The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 1995

  A WOMAN’S LIBERATION Ursula K. Le Guin

  STARSHIP DAY Ian R. MacLeod

  A PLACE WITH SHADE Robert Reed

  LUMINOUS Greg Egan

  THE PROMISE OF GOD Michael F. Flynn

  DEATH IN THE PROMISED LAND Pat Cadigan

  FOR WHITE HILL Joe Haldeman

  SOME LIKE IT COLD John Kessel

  THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN FUTURE Allen Steele

  THE LINCOLN TRAIN Maureen F. McHugh

  WE WERE OUT OF OUR MINDS WITH JOY David Marusek

  RADIO WAVES Michael Swanwick

  WANG’S CARPETS Greg Egan

  CASTING AT PEGASUS Mary Rosenblum

  LOOKING FOR KELLY DAHL Dan Simmons

  THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR James Patrick Kelly

  COMING OF AGE IN KARHIDE Ursula K. Le Guin

  GENESIS Poul Anderson

  FEIGENBAUM NUMBER Nancy Kress

  HOME Geoff Ryman

  THERE ARE NO DEAD Terry Bisson

  RECORDING ANGEL Paul J. McAuley

  ELVIS BEARPAW’S LUCK William Sanders

  MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH Brian Stableford

  HONORABLE MENTIONS: 1995

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgment

  Copyright

  For Tyler Harrison Amelio Casper,

  who made me a grandparent

  (well, I suppose his parents had something to do with it …)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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, Janet Kagan, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Scott L. Towner, Tina Lee, David Pringle, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Pat Cadigan, David S. Garnett, Charles C. Ryan, Chuq von Rospach, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Lou Aronica, Betsy Mitchell, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, David G. Hartwell, Mike Resnick, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Steve Pasechnick, Richard Gilliam, Susan Ann Protter, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Darrell Schweitzer, Don Keller, Robert Killheffer, Greg Cox, 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] 3399198) 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.

  SUMMATION:

  1995

  Nineteen ninety-five seemed to be a fairly glum year, with a lot of grim recessionary talk to be heard at most gatherings of science fiction professionals, although the actual numbers didn’t really seem to justify the intensity of the gloom; perhaps the unusually large number of deaths of prominent figures in the science fiction community during 1995, including some of the most beloved individuals in the field, helped to set the emotional tone of the year.

  In spite of all the recessionary talk, the overall number of books “of interest to the SF field” published in 1995 rose by 13 percent over the previous year, according to the newsmagazine Locus, reversing three years of minor decline, with that total including 659 new science fiction/fantasy/horror novels. Even focusing strictly on science fiction, there were still 239 new SF novels published in 1995, the number up from last year’s total, so it can be seen that SF remains an enormous genre, one which grows even larger if you add in the related fantasy and horror genres, as is usually the custom. The SF publishing scene was, overall, relatively quiet in 1995, although the magazine market continued to deteriorate, with several major titles lost and others struggling (see below). There have been cutbacks at some houses, and even SF publishing lines have been lost over the last couple of years, but, as usual, these losses have been balanced by the launching of new lines or by some publishers increasing the number of titles they release, leaving the overall totals roughly the same. Wizards of the Coast, for instance, abruptly abandoned plans for an ambitious new SF/fantasy book line, one they’d wooed Janna Silverstein away from Bantam last year to edit, but relatively new lines such as HarperPrism and Warner Aspect and Tor Forge and White Wolf continued to expand throughout the year (although White Wolf later contracted a bit in early 1996—having perhaps expanded too fast—laying off some staff and cutting back on their projected, and perhaps overly ambitious, book line); and a big hardcover list of somewhere between thirty and fifty new titles per year has been announced by Avon. The comics and gaming worlds, by comparison, were much harder hit by recessionary economics than the SF publishing world has been, with massive cutbacks at companies like Marvel and DC Comics, and many comics titles being dropped or sold, and with big cutbacks in the gaming areas under way at companies like White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast.

  There was another vigorous round this year of the publishing world’s favorite game, editorial musical chairs. Lou Aronica, who had moved to Berkley from Bantam in 1994, moved to Avon to become their new senior vice president and publisher. Jennifer Hershey moved from Bantam shortly thereafter, where she had been executive editor of Bantam Spectra and senior editor at Bantam Books, to become the new executive editor at Avon. Christopher Schelling, the executive editor at HarperPrism, retired for health-related reasons and was replaced by John Douglas, who had since 1983 been senior editor at Avon. Jennifer Brehl, who had been the late Isaac Asimov’s editor at Doubleday, will take over at Avon as senior editor in charge of the science fiction program. Owen Lock, former Del Rey editor in chief, moved on to become vice president and editor at large of the Ballantine Publishing Group, while Kuo-Yu Liang, former Del Rey sales manager, has moved up to become associate publisher of Del Rey and will oversee the SF programs at Ballantine in general.

  Everyone waited throughout the year for Bantam Spectra to announce a replacement for Jennifer Hershey, with rumors targeting one editor or another for the job, but so far, as of the time this is being written, Bantam has not dropped the other shoe, and the position remains vacant.

  A bit more than halfway through the decade, with the twenty-first century looming on the horizon, it’s perhaps an appropriate time to take a brief look at how science fiction is doing as a genre, and what the prospects are for its future.…

  … If it has a future, of course. Gloomy prognostications about the imminent death of the SF genre continued to appear here and there throughout the year. The editor of Interzone, David Pringle, recently published an editorial in which he made some disturbingly plausible comparisons between the decline of the Western as a genre and the possible future decline of SF as a genre, or at least as a print genre—arguing that, like the Western before it, print SF is becoming secondary to its film and TV forms, and may vanish as suddenly as did midlist Western novels, which pretty much disappeared from the British racks, quite suddenly, in the mid-1980s. Pringle says, “Already one senses that there is a younger generation for whom science fiction means film-and-TV sf before it means books or other written forms. And an ever-greater pro
portion of the sf books which do get published, and enjoy sales, are movie or TV spinoffs.” And it’s certainly possible to come up with a lot of evidence in support of this view if you look around: The new British magazine SFX, which bills itself as the “world’s greatest SF magazine,” publishes no print fiction at all, being devoted to SF in other forms; SF media magazines proliferate wildly here in the United States; TV Guide is now running a regular “Sci-Fi” column that never mentions print SF, or print authors (unless they’re working on a TV show); the huge media-oriented “SF” conventions, often with attendances in excess of eight or nine thousand people, where it’s possible to walk around for days without meeting anyone who knows anything about print SF, or cares. And so on. Along similar lines, during a recent visit to Britain, for the Scottish Worldcon, most of the SF writers I spoke to were sunk in gloom because many of the British publishers are now refusing to buy science fiction, insisting on buying only fantasy instead, one writer saying that a book editor had told him “if you don’t have a Celtic trilogy to offer, don’t bother us”; the sales department of one of the major British publishers has been quoted as saying that “the UK sf market is now too small to be worth bothering with”; and a prominent British SF writer has said that it’s now impossible for him to sell science fiction novels without “disguising” them as horror or fantasy novels—an ironic turnaround since the days of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was impossible to sell fantasy without “disguising” it as science fiction!

  Of course, what most of the American professionals in attendance wanted to know was—could it happen here? Are SF’s days numbered, as a print genre anyway?

  Well, yes,’ it could happen here, and print SF’s days might be numbered—but not necessarily. Such gloomy scenarios are hardly new, and should probably be taken with a grain of salt. To add a bit of historical perspective, I recently came across a New Worlds anthology from 1975, which was predicting the imminent death of the genre back then, for many of the same reasons. In fact, in more than twenty years of surveying the state of the genre in the course of preparing Best of the Year anthologies, it’s hard to remember a year in which somebody wasn’t predicting the imminent death of the field—just as they were doing back in 1961, when the fanzine Hugo was won by a symposium with the title “Who Killed Science Fiction?”

  It sometimes seems to me that the current state of SF publishing would be best expressed in a sequence of good news–bad news jokes: For example, the good news is that a lot more SF writers are making a lot more money—an enormously greater amount of money—and selling much greater numbers of books than was thought even remotely possible in the seventies; the bad news is that the dwindling of the midlist and the near disappearance of the backlist is making it a lot more difficult to have a reasonable career as an SF writer if you’re not a best-selling A-list author, driving more and more writers who would once have gotten by comfortably as midlist SF writers into having to write media tie-in novelizations and Star Trek books in order to survive. Or, the good news is, in today’s greatly expanded market, it’s probably easier to sell a first and even a second novel than it was twenty years ago; the bad news is that with the much more efficient and immediate return figures made possible by computers, and the fact that bookstore chains such as B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks won’t order a book by someone whose last couple of books haven’t sold well (which they can now check by clicking a few buttons), and that publishers are highly reluctant to buy from someone whom they can’t sell to the chains, many authors are finding it considerably more difficult—if not impossible—to sell their third or fourth novel than it was to sell their first and second, nipping in the bud some careers that in the old days might instead have been allowed to develop to the point where the author was successful in building an audience. (If you applied the same standards—immediate commercial success, or oblivion—to Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov, for instance, nobody would ever have heard of them, either.) Or, the good news is, books—and not just SF books—are selling in greater numbers today than ever before; the bad news is, the big bookstore chains are gobbling an ever increasing share of those sales, forcing independent booksellers out of existence, and even the chains themselves are contracting, closing more and more individual stores in favor of huge “superstores” … so that more books than ever before are being sold, but at fewer and fewer locations nationwide. Or, the bad news is, every time you walk into a bookstore, you’re overwhelmed by what seem like ever increasing amounts of media tie-in books—Star Trek books, Star Trek: The Next Generation books, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine books, Star Trek: Voyager books, X-Files books, Highlander books, Tek War books—and Celtic fantasy trilogies, and gaming-oriented books, and so on, until sometimes it seems next to impossible to spot the SF books that cling to rack space here and there, sometimes visible if someone hasn’t buried them under a stack of Star Wars or Magic: The Gathering books; the good news is, in spite of all that, there are still adult SF and fantasy novels of quality and intelligence there to be found.… In fact, there are probably more such novels being published now than there were twenty years ago, since, although the number of peripheral items has grown, the core of the field itself has continued to grow as well.

  I choose to believe that print SF does have a viable future, although I admit that it’s something I choose to believe, something taken on faith, an intuition at best, rather than a proposition for which I can muster an overwhelmingly convincing body of evidence. I don’t like to see statements about the imminent death of the field, not so much because they disagree with that intuition or item of faith, but because I fear in some primitive part of my hindbrain that such statements have an incantatory function—that if enough people say it, they may conjure that future into existence. This may not be just superstition—after all, all you have to do to engineer the death of the genre, or at least a severe setback for it, is to plant the idea that print SF is dying or is passé or is not worth bothering with anymore into the minds of six or seven people, executives highly placed in the publishing world, who will then, by refusing to invest resources in SF lines anymore or by telling the editors under them not to buy SF, create that very future in a self-fulfilling prophecy. I suspect that something of the sort has happened in British publishing, where the meme “Fantasy sells, SF doesn’t” has replicated to the point where no one is bringing SF books out anymore. And since none are available for readers to buy, nobody buys them, thus neatly proving the point that they don’t sell.

  So we should be careful what we wish for—we may get it!

  An interesting point, here in the looming shadow of the twenty-first century, one that may or may not turn out to be significant: in spite of an almost universal agreement in the SF publishing world that electronic publishing is never going to amount to anything (or that if it eventually does, that time is still twenty or thirty years away), this year, for the first time ever, this anthology contains a story that never saw print in any form before its appearance here, a story that until now existed only as phosphor dots on a computer screen, and is only now, with the publication of this book, appearing on paper in a form you can pick up and hold in your hands. I can’t help but feel that this is a signpost to the future—or at least to a future. But only time will tell.

  * * *

  It was a very bad year in the magazine market, with several major losses, and major shake-ups and changes under way at other magazines. The cost of paper continued to escalate alarmingly throughout 1995, and this, coupled with 1994’s massive hike in postage rates and a dramatic industrywide drop-off in “stamp” subscription sales (Publishers Clearing House, for instance, the largest “stamp” subscription seller, experienced a 30 percent drop in overall sales last year), has hurt every magazine in existence to some extent. Magazines across the entire marketplace were affected, not just the science fiction magazines … although the SF magazines, which usually have lower circulations than general-interest magazines, are perhaps even more vul
nerable to such changes, being, for instance, among the first magazines to be dropped from PCH stamp cards when belt-tightening is thought to be in order. In such a publishing climate, the marginal publications are often the first to die—a gloomy prospect for the science fiction market, especially with the threat of new and even more massive postal rate hikes looming on the horizon. And yet, in spite of this glowering and forbidding atmosphere, several newer magazines seem to have established themselves, and brand-new magazines continued to struggle to be born, bravely ignoring the seemingly overwhelming odds against their survival; it would be nice to think, although perhaps this is whistling past the graveyard, that a few of them will manage to beat the odds and establish themselves successfully as well.

  Even putting the most optimistic spin possible on things, though, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the major stories in the magazine market this year were negative.

  The biggest story, and perhaps the greatest loss, was the death of Omni as a regular print magazine. Early in 1995, after publishing four regular issues, Omni announced that it was immediately ceasing publication of its regular monthly edition, and was instead converting its monthly editions to interactive online information services, “supplemented” by quarterly print issues, to be sold only on newsstands; mail subscriptions were immediately phased out. Two issues of the “quarterly” print format were published in 1995 (one of them was actually published in January 1996, although it was dated 1995), and then, early in 1996, it was announced that the quarterly print edition was being killed as well. Supposedly Omni continues to exist as an “electronic online magazine” on America Online, and as a recently established Web page on the World Wide Web (http://www.omnimag.com/), although no one as yet seems to know exactly what that means, now that the print edition has vanished altogether. The party line is that Omni has not died at all, merely changed its format, making a deliberate attempt to “get a jump on the new millennium” by moving into the “new frontier” of electronic publishing, which they represent as the future of publishing, particularly magazine publishing. Most industry insiders are skeptical, speculating that the change was forced on Omni by escalating production costs for the monthly print edition and by the fact that most of Omni’s subscriptions were cut-rate “stamp” subscriptions from Publishers Clearing House, which often cost more to fulfill than the income they brought in—that, in other words, they were merely putting the best face possible on a change they would have had no choice but to make anyway. It will be very, very interesting (and perhaps significant for the future of the magazine market, especially as there are several other electronic “magazines” in the process of being launched) to see if the electronic “online” version of Omni can survive. One commonly asked question is, Where’s the money going to come from? This is an especially pertinent question in regards to the Web page, where there will likely be no charge to access the Omni area, as there is on America Online. So far, much of Omni’s electronic publishing has been underwritten by major advertisers such as the car company Dodge Neon, which sponsored the online publication of some of the novellas published in the Omni Online area of America Online last year (the novellas were considered to make up an “online anthology” called Neon Visions), but it remains to be seen whether or not advertisers will remain interested now that there is no print publication at all to support the “online magazine” version.