine market is a full-size, full-color British magazine called

Odyssey, which published one practice issue and one real issue in 1997. This is a nice-looking magazine,

although the interior layout is a touch chaotic and confusing; and it ran some good stuff by Brian

Stableford, Jeff Hecht, and others, although in my opinion they should concentrate on actual science

fiction and stay away from the gaming fiction, horror, and fantasy (which tends to be weak here, as it also

is in Interzone). They also need to forge an identity for themselves other than "not Interzone," a positive,

strong identity and flavor of their own. At the moment, the magazine could go in any of a halfdozen

directions, and it's hard to tell in which of them it's more likely to go. If it goes in the right direction,

though, it could be a quite valuable addition to the magazine scene, and I wish them well.

It was also announced early in 1998 that Amazing Stories, reported to have died back in 1994, will

rise yet again from the grave, something it has done several times in its seventy-year-plus existence. This

time Amazing Stories will be brought out in a full-size, full-color format by Wizards of the Coast Inc.,

who recently bought TSR Inc., Amazing's former owner. The new version will feature media fiction as

well as more traditional science fiction, with several Star Trek stories in each issue, and will be edited by

the editor of the former incarnation, Kim Mohan. It's scheduled to be launched at the 1998 Worldcon in

Baltimore.

We should mention in passing that short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside

genre boundaries, as usual, from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine to Playboy.

(Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine

of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT 06796,

annual subscription $25.97 in U.S.; Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625,

Boulder, CO 803234625, $33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove,

Brighton BNI 6FL, United Kingdom, $60.00 for an airmail one year, twelve issues, subscription; Analog,

Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323, $33.97 for annual subsciption in U.S.;

Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $21.50 for four issues; Marion

Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.;

Odyssey, Partizan Press 816-816, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 3NH, United Kingdom, $35 for a

five-issue subscription, $75 for a twelve-issue subsciption.)

The promise of "on-line electronic publication" remained largely unfulfilled in 1997-there aren't really

that many good, professional4evel science fiction stories being published on-line at the moment, although

I did find two stories I liked this year that were published only as phosphor dots on an "on-line

magazine," one from Omni Online and one from Eidolon: SF Online, that we're bringing to you in print

form for the first time anywhere in this anthology. But this whole area is growing so fast, with changes

coming so rapidly and new Web sites springing up so rapidly, that the potential here is enormous, and I

can't help but feel that this market will end up being a very significant one before we're too many years

into the next century. The SF community on the Web, in particular, is growing and expanding with

dizzying speed, growing even as you watch it, and is not only getting larger, but is also (perhaps more

importantly) growing more interconnected, forging links from site to site, with traffic moving easily

between them, growing toward becoming a real community-and a community with no physical

boundaries, since it's just as easy to click yourself to a site on the other side of the Atlantic or on the

other side of the world as it is to click to one next door. This growth and evolution of a tightly

interconected on-line SF community is a development that may prove to have significant consequences

in the not-too-distant future. So even though this whole area at the moment probably produces less

worthwhile fiction annually than a couple of good anthologies or a few good issues of a top-level

professional print magazine, it's worth keeping an eye on this developing market, and even taking a closer

look at it.

As has been true for a couple of years now, your best bet for finding good online-only science fiction,

stories published only in electronic format, would be to go to Omni Online http://w.omnimag.com),

where the stories are selected by veteran editor Ellen Datlow, longtime fiction editor of the now-defunct

print version of Omni. To date, Omni Online "publishes" the best fiction I've been able to find on the

Web, including this year's strong stories by Simon Ings, Brian Stableford, Paul Park, Michael Bishop,

Michael Kandel, and others, but it seemed to publish fewer stories this year than last; and with the recent

death of Omni founder Kathy Keeton, a strong supporter of the Omni Online concept, some insiders

have speculated that perhaps General Media is losing interest in the Omni site and that it may be in

danger of being closed down. This conjecture has been officially denied, though, and I hope that the

Omni site stays up and running, as, at the moment, it is the most reliable place I know of on the Internet

to find professional-level SF, fantasy, and horror. (There's other stuff there as well: nonfiction pieces,

interviews, reviews, a place where you can "walk" through a virtual representation of the Titanic, and so

on, and they also do regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or "chats" with various prominent

authors).

A new innovation there this year are "round-robin" stories, written by four authors in collaboration,

each writing a section in turn, and cycling in that fashion until the story is done. "Round-robin" stories

rarely hold up well against " real" stories, since usually some of the pieces don't really match very well,

and these don't either, but they're fun and much better-executed than stories of this sort usually are.

Authors who participated in the round-robins this year included Pat Cadigan, Maureen F. Mchugh, Terry

Bisson, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Murphy, Jonathan Lethem, and others, so at the very least, they offered

you a rare opportunity to watch top creative talents at play.

The only other "on-line magazine" that really rivals Omni Online as a fairly reliable place in which to

find good professional-level SF is Tomorrow SF (http:/ /w.tomorrowsf.com), edited by veteran editor

Algis Budrys, the on-line reincarnation of another former print magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction.

This is also a very interesting and worthwhile site, although the fiction here is not quite as strongly to my

taste as that of the Omni site, something that was true of their respective print incarnations as well. Still,

the stuff here is always solidly professional, and they published ("posted?" "promulgated?") good work

this year by Kandis Elliot, Michael H. Payne, Robert Reed, Paul Janvier, K. D. Wentworth, and others.

Tomorrow SF is also engaged in an experiment that, if successful, could have profound implications for

the whole electronic publishing area. Starting last year, they "published" the first three on-line issues of

Tomorrow SF for free; then, this year, they have begun charging a "subscription fee" for access to the

Web site, hoping that the audience will have been hooked enough by the free samples that they will

continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. The wise money is betting that this will not work,

the argument being that so much stuff is available to be read for free on the Internet-oceans and oceans

of it, in fact-that nobody is going to pay to access a site; they'll just click to a site where they can read

something for free instead. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, however. It's true that there are

oceans and oceans of free fiction available on the Internet, but most of it is dreadful, slush-pile quality at

best, and if Budrys has sufficiently convinced a large-enough proportion of the audience that he can

winnow out the chaff and find the Good Stuff for them, they may well be willing to pay so that they don't

have to wade through all the crap themselves. This has been the function of the editor from the beginning

of the print fiction industry after all, and people buy print magazines for the very same reason: because of

the implicit promise that the editor has gone out into the wilderness of prose and hunted down and

bagged and brought back for them tasty morsels of fiction they'll enjoy consuming, and I don't see why

this wouldn't work for an on-line magazine as well. The question then becomes, has Budrys succeeded in

so convincing a large-enough portion of the potential alldience to actually keep him in business? The

jury's still out on that question so far. But if Tomorrow SF can succeed in getting readers in significant

numbers to pay to access the site, it could have a big effect on the shape of genre publishing on-line.

Another interesting experiment on which the jury's still out is taking place at Mind's Eye Fiction

(http://www.tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of stories for free, but if you want to

read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an

electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. The fees are small, less than fifty cents per

story in most cases, and although the wise money is sneering at this concept as well, I think that this setup

could actually work if they got some Bigger Name authors involved in the project. At the moment, most

of the writers you can access here are writers who don't have large reputations or avid followings (who

are willing to take a chance on a screwy concept like this because they have little to lose), and that may

make it harder for this experiment to succeed as fully as it otherwise might.

The quality of the fiction falls off quickly after these sites, although there are a few new contenders

this year. Most of these sites are still in their infancy, however, and not working entirely up to speed as

yet; most are also associated with existent print magazines. Eidolon: SF Online (http://w.midnight.com.all/

eidolorx/) offers information about back issues of Eidolon magazine and about Eidolon authors and about

the Australian professional scene in general, as well as reprint stories from previous issues, available to be

read on-line or downloaded. They are also promising to publish a good amount of original on-line-only

fiction in the future, though at the moment the only such story available is one by Sean Williams and

Simon Brown-and that one was good enough to make it into this anthology. Aurealis, the other Australian

semiprozine, also has a site (http://w.aurealis.hi.net) with similar kinds of features available, although so

far they've announced no plans for original fiction. I've already mentioned the Asimov's

(http://asimovs.conv) and Analog (http.//analogsf.conv) sites. Both sites are currently running teaser

excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, as well as book reviews, critical essays, and so

forth, and I plan to start running a certain amount of original on-line-only fiction on the Asimov's site as

soon as I can arrange to do so, as well as live interactive author interviews and chats. Another interesting

site is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a large selection of

reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information,

book reviews, critical essays, and so forth. They too promise to begin running a good deal of original

on-line-only fiction in the near future, and (as far as I can tell, anyway; it would be helpful, with this and

other sites, if they'd label more clearly what's a reprint and what isn't) already have some excerpts from

as yet unpublished novels. Terra Incognita (http://www.netaxs.com/-incognit), Century

(http://w.supranet.net/century/) and the two Canadian semiprozines On Spec (http://w.icomm.ca/onspec/)

and Transversions (http://w.astro.psu.edu/ users/harlow/transversions/) also have Web sites, although not

terribly active ones. Talebones (http://w.wenture.convtalebones) is another interesting site, although

oriented toward horror and dark fantasy rather than SF. Longer established sites that are worth keeping

an eye on, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven, include

Intertext(http://w.etext.org/Zines/Intertext/), and E-Scape (http://w.interink.coni/escape.litm]).

If none of these sites has satisfied you, you can find lots of other genre "electronic magazines" by

accessing littp.//w.yahoo.convarts/humanitiesaiterature/genres/science-fiction-fantasy-horror/magazines/,

but I hope you're extremely patient and have a strong stomach, since many of these sites are extremely

badin fact, there's more amateur-level, slush-pile quality fiction out there on the Internet than you could

wade through in a year of determined reading.

While you're on-line, don't forget to check out some of the genre-related sites that don't publish

fiction. Science Fiction Weekly (http://w.scifiweekly.com), which has been around long enough to be

venerable by on-line standards, is a good place to start, a lively general-interest site, with SF-related

news, reviews of other SF sites of interest, and lots of media, gaming, and book reviews (including an

occasional column by John Clute), as well as links to many genrerelated sites. Also valuable as a

home-away-from-home for genre readers is SFF NET (http//w.sff.net), which features dozens of home

pages for SF writers, genre-oriented we chats," and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine

Index 1984-1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction

Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as

well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web page at http://www.sfwa.org/sfw.

There are some new contenders in this area this year as well. The newszine Locus now has an on-line

version up and running, Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), and it's quickly become one of my

most frequent stops on the Internet, in part because of the rapidity with which breaking news gets posted

there, and for the other reviews and features, but mostly to browse Mark Kelly's comments about recent

short fiction, which are similar to the contents of his column in the print Locus, but with some additional

perspectives not available in the print edition. Another ambitious new site, which has quickly become one

of my favorite destinations while Web-surfing, is SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which, in addition to hosting

the Asimov's and Analog sites, and having lots of links to other genre-related sites of interest, also

features extensive review sections, and is perhaps more oriented toward print literature (as opposed to

media and gaming stuff) than is Science Fiction Weekly. SF Site has also just started carrying a

short-fiction review column by Dave Truesdale of the print semiprozine Tangent, which is one of the few

places on-line other than Locus Online where you can find genre short fiction being reviewed on a

regularly scheduled basis. And for a refreshingly iconoclastic and often funny slant on genre-oriented

news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the on-line version of his fanzine Ansible

(http://www.des.gla.ac.uk/ansible/). Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New

York Review of Science Fiction (http://eebs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html), Nova Express

(http://www.delphi.convsflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), SF

Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), and Tangent (http://www.sff.net/tangent/), but most of

these sites are fairly inactive.

Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GENIE, Delphi (which also now has a Web site,

http://www.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and

fans, with GENIE having perhaps the largest and most active such community. Most of these services

also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time "chats" or conferences, as does SFF NETTHE

SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I'm most familiar, and which gives you the opportunity to

schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. It starts every

Wednesday at about 10:00 P.m. EST.

It was a bad year in the semiprozine market, particularly in the fiction semiprozines, although even as

old titles falter, new titles appear on the horizon to replace them-or try to anyway. Some of the proposed

new titles look promising, but the odds are greatly against any new magazine succeeding in the current

market and under the current distribution system, I fear, particularly an undercapitalized magazine, and

that description fits most semiprozines. Those long odds don't seem to discourage people enough to stop

them from trying though.

There was no issue of Century published in 1997, just as they didn't publish their last three scheduled

issues in 1996; and although the editor was claiming as recently as a couple of weeks ago that Century

would eventually rise again from the ashes, he was assuring me of exactly the same thing at the end of

1996, so at this point I'm skeptical. Century was the most promising fiction semiprozine launch of the

'90s, but for the moment, I'm afraid that I have to consider it dead; they'll have to Show Me that I'm

wrong by actually publishing an issue before I change my mind, and even then I'd think they'd have to

show they can publish on something approaching a regular schedule before they'd entirely regain the trust

of their subscribers. I'm going to continue to list their subscription address here, in case you want to take

a chance on them, but at this point in time I can't in good faith recommend that you subscribe, since

there's at least a decent chance you'll never see anything in return for the money. There was also no issue

of Crank!, another eclectic and literarily sophisticated fiction semiprozine, published this year, although

one is promised for early in 1998; let's hope they can hold it together and not follow Century into the

Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual

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