The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  There was also a book of pleasant but mostly minor funny fantasy stories, Betcha Can’t Read Just One (Ace), edited by Alan Dean Foster and Martin H. Greenberg; another anthology of stories about Frankenstein’s Monster (there was one out a couple of years ago), Frankenstein: The Monster Wakes (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and two more in the somewhat lackluster “Ultimate” anthology series, The Ultimate Witch (Dell) and The Ultimate Zombie (Dell), both edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Byron Preiss. I was horrified to see that The Ultimate Witch bears a disclaimer stating that the anthology is not meant to endorse the practice of witchcraft! Boy, if we’re far enough gone in this country that a fantasy anthology can’t be published without running such a disclaimer to protect it from attacks by religious fundamentalists, we may all end up hiding out with Salman Rushdie!

  I’m not following the horror field as closely as I used to, since it’s now being covered by three separate Best of the Year anthologies, but there the big original anthologies of the year seem to have been Confederacy of the Dead (Roc), edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer, and Borderlands 3 (Avon), edited by Tom Monteleone. (It should be pointed out, though, that Snow White, Blood Red, which I’ve chosen to consider as a fantasy anthology here, could also be considered to be a horror anthology, and a major one, if you squint at it a bit differently … and that anthologies such as Pulphouse Twelve, Christmas Ghosts, and Christmas Forever also carried a pretty high percentage of horror stories in them. Deciding whether to list these books as horror anthologies or fantasy anthologies was a subjective call on my part, and a case could be made for either categorization.)

  * * *

  As far as literary quality is concerned, 1993 seemed to be another pretty strong year for novels, although perhaps not as strong overall as last year … but it was a good year for first novels. As far as the numbers are concerned, the newsmagazine Locus estimates 1173 original books and 647 reprints, for an overall total of 1820 SF/fantasy/horror books published in 1993, declining by only 1 percent from 1992’s total, in spite of much grim recessionary talk during the last couple of years; original SF/fantasy/horror novels make up 705 titles in that overall total. As usual, there were gains in some areas, balanced by losses in others, the kind of thing that makes it hard to predict whether next year’s numbers will be down due to factors such as the cancellation of the Harcourt Brace line or up due to factors such as the launch of the new HarperCollins line and the revamped Warner line. Hardcover numbers were up 13 percent, according to Locus, with hardcover reprints up 11 percent, fueled in part by an increase in small-press hardcover titles, while mass-market paperbacks were down 10 percent, with paperback originals down 5 percent and paperback reprints down 15 percent; paperback originals are down 23 percent overall since 1991. This decline in mass-market paperback totals is partially due to cutbacks, but also because some publishers have begun to publish books as hardcovers or trade paperbacks that they would have published as mass-market paperbacks in previous years; Tor, for instance, now does 76 percent of its original titles as hardcovers. This may have interesting implications for the future, since it seems to support the theory that much of the general public now feels that books are too expensive, perhaps particularly mass-market paperbacks, which, after all, used to have as their main (if not only) selling-point the fact that they were “cheap”—perhaps the buying public now feels that they come closer to “getting their money’s worth” when they purchase a more-permanent hardcover or a “classier”-looking trade paperback, since the gap between the price of those formats and the price of a mass-market paperback is no longer as wide as it once was. Locus estimates that there were 263 new SF novels published last year (up from 1992’s estimate of 239, although down somewhat from 1991’s estimate of 308), 267 new fantasy novels published (down somewhat from last year’s estimate of 278), and 175 new horror novels (up some from last year’s 165 in spite of sharp cutbacks in the adult horror novel market because of an explosion of Young Adult horror novels, which nearly doubled in 1993, to 30 percent of the overall horror novel total).

  Even if we ignore the fantasy and horror novels, it has obviously become just about impossible for any one individual to read and evaluate all of the more than 200 new science fiction novels that come out every year, or even a really significant fraction of them. Certainly with all of the reading I have to do at shorter lengths for Asimov’s and for this anthology, I don’t have the time to read all the novels anymore; in fact, I can’t even come close.

  This year, I seemed to have even less time for novels than usual, so I’m going to limit myself to listing those novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1993, including: Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress (Morrow/AvoNova); Virtual Light, William Gibson (Bantam Spectra); Ring of Swords, Eleanor Arnason (Tor); The Drylands, Mary Rosenblum (Del Rey); Timelike Infinity, Stephen Baxter (Roc); The Innkeeper’s Song, Peter S. Beagle (Roc); Moving Mars, Greg Bear (Tor); Cold Allies, Patricia Anthony (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); Growing Up Weightless, John M. Ford (Bantam Spectra); Hard Landing, Algis Budrys (Warner Questar); Ammonite, Nicola Griffith (Del Rey); Assemblers of Infinity, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason (Bantam Spectra); Nightside the Long Sun, Gene Wolfe (Tor); The Hammer of God, Arthur C. Clarke (Bantam Spectra); Nimbus, Alexander Jablokov (Morrow/AvoNova); Kalifornia, Marc Laidlaw (St. Martin’s Press); High Steel, Jack C. Haldeman II and Jack Dann (Tor); Godspeed, Charles Sheffield (Tor); Harm’s Way, Colin Greenland (AvoNova); Purgatory: A Chronicle of a Distant World, Mike Resnick (Tor); A Plague of Angels, Sheri S. Tepper (Bantam Spectra); Chimera, Mary Rosenblum (Del Rey); The Call of Earth, Orson Scott Card (Tor); Glimpses, Lewis Shiner (Morrow); Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov (Doubleday Foundation); Kingdoms of the Wall, Robert Silverberg (Bantam Spectra); Dream of Glass, Jean Mark Gawron (Harcourt Brace & Co.); Warpath, Tony Daniel (Tor); Rainbow Man, M. J. Engh (Tor); Brother Termite, Patricia Anthony (Harcourt Brace & Co.); Vanishing Point, Michaela Roessner (Tor); A Clear Cold Light, Gregory Frost (AvoNova); Virtual Girl, Amy Thomson (Ace); Harvest of Stars, Poul Anderson (Tor); Glory Season, David Brin (Bantam Spectra); Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon, Lisa Goldstein (Tor); Icarus Descending, Elizabeth Hand (Bantam Spectra); Deerskin, Robin McKinley (Ace); Elvissey, Jack Womack (Tor); Throy, Jack Vance (Tor); The Destiny Makers, George Turner (Morrow/AvoNova); The Broken God, David Zindell (Bantam Spectra); The Golden, Lucius Shepard (Bantam); and Against a Dark Background, Iain M. Banks (Bantam Spectra).

  My subjective opinion, gathered to a large extent from reading the reviews and listening to reader reaction, was that 1993 was a good solid year for novels, but that none of the individual titles has whipped up the kind of excitement that 1992’s strongest books, like Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, had received the year before; even Gibson’s Virtual Light did not receive the kind of wholehearted rave reviews that Gibson’s books usually get, although it, and Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain, seem to have stirred up the most excitement overall among this year’s novels, with Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords perhaps sneaking in as a dark horse (many sources didn’t review it at all, but those that did tended to like it a lot). The field lost a very promising line with the dismissal of Michael Kandel at Harcourt Brace & Co., and, with the fate of Avon up in the air, no one seems at all sure what’s going to happen with the AvonNova line. On the other hand, new editors (although, as the game of Editorial Musical Chairs plays itself out once again, they’re mostly familiar faces) are now in authority at Bantam Spectra, Roc, and Millennium while others are starting new lines for houses like HarperCollins and Warner, and it will be interesting to see what they can do with these lines in the years ahead. It’ll also be interesting to see what Tor can do with the new Orb “classic reprint” line, another very promising line. As should be obvious from the list above, Tor had another solid year, as did Bantam Spectra.

  This was another strong year for first novels—in fact, in some ways
the best of the first novels stirred up as much excitement as the novels by more experienced hands … more, in some cases. Among the strongest of the first novels, and among those that have aroused the most enthusiastic response, are: Ammonite, Nicola Griffith; The Drylands, Mary Rosenblum; Cold Allies, Patricia Anthony; and Warpath, Tony Daniel; the prolific Rosenblum and Anthony had each turned out a well-received second novel (Rosenblum’s Chimera and Anthony’s Brother Termite) before the end of the year! Other good first novels included: Virtual Girl, Amy Thomson; Mutagenesis, Helen Collins (Tor); The Rising of the Moon, Flynn Connolly (Del Rey); CrashCourse, Wilhelmina Baird (Ace); The Well-Favored Man, Elizabeth Willey (Tor); and Flying to Valhalla, Charles Pellegrino (Morrow/AvoNova). As can be seen, the new “Del Rey Discovery” line, edited by Ellen Key Harris, has scored big this year, and, if it can keep it up, may turn out to be one of the most important “first novel” lines since the demise of Terry Carr’s (all-too-briefly) revived “Ace Special” line, which introduced at book length the work of such (at the time) new authors as Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Lucius Shepard, and Michael Swanwick. Michael Kandel’s now-defunct line for Harcourt was also turning up a lot of new talent (Patricia Anthony’s first and second novels this year, Jonathan Lethem’s and J. R. Dunn’s first novels coming up in 1994), as Tor, AvoNova, and Ace have been doing as well. All of these editors should be congratulated, as should every editor who dares to take a chance on untested new talent in a novel market that grows ever more cautious and addicted to “the sure thing” (not that such a thing actually exists, mind you, but editors and publishers are a superstitious lot, and like to believe that it does—the alternative, that you can never really tell what’s going to sell well, no matter whose name is on the cover and how much you spend promoting it, is too horrible to contemplate, and makes such people wake up screaming in the dead of night).

  It’s hard to see any clear favorite here for this year’s Hugo Award, and it’s even harder to handicap the race for the Nebula Award, since, due to SFWA’s bizarre “rolling eligibility” rule, several prominent novels from 1992, such as Robinson’s Red Mars and Budrys’s Hard Landing, are eligible for this year’s award as well; we’ll just have to wait and see what ends up winning what—I won’t even venture a guess.

  There were several novels this year that came very close to functioning as straight historical novels, with only slight (and sometimes almost subliminal) fantastic elements, or, sometimes, with minor Alternate History tropes: Parke Godwin’s Robin and the King (Morrow), Harry Harrison’s The Hammer and the Cross (Tor), Diana L. Paxson’s The Wolf and the Raven, Judith Tarr’s Lord of the Two Lands (Tor), and others. This really shouldn’t be surprising, I guess, since many genre authors such as L. Sprague de Camp, Keith Roberts, Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, and others have written well-received historical novels, and many other authors, like Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove, have academic backgrounds in historical scholarship. I wonder if enough of these borderline fantasy/historical novels will actually be written every year to split this sort of thing off eventually into a separate subgenre. There is a parallel in the mystery field with the phenomenal rise of so-called “historical mysteries”—originally sometimes called “medieval mysteries,” but the time periods used have broadened out—which have increased mightily in numbers during the past few years. Some fantasy and SF writers, such as John Maddox Roberts and David Drake, also work in the “historical mystery” field, and some of the novels published there also have fantastic elements—for instance, to what genre does a mystery novel set in ancient Rome which features historical characters tracking down a vampire belong? Such novels have so far been classified as mysteries, but surely it would be just as valid to consider them fantasy novels with historical settings, or, for that matter, historical novels with fantastic tropes. It’s interesting to watch how the boundaries between all fictional categories (what about a mystery, published as a hardcore mainline mystery, in which one of the main characters is a ghost, for instance? [In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, mentioned below.] Where do you list that?) is blurring more and more frequently as the 90s progress.

  * * *

  Associational items and obscurely published novels that might be of interest to SF readers this year included: Samuel R. Delany’s They Fly at Çiron ($25.00 plus $3.00 shipping and handling from Incunabula Press, P.O. Box 20146, Seattle, WA 98103-0146); John Calvin Batchelor’s Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing (Holt); and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (Four Walls, Eight Windows); Paul Voermans’s The Weird Colonial Boy (Gollancz) probably never will have an American edition, but is worth seeking out. Mystery novels of associational interest or by known genre authors include: Justice for Some, Kate Wilhelm (St. Martin’s Press); In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, James Lee Burke (Hyperion—mystery with fantastic elements); The Long-Legged Fly (Carroll & Graf) and Moth (Carroll & Graf), both by James Sallis; Growing Light, Marta Randall (under the pseudonym “Martha Conley”) (St. Martin’s Press); and a reissue of a long out-of-print mystery by H. Beam Piper, Murder in the Gunroom (Old Earth Books, $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping and handling).

  * * *

  Nineteen ninety-three was another good year for short-story collections. The best collection of the year, and one of the best in years, is the posthumous retrospective collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (NESFA Press). The subtitle says it all—Smith was one of the greatest short story writers ever to work in the genre, and this immense (672 pages) collection manages to gather almost every science fiction story he ever wrote, plus an interesting array of associational material. Sadly, Smith is almost unknown these days to many contemporary readers, even though he is a giant of the form, someone who was essential to the evolution of modern science fiction; maybe, with luck, the NESFA collection will help to redress this injustice, and reintroduce Smith’s work to new generations of readers. This is a collection that belongs in every complete science fiction library. As does also a reissue of Samuel R. Delany’s landmark Driftglass collection, one of the best collections of the 60s, now reissued with a few added stories, and with the title slightly altered, as Driftglass/Starshards (Grafton).

  Among the more modern masters, the best collections of the year were: Impossible Things, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra); The Aliens of Earth, Nancy Kress (Arkham House); Dirty Work, Pat Cadigan (Mark V. Ziesing); Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson (Tor); Antiquities, John Crowley (Incunabula); LoveDeath, Dan Simmons (Warner); and Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories, Rebecca Ore (Tor). Also first-rate were: Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, Joe Haldeman (NESFA Press); Rivers in Time, L. Sprague de Camp (Baen); Departures, Harry Turtledove (Del Rey); Dancing with Myself, Charles Sheffield (Baen); Rude Astronauts, Allen Steele (Old Earth Books); Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Stephen King (Viking); Sam Gunn, Unlimited, Ben Bova (Bantam Spectra); Challenges, Ben Bova (Tor); Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson: The Complete Stories, George Alec Effinger (Swan Press); Identifying the Object, Gwyneth Jones (Swan Press); Bunch!, David R. Bunch (Broken Mirrors Press); and Hog-foot Right and Bird-hands, Garry Kilworth (Edgewood Press). Nightshades, Tanith Lee (Headline), is an interesting package that contains a novel by Lee plus twelve stories; the novel, Nightshade, is published there for the first time, but the stories, while reprints, take up the bulk of the book, so I’ve decided to list it here under collections. Also of interest were several collections that straddled the uneasily defined borderlines between SF, fantasy, and mainstream “Magic Realism”: The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories, William Browning Spencer (The Permanent Press); Evolution Annie and Other Stories, Rosaleen Love (The Women’s Press); and The Seventh Day and After, Don Webb (Wordcraft of Oregon).

  As has been true for several years now, with a few exceptions (Tor was fairly active this year, for instance), the bulk of the best collections continue to come from small-press publishers instead of by mainline trade publishers
. The most unfortunate thing about this—other than the fact that the authors probably don’t get paid as much for a collection by a small press as they would have been paid by a trade publisher—is that it makes it harder for the average reader, with the average reader’s resources, to find short story collections than it was a few decades ago. And that, I think, is, in the long run, bad for the field. It makes it harder for writers to build their reputations, particularly writers who work primarily at short fiction length, and the knowledge of how hard it is to sell a trade collection these days must certainly be yet another economic factor to discourage writers from doing short work in the first place … and, since, as I’ve said before, most of the really important evolutionary work that gets done, work that’s going to change the shape of the field, gets done at the short-story level, that certainly hampers the development of the genre. Lack of access to short fiction also makes it more difficult for a reader to develop any kind of systematic overview of the state of the field, and contributes to the dismaying loss of historical memory and historical continuity that is now endemic among younger audiences. Perhaps most importantly, it also hurts the readers because it keeps them from easy access to material that they might otherwise enjoy.