The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 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: 1994

  FORGIVENESS DAY Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE REMORAS Robert Reed

  NEKROPOLIS Maureen F. McHugh

  MARGIN OF ERROR Nancy Kress

  CILIA-OF-GOLD Stephen Baxter

  GOING AFTER OLD MAN ALABAMA William Sanders

  MELODIES OF THE HEART Michael F. Flynn

  THE HOLE IN THE HOLE Terry Bisson

  PARIS IN JUNE Pat Cadigan

  FLOWERING MANDRAKE George Turner

  NONE SO BLIND Joe Haldeman

  COCOON Greg Egan

  SEVEN VIEWS OF OLDUVAI GORGE Mike Resnick

  DEAD SPACE FOR THE UNEXPECTED Geoff Ryman

  CRI DE COEUR Michael Bishop

  THE SAWING BOYS Howard Waldrop

  THE MATTER OF SEGGRI Ursula K. Le Guin

  YLEM Eliot Fintushel

  ASYLUM Katharine Kerr

  RED ELVIS Walter Jon Williams

  CALIFORNIA DREAMER Mary Rosenblum

  SPLIT LIGHT Lisa Goldstein

  LES FLEURS DU MAL Brian Stableford

  Honorable Mentions: 1994

  Also by Gardner Dozois

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  For Ellen Datlow

  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, $40.00 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: 1994

  For the most part, this was a gray, quiet year, solidly sunk in the traditional mid-decade doldrums. As usual, there were plenty of omens to be found, both positive and negative, and plenty of prognosticators eager to read the entrails for you—and again, also as usual, what conclusions you reached about whether things were looking good or looking bad for science fiction depended on which evidence you selectively chose to examine, and what weight you arbitrarily decided to give to it. Sometimes the future of SF publishing seems like Schrödinger’s Cat—not only can’t you know what’s going to be in the box until you open it, but I sometimes suspect that our expectations help to determine what we’re going to find in there when we finally do pop the lid. Whether we find a live cat or a dead cat in the box is going to be determined, in some small part at least, by our own actions, by how determined we are not to settle for lowest-common-denominator entertainment, by how ready we are to insist loudly and vocally on adult entertainment of intelligence and then to back that demand with cash money out of our wallets, and finally by how resourceful and creative people at every level of the publishing world can be in learning to overcome the daunting (but not, I hope, insurmountable) problems that lie in wait in the new century to come.

  Whatever’s going to happen in that new century, this year, in the closing decade of the current century, was a relatively quiet one. The game of Editorial Musical Chairs that has been underway for the last couple of years seems to have mostly played itself out—for the moment. (There were some exceptions, of course—Chris Miller was forced out of Avon by a corporate realignment that did away with her job, Janna Silverstein left Bantam for a job with Wizards of the Coast and Anne L. Groell left Avon to take the empty chair at Bantam.) Some established book lines died, such as the acclaimed Dell Abyss imprint, which was pretty much abandoned after the resignation of editor Jeanne Cavelos, and other lines, such as the last year’s newly launched Del Rey Discovery program, are seemingly being allowed to languish away. On the other hand, some lines which were seen as being threatened last year got reprieves this year, such as the AvoNova line, which was left in place and relatively undisturbed after the long-rumored sale of Avon fell through (it had been feared that the rumored new owners would dismantle it) … and some lines that were even reported to have died last year rose again from the grave in 1994, as Harcourt Brace thought better of killing its SF line after the last possible minute, and rehired editor Michael Kandel, who had left only months before. New or revamped SF lines were also launched this year or enjoyed their first year of publication, including the very promising-looking new HarperPrism line, edited by John Silbersack, the new Tor, Orb, and Forge lines, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and the “relaunched” Warner line, now called Warner Aspect, edited by Betsy Mitchell. New lines were also launched or are in the process of being launched by new players in the publishing game: White Wolf, primarily a gaming company up until recently, sharply increased its presence in the SF and fantasy book area (Stephen Pagel, formerly science fiction buyer for B. Dalton’s and the Barnes & Noble superstores, moved to White Wolf this year as Director of Sales; he will also be doing some editing for them—this will probably be good for White Wolf, but it might be bad for SF in general, as Pagel was primarily responsible for increasing the sale of SF at those chains by almost 25 percent in the last two years); and Wizards of the Coast, the Seattle-based gaming company responsible for the immensely popular trading card/fantasy game Magic: The Gathering hired Janna Silverstein away from Bantam to launch a new line of Fantasy and SF books; most of the books from these lines will probably be gaming-related, but some of them probably will be (and already have been, in the case of White Wolf) regular fantasy/SF/horror titles. One major magazine died this year, another seemed to be on its deathbed, and a third underwent a bizarre surprise transformation—while, at the same time, a half-dozen or more new magazines were struggling to establish themselves. The overall number of genre books published this year went down slightly for the third year in a row, but there were still more than 1,700 genre titles published, so the difference was hardly noticeable. There were enormous amounts of crap published during 1994, with media tie-in books, sharecropper books, gaming-oriented books, next-volume-in-infinitely-expansible-fantasy-trilogy books, wet-dream mercenary space-war fantasies, Star Trek books, Star Trek: The Next Generation books, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine books, Star Trek: Voyager books, Tek War books, and so on and so on, taking up ever-increasing amounts of room on bookstore shelves—and yet, in spite of all that, adult SF and fantasy novels of quality and intelligence continued to be published. Electronic publishing remained for the most part a dream for the 21st Century—and yet, at the same time, the first tentative steps that might make it a practical reality
were being taken, here and there, one small incremental step at a time.

  What you find in that box doesn’t have to be a dead, rotting cat.

  Only seven years left until the 21st Century! Until THE FUTURE!… that fabulous formless place where thousands of science fiction books and stories have been set. Will it be a glorious dream, or a hideous nightmare? It’ll be interesting to open the box and see.

  * * *

  It was a grim year in the magazine market, with a massive hike in postage rates and the quickly escalating cost of paper affecting every magazine in existence to one extent or another. Many magazines throughout the entire marketplace were hit hard, and the science fiction market was no exception, with some major magazines dying or hovering just this side of death, and other magazines going through significant upheavals, the ultimate effects of which are impossible to predict as yet. And yet, at the same time that older magazines were faltering and dying, many new magazines were struggling to be born, ignoring, either bravely or naively, the overwhelming odds against them succeeding either.

  Most of the big stories in this market this year involved death or drastic change. Aboriginal SF, which has been struggling for some time now and only managed to produce one “double” issue in 1994, was put up for sale, found no new buyer, and was finally declared officially dead in the early spring of 1995. Amazing, which had abandoned its large-size format in 1993, produced three digest-sized issues this year, and then “suspended publication” again; Amazing was also shopped around throughout the year and also found no one willing to buy it, at least as far as we know at the time of this writing. If Amazing does not find a new buyer, and quickly, then the odds are pretty good that it will die too, ending a remarkable sixty-eight-year run. Just as I was finishing the first draft of this Summation, there was a late-breaking news story of major proportions, major enough to get me to rework this section at the last possible moment: in a press release distributed in early March, Omni announced that it was immediately ceasing publication of its regular monthly edition, ending its seventeen-year history in that format. Instead, Omni “will convert its monthly editions to interactive online information services and begin publishing special quarterly ‘super’ editions this fall.” The quarterly print version of Omni, supposedly featuring “expanded editorial content,” including more stories per issue, will be “relaunched” in October, and will be sold only on newsstands; mail subscriptions to the magazine will be phased out beginning with the May issue. Ellen Datlow will stay on as the magazine’s fiction editor.

  Reverberations from this bombshell are still washing back and forth through the field even as I type, and so it’s still hard to see through the smoke and discern what this news really means. The Omni press release puts the most positive spin possible on the decision to cease publication of the monthly print edition, saying that even though Omni is in a period “of growing advertising and stable circulation,” they were making the decision to shift their primary emphasis to an electronic online format as a deliberate attempt to “get a jump on the new millennium,” adding that “electronic publication, supplemented by high-quality print on a supportive basis, represents the future pathway for growth of this important brand name.” Some industry insiders were skeptical, theorizing that the decision may actually be more sharply motivated by escalating production costs for the monthly print format than by a desire to explore exciting new markets, and that Omni may just be putting the best face possible on a decision they would have been forced to make anyway. It seems to me, though, that with a circulation of 787,000 (a circulation that had actually gone up almost 11% from the previous year), Omni should still be able to make a profit in spite of its no-doubt massive production costs … so perhaps we should give the Omni people the benefit of the doubt, and take their statement at face value.

  Whatever the motivation behind the transformation, Omni will be the first really major general-interest magazine to try to establish an electronic online version of itself (Wired does have an online version, HotWired, but Wired is more specifically aimed at the intensive computer-user audience than are most magazines, including Omni), and it will be extremely interesting to see what kind of a success they can make for themselves in that format. If they make a really impressive go of it, we can expect to see other magazines take the plunge as well.

  It was a gray year as well for the three major digest magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which all continued to lose circulation, although none of them suffered the kind of disastrous plunge that hit Amazing in 1992, when their circulation went down 61.6 percent from the previous year. So far, the circulation losses of the three digests have been relatively small—but this continued loss of blood is worrisome. The traditional digest-sized magazines really are the center of the field in some ways, or come as close to being a coherent center as the field has these days, anyway—a place where writers can hammer out a consensus as to what science fiction is like now and where it’s going, and know that their work will be seen by the majority of serious core SF readers, as well as being seen by (and influencing) their peers. This is why the serious evolution of science fiction writing has always taken place at the short-story level; in a way—and this has been true as long as there has been a science fiction genre, certainly back to the days when Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were the unknown new writers—it usually doesn’t matter all that much what Big Novels by which Big Name Authors are sitting on the top of nationwide bestseller lists: most of the really evolutionary work is being done by young new writers at the short-story level, usually in the digest magazines. If we should lose most of the SF magazines, particularly the traditional digest magazines, it would be a disaster for the field, perhaps even one that would spell the eventual death of the genre as a genre, eliminating most of the continuity from one literary generation to another, and making it much more difficult for new writers to get into print and successfully develop their talents. Science fiction novels might continue to appear as usual for years after the magazines disappeared, as if nothing had happened, but, sooner or later, cut off at its roots, the genre would wither, or become so attenuated that it would shred and blow away on the wind in a thousand different directions. Some people tell you that the death of the genre as a genre would be a good thing, a liberating thing, but I don’t agree with them—science fiction has built on other science fiction for decades, and, although that kind of force-breeding has produced weaknesses, it is also the source of science fiction’s very special strengths, and some of the blossoms that have bloomed in that hothouse have been rare and wonderful indeed.

  Asimov’s Science Fiction, whose overall circulation had risen by 1.4 percent in 1993, lost 5.4 in circulation overall this year, with a decline of 3,000 in subscriptions, and a decline in copies sold on the newsstand of 1,000. Analog lost 3.8 percent in overall circulation, 2,000 in subscriptions, 1,000 on the newsstand. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost almost 10 percent of its overall circulation, 4,186 in subscriptions, 1,503 on the newsstand. Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog got a new president and publisher, Joachim P. Rosler, who replaced Christoph Haas-Heye. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost popular columnists John Kessel and Bruce Sterling; Robert Killheffer will replace Kessel as the primary book reviewer.

  The British magazine Interzone completed its fourth full year as a monthly publication. Overall circulation dropped somewhat, and the literary quality seemed to have slipped a little, perhaps because they are now publishing a noticeably higher percentage of fantasy than they used to, most of it undistinguished. On the whole, though, the average quality of the stories remained high, and they are still one of the most reliable magazines in which to find first-rate material—myself, I think they should deemphasize the fantasy, and concentrate on science fiction again, particularly science fiction of the new “British hard SF” school, for which they are one of the natural homes. Interzone “merged” with the semiprozine Ne
xus this year, producing an issue devoted to material that had been originally produced for Nexus, and undergoing an internal “redesign” by former Nexus editor Paul Brazier—as far as I can tell, all the redesign did was make the magazine uglier and considerably harder to read, being one of those hip design jobs sported by magazines such as Wired, where the object seems to be to make the presentation of the text as confusing and hard to follow as possible. Since most of the Interzone audience is probably more interested in actually reading the text than in admiring its clever use as design elements, this may turn out to be a mistake.

  Two of the newer SF magazines—Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow, both large-size magazines—successfully completed their second full years of publication. The overall circulation of Science Fiction Age remained more or less steady, losing about 4,400 newsstand sales but gaining about 4,800 in subscriptions—its overall circulation, though, is only about 62,000, and I continue to wonder if it can really be profitable, considering how expensive it must be to produce (a slick, full-color, large-format magazine like Science Fiction Age is much more expensive to produce than a digest-sized magazine like Asimov’s or F&SF, which means that you have to earn a lot more to break even); of course, the upscale advertising that they’re attracting might make up the difference. Tomorrow’s circulation, already tiny by comparison with that of Science Fiction Age (Science Fiction Age, backed by a publishing company, obviously has much more money behind it than does Tomorrow, which is basically a one man show, and has only that man’s own financial resources to back it), declined somewhat rather than growing this year, a bad sign. Last year I said that Tomorrow seemed to have published better fiction than Science Fiction Age, to a noticeable degree, in spite of the greater financial resources of the other magazine. This year, the differences in the quality of the fiction published in the two magazines seemed less marked, with Science Fiction Age seeming to improve somewhat and Tomorrow worsening by a similar degree. The overall quality of the stories in both magazines was somewhat lackluster—certainly not up to the average standard of, say, F&SF, or Interzone—but each magazine did publish their share of good work, including, in both cases, several of the year’s first-rate stories. Science Fiction Age launched a companion magazine this year, Realms of Fantasy, edited by veteran editor Shawna McCarthy, another slick, large-size, full-color magazine, looking much like Science Fiction Age, in fact, except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction. So far, Realms of Fantasy hasn’t managed to produce anything really exceptional—most of the really innovative, Cutting-Edge fantasy is still being published in digest magazines like F&SF or Asimov’s, or in anthologies like Xanadu or Tales from the Great Turtle—but it’s early days yet, and McCarthy is a shrewd and energetic editor, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a dramatic improvement in quality here in days to come. In any event, Realms of Fantasy is the first professional magazine devoted entirely to fantasy to come along for a good number of years, and as such is a welcome addition to the field.