The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Read online

There were some shake-ups in the fiction semiprozine market this year, although things remained fairly lively. Mark Ziesing and Andy Watson’s very strange Journal Wired published two eclectic issues in 1990, containing some worthwhile fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Lewis Shiner, and others, as well as author interviews and a good deal of critical ranting of various degrees of coherency and interest, but died at the beginning of 1991; by press time, there were rumors that it was going to be reborn in a different form, and then counter-rumors that it was not going to be—if it is gone, I’ll miss it. There were also rumors flying at press time that Michael G. Adkisson’s New Pathways might have died, but I called one of the staff just before sitting down to write this portion of the Summation, and he assured me that the rumors were not true, and that New Pathways was still alive. I’m relieved to hear that, since it is the most consistently interesting of all the weirdly eclectic mixed fiction and review semiprozines that started to appear in the eighties. There were three issues of New Pathways published in 1990; in addition to the usual reviews, comix, and Weird Stuff, they published some good fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Don Webb (the year’s second most erotic story, about a woman who has Great Sex with a dildo-sized flying saucer), Lewis Shiner, and others. There were only two issues of Nova Express—edited by Michael Sumbera, with help by Glen Cox and Dwight Brown—out this year, although I’m told that another one was in the mail at about the time that I sat down to write this Summation; although the fiction they publish has been unimpressive to date, Nova Express is a lively and irreverent magazine full of interesting features, reviews, and interviews, and deserves your support. A (mostly) all-fiction semiprozine called Strange Plasma, edited by Steve Pasechnick, published two issues this year, and although nothing in it was quite up to the best of the stuff in last year’s debut issue, it did feature interesting work by R. A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, Cherry Wilder, and Carol Emshwiller.

  There are also a slew of horror semiprozines, on both sides of the Atlantic, and there seem to be more of them all the time, in spite of all the talk about the coming disastrous crash of the horror market. Counting Weird Tales as a professional market (although there is some argument about that under the Hugo-eligibility rules), the most visible of them are probably Midnight Graffiti—which only published one issue this year, though—Grue, and the British magazine Fear, although that is very difficult to find on the American side of the Atlantic; Cemetery Dance, Haunts, 2 A.M., Eldritch Tales, Deathrealm, and the long-running Weirdbook are some of the other horror semiprozines, along with the hardcover anthology continuation of the prominent British semiprozine, Fantasy Tales. A new horror semiprozine, Iniquities: The Magazine of Great Wickedness and Wonder, started at the beginning of 1991, and has already had the dubious distinction of being barred from entering Canada by offended customs officials. There was no issue of Whispers once again this year. There is also a semiprozine aimed at the High Fantasy market, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, but, to date, the fiction published there has yet to reach reliable levels of quality.

  As ever, Locus and SF Chronicle remain your best bet among the semiprozines if you are looking for news and/or an overview of the genre. Thrust, recently renamed Quantum, is the longest-running of those semiprozines that concentrate primarily on literary criticism, and one of the most consistently good. The last issue of Mark Van Name’s Short Form that I saw reviewed more short fiction than some of last year’s issues, but still didn’t review enough of it to justify the magazine’s name; I’d like to see more short fiction reviews in the magazine, since they remain vanishingly rare. There were only two issues of Stephen Brown’s Science Fiction Eye this year, and I don’t imagine that the magazine will ever be able to stick to a regular publication schedule, but I suppose that in a way it really doesn’t matter—the two issues they did produce were jammed to bursting with interesting material, passionately opinionated and avidly controversial, and all that probably counts more than punctuality; Bruce Sterling’s column alone is probably worth the price of the magazine, and the Sterling column in the August 1990 issue, “My Rihla,” is especially good, as fascinating and full of surprising insights as the best of his fiction. The New York Review of Science Fiction—whose editorial staff includes Kathryn Cramer, L. W. Currey, Samuel R. Delany, David G. Hartwell, Greg Cox, Robert Killheffer, John J. Ordover, and Gordon Van Gelder—has established itself as perhaps the most reliable of the criticalzines, producing twelve issues right on time this year; the level of criticism here is erratic—some of it is obtuse and bloodless, while other articles are literate, interesting, and intelligent; I like the Reading Lists they solicit from well-known professionals, and the occasional touch of humor (they even produced an issue parodying themselves, which takes guts and a certain amount of grace). Another contender entered the ring in the criticalzine arena this year, Science Fiction Review, a continuation by other hands (mostly Elton Elliott’s) of Dick Geis’s famous fanzine of the same name, with some editorial contribution by Geis himself; the three issues they published this year were fat and full of interesting material, although I think they’d do better omitting the short fiction they run to make room for more reviews and commentary. There is also a new critical magazine called Monad, edited by Damon Knight; only one issue has appeared to date.

  (Locus, Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $48.00 for a one-year first class subscription, $35.00 second class, 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, Algol Press, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, NY 11202–0056, $27.00 for 1 years, 12 issues, $33.00 first class; Quantum (formerly Thrust), Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, $9.00 for 4 issues; Science Fiction Eye, P.O. Box 43244, Washington, DC 20010–9244, $10.00 for one year; Short Form, Hatrack River Publications, P.O. Box 18184, Greensboro, NC 27419–8184, one year subscription (six issues), $24.00; New Pathways, MGA Services, P.O. Box 863994, Plano, TX 75086–3994, $25.00 for 6 issue subscription; Nova Express, White Car PubLications, P.O. Box 27231, Austin TX 78755–2231, $10.00 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Strange Plasma, Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 264, Cambridge, MA 02238, $8.00 for three issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $24.00 per year (twelve issues); Science Fiction Review, SFR Publications, P.O. Box 20340, Salem, OR 97307, $25.00 for 4 issues; Grue Magazine, Hells Kitchen Productions, Box 370, Times Square Sta., New York, NY 10108, $13.00 for three issues; Fear, Box 20, Ludlow, Shropshire, SY8 1DB, United Kingdom, $65.00 for 12 issues; Midnight Graffiti, 13101 Sudan Road, Poway, CA 92064, one year for $19.95; Monad, Pulphouse Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440, $5.00 for single issues or $18.00 for four issues.)

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  Nineteen ninety was a weaker year overall than last year in the original anthology market, with fewer memorable one-shot nonseries anthologies and fewer good theme anthologies. The best one-shot theme SF anthology of the year was undoubtedly Alien Sex (Dutton), a mixed original-and-reprint anthology edited by Omni fiction editor Ellen Datlow. There is a first-rate original story here by Pat Murphy, as well as good original work by Lewis Shiner, Geoff Ryman, Lisa Tuttle, Scott Baker, and others, including a real shocker by K.W. Jeter, but the original stuff, good as it is, is overshadowed by the classic reprints here, wonderful stories such as James Tiptree, Jr.’s “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face,” Pat Cadigan’s “Roadside Rescue,” and Connie Willis’s “All My Darling Daughters” … together with other good reprint stuff by Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, Bruce McAllister, Larry Niven, and others, it makes up into a—dare I say it?—highly desirable package, and makes an intriguing companion piece to the last round of SF/sex anthologies, Eros In Orbit and Strange Bedfellows, which came out back in the seventies. (Interestingly the most erotic new story of the year, Nancy Collins’ surprisingly upbeat “The Two-Headed Man,” is to be found in Pulphouse Nine, not in Alien Sex.) Another good anthology was Time Gate II (Baen), edited by Robert Silverberg with Bill
Fawcett; it’s not as strong as last year’s Time Gate, lacking Silverberg’s own Hugo-winning story, for one thing, but it does feature some powerful work, most notably by Gregory Benford. A good Alternate History anthology—although not as strong as the two Benford/Greenberg Alternate History anthologies from last year—is Beyond the Gate of Worlds (Tor), edited by Robert Silverberg; again, the strongest story in the book is Silverberg’s own, the evocative novella “Lion Time in Timbuctoo,” but the anthology also features good work by John Brunner and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Semiotext[e] SF (Autonomedia), edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Robert Anton Wilson, was a relentlessly self-hyped anthology of “material which had been rejected by the commercial SF media,” theoretically repressed stories that had supposedly been too controversial, too radical, too good, to be published in the SF magazines and anthologies. The editors describe their own book as “a book of colossal importance not only for the future of SF, but for the future in general,” and bill themselves as “the Dangerous Visions for the 90s”—but the only thing that is really exceptional here is the hype. Far from being too radical, too brilliant, too daring, most of the material here is just plain bad—and much of it has nothing to do with SF by an even remotely reasonable definition. I also wonder how much of the charge that the magazines are too timid to buy controversial material is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, I don’t know where else Bruce Sterling submitted his “We See Things Differently,” the one really first-rate story in the book, but he certainly didn’t submit it to me at IAsfm, because I would have bought it if he had. Actually, the despised “commercial media” published some pretty controversial stuff this year, including stuff as “dangerous” or more so than most of the stories in Semiotext[e] SF. Also worthwhile was Catfantastic II (DAW), edited by Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg.

  Turning to the SF anthology series, 1990 saw the debut of an important new anthology series with the publication of Universe 1 (Doubleday Foundation), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. This is supposedly the continuation of the long-running Universe series edited by the late Terry Carr, but, somewhat confusingly, the publisher has chosen to number this volume Universe 1, even though Terry Carr had gotten up to Universe 17 before his untimely death; this will bewilder bibliographers and librarians for years to come. All that to the side, what’s the fiction like? Well, perhaps not surprisingly, the stuff here reminds me more in style and tone and ambiance of the kind of story you would have found in a volume of Silverberg’s previous anthology series, New Dimensions, than it really does of stuff you would have found in Carr’s Universe—but that is no mean recommendation, since Silverberg’s New Dimensions was undoubtedly the strongest anthology series of the mid-seventies. This is a strong anthology, too, with first-rate stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Bruce Sterling, and good stuff by Kim Stanley Robinson, Geoffrey A. Landis, M. J. Engh, Richard R. Smith, Gregor Hartmann, James Patrick Kelly, Damian Kilby, and others. There are some minor stories here, of course, but at five hundred pages and twenty stories for $8.95, it’s a great value for your money, and I hope that Silverberg and Harber go on to produce another seventeen volumes of Universe, at the least. Universe and Full Spectrum, another anthology series produced within the Bantam Spectra/Doubleday Foundation group, are among the most solid and substantial SF original anthology series to come along in some while, and it’s a shame that Bantam can’t be persuaded to issue a volume of each series every year, instead of alternating them every other year, the way they’re doing it now.

  Another important new anthology series is Pulphouse (Pulphouse Publishing), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a quarterly hardcover anthology—billed as a “hardback magazine”—that is primarily available by subscription. Each issue of Pulphouse has a specific theme; of the Pulphouses this year, Pulphouse Seven was devoted to Horror, Pulphouse Eight was the Science Fiction issue, and Pulphouse Nine was devoted to Dark Fantasy. Some of these themed issues work better than others. Pulphouse Seven, for instance, the Horror issue, was the weakest of the year’s Pulphouses, although it did feature interesting work by Marina Fitch, Don Webb, Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint, and others, as well as a smug and childishly petulant essay/rant by David J. Schow. I’m not sure of just what distinction they’re making here between “Horror” and “Dark Fantasy,” because for me Pulphouse Nine, the so-called “Dark Fantasy” issue, actually functioned better as a horror anthology than the Horror issue did; it’s a stronger anthology than Seven, at any rate, with powerful stories by Joe R. Lansdale and Nancy Collins, and good stuff by Marina Fitch, Mary Rosenblum, William F. Wu, Melinda M. Snodgrass, and others. The strongest Pulphouse overall this year was Pulphouse Eight, the Science Fiction issue, which is a good anthology by any standard, containing a first-rate story by Greg Egan, and good stuff by Patricia Anthony, Kij Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas F. Monteleone, R. Garcia y Robertson, L. Timmel Duchamp, S. P. Somtow, and others. As mentioned above, Kristine Kathryn Rusch is stepping down as editor of Pulphouse to take over the editorial helm of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but apparently she has already completed future issues through Pulphouse Twelve, which will be the last Pulphouse to be published in hardcover anthology format as a “hardback magazine.” After that, the editorship will be assumed by Dean Wesley Smith, Pulphouse’s publisher, and the format will be changed to that of an actual magazine rather than a hardcover anthology; a weekly magazine, in fact, to be called Pulphouse: A Weekly Magazine. As the editor of a monthly magazine, I must admit that the idea of trying to produce a weekly magazine fills me with terror, and I wonder if it is really a feasible concept; it also takes Pulphouse out of the economics of the small press hardcover market, where it has done quite well, and into the economics of the magazine market instead, which is quite a different thing. Still, I wish them well—the field can use all the short fiction markets it can get—and all of the Pulphouse projects (all of which will retain Rusch as editor except for the weekly magazine—including the Axolotl novella line, the Author’s Choice Monthly line, the new Short Story Paperbacks line, and a new Bantam/Pulphouse novella series to be co-edited by Rusch and Betsy Mitchell … Good Lord, is she going to be busy!) deserve your support. (For information about them, contact: Pulphouse Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440.)

  There didn’t seem to be any issues of George Zebrowski’s Synergy this year, as far as I could tell, anyway, and I wonder if the series still exists. There was only one issue of James Baen’s New Destinies (Baen). L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol. VI (Bridge), edited by Algis Budrys, features work by some writers who may well become established professionals someday, but they are not established yet, and the book that you will hold in your hand here and now is mostly undistinguished novice work. There was a second edition of a new British anthology series this year, Zenith 2 (Sphere), edited by David S. Garnett; it featured a brilliant novella by Michael Moorcock, as well as good work by Ian McDonald, Lisa Tuttle, John Gribbin, and others. Clearly the Zenith series deserved life, but it was denied it—canceled by its publisher this year. I caught up with the newest edition of another British anthology series this year, an anthology I had missed last year, Other Edens III (Unwin), edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock; it featured a first-rate story by Ian McDonald, as well as good fiction by Keith Roberts, Brian Aldiss, Lisa Tuttle, Christopher Evans, and others … but this series too has been canceled by its publisher. Taken along with the cancelation of David Garnett’s Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook series, that seems to be pretty much the end of the brief British anthology renaissance everyone was talking about a year or two ago—almost all of the new British anthology series died in 1990. (There was a More Tales From the Forbidden Planet (Titan Books) released this year, edited by Roz Kaveney, but that’s a special case, more an occasional one-shot rather than an actual anthology series; it was a good deal weaker than the original volume a few years back, but had some interesting stuff by Rachel Pollack, David Langford, R. M.
Lamming, and others.) One ray of hope: David Garnett, obviously not a man who is easily discouraged, has announced that he will be editing a revival of the famous British SF magazine New Worlds in paperback anthology form, with the blessing and at least partial participation of former New Worlds editor Michael Moorcock, the anthology series to be published by Gollancz. I wish it well, and hope that it has better luck surviving than most other recent British anthology series.

  Shared-world anthologies this year included: Liavek 5: Festival Week (Ace), edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull; Wild Cards 7 (Bantam), edited by George R.R. Martin; Tales of the Witch World III (Tor), edited by Andre Norton; Sword & Sorceress VI (DAW), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; Warworld II (Baen), edited by Jerry Pournelle; and two “Fleet” anthologies, Total War (Ace), edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett and The Farstars War (Roc), edited by Bill Fawcett.

  In the horror market, the best original one-shot horror anthology was probably Walls of Fear (Morrow), edited by Kathryn Cramer (especially if you consider Datlow’s Alien Sex to be a science fiction anthology instead—which it mostly was, although stories like Jeter’s “The First Time” are clearly horror stories, not SF). Walls of Fear was a literate and intelligent anthology, containing a first-rate story by M. J. Engh, and good stuff by Karl Edward Wagner, Jonathan Carroll, Gene Wolfe, Susan Palwick, Edward Bryant, and others. Women of Darkness II (Tor), edited by Kathryn Ptacek, was not as impressive, although it featured interesting work by Melanie Tem, Tanith Lee, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, as well as by newer talents such as Poppy Z. Brite and Patricia Ramsey-Jones. A promising new horror anthology series debuted this year, Borderlands (Avon), edited by Thomas F. Monteleone. Borderlands, appropriately enough, seems to be sitting right in the middle of two hostile aesthetic camps, as far as the acrimonious Splatterpunk/“quiet horror” war that is raging in the horror industry is concerned: Some of it is gross enough for anybody (although the shock stuff here tends to be more sexual than gory), while the rest of it is “quiet” but scary stuff reminiscent of the kind of thing Charles L. Grant used in his Shadows anthologies—the kingpiece here is a strong story by Harlan Ellison, and the anthology also contains interesting work by Poppy Z. Brite, Chet Williamson, Karl Edward Wagner, Joe R. Lansdale, and others. Pulphouse Seven and Pulphouse Nine, discussed above, also function as horror anthologies.