The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 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: 1993

  PAPA Ian R. MacLeod

  SACRED COW Bruce Sterling

  DANCING ON AIR Nancy Kress

  A VISIT TO THE FARSIDE Don Webb

  ALIEN BOOTLEGGER Rebecca Ore

  DEATH ON THE NILE Connie Willis

  FRIENDSHIP BRIDGE Brian W. Aldiss

  INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT G. David Nordley

  MWALIMU IN THE SQUARED CIRCLE Mike Resnick

  GUEST OF HONOR Robert Reed

  LOVE TOYS OF THE GODS Pat Cadigan

  CHAFF Greg Egan

  GEORGIA ON MY MIND Charles Sheffield

  CUSH Neal Barrett, Jr.

  ON THE COLLECTION OF HUMANS Mark Rich

  THERE AND THEN Steven Utley

  THE NIGHT WE BURIED ROAD DOG Jack Cady

  FEEDBACK Joe Haldeman

  LIESERL Stephen Baxter

  FLASHBACK Dan Simmons

  A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN FLORIDA William Browning Spencer

  WHISPERS Maureen F. McHugh and David B. Kisor

  WALL, STONE, CRAFT Walter Jon Williams

  Honorable Mentions: 1993

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgment

  Copyright

  For Jane Jewell and Peter Heck—fellow travelers

  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, Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, Jim Frenkel, Greg Egan, Steve Pasechnick, Susan Ann Protter, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Chris Reed, Dirk Strasser, Michael Sumbera, Glen Cox, 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, $38.00 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, $30.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $36.00 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  SUMMATION

  1993

  This was a generally quiet year, and whether you considered it to be a depressing year or a hopeful year depended largely on which omens you chose to read, for certainly every negative omen was counterbalanced by a positive one, or vice versa.

  The traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs, which started up again last year, went through a couple of additional rounds this year, with John Silbersack, who had moved to Warner from Roc in 1992, moving from Warner to HarperCollins in 1993, and being replaced at Warner by former Bantam editor Betsy Mitchell; former Legend (U.K.) editor Deborah Beale, who had moved to Millennium a couple of years back, decided to quit the publishing world (or at least to semiretire), and was replaced at Millennium by Caroline Oakley. Lou Aronica, deputy publisher of Bantam, moved to The Berkley Publishing Group as senior vice president and publisher, succeeding Roger Cooper, who moved to St. Martin’s Press last year, and being succeeded as deputy publisher at Bantam by Nita Taublib. In the vacuum left behind by the departure of Lou Aronica and Betsy Mitchell, Jennifer Hershey was promoted internally to executive editor, and Tom Dupree was moved internally to help coordinate the Bantam Spectra SF line. Susan Allison remains editor-in-chief of Ace and executive editor of Berkley, while Ginjer Buchanan is still executive editor of Ace and senior editor of Berkley. Christopher Schelling left Roc early in 1994 and joined HarperCollins as an executive editor. Amy Stout replaced him at Roc as executive editor.

  On the downhill side, editor Michael Kandel parted ways with Harcourt Brace, killing their very promising SF line; there were cutbacks at several publishing houses, including at Bantam Spectra, where they’ve cut to an average of three titles per month from a previous average of five or six titles per month in 1992; the fate of the AvoNova SF line remains uncertain, as contradictory rumors continued to circulate right up until press time about whether or not Avon and Morrow would be sold (and if so, to whom, and what would happen to them there); the Poseidon Press line from Simon & Schuster was canceled after the dismissal of editor Ann Patty; we probably have lost one of the major SF magazines, and the imminent death and vanishing of the rest of the SF magazines was predicted once again, as it has been predicted nearly every year since the late 1960s.

  On the other hand, on the uphill side, John Silbersack is starting a major new SF line, HarperPrism; Betsy Mitchell is “relaunching” Warner Questar as the Warner Aspect line (essentially creating a whole new line); Tor launched two new lines, Orb and Forge; Ellen Key Harris launched the successful “Del Rey Discoveries” line at Del Rey; Jeanne Cavelos launched a new “Dell Edge” line at Dell to publish less genre-oriented books that don’t fit into her “Dell/Abyss” line; book sales held reasonably steady throughout the field (the loss in some places being offset by gains in other places); the small-press market continued to expand, and not only did the SF magazines manage to survive the year again, there are a flock of new ones pushing to be born, including a couple that look near to establishing themselves successfully.

  So, as I say, whether you sum these omens and decide that 1993 was a discouraging or an encouraging year for science fiction depends largely on which omens you decide to consider, and how much weight you decide to give them. As I mentioned last year, though, it does seem to me as though there’s more gloom and pessimism around about the Future of Science Fiction than is really justified by the year’s events. Some critics, such as Barry N. Malzberg, John Clute, and others, have even gone so far as to say that, with the death of older writers such as Isaac Asimov, the field has lost its “center,” that science fiction is in a much worse state now than it was in a few years ago, and that the outlook for the future is very gloomy, that science fiction is now doomed either to extinction or at least to a long, slow dwindling-away into eventual obscurity where less and less of real merit will be published every year—that, in other words, SF’s best days are behind it.

  I must say that I don’t believe this. It’s easy to see where this kind of depression comes from, as SF has suffered terrible losses in the last few years, with the death of major figures such as Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, Alfred Bester, and dozens of others. Nevertheless, to conclude that SF’s best days are behind it is to view the evidence with a very selective eye, and to distort historical perspective by creating a wistfully utopian version of a past that never really existed—and then holding the present up to that imaginary past and judging the present as lacking.

  For one thing, I doubt that there ever really was a “center” to the field—it has always been a matter of what (and who) you choose to look at, and what you choose to ignore, of selective viewin
g of the evidence. To say, for instance, that John Campbell’s Astounding was once the center of the field is to ignore all those writers who couldn’t really fit into it comfortably, such as Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth and Damon Knight, who later went on to become the mainstay of Astounding’s chief rival, Galaxy; and even if you then widen the definition of “center” of the field to include both Astounding and Galaxy, that still ignores those writers such as Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Charles Harness, Leigh Brackett, and a number of others, who mostly didn’t fit into either magazine. And it has always been true, and still is, that major works of substance and high literary ambition are published side-by-side with trooping legions of bottom-of-the-barrel, lowest-common-denominator hack books … and that sometimes posterity ends up remembering the “hack” books as major work, and forgets about the supposedly “major” novels altogether! Gene Wolfe and Jerry Pournelle are displayed on the same racks in the same bookstores, and which of them you choose to say represents the “center” of the field is largely a subjective matter, and depends largely on who you are in the first place. The field probably has quite a different “center” for each of us.

  For another thing, science fiction has always depended on the work of the new young writers coming along as much (or more) as it depended on the work of the Big Name Writers at the top, and that’s the work that often determines the overall quality of a period, not the work of the Famous Authors at the top of the best-seller lists—and this was just as true when the new young writers coming along were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein as it is today. And new young writers of quality have definitely not stopped coming into science fiction; if anything, they are coming into the field in increasing numbers as the nineties progress. Isaac Asimov himself would certainly have dismissed the idea that science fiction was finished, or at least that some essential quality had gone out of it, because he was gone; in fact, he probably would have been offended by the idea. He knew that science fiction depends on new writers for its continued evolution, and drew comfort from the idea that they would go on building on the foundations of his own life’s work long after he was dead, just as he in his time had built upon the work of those who came before him. He would have laughed to scorn the idea that science fiction had died with him.

  Finally, I must question the idea that science fiction as a genre has seen better days. I’ve been here, observing it, for at least the past thirty years, and I must say, when was this Terrestrial Paradise? I don’t remember it. (I’ve heard both the New Wave days of the late-sixties and the post–New Wave days of the mid-seventies put forward as the Time When Things Were So Much Better, by young critics like t. Winter-Damon and K. J. Cypret, and others … and if you could go back in a time machine and tell that to writers living through either period, they’d fall on the ground laughing.) A lot of this is nostalgia, and a lot of it is selective memory. In fact, for all of our very real problems, it seems to me as if the genre has never been in a better position, either commercially or artistically.

  Consider: When I first became professionally involved in the field, in the early sixties, very few SF novels were allowed to be longer than 50,000 words; almost nobody, including most of the Big Names, was getting more than three or four thousand dollars per book; almost nobody could make a living from writing SF, unless he or she was prolific enough to turn out five or six books a year; the total number of SF books published every year was immensely smaller than it is today, and, even so, few bookstores carried more than a smattering of SF titles (most carried no titles at all); SF was an academically taboo topic, and admitting that you read it was often enough to get you ostracized from Decent Society—you might even be openly berated and publicly humiliated for reading SF, by total strangers, if you happened to be caught reading it on a bus or in a laundromat. Artistically, things were even worse, both in the novel market and the short fiction market. You were not allowed to write about sex, for instance—in many cases, you were not allowed to even say that your characters had had sex, let alone to describe the sex act in any sort of detail. You were not allowed to use “dirty” language—which, in many cases, extended even down to the word “damn,” which an editor of one of the major SF magazines of the time systematically changed to “darn” every time I used it. You were not allowed very much, if any, latitude in the matter of political controversy, either, and in most cases, religious and racial issues were taboo, as was any really “disturbing” view of society, or any adopting of values that weren’t those of the straightest mainline society. You were even discouraged from using certain kinds of characters, since the SF audience wasn’t supposed to be interested in reading about women or black people (I got that last one, about the SF audience not being interested in reading about black people, as late as last year, when I was trying to sell my Under African Skies anthology), let alone gay or lesbian people or “political extremists,” and, of course, any kind of stylistic experimentation, even of the most basic sorts, was totally out of the question. Worse, in many markets you were required to be “upbeat” and “positive,” and more than one writer, including myself, routinely had their stories rejected for not being “optimistic” enough. Few readers or even writers who entered the field after the “New Wave revolution” of the late sixties realize how bad things really and routinely were back then, or how badly the “New Wave revolution” was needed.

  In fact, I’d be willing to bet that at least 70 percent of the SF novels published in 1993—and probably closer to 90 percent of the short fiction, even that from the most conservative of markets—could not have been published in 1963; most of it still could not have been published in 1973, and probably a considerable percentage of it still couldn’t have been published in 1983, either. This is why I find it hard to conclude that SF’s Best Days are behind it. In spite of the flood of sharecropper novels and choose-your-own-adventure books and gaming and media-related tie-in titles on the shelves, there is more good SF and fantasy of many different kinds being published today, across an amazingly wide aesthetic spectrum, and by writers of all generations, from the surviving Golden Age giants to the newest of new writers, than there has ever been before—and most of it could not even have been published just a few decades back. If you want to see the Golden Age, don’t look to the past—look around you.

  This kind of thinking is not unique to the science fiction world, of course. I run into it every time I hear some young person say despairingly that no progress at all has been made in combating racism or sexism in the past few decades—something that those of us who actually remember living in the fifties know is not true—and that therefore there’s no point trying to fight to make things better in the future, either. I strongly recommend Otto Bettman’s book The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible! as an antidote for such thinking. Because, of course, in science fiction or out of it, the danger in painting the past as having been better than it was is that it encourages people to think that the present is worse than it is, and that therefore there’s no hope, and no viable future to struggle toward, and that generates apathy and despair. Let’s not give up on the future before we reach it, and especially not because we’re judging the present by the standards of a past that never was.

  * * *

  It was another gray year in the magazine market, and although most of the magazines at least managed to hold their ground, the year did see the probable loss of a major magazine, and some serious problems at a few others; on the uphill side, it also saw a few new magazines successfully complete their first full year of publication, and a number of even newer magazines struggled to be born, with rumor of even more to come.

  The big story of the year in this market was Amazing, which went “on hiatus” toward the end of 1993 while TSR Publishing decides what they want to do with the magazine. As of this writing, no one seems really sure whether or not this means that Amazing has died. It seems certain, however, that at the very least, the end of Amazing’s incarnation as a large-size, slick-format monthly has
come. This incarnation proved ruinously expensive to produce, since production costs are much much higher for a large-size magazine than they are for a digest-sized magazine, which drives profitability down; the last large-size issue, scheduled to be the December issue, was published at the end of the year as the “Winter 1994” issue instead (we’ve listed stories from that issue in this year’s Honorable Mentions list for convenience’s sake, in spite of the 1994 cover date, since the magazine did come out in 1993). Amazing’s circulation had plummeted disastrously in 1992, down 61.6 percent from the previous year, at the worst possible time, since sales were dropping just as profitability was declining (due to the rising costs demanded by the shift from a digest-sized to a large-size format); circulation did come up 21.4 percent this year, with most of the gain in newsstand sales, but it was too little too late to save a magazine that was rumored to have been losing almost $50,000 per issue. Initial reports in early 1994 were that the magazine was dead, and that its unused inventory would be used up in two original anthologies for Tor. Later, rumors began to circulate that Amazing would be reborn as a monthly digest-sized magazine, back to its old format, sometime in 1994. Then there were rumors that it would not be reborn, or, perhaps, would be reborn in some other format, such as an original anthology series or even in an “illustrated” version similar to “graphic novel” format. The last report I’ve seen claims that Amazing will “temporarily resume publication” as a digest-sized magazine (although the two Tor original anthologies of inventory stories apparently will still appear as well), publishing three issues which are scheduled to appear in Spring 1994, Fall 1994, and Winter 1995; I suppose that this is being done largely to test the waters, and, if sales don’t climb very significantly on those issues, I expect that TSR will finally pull the plug on Amazing for good, in any format. TSR is still talking supportively about Amazing, with associate publisher Brian Thomsen quoted by the newszine Locus as saying “Amazing Stories is the oldest, and longest-running, magazine in the field, and TSR has no desire to go down in history as the company who killed it.” … But he then goes on to say that TSR “will by no means rule out the sale of the magazine to another party” as one of the options they’re considering. I’ve pronounced Amazing dead several times before during the eighteen years that I’ve been editing Best of the Year anthologies, only to see it come to life again each time, so I’m reluctant to go out on a limb again this time—but I suspect that, unless a new buyer for the magazine can be found (always a possibility, of course), Amazing may finally have run out of lives. We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s wish it well.