The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 1991

  BEGGARS IN SPAIN Nancy Kress

  LIVING WILL Alexander Jablokov

  A JUST AND LASTING PEACE Lois Tilton

  SKINNER’S ROOM William Gibson

  PRAYERS ON THE WIND Walter Jon Williams

  BLOOD SISTERS Greg Egan

  THE DARK Karen Joy Fowler

  MARNIE Ian MacLeod

  A TIP ON A TURTLE Robert Silverberg

  ÜBERMENSCH! Kim Newman

  DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION Pat Cadigan

  PIPES Robert Reed

  MATTER’S END Gregory Benford

  A HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS Kim Stanley Robinson

  GENE WARS Paul J. McAuley

  THE GALLERY OF HIS DREAMS Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  A WALK IN THE SUN Geoffrey A. Landis

  FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA Ian McDonald

  ANGELS IN LOVE Kathe Koja

  EYEWALL Rick Shelley

  POGROM James Patrick Kelly

  THE MOAT Greg Egan

  VOICES Jack Dann

  FOAM Brian W. Aldiss

  JACK Connie Willis

  LA MACCHINA Chris Beckett

  ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS Mike Resnick

  DESERT RAIN Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy

  Honorable Mentions

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  For the Wednesday-night conference gang on Delphi

  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, Uwe Luserke, 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, Greg Egan, Steve Pasechnick, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Chris Reed, Dirk Strasser, Michael Sumbera, Glen Cox, Steven Higgins, 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, $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, $30.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $36.00 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  SUMMATION

  1991

  We live in a world where, suddenly, there is no Soviet Union anymore.

  Think of that!

  Only a few months ago, the Soviet Union seemed a gray monolithic bureaucracy that would probably endure as long as Byzantium—and then suddenly, all at once, it’s gone, like a pricked soap bubble. Even those few pundits—mostly science fiction writers—who had predicted the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union never expected it to happen so fast; Norman Spinrad’s Russian Spring, for instance, which deals with that very topic, was obsolete almost before it was published, in spite of the fact that Spinrad is savvy enough in foreign affairs to be one of the few who’d seen the breakup of the U.S.S.R. coming in the first place. By the time Spinrad’s book hit the bookstore shelves, though, the world had already seen the statue of Lenin featured in the cover painting of Russian Spring being pulled down on CNN.

  We live in a world where Germany, which has been forcibly sundered for most of a human lifetime, is suddenly and quietly reunified, again all at once, poof! … an event that went almost unnoticed by the media in the shadow of the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Suddenly there’s a bitter civil war being fought in Yugoslavia, a country that only a decade ago was considered to be one of the most stable and prosperous nations in the Soviet sphere. Suddenly there are new countries on the map—and it all happened so fast that athletes from the former Soviet Union and its former satellite countries who won medals in the Winter Olympics had to have the Olympic theme played during their medal ceremonies, because the new countries they were suddenly from had not yet had time to come up with national anthems of their own.

  We live, in fact, in a very science fictional world, a world as unlikely as any to be found in a Philip K. Dick novel. Remember when Dick’s scenario in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—in which global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer made it necessary to travel in metal-roofed pedestrian walkways and wear tinted goggles and pith helmets when you went outside—seemed like satire? Remember when even the richest man in the world couldn’t have afforded to have a little plastic box with more computing power than UNIVAC sitting on the corner of his desk? Remember when The Wall Street Journal would hardly have known what a computer was, let alone have devoted space to worrying if a computer virus was going to disrupt the workings of international commerce? Remember when you could have sex without worrying if it was going to kill you?

  The rate of change has been accelerating throughout the twentieth century—but it really seems to have shifted into high gear now, as we hurtle haplessly toward the twenty-first.

  Science fiction readers should not be as surprised by these changes as others are, as one of the fundamental messages of good science fiction is that the only constant is the certainty of change. Change is inescapable, however much we may nostalgically long to freeze life in a form that we find comfortable and familiar. As I’ve said before, the world only seems static to us because we are too short-lived to see it change. If we could speed up time, condense eons into seconds, we would see mountains flow like water and fish learn to walk.

  At its best, science fiction is a lens that helps us to see in this special fashion, an eye that looks at change. It’ll be interesting, then, to see how good a job the science fiction world does of facing up to and dealing with the changes that are inevitably ahead for science fiction itself.

  For, as the twentieth century winds down toward its close, it becomes clear that there are radical changes ahead—and not only for science fiction, but for the entire publishing industry.

  Publishing may be in trouble. Yes, the country is deep in a recession that is hurting the sales of nearly everything nearly everywhere, but even taking that into consideration, there have been some ominous rumblings on the horizon, and some uneasy ripples passing through the publishing world of late. I myself have seen something happen in bookstores several times this year that fills me with unease: a browser reaching out his hand toward the bookshelves and picking up a book—the fundamental buying impulse on which the entire industry is based—and then looking at the price, hesitating, shaking his head, and putting the book back … and walking out of the store with his money still unspent in his pocket. If books have become so expensive, even mass-market paperbacks, that they are no longer candidates for impulse buying, then publishing is in big trouble … because the higher the price, the more t
he customer has to stop and think if the book is really worth it, and the more time he spends thinking about it, the more likely he is to decide that it’s not, especially these days, when you can break a ten-dollar bill buying a paperback and only get a buck or two back. And that’s just paperbacks. Hardcovers are edging up into the prices for which you used to be able to buy a small household appliance. These days you may even be able to buy a toaster for less than the cost of an average hardcover. Even allowing for inflation, books these days just cost too damn much.

  The annoying thing about this is that most of these inflated prices are artificial—that is, that the problems causing them to inflate could be solved if anyone was willing to face those problems and actually institute some radical solutions. Most of the rising costs of books comes from the truly horrendous system of distribution and marketing, as inefficient a system as it is possible to imagine, and especially from the returns system. This is the publishers’ policy of accepting returned books (or, more usually, their stripped-off covers) from bookstores and distributors for cash or credit; it’s such a crushing Old Man of the Sea around the neck of the publishing industry that return rates of 50 percent or more are now commonplace—which means that a publisher has to figure on printing two thousand copies of a book in order to sell a thousand copies of it, with the other copies being either pulped or stripped and sold illegally with no royalties filtering back to either publisher or author. This is absurd in the Computer Age, when you ought to be able to know in advance exactly how many copies you need to print, with the ability to print more as needed—as absurd as paying astronomical rents and overhead to maintain an office building in New York City where everyone has to be physically present from nine to five, in an age of modems and faxes and an instant telecommunications network that is open and working twenty-four hours a day. Most publishing personnel could do their work as easily from their home in some little town in Ohio, or at least from an office in some locale where rents are significantly cheaper, as they could do it in Manhatttan; for that matter, as we evolve toward a twenty-four-hour society, they could do it at four o’clock in the morning as efficiently as they could at three o’clock in the afternoon, in most cases. Desktop publishing methods could also help cut book production costs to the bone … if anyone could be convinced to use them on a major scale.

  And, looming just over the horizon, as Ben Bova and Richard Curtis and others have pointed out, is the prospect of Electronic Publishing, seen by some as an enormous opportunity, seen by others as a specter that could wipe out the entire book industry. Certainly Electronic Publishing will be a major player in some form long before 2001, whether it’s in the form of books and stories that can be downloaded for a price from one of the computer networks (this isn’t sci-fi stuff, by the way—you can do this right now), or in the form of what Ben Bova has called “cyberbooks,” hand-held interactive multimedia CD players that display text plus graphics and sound (not SF either—similar devices, called Electronic Book Players, have been on sale in Japan for some while, and are now available in Europe and the U.S.), which some people predict will replace traditional printed-text books altogether. (I don’t think it will go that far—I think there’ll always be some audience for the printed book; the question is, how large an audience?)

  If there is a radical reorganization ahead for the publishing industry, the key question is, will the Big Publishers, particularly those owned by giant corporations, be flexible enough to adapt successfully—or will they die off, and leave the book business to those now-minor companies that are small and fast and agile enough—and smart enough—to change in order to survive? We’ll see—but the publishing world could look very different (no doubt for both better and worse) ten years from now.

  In spite of all this apocalyptic talk, 1991 was actually a rather quiet year in the science fiction publishing world, in the United States anyway—although it was that kind of hushed, ominous, and oppressive calm that often comes just before a storm.

  A crippling recession slammed British book publishing early in 1991, causing almost five hundred employees to be laid off and several publishing houses to be sold or placed in receivership, and touching off a dizzyingly confusing round of editorial changeovers in late 1991 and early 1992, with some of the major British SF editors sometimes seeming to be engaged in a round of musical chairs played with an ever-decreasing number of seats. Among other major changes, Deborah Beale left the successful Legend SF line to create a new SF line, Millennium, for brand-new British publisher Orion Books, being replaced as Legend editor by John Jarrold, former senior editor at Macdonald.

  In America, most of the substantial changes so far were in the magazine industry (see below). In spite of fears of a crash, the total number of SF and SF-related books published in 1991 was actually up, according to the newsmagazine Locus. The total rose only slightly, up to an estimated 1,990 from 1990’s estimated total of 1,890, a rise of five percent (the total has risen forty-seven percent since 1981, though, according to Locus, a staggering overall rise). The near-total collapse of the horror market that was being predicted by industry insiders last year also didn’t come to pass—it’s now being predicted for next year. The American SF book publishing world was not hit by as many major changes as was the British industry, although David Hartwell was ousted from his position as editor at Morrow (in spite of having put together a very impressive hardcover line at Morrow for the past few years) when Morrow and Avon’s SF lists were combined into the forthcoming AvoNova line under the editorship of John Douglas. Also of significance is the fact that Lester del Rey retired from Del Rey Books.

  Rumors of upcoming major changes in the American SF book industry circulated freely throughout the year, however, with at least one major SF book line reputed to be in major trouble, and unadmitted buying slowdowns and even unacknowledged buying freezes rumored to be underway at several other houses. Whether any of these rumors are true or not is anyone’s guess.

  So people are looking uneasily to the future at the moment, braced for the oncoming storm.… Next year we’ll be able to see what the weather was actually like, and how much of our world, if any, was washed away in the flood.

  * * *

  It was a turbulent year in the magazine market, a year that saw many dramatic changes, some positive, some negative, some whose ultimate effect may not be known for quite a while. As I explained last year, the recent big hike in postage rates hurt the entire magazine market to some extent, especially when coupled with a decrease in advertising revenue, mostly caused by book publishers cutting back on ads because of the recession; newsstand sales were also down almost across the board, probably because of the recession as well. The damage hasn’t been restricted to science fiction magazines. Many mainstream magazines, of many different types, were forced out of business in 1991, with no doubt more to follow. All the magazines that have survived, science fiction or otherwise, have had to adapt to changing conditions somehow, usually by cutting corners and reducing costs as much as possible. For instance, Aboriginal SF only published five issues in 1991, publishing a double December issue instead of the September/October issue. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction also published a double-issue this year as a cost-saving measure, skipping one issue, doing eleven issues instead of twelve. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Analog are now doing two double-issues a year, also as a cost-saver, although they still continue to publish their usual thirteen issues. Some of the magazines have cut pages, and more will probably follow suit.

  Even Omni, backed by the giant General Media International, had a rough year, going through a massive internal reorganization that saw many of their employees laid off and the editorial offices of the magazine moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where its production will be consolidated with that of another General Media magazine, Compute, to save on production costs. (Fortunately, longtime Omni fiction editor Ellen Datlow has been kept on, and will continue to work out of the New York address.) After a
couple of years of financial difficulties, Davis Publications sold all four of its digest fiction titles—Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Science Fiction & Fact, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—at the beginning of 1992 to Dell Magazines, part of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, which is a part of the international consortium Bertelsmann. (This caused a good deal of anxiety in the science fiction field at first, naturally enough, but both Stanley Schmidt and I have been kept on as editors of our respective magazines, with our editorial staffs intact, and I think it is quite probable that the sale will prove to be a positive thing for both magazines—since Dell Magazines has the money and the connections to help improve circulation and distribution in a way that Davis, a small company, never had the resources to manage. I should probably note that Davis’s money problems were caused by the very expensive failure of Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance Magazine a few years ago; the fiction titles have remained profitable, which is why they were able to be sold.) Also by the beginning of 1992, money problems had hurt Aboriginal SF badly enough to force them to lay off their paid staff (all work is now being done by volunteer labor) and apply to the IRS for nonprofit status in order to enable the magazine to continue to publish (which it could, for the foreseeable future, if it does manage to get nonprofit status; keep your fingers crossed).

  There were also big changes at Amazing, which published its last two bimonthly digest-sized issues, edited by Patrick L. Price, early in 1991, and then shifted over to a large-size monthly format for the rest of the year, publishing eight more issues under new editor Kim Mohan. The change in format is probably a positive change: the magazine in its new avatar is a handsome-looking thing, with full-color covers and full-color interior illustrations throughout. It must also be very expensive to produce, though—considerably more expensive than producing a digest magazine—and the key question is whether or not parent company TSR is going to support the new Amazing at a loss long enough for it to have a real chance of establishing itself in the marketplace. Kim Mohan says that TSR is solidly behind the magazine and committed to supporting it; keep your fingers crossed for it, too.