The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 1990

  James Patrick Kelly

  MR. BOY

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE SHOBIES’ STORY

  Greg Egan

  THE CARESS

  Charles Sheffield

  A BRAVER THING

  Bruce Sterling

  WE SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY

  Kate Wilhelm

  AND THE ANGELS SING

  Ian R. MacLeod

  PAST MAGIC

  Terry Bisson

  BEARS DISCOVER FIRE

  Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier

  THE ALL-CONSUMING

  Molly Gloss

  PERSONAL SILENCE

  John Kessel

  INVADERS

  Michael Moorcock

  THE CAIRENE PURSE

  Dafydd ab Hugh

  THE COON ROLLED DOWN AND RUPTURED HIS LARINKS, A SQUEEZED NOVEL BY MR. SKUNK

  Ted Chiang

  TOWER OF BABYLON

  Alexander Jablokov

  THE DEATH ARTIST

  John Brunner

  THE FIRST SINCE ANCIENT PERSIA

  Nancy Kress

  INERTIA

  Greg Egan

  LEARNING TO BE ME

  Connie Willis

  CIBOLA

  Jonathan Lethem

  WALKING THE MOONS

  Ian McDonald

  RAINMAKER COMETH

  Robert Silverberg

  HOT SKY

  Lewis Shiner

  WHITE CITY

  Pat Murphy

  LOVE AND SEX AMONG THE INVERTEBRATES

  Joe Haldeman

  THE HEMINGWAY HOAX

  Honorable Mentions 1990

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  For

  SCOTT and SUZI BAKER

  —for all the help in Paris

  and for

  MARGARET S. M. FLINN

  —for all the help at home

  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, Arnie Fenner, David S. Garnett, Charles C. Ryan, Chuq von Rospach, James Turner, Lucius Shepard, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, Beth Meacham, Claire Eddy, David G. Hartwell, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Jim Frenkel, Michael G. Adkisson, Steve Pasechnick, Lawrence Person, Don Webb, Andy Watson, Michael Sumbera, Glen Cox, Mark Van Name, Don Keller, Chris Napolitano, 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, $48.00 for a one year subscription [twelve issues] via first class mail, $35.00 second class) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202-0056, $27.00 for a one year subscription [twelve issues]; $33.00 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  SUMMATION

  1990

  Charles Dickens had it right: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Well, not really—science fiction has seen both better years and worse years than 1990. But certainly if you were scanning the sky for omens this year—as many people were, standing posed as we are on the brink of a new decade … and, at that, not only the last decade of the century, but the last decade of the millennium as well, with all the End-of-the-World panic that is likely to be whipping up—it was possible to find any number of them, both positive and negative, and whether you predicted a bleak future or a hopeful future depended on what weight you were willing to give to which omen as you added up the auguries.

  This was as true of the wide world outside as it was of the insular little world of science fiction publishing. 1990 was a year that saw positive social reform sweep like a warm thawing breeze through the long-frozen landscapes of Eastern Europe … and saw a massive, bitterly fought ground war break out in the Middle East. It was a year that saw a higher degree of public awareness of ecological issues than ever before, in the West, at least … and perhaps-irreversible ecological damage on a scale never before imagined. That saw record bull markets on Wall Street … and ever-increasing legions of the homeless sleeping on hot-air grates on the street. A year in which there seemed to be an increased emphasis on the importance of literacy and the arts, certainly over the apathetic seventies and eighties … and a year in which free expression and First Amendment rights were under ever-escalating attacks by fanatics of both the right and the left, making enforced censorship of the arts a more real and palpable threat than it has been since the fifties and sixties.

  It would be possible to go on in this fashion for pages—but you get the idea.

  And as it was in the bigger world outside, so it was in the teapot-tempest microcosm of the science fiction publishing industry. Actually, as far as actual substantive change was concerned, 1990 was a rather quiet year for SF, with most of the real changes coming in the magazine market—but the omens both dark and light were certainly there in the wind to be read, and, as I said, whether you are cautiously hopeful about the future of SF or paint a bleak scenario of approaching collapse and economic retrenchment depends on how you interpret them; plenty of evidence could be assembled to support either forecast. The major slump many feared would hit SF publishing this year did not actually occur, for instance; in fact, there was a six percent gain in the total number of books published in the related SF/fantasy/horror fields in 1990 over 1989, according to the newsmagazine Locus. At the same time, many publishers were clearly worried by the recession, cutting back on their advertising budgets, staging unadmitted buying slowdowns and even unacknowledged buying freezes, being cautious, being wary, going slow, and I suspect that a lot of intense thought is being given behind the scenes to what can be done to retrench, reorganize, save money, and cut the fat out of publishing lines, should the recession deepen into a depression. A major collapse in the overextended horror market was predicted for next year by many industry insiders … at the same time that Dell was launching a major new horror imprint, Abyss Books. Specialty SF bookstores—a form of bookstore that only began to proliferate in the early seventies—continued to spread … at the same time that the longest-running such store, California’s A Change of Hobbit, was forced out of business, and other specialty stores were reporting a weak year and poor sales (while yet other specialty stores said that they were doing better than ever). A high degree of creativity is expressing itself through many unorthodox channels, with the small press market more prominent, more lively, and more important to the field than it has ever been before … at the same time that sharecropper stuff, shared-world anthologies, and seemingly never-ending series are gobbling up an ever-increasing amount of precious rack-display space in bookstores, to the point where it is becoming rare to find an adult SF novel that is complete in itself, and, according to Locus, 147 out of a total of 256 adult SF novels were parts of series or s
et in already established universes—fifty-seven percent of the adult total, up considerably from last year’s thirty-nine percent, and a very disturbing trend indeed.

  So, cast your own runes, and make your own forecasts. I myself remain cautiously optimistic that SF will not only survive but prosper in the nineties, although things may well look considerably bleaker in the immediate next few years, before they begin to brighten. (In fact, I would go as far as to forecast that a new surge of creative energy and evolutionary/revolutionary furor, with a consequent economic Boom, will hit the field in the mid-nineties, just as it did in the mid-eighties, when dozens of new young writers—some “cyberpunk,” some not—seemed to appear out of nowhere all at once, and many older writers were suddenly revitalized by the new currents of creative energy surging through the genre.… but only time will tell.)

  So, as we plunge into the nineties, keep your fingers crossed, keep your eyes open—and hope for the best.

  * * *

  It was a year of changes in the magazine market, some negative, some positive. The recent big hike in postage rates will hurt all of the magazines to one extent or another, particularly the ones with small operating budgets and/or profit margins, and all of them will have to adapt to it somehow, by cutting corners and reducing costs, if they are to survive. A decrease in advertising revenue, mostly caused by book publishers cutting back on ads because of the recession, has also weakened many of the magazines. Another big hike in postage costs could wipe out the SF magazine market altogether, except for big-budget magazines like Omni—and I remain convinced that that would eventually spell the death of the genre as a genre, cutting it off at its roots, eliminating most of the continuity from one literary generation to another, and making it much more difficult for new young writers to develop their talents successfully (the magazines have been the training ground for new SF writers for generations now, and I don’t think that anything could adequately replace them, not even the original anthology series). Let’s all hope that this bleak scenario does not come to pass.

  Also on the downhill side, the promising new magazine Starshore seemingly died after three issues, money problems caused Aboriginal SF to cut back on its national distribution because of heavy returns and to downgrade the quality of its paper from an all-slick format to middle grade non-slick paper (it still retains slick covers, however), and several of the new semiprozines are either dead or seemingly in trouble.

  On the upbeat side, Amazing seems to have risen from the grave yet again, after I’d read memorial services over it here last year—a Lazarus trick it’s managed to pull off several times during the fifteen years I’ve been editing Best of the Year anthologies. Plans have been announced for Amazing to be reborn in 1991 in a large-size, full-color, slick-paper format, something Amazing’s owner TSR probably should have tried years ago—it’ll be interesting to see whether TSR will be willing to sink enough money in backing into the magazine over a long-enough period of time to give the new Amazing a real chance to establish itself. Amazing’s current editor, Patrick L. Price, has been let go, and will not be associated with the new Amazing—this is somewhat disappointing, since Price was doing quite a good job as editor, publishing some excellent fiction, and the magazine was livelier under his editorship than it had been in years (also somewhat unfair, since TSR is only now implementing some of the long-needed changes that Price had been agitating for for years, and that he will not survive to see any benefits from … but that’s the publishing world for you). Amazing’s new editor is Kim Mohan, and it will be interesting to see how well he does at filling Price’s shoes; I wish him well. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction will also have a new editor in 1991, for the first time in twenty-five years, as longtime editor Edward L. Ferman steps down, to be replaced by current Pulphouse editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Ferman will continue as publisher, and will art direct the magazine from his home in Connecticut; the editorial office will move to Rusch’s address in Oregon). It’s sad to see Ed Ferman stepping down after a very distinguished career as a magazine editor, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a good editor too, and I suspect that she will infuse some needed new blood into the magazine. F & SF’s continued survival is important to the genre, and the passing-on of the torch to a young editor like Rusch will, we hope, help to assure that the magazine will be around for years to come. Rusch will step down as editor of Pulphouse (see the original anthology section below for details), to be replaced by Dean Wesley Smith, and Pulphouse, currently a hardcover anthology series, will be transformed under his editorship to a weekly SF magazine called Pulphouse: A Weekly Magazine (the idea of a weekly SF magazine seems like a very dubious one to me … but then, I had my doubts about the feasibility of the original Pulphouse concept in the first place, and turned out to be wrong there, so who knows?).

  The British magazine Interzone went monthly in May, but so far the increased frequency of publication has not hurt the quality of the fiction they publish—in fact, Interzone seemed stronger than ever to me, and may have published more good stuff this year than it ever has before. Interzone and Aboriginal SF have come up with a bizarre promotional scheme which calls for them to swap editorial content for an issue, with Aboriginal SF publishing the contents of Interzone’s June 1991 issue as their July–August issue, while the contents of the May–June Aboriginal SF will be published as Interzone’s July issue. I suppose that the idea behind this is to attract new potential subscribers for each magazine on the other magazine’s side of the Atlantic, but the whole thing sounds kind of screwy to me, and I hope that it doesn’t backfire for them—I could easily see the regular readership of both magazines being puzzled, disappointed, and annoyed by the switch, and they might both end up losing subscribers as a result; let’s hope not.

  There was no sign this year of the promised Shadows Magazine, a new horror magazine to be edited by veteran horror editor Charles L. Grant, a project that had been talked about last year; we’ll have to wait and see if it ever materializes. I saw the first issue of a magazine called Unique, a large-format slick pop-culture magazine that said it was also going to be using a fair proportion of SF, fantasy, and horror fiction, but I could never find the announced second issue, and so I don’t know whether or not the magazine still exists; maybe more information will be available next year.

  As most of you probably know, I, Gardner Dozois, am also editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And that, as I’ve mentioned before, does pose a problem for me in compiling this summation, particularly the magazine-by-magazine review that follows. As IAsfm editor, I could be said to have a vested interest in the magazine’s success, so that anything negative I said about another SF magazine (particularly another digest-sized magazine, my direct competition), could be perceived as an attempt to make my own magazine look good by tearing down the competition. Aware of this constraint, I’ve decided that nobody can complain if I only say positive things about the competition … and so, once again, I’ve limited myself to a listing of some of the worthwhile authors published by each.

  Omni published first-rate fiction this year by Ted Chiang, Kate Wilhelm, Terry Bisson, Jonathan Carroll, Pat Cadigan, and others. Omni’s fiction editor is Ellen Datlow.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction featured good fiction by John Kessel, Robert Reed, Bruce Sterling, R. Garcia y Robertson, Alan Brennert, Stephen Kraus, Bradley Denton, and others. F & SF’s longtime editor was Edward Ferman; starting next year, F & SF’s new editor will be Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine featured critically acclaimed work by James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, Pat Cadigan, Judith Moffett, Greg Egan, Molly Gloss, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Bisson, Ian R. MacLeod, Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, Alexander Jablokov, Mike Resnick, Walter Jon Williams, Pat Murphy, and others. IAsfm’s editor is Gardner Dozois.

  Analog featured good work by Nancy Kress, Stephen Kraus, Michael F. Flynn, Charles Sheffield, Lois McMaster Bujold, Bernar
d Deitchman, W. R. Thompson, Robert R. Chase, and others. Analog’s longtime editor is Stanley Schmidt.

  Amazing featured good work by John Brunner, J. R. Dunn, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gregory Benford, Phillip C. Jennings, N. Lee Wood, Martha Soukup, Ian McDonald, and others. Amazing’s editor was Patrick L. Price; starting next year, Amazing’s new editor will be Kim Mohan.

  Interzone featured excellent work by Greg Egan, Ian MacLeod, Greg Bear, Brian Stableford, Lisa Tuttle, Richard Calder, Pat Murphy, Kim Newman, Thomas M. Disch, Gwyneth Jones, and others. Interzone’s editor is David Pringle.

  Aboriginal Science Fiction featured interesting work by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael Swanwick, Sarah Smith, Rory Harper, and others. The editor of Aboriginal Science Fiction is Charles C. Ryan.

  Weird Tales published good work by Ian McLeod, David J. Schow, John Brunner, Jonathan Carroll, Gerald Pearce, and others. Weird Tales’s editors are George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer.

  Short SF continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries, including markets as outré as Penthouse Hot Talk, an “erotic letters” magazine. Playboy in particular continues to run a good deal of SF, under fiction editor Alice K. Turner.

  (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the news stands: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, CT, 06753, annual subscription—twelve issues—$26.00 in U.S.; Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Davis Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 7058, Red Oak, IA, 51566—$34.95 for thirteen issues; Interzone, 124 Osborne Road, Brighton, BN1 6LU, United Kingdom, $52.00 for an airmail one year—twelve issues—subscription;Analog, Davis Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 7061, Red Oak, IA, 51591, $34.95 for thirteen issues; Amazing, TSR, Inc., P.O. Box 5695, Boston, MA 02206, $30.00 for twelve issues; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $15.00 for 6 issues in U.S.; Weird Tales, Terminus Publishing Company, P.O. Box 13418, Philadelphia, PA, 19101-3418, $16.00 for 4 issues in U.S.)