The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual Gardner Dozois (2024)

summation: 2008

The publishing world proved not to be immune to thedeepening recession, and the genre suffered several major losses in2008. About the best spin that can be put on it is to say thatthings could have been worse. (And things may yet stillget worse, of course. The rumored possible bankruptcy ofthe Borders bookstore chain, which has been buzzed about for monthsnow, would, if it happens, likely have an adverse effect on manypublishers.)

Much of 2008’s bad news was delivered onDecember 3, what has come to be called Black Wednesday in thepublishing industry, when Random House announced majorrestructuring and layoffs, making Bantam Dell part of Random Houseinstead of an independent operation; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sawresignations and firings even at the highest levels of the company(and caused a furor by announcing a “buying freeze” on new titles);and Simon & Schuster also announced significant staff cuts.Earlier, many people had been let go by Doubleday, and later therewere huge layoffs at Macmillian, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, andelsewhere. Random House, the largest publisher in the UnitedStates, was the most strongly affected, undergoing sweepingchanges, with many divisions being consolidated. The Random HousePublishing Group swallowed the adult imprints of the Bantam DellPublishing Group, including Bantam Spectra and Del Rey. The KnopfPublishing Group will absorb Doubleday as well as imprint Nan A.Talese. Senior Bantam Spectra editor Juliet Ulman was let go, aswas Bantam Dell publisher Irwyn Applebaum and Doubleday publisherSteve Rubin; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publisher and seniorvice-president Rebecca Saletan resigned and executive editor AnnPatty was fired; Simon & Schuster Children’s president RickRichter and senior vice-president and publisher Rubin Pfeffer;Farrar, Straus, and Giroux lost publisher Linda Rosenberg, theheads of production and sub rights, a senior editor, and severalassistants—and scores of people in lesser positions lost their jobsthroughout the industry. The slaughter continued into the earlymonths of 2009, with Del Rey editor Liz Scheier and Ballantineeditor Anika Streitfeld being fired, along with Pantheon Bookspublisher Janice Goldklang.

German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, whichhad bought BookSpan, publisher of numerous book clubs, includingthe Science Fiction Book Club, just last year, turned around andsold their Direct Group North America in 2008, including BookSpan,to private investment firm Najafi Companies. What effect this willultimately have on the Science Fiction Book Club is as yetuncertain, although at the moment they seem to be continuing tofunction pretty much as normal. Small press Wheatland Press went on“hiatus,” usually a bad sign, as far as issuing new titles isconcerned, and may or may not be back, although they’re continuingto make already-released titles available for order. Several othersmall presses are rumored to be teetering on the edge (while othersseem to be doing okay).

Horrendous as all this is, it could havebeen worse. It was possible to see much of therestructuring of Random House coming a year or so back, even beforethe economic downturn had really taken hold, as a result ofcorporate mergers, and to date the party line is that Del Rey andSpectra will be kept as separate imprints. Most of the major SFlines are still in business, and a few, like the Hachette BookGroup, which includes Orbit, even registered modest gains.

Of course, as the recession continues todeepen, there may be—and probably will be—lots of hardtimes left ahead.

Historically, books, magazines, and moviesdo well during recessions, as hard economic times make peoplesearch for cheap entertainment to distract themselves from theirfinancial woes. The question for this particular recession is, Dobooks, magazines, and movies qualify as “cheap” entertainmentanymore? These days, many hardcover books are in the $25 to $30range, even a mass-market paperback can cost eight bucks, and inmany places a single movie ticket can cost over $13 (for a familyof five, once you throw in the eight-bucks-a-shot boxes of stalepopcorn, you’re edging perilously close to having had to spend $100to go to the movies). Even adjusting for inflation, it seems to methat this doesn’t really qualify as “cheap.” Ironically, the oneform of entertainment in the genre that is still reasonably cheap,the digest-sized SF magazines, are being put out of businessbecause they can no longer easily reach the customers; most people,even most regular SF readers, may go for years without ever layingeyes on an SF magazine, many don’t even know they exist, and eventhose who do may not be able to find one even if they go to anewsstand specifically searching for it. Perhaps the Kindle and theiPod and other similar text readers (and there are new and improvedgenerations of them coming along all the time) will save themagazines by making them easily accessible to readers onceagain.

Considering the problems that have latelyplagued Borders and other brick-and-mortar bookstores, they maysave the publishing industry too, if anything can. Certainlyeverything in the publishing world is going to look very differentten years from now, and in twenty years it may be completelyunrecognizable. Even today, many people are as likely or morelikely to read a book on their iPod while commuting to work as theyare to walk into a bookstore and buy a book. It’s worth noting thatonline bookseller Amazon was one of the very few businesses in theentire country to actually turn a profit in the fourth quarter of2008.

The print magazines had a good year creatively, interms of the quality of the material published, althoughcirculation continued its slow decline. Asimov’s andAnalog changed their trim size, getting larger althoughdropping pages, losing about 4,000 words’ worth of content in theprocess, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictionchanged from their decades-long monthly format to a bimonthlyformat of larger but fewer issues, losing about 10 percent of theiroverall content in the process. Opinion among industry insiders wasdivided as to whether these were sensible money-saving measuresthat will help the magazines survive or bad ideas, risky last-ditchattempts to save the magazines that could backfire; time will tell,I guess. With another big postal hike looming on the horizon in2009, rising printing costs, and some major magazine distributors(including two of the nation’s biggest) beginning to charge aseven-cent-per-copy surcharge for all the magazines theydistribute, a surcharge many magazines just can’t afford, thingsare looking precarious, and if the cost-cuttingmoves that Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF aretaking turn out to be ineffective in offsetting rising costs, allof these magazines could be in serious trouble. (Just as I wasfinishing work on this Summation, word came in that Anderson News,the huge magazine wholesaler and distributor who had been one ofthe distributors demanding a seven-cent-per-copy surcharge forevery copy of the magazines they handle had been forced to suspendoperations because many publishers had balked at paying thesurcharge and stopped shipping them product. The CEO there saysthat the company is working “toward an amicable solution” with thepublishers, and it remains to be seen how this situation willultimately play out.)

Realms of Fantasy magazine threw inthe towel early in 2009, citing disasterously plummeting newsstandsales (although the declining advertising revenue due to therecession—ROF was always heavily dependent on advertising—may alsohave been a factor). The magazine would die after the April 2009issue, a sad loss to the field.

The good news, such as it is, for theso-called Big Three magazines is that sales were nearly flat thisyear, with only minuscule declines from 2007. Asimov’s ScienceFiction registered only a 2.7 percent loss in overallcirculation, from 17,581 to 17,102, not bad when compared to lastyear’s 5.2 percent loss, 2006’s 13.6 percent loss, or 2005’sdisasterous 23.0 percent; it seems that declines in circulationhere are at least beginning to slow, even if they haven’t yetturned around. Subscriptions dropped from 14,084 to 13,842, andnewsstand sales dropped from 3,497 to 3,260; sell-through rose from30 percent to 31 percent. One encouraging note is that digitalsales of the magazine through Fictionwise and Kindle were on therise, although that rise is not yet reflected in these circulationfigures. Asimov’s published good stories this year byJames Alan Gardner, Mary Rosenblum, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress,Elizabeth Bear, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, and others.Sheila Williams completed her fourth year as Asimov’seditor. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 5.1percent loss in overall circulation, from 27,399 to 25,999, withsubscriptions dropping from 22,972 to 21,880, and newsstand salesdropping from 4,427 to 4,119; sell-through remained steady at 34percent. Analog published good work this year by Dean McLaughlin,Geoffrey A. Landis, Michael F. Flynn, Robert R. Chase, Ben Bova,and others. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there for twenty-nineyears. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictionregistered a small 2.7 percent loss in overall circulation, from16,489 to 16,044, with subscriptions dropping from 12,831 to 12,374but newstand sales actually rising slightly from 3,658 to 3,670;sell-through rose from 33 percent to 35 percent. F&SFpublished good work this year by Charles Coleman Finlay, TedKostmatka, Albert E. Cowdrey, Carolyn Ives Gilman, MichaelSwanwick, Steven Utley, John Kessel, and others. Gordon Van Gelderis in his twelfth year as editor and eighth year as owner andpublisher. In its last full year, Realms of Fantasypublished good stuff by Liz Williams, Carrie Vaughn, Greg Frost,Richard Parks, Tanith Lee, Eugie Foster, Aliette de Bodard, andothers. Shawna McCarthy was the editor of the magazine from itslaunch in 1994 to its death in 2009.

Interzone doesn’t really qualify asa professional magazine by the definition of The ScienceFiction Writers of America (SFWA) because of its low rates andcirculation—in the 2,000 to 3,000 copy range—but it’s thoroughlyprofessional in the caliber of writers that it attracts and in thequality of the fiction it produces, so we’re going to list it withthe other professional magazines anyway. Interzone hadanother strong year creatively, in 2008 publishing good stories byGreg Egan, Hannu Rajaniemi, Paul McAuley,Aliette de Bodard, Mercurio D. Rivera, Jamie Barras, Jason Sanford,and others. The ever-shifting editorial staff includes publisherAndy Cox, assisted by Peter Tennant. TTA Press,Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror ordark suspense magazine Black Static.

The survival of these magazines is essentialif you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published everyyear—and you can help them survive by subscribing to them!It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines,since you can now do it electronically online with the click of afew buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. In the Internetage, you can also subscribe from overseas just as easily as you canfrom the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible.Furthermore, Internet sites such as Fictionwise (fictionwise.com), magaz!nes.com(magazines.com), and evenAmazon.com sell subscriptionsonline, as well as electronic downloadable versions of many of themagazines to be read on your Kindle or PDA or home computer,something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvyset. And, of course, you can still subscribe the old-fashioned way,by mail.

So I’m going to list both the Internet siteswhere you can subscribe online and the street addresses where youcan subscribe by mail for each magazine:Asimov’s site is at asimovs.com; its subscription address isAsimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines,6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855—$55.90 for annual subscriptionin the U.S. Analog’s site is at analogsf.com; its subscription address isAnalog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street,Norwalk, CT 06855—$55.90 for annual subscription in the U.S.The Magazine of Fantasy & ScienceFiction’s site is at sfsite.com/fsf; its subscriptionaddress is The Magazine of Fantasy & ScienceFiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ07030, annual subscription—$50.99 in the U.S.Interzone and BlackStatic can be subscribed to online at ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html;the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane,Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, 21 pounds each for asix-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dualsubscription offer of 40 pounds for both magazines for six issues;make checks payable to TTA Press.

The print semi-prozine market is subject tothe same pressures in terms of rising postage rates and productioncosts as the professional magazines are, and such pressures havealready driven two of the most prominent fiction semi-prozines,Subterranean and Fantasy Magazine, from printinto electronic-only online formats, with Apex followingthis year (see a review of the Apex site in the onlinesection below), and I suspect that more will eventually follow.Print semi-prozines such as Argosy Magazine, AbsoluteMagnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Dreams ofDecadence, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Artemis Magazine:Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, Century, Orb,Altair, Terra Incognita, Eidolon, Spectrum SF, All Possible Worlds,Farthing, Yog’s Notebook, and the newszine Chroniclehave died in the last couple of years, and I won’t be listingsubscription addresses for any of them anymore. Tim Pratt andHeather Shaw’s Flytrap, “a little ’zine with teeth,”produced two issues in 2008 and then died as well. It looks likeSay ... and Full Unit Hookup may alsobe dead, or at least on hiatus, since I haven’t seen them for acouple of years. Weird Tales survives in a new incarnationfrom a different publisher, and thanks at least in part to someclever promotional ploys, seems even to be thriving. Another refugefrom the collapse of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing empire,Mythic Delirium, also still survives, publishing mostly poetry. Neither H. P. Lovecraft’sMagazine of Horror nor the revived Thrilling WonderStories published an issue, but considering the erraticschedule on which most semi-prozines get published, with somesupposed “quarterlies” unable to manage even one issue per year, itmay be premature to declare them dead. Saw two issues ofFictitious Force, but since they’re not dated, it’s hardto tell when they were published, and since no address orsubscription information is given anywhere, it’s hard to tell youhow to order it; try website sciffy.com/dnw.

Warren Lapine and DNA Publications may bereturning to the fray this year, with a newly relaunched version ofFantastic Stories, due to hit the stands in mid-2009.

Of the surviving print fictionsemi-prozines, by far the most professional and the one thatpublishes the highest percentage of stories of professionalquality, is the British magazine Postscripts, edited byPeter Crowther and Nick Gevers. They published a hugemore-than-double-length issue this year, Postscripts 15,which is most usefully considered to be an anthology and which isdiscussed in the anthology section below, but there was additionalgood stuff in Postscripts 14, Postscripts 16, andPostscripts 17 by Ian R. MacLeod, John Grant, SarahMonette, Lisa Tuttle, Robert Reed, Vaughn Stanger, Marly Youmans,and others. Postscripts has announced that they’ll bechanging from a magazine to an “anthology” format, mostly bychanging the format from two column to full width and upping theword count from 60,000 to about 70,000–75,000 per issue.Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, seems to bepublishing more science fiction these days, although they alsocontinue to run slipstream and fantasy; they managed two issues in2008, one of them a double issue, and published good stuff byWilliam Shunn, Aliette de Bodard, Patrick O’Leary, JenniferPelland, Sandra McDonald, Elissa Malcohn, and others.

One of the longest-running of the fictionsemi-prozines is the Canadian On Spec, edited by acollective under general editor Diane L. Walton, which once againkept reliably to its publishing schedule in 2008, bringing out allfour scheduled quarterly issues; unfortunately, I don’t usuallyfind their fiction to be terribly compelling; best work here wasprobably by Marissa K. Lingen, Kate Riedel, and Claude Lalumiere.The fiction in Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways In-flightMagazine, another collective-run magazine, one with a rotatingeditorial staff, which published its full six issues this year,tends to be somewhat livelier, and there were worthwhile storiesthere this year by Sarah Totton, Dirk Flinthart, Geoffrey Maloney,Aliette de Bodard, Lyn Battersby, and others. Another Australianmagazine Aurealis, once thought to be dead, managed oneissue this year under new editor Stuart Mayne, with worthwhile workby Stephen Dedman and Lee Battersby. Talebones, anSF/horror ’zine edited by Patrick Swenson, after surviving a roughpatch last year, managed two issues in 2008, with good work byJames Van Pelt, Paul Melko, Edd Vick, and others. Paradox,edited by Christopher M. Cevasco, an Alternate History magazine,only managed one issue this year. Neo-opsis, a Canadianmagazine, edited by Karl Johanson, managed only two out of fourscheduled issues in 2008. Jupiter, a small Britishmagazine edited by Ian Redman, managed all four of its scheduledissues in 2008; it’s devoted exclusively to science fiction, a bigplus in my book, but it’s a poorly produced andamateuristic-looking magazine, and the fiction to date is not yetof reliable professional quality. Shimmer, Ireland’sAlbedo One, and Greatest Common Denominator managed twoissues this year, Tales of the Unexpected, Sybil’s Garage,and the long-running Space & Time, back from a closebrush with death, one each. Turning to fantasy semi-prozines, Sword & Sorcerymagazine Black Gate managed one issue this year, and therewere three issues apiece of glossy fantasy magazines Zahir,Tales of the Talisman, and Aoife’s Kiss.

Many of the “minuscule press” slipstreammagazines inspired by Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlethave died or gone on hiatus in the last couple of years, butLady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet itself seems to be stillgoing strong, producing two issues in 2008. Mostly slipstream,literary fantasy, and fabulation here, of course, but there’s anoccasional SF story, such as Charlie Anders’s in issue 22.

There’s not much left of the criticalmagazine market except for a few sturdy, long-running stalwarts. Asalways, your best bet is Locus: The Magazine of the ScienceFiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo-winner, publishedby Charles N. Brown and edited by a large staff of editors underthe management of Kirsten Gong-Wong and Liza Groen Trombi. For morethan thirty years now this has been an indispensable source ofinformation, news, and reviews, and is undoubtedly the mostvaluable critical magazine/newszine in the field. Anotherlong-lived and reliably published critical magazine is The NewYork Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwelland a staff of associate editors, which publishes a variety ofeclectic and sometimes quirky critical essays on a wide range oftopics.

Below this point, most other criticalmagazines in the field are professional journals aimed more atacademics than at the average reader. The most accessible of theseis probably the long-running British critical ’zineFoundation.

Subscription addresses follow:

Postscripts, PSPublishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire,HU18 1PG, England, UK, published now as a quarterly anthology, $18for one issue, 4 issues for $100(Postscripts can also be subscribed toonline, perhaps the easiest way, at store.pspublishing.com.uk.);Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction &Fantasy Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $68.00 for a one-year first classsubscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of ScienceFiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville,NY, 10570, $40.00 per year, 12 issues, make checks payable toDragon Press; Foundation, Science FictionFoundation, Roger Robinson (SFF), 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood,Essex RM3 ORG, UK, $37.00 for a three-issue subscription in theU.S.A; Talebones, A Magazine of Science Fiction &Dark Fantasy, 21528 104th St. Ct. East, Bonney Lake,WA 98390, $24.00 for four issues;Aurealis, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box2149, Mt Waverley, VIC 3149, Australia (Web site: aurealis.com.au), $50 for a four-issueoverseas airmail subscription, checks should be made out toChimaera Publications in Australian dollars; On Spec,The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, P.O. Box4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, for subscription information,go to Web site onspec.ca; Neo-Opsis Science FictionMagazine, 4129 Carey Rd., Victoria, BC, V8Z 4G5,$28.00 Canadian for a four-issue subscription; AlbedoOne, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co.,Dublin, Ireland, $32.00 for a four-issue airmail subscription, makechecks payable to Albedo One; Tales of theUnanticipated, P.O. Box 8036, Lake Street Station,Minneapolis, MN 55408, $28 for a four-issue subscription (three orfour years’ worth) in the U.S.A, $31 in Canada, $34 overseas;Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, SmallBeer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027, $20.00for four issues; Electric Velocipede,Spilt Milk Press, see Web site electricvelocipede.com, forsubscription information; Andromeda Spaceways InflightMagazine, see Web site andromedaspaceways.com for subscription information;Zahir, Zahir Publishing, 315 South CoastHwy., 101, Suite U8, Encinitas, CA 92024, $18.00 for a one-yearsubscription, subscriptions can also be bought with credit cardsand PayPal at zahirtales.com;Tales of the Talisman, HadrosaurProductions, P.O. Box 2194, Mesilla Park, NM 88047-2194, $24.00 fora four-issue subscription; Aoife’s Kiss,Sam’s Dot Publishing, P.O. Box 782, Cedar Rapids, IA 52406-0782,$18.00 for a four-issue subscription; BlackGate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles,IL 60174, $29.95 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription;Paradox, Paradox Publications, P.O. Box22897, Brooklyn, NY 11202-2897, $25.00 for a one year (four-issue)subscription, checks or U.S. postal money orders should be madepayable to Paradox, can also be ordered online at paradoxmag.com; WeirdTales, Wildside Press, 9710 Traville Gateway Drive,#234, Rockville, MD 20850-7408, annual subscription—four issues—$24in the U.S.A., Jupiter, 19 Bedford Road,Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5UG, UK, 10 Pounds Sterling for four issues;Greatest Uncommon Denominator, GreatestUncommon Denominator Publishing, P.O. Box 1537, Laconia, NH 03247,$18 for two issues; Sybil’s Garage,Senses Five Press, 307 Madison Street, No. 3L, Hoboken, NJ07030-1937, no subscription information available but try Web sitesensesfivepress.com;Shimmer, P.O. Box 58591, Salt Lake City,UT 84158-0591, $22.00 for a four-issue subscription.

As more and more print markets die, emit distressedwobbling noises, or switch to online formats, electronic magazinesand Web sites are becoming increasingly important, and that’s notgoing to change; if anything, it’s likely to become even more trueas time goes by. Already, if you really want to keep up with allthe good short fiction being “published” during a given year, youcan’t afford to overlook the online markets.

Of course, as we discussed here at lengthlast year, the problem of how these online publications are goingto make enough money to survive continues to be a vexing one, withseveral formulas being experimented with at the moment. Provingthat electronic publication alone is not a guaranteed formula forsuccess, several ezines died in 2007, and this year Aeonand Helix folded—Aeon, oddly, almost immediatelyafter announcing that it was going to raise its rate of payment toprofessional levels. Both markets produced a lot of good work intheir time, and both will be greatly missed. (In their last year,Helix published good work by Charlie Anders, SamanthaHenderson, James Killus, George S. Walker, Annie Leckie, andothers, and Aeon published good work by Jay Lake, BruceMcAllister, Lavie Tidhar, and others.)

Now that the late lamented SciFiction has died, probably the most important ezine on theInternet, and certainly the one that features the highestproportion of core science fiction, is Jim Baen’s Universe(baensuniverse.com), editedby Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, which takes advantage of thefreedom from length restrictions offered by the use of pixelsinstead of print by featuring in each issue an amazingly largeselection of science fiction and fantasy stories, stories bybeginning writers, classic reprints, serials, columns, andfeatures, certainly more material than any of the print magazinescould afford to offer in a single issue. The best SF story inJim Baen’s Universe this year was Nancy Kress’s “FirstRites,” but there were also good SF stories by Ben Bova, Jay Lake,Lou Antonelli, Bud Sparhawk, Marissa Lingen, David Brin, andothers. The best fantasy stories here were by Tom Purdom and PatCadigan. There was a lot of good solid work inJim Baen’s Universe this year, but somehow it didn’t seemlike there was as much first-rate work as last year.

A similar mix per issue of SF stories,fantasy stories, and features, including media and book reviews anda new story by Orson Scott Card, is featured in Orson ScottCard’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (intergalacticmedicineshow.com),edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself.There seems to be a greater emphasis on fantasy here than atJim Baen’s Universe, and they do better with the fantasy,in terms of literary quality. The best story in Orson ScottCard’s Intergalactic Medicine Show this year, by a goodmargin, was Peter S. Beagle’s elegant Japanese fantasy “The Tale ofJunko and Sayuri,” but they also featured good fantasy stories byDennis Danvers, Stephanie Fray, and others, and good SF stories byKen Scholes, Aliette de Bodard, Sharon Shinn, and others.

The new Tor Web site, Tor.com (tor.com), a blog/community meeting ground thatfeatures lots of commentary and archives of comics and art inaddition to original fiction, has quickly established itself asanother important Internet destination. The best stories publishedthere this year were excellent works by Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi,Jay Lake, and Geoff Ryman, although there were also good stories byCharles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, and BrandonSanderson.

Two former print magazines that havecompleted a transformation to electronic-only formats, something Ithink we’ll inevitably see more of as time goes by, areSubterranean (subterraneanpress.com), editedby William K. Schafer, and Fantasy (darkfantasy.org), edited by SeanWallace and Cat Rambo. Subterranean usually leans towardhorror and “dark fantasy,” although they also run SF, and, in fact,the two best stories featured there this year, stories by ChrisRoberson and by Mike Resnick, were both SF, as were other goodstories by Beth Bernobich and Mary Robinette Kowal; fantasy wasrepresented by Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, and others.Fantasy, as should be expected from the title, usuallysticks to traditional genre fantasy and the occasional mild horrorstory, sometimes a bit of slipstream, almost never running anythingthat could be considered SF. The best stories here this year wereby Holly Phillips and by Rachel Swirsky, although there were alsogood stories by Gord Seller, Peter M. Ball, Ari Goelman, andothers.

Strange Horizons (strangehorizons.com), edited bySusan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner,features more slipstream and less SF than I’d like, but lots ofgood stuff continues to appear there nevertheless; best storiesthis year were by Meghan McCarren, Constance Cooper, and AlanCampbell, but there was also good work by A. M. Dellamonica, BillKte’pi, Deborah Coates, and others. The best stories this year inAbyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction(abyssandapex.com), edited byWendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbelland Ilona Gordon, were by Cat Rambo, Mecurio D. Rivera, and RuthNestvold, but Abyss and Apex also featured good stuff byAlan Smale, Marissa Lingen, Vylar Kaftan, and others.Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com),which features elegantly perverse fantasy, slipstream, and even theoccasional SF story, was co-edited by Nick Mamatas until July, whenSean Wallace took over as co-editor. My favorite stories here thisyear were by Jay Lake and Jeff Ford; there were also good storieshere by Tim Pratt, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente,Stephen Dedmen, Eric M. Witchey, Don Webb, and others. Ironically,for an online magazine that has no real physical existence, thecovers are quite striking, some of the best I’ve seen in a while. Iparticularly like the cover for Issue 19.

The Australian sciencemagazine Cosmos publishes an SF story monthly, but theyalso frequently feature stories available as unique content on theCosmos Web site (cosmosmagazine.com), all selectedby fiction editor Damien Broderick; good stuff appeared inCosmos this year, both online and in print, by BrendanDuBois, Steven Utley, Vylar Kaftan, Christopher East, and others. Asimilar mix of science fact articles and fiction is available fromthe ezine Futurismic (futurismic.com) and from newpublication Escape Velocity (escapevelocitymagazine.com),issues of which can be downloaded to your computer.

Apex Digest is another former printmagazine that has shifted completely to electronic online-onlyformat and can now be found as Apex Online (apexbookcompany.com/apex-online),still being edited by Jason Sizemore; good SF work by StevenFrancis Murphy, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lavie Tidhar, and othersappeared there, and they publish fantasy and critical articles aswell.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies(beneath-ceaseless-skies) is a new ezine devoted to “literaryadventure fantasy” that to date has published good work by David D.Levine, Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay, andothers.

Shadow Unit (shadowunit.org) is a Web site devotedto publishing stories drawn from an imaginary TV show, which inspite of the unlikeliness of the premise has attracted some toptalent such as Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, WillShetterly, and others.

Book View Café (bookviewcafe.com) is a “consortium ofover twenty professional authors, including Vonda N. McIntyre,Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zittel, Brenda Clough, and others, who havecreated a new Web site where work by them is made available forfree—mostly reprints for the moment, although new work is promised,and the site also contains novel excerpts.

Flurb (flurb.net), edited by Rudy Rucker, publishesas much strange Really Weird stuff as it does SF, but there weregood stories there this year by Bruce Sterling, Michael Blumlein,Lavie Tidhar, Terry Bisson, and others.

Below Flurb, science fiction andeven genre fantasy become harder to find, although there are anumber of ezines that publish slipstream/postmodern stories, oftenones of good literary quality (and even the occasional SF story).They include: Revolution SF (revolutionsf.com), which alsofeatures book and media reviews; Coyote Wild (coyotewildmag.com); IdeomancerSpeculative Fiction (ideomancer.com); Lone StarStories (literary.erictmarin.com);Heliotrope (heliotropemag.com); Farrago’sWainscot (farragoswainscot.com); andSybil’s Garage (www.sensefive.com); and the somewhatless slipstreamish Bewildering Stories (bewilderingstories.com).

Chiaroscura and New Ceresseem to have died; at least, I’m no longer able to get to them.Last year I reported that quirky little ezine Spacesuits andSix Guns (spacesuitsandsixguns.com) wasdead, but reports of its death seem to have been exaggerated, sinceit’s still there.

There’s also a Web site dedicated to YAfantasy and SF, Shiny (shinymag.blogspot.com).

Many good reprint SF and fantasystories can also be found on the Internet, perhaps in greaternumbers than the original ones, usually accessible for free. Thelong-running British Infinity Plus (users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus) hasceased to be an active site, but their archive of qualityreprint-stories is still accessible on the net, as is their archiveof biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews,interviews, and critical essays. The Infinite Matrix(infinitematrix.net) isalso no longer an active site, but theirsubstantial archives of past material are still available to beaccessed online. Most of the sites that are associated withexistent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, WeirdTales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & ScienceFiction, make previously published fiction and nonfictionavailable for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaserexcerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. On all ofthe sites that make their fiction available for free, Fantasy,Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizon, you can alsoaccess large archives of previously published material as well asstuff from the “current issue.” A large selection of novels and afew collections can also be accessed for free, to be eitherdownloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library(baen.com/library). Hundredsof out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are alsoavailable for free download from Project Gutenberg(promo.net/pc/).

If you’re willing to pay a small fee forthem, though, an even greater range of reprint stories becomesavailable. The best and the longest-established such site isFictionwise (fictionwise.com), where you can buydownloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or homecomputer, in addition to individual stories; you can also buy“fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, aswell as a selection of novels in several different genres; and youcan subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SFmagazines here, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, andInterzone, in a number of different formats. A similarsite is ElectricStory (electricstory.com); in addition tothe downloadable stuff for sale here (both stories and novels), youcan also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles byHoward Waldrop, and other critical material.

But there are other reasons for SF fans togo on the Internet besides searching for fiction to read. There arealso many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, mostof which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TVshows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of whichalso feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented newsof various kinds. Locus Online (locusmag.com), the online version of thenewsmagazine Locus, is easily the most valuablegenre-oriented general site on the entire Internet, anindispensable site where you can access an incredible amount ofinformation—including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists,links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and linksto extensive data base archives such as the Locus Index to ScienceFiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards—and which isalso often the first place in the genre to reveal fast-breakingnews. I usually end up accessing it several times a day. One of theother major general-interest sites, Science FictionWeekly, underwent a significant upheaval at the beginning of2009, merging with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a newsite called Sci Fi Wire (scifi.com/sfw); the emphasis here is onmedia-oriented stuff, movie and TV reviews, as well as reviews ofanime, games, and music, but they feature book reviews as well.SF Site (sfsite.com)features reviews of books, games, movies, TV shows, and magazines,plus a huge archive of past reviews, and Best SF (bestsf.net/), which boasts another greatarchive of reviews and which is one of the few places that makesany attempt to regularly review short fiction venues. Pioneeringshort-fiction review site Tangent Online was inactivethroughout 2008, and editor David Truesdale finally announced atthe end of the year that, as many of us suspected, it was not goingto return; a pity. But a new short-fiction review site, TheFix (thefix-online.com), launched by aformer Tangent Online staffer, is still going strong, andshort-fiction reviews can also be accessed on The InternetReview of Science Fiction (irosf.com), which also features novelreviews, interviews, opinion pieces, and critical articles. Othergood general-interest sites include SFRevu (sfsite.com/sfrevu), where you’llfind lots of novel and media reviews, as well as interviews andgeneral news; SFF NET (sff.net), whichfeatures dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; theScience Fiction Writers of America page (sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries,award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed;Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), anothervaluable review site; The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), media andbook reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (sffworld.com), more literary and mediareviews; SFReader (sfreader.com), which features reviews ofSF books; SFWatcher (sfwatcher.com), which features reviewsof SF movies; SFCrowsnest (sfcrowsnest.com); newcomerSFScope (sfscope.com),edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock,which concentrates on SF and writing business news; Pat’sFantasy Hotlist (fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com),io9 (io9.com); andSciFiPedia (scifipedia.scifi.com), awiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia. One of the mostentertaining SF sites on the Internet is Ansible (dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible), theonline version of multiple Hugo-winner David Lang-ford’slong-running fanzine Ansible. SF-oriented radio plays andpodcasts can also be accessed at Audible (audible.com), Escape Pod(escapepod.org), Star ShipSofa (starshipsofa.com),and Pod Castle (podcastle.org). Long-runningwriting-advice and market news site Speculations hasdied.

This has been an almost unprecedented year for thenumber of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at leastsince the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, andUniverse in the seventies. All of the new annual originalseries launched last year—Lou Anders’s Fast Forward,Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse, and George Mann’s TheSolaris Book of New Science Fiction—produced second volumesstronger than the initial volumes had been, a good sign. Even2008’s second-tier anthologies—there were a lot of anthologiespublished this year—were often good enough to have been incontention for the title of year’s best anthology in otheryears.

It may be premature to speak of arenaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as somehave been doing—none of these anthology series have firmlyestablished themselves financially as yet and, in fact, a few arerumored to not be selling so well. Still, even if it’s just forthis year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies at hand tochoose from.

The best of them was probably EclipseTwo (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan, althoughthere was only a whisker’s thickness of difference between it andFast Forward 2 (Pyr), edited by Lou Anders. A half stepbelow them was The Starry Rift (Viking), edited byJonathan Strahan; Sideways in Time (Solaris), edited byLou Anders; The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume 2(Solaris), edited by George Mann; and Dreaming Again:Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of AustralianFiction (Eos), edited by Jack Dann, all of them strong enoughto have carried off the prize in a weaker year. Postscripts15, edited by Nick Gevers, a double-issue of the magazine thatfunctioned essentially as an anthology, ought to be in the hunthere somewhere too.

Below these were a number ofstill-substantial anthologies such as The Del Rey Book ofScience Fiction and Fantasy (Del Rey), edited by Ellen Datlow;Extraordinary Engines (Solaris), edited by Nick Gevers;Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty andStrangeness (Norilana), edited by Mike Allen; Seeds ofChange (Prime), edited by John Joseph Adams; andSubterfuge (Newcon) and Celebrations (Newcon),both edited by Ian Whates—with yet more anthologies a couple ofsteps below them

Several reviewers, including me, criticizedJonathan Strahan’s Eclipse last year for not having enoughreal science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can beleveled at his Eclipse Two. There are still a couple offantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, butthe bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ corescience fiction. My favorite stories are by Stephen Baxter,Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroeder, Ted Chiang, and Daryl Gregory.Also good were stories by David Moles, Tony Daniel, Terry Dowling,Paul Cornell, and others. The best of the fantasy stories here areby Peter S. Beagle, Richard Parks, and Margo Lanagan.

Only a whisker-thickness behind is FastForward 2, edited by Lou Anders. The best stories here areprobably those by Paolo Bacigalupi and Ian McDonald, but the bookalso contains good work by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow,Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Chris Nakashima-Brown, PaulCornell, Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Bucknell, Kristine KathrynRusch, Kay Kenyon, and others.

Don’t let the fact that it’s being publishedas a YA anthology put you off—The Starry Rift, edited byJonathan Strahan, is definitely one of the best SF anthologies ofthe year, everything in it fully of adult quality, and almost allof it center-core SF as well.

Best stories here are those by Kelly Linkand Ian McDonald (his gorgeously colored Future India story, “TheDust Assassin”), but there are also excellent stories by PaulMcAuley, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams,and others, including an atypical near-future story by Greg Egan,more openly political than his stuff usually is. The fact thatseveral stories are told in the first person by teenage narrators,usually young girls, may make several of the stories seem a bitfamiliar if read one after the other (and is also the only realindication that this is a YA anthology), so space them out overtime.

Another excellent anthology is Sidewaysin Crime, edited by Lou Anders. Most Alternate History storiesare SF (particularly those that add a time-travel element), butwe’ve already seen a fair amount of Alternate History Fantasy inthe last few years (it’s an Alternate World, but in it griffins orgiants are real, or magic works), and now we’ve got AlternateHistory Mystery, producing a book that’s a lot of fun; most of thestories would fall under the Alternate History Mystery SF heading,I guess (including one with crosstime travel), rather than theAlternate History Mystery Fantasy heading, since although there’s acouple of fairly wild alternate possibilities here, there’s nonewith griffins or where magic works. The best stories in the book isprobably by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, but there’s also excellent workby Kage Baker, Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Theodore Judson, S. M.Stirling, Chris Roberson, and others. The most likely Alternate, asit requires the fewest changes from our own time line, is KristineKathryn Rusch’s story; the least likely is probably Mike Resnickand Eric Flint’s story, even more so than Chris Roberson’s storywith its crosstime-traveling zeppelins.

Several of the basic plotlines here arepretty similar—important man found dead under strange, usuallypolitically charged circ*mstances—although the settings changeradically from story to story, so I’d recommend that you read thesea few at a time rather than all in one sitting.

There are also some some good solid storiesin The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II (Solaris), edited by George Mann, which ismore even in quality than the first volume—none of the stories areas bad as the worst of the stories in the first one ...but then again, none of the stories are as good as the best of thegood stories were. The best stories here, in my opinion, are byPeter Watts, Eric Brown, Mary Robinette Kowal, Karl Schroeder, andDominic Green. If I had to narrow it down to only two picks, itwould be the Dominic Green and the Mary Robinette Kowal.

In the past, I’ve criticized the Britishmagazine Postscripts for not running enough core sciencefiction, and as if to twit me on this, Postscripts 15, ahuge double-length (or longer) issue that is probably bestconsidered as an anthology rather than a magazine, edited by NickGevers, bills itself an “all science fiction issue!” Not thatthat’s true, of course. By my definitions, there’s at least six orseven fantasy stories of one sort or another here, a reprintedarticle by Arthur C. Clarke, a metafiction piece by Brian W. Aldissabout meeting the Queen, and a fascinating autobiographical articleby Paul McAuley about growing up in post–World War II England.Nevertheless, there is plenty of core science fiction here, most ofit of excellent quality. Many of the best stories here are to befound in the special “Paul McAuley section,” which features, inaddition to the above-mentioned autobiographical essay, a novelexcerpt from McAuley’s The Quiet War, and four goodstories by McAuley, one of which, “City of the Dead,” may be thepick of the issue, rivaled only by Ian McDonald’s (“A GhostSamba”), which does almost as good a job of painting an evocativepicture of a future Brazil as his Cyberaid stories have done with afuture India. There are other good SF stories here by ChrisRobertson, Matthew Hughes, Steven Utley, Jay Lake, Robert Reed,Mike Resnick, Beth Bernobich, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, andothers. The best of the fantasy stories are by Justina Robson, JackDann, and Paul Di Filippo.

American publishers, especially the bigtrade houses, seem to like their genres segregated—no fantasy inscience fiction anthologies, no science fiction in fantasyanthologies, no mystery or mainstream in either. That’s not true ofAustralian publishers, however, where it seems to be okay to jumbledifferent genres together in the same anthology, and it’s certainlythe rule with Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New StoriesCelebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction, edited byJack Dann—the follow-up to 1998’s monumental Dreaming DownUnder, edited by Dann and Janeen Webb, which brings us asimilarly rich stew of fiction by Australian authors working indifferent genres, horror, fantasy, slipstream, science fiction. Awide variety of moods, too, with some stories horrific and grim,others seeming almost to be Young Adult pieces. There’s a bit toomuch horror here for my taste—a few zombie stories go a long waywith me, and there’s lots of zombie stories here, to the pointwhere it almost seems to become a running (or lurching) joke—butthere’s also enough fantasy and science fiction stories in thishuge volume to make up into respectable anthologies of their own,and if horror is your cup of blood, you’ll find the horror storiesto be of high quality. Almost everything here is of high quality,in fact (even the stories I didn’t care for were excellentlycrafted), a rich smorgasbord, by thirty-six different authors,representative of the obviously busy Australian scene. The bestscience fiction is from Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Lee Battersby,Stephen Dedman, Simon Brown, Sean McMullen, Ben Francisco and ChrisLynch, Rowena Cory Daniels, and Jason Fischer. Fantasy (sometimesshading into horror) is best represented here by Terry Dowling,Rjurik Davidson, Peter A. Ball, Russell Blackford, IsobelleCarmody, Richard Harland, and Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

The question, raisedin the past by Greg Egan and others, as to whether there is such athing in the first place as specifically Australianscience fiction, as opposed just to science fiction ingeneral, is a question too large to be settled here, but most ofthe stories in Dreaming Again that take place on Earth atleast feature Australian settings, and a few of the stories—mostlythe fantasies—seem to draw on Australian myths and legends.

Flying in the face of what I said aboveabout American trade publishers, The Del Rey Book of ScienceFiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a cross-genreanthology featuring SF, fantasy, horror, and slipstream stories.Oddly, for a book that puts “Science Fiction” first in its title,especially from a company like Del Rey, which is known for itssolid, core, rather traditional science fiction, the smallestelement in the mix is science fiction, with horror, fantasy, andslipstream making up the bulk of its contents—and what sciencefiction there is is soft near-future SF, with Datlow herselfannouncing in the Introduction (rather proudly, I thought) that“you won’t find off-planet stories or hard science fiction” in theanthology. The best story in the book, by a good margin, is one ofthose near-future SF stories, in fact, Maureen McHugh’s “SpecialEconomics,” although there is also good SF work by Paul McAuley andKim Newman, Pat Cadigan, and Jason Stoddard. More unclassifiablebut still readable stuff, often on the borderline betweenslipstream and SF/fantasy, is provided by Elizabeth Bear, JefferyFord, Laird Barron, Christopher Rowe, Lucy Sussex, and others.

Extraordinary Engines (Solaris),edited by Nick Gevers, is a steampunk anthology, many of whosestories double almost by definition as Alternate History. The beststories here are by Ian R. MacLeod and Kage Baker, but there’s alsofirst-rate work by Jay Lake, Robert Reed, Jeff VanderMeer, JamesLovegrove, Keith Brooke, and others.

One of last year’s strongest anthologies,appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere was disLOCATIONS,edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press.This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three originalanthologies: Subterfuge, Celebrations, andMyth-Understandings. None of these is quite as strong asdisLOCATIONS, but all contain good stories of varioustypes, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these isSubterfuge, which, probably not coincidentally,considering my tastes, contains the highest percentage of sciencefiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF andfantasy). Best stories here are by Neal Asher and John Meaney, butthere are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack,Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are byTanith Lee and Dave Hutchinson. The best story inCelebrations, an anthology commemorating the fiftiethanniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is aPhildickian SF piece by Alastair Reynold, but there’s good work,both SF and fantasy, by Stephen Baxter, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, KenMacLeod, Dave Hutchinson, Brian Stableford, Liz Williams, and MollyBrown. The weakest of the three anthologies isMyth-Understandings, which features mostly fantasy. Beststory here is Tricia Sullivan’s, although there’s also strong workby Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, andothers.

An odd item, another British small-pressanthology, is The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, QuercusOne (Three Legged Fox Books), edited by Paul Brazier, ananthology of stories that have supposedly been previously publishedin electronic form on the members-only Quercus SF site(quercus-sf.com—although itdoesn’t seem to have been updated for several years, and may befallow). Half of the book is taken up byrather specialized Alternate History stories about alternate fatesfor the now-destroyed West Pier in Brighton, England, hence thetitle, and the rest of the book is devoted to more generalized SF,fantasy, and slipstream stories. Best thing here is a high-techliteralization of Egyptian mythology by Liz Williams, but there arealso good stories by Geoff Ryman, Lavie Tidhar, Andy W. Robertson,Chris Butler, and others.

Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty andStrangeness, edited by Mike Allen, is a mixed sciencefiction/fantasy anthology, with a few slipstream stories thrown infor good measure. In an exceptional year for original anthologies,it doesn’t come in at the top of the heap, but there is a lot ofgood stuff here, and the cover, an effective use of an oldpainting, is lovely. The best story in Clockwork Phoenix,by a considerable margin, is an SF story by Vandana Singh, butthere is also good work by John C. Wright, Cat Sparks, C. S.MacCath, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are by TanithLee, Marie Brennan, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Ekaterina Sedia, andothers.

Another good anthology, full of solid,enjoyable work, is Seeds of Change (Prime), edited by JohnJoseph Adams. Best story here by a substantial margin, and one ofthe best of the year, is Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words,” but there isalso good work to be had here from Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, NnediOkorafor-Mbachu, Mark Budz, Tobias Buckell, and others

2012 (Twelfth Planet Press), editedby Alisa Krasnestein and Ben Payne, delivers a smaller proportionof substantial work than Seeds of Change, although thereare still worthwhile stories here by Sean McMullen and SimonBrown.

There are probably no award-winners inTranshuman (DAW), edited by Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F.Weisskopf (title makes the subject matter self-explanatory,surely), but there is a respectable amount of good solid core SF.Best story here is by David D. Levine, but there are also goodstories by Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, Sarah A. Hoyt, WenSpenser, and others.

Future Americas (DAW), edited byMartin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, and Front Lines(DAW), edited by Denise Little, are a bit more substantial thanthese DAW anthologies usually are. Best story in FutureAmericas is by Brendan DuBois; best story in FrontLines is by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Dimension NextDoor (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes,was worthwhile but minor.

Another pleasant surprise last year was thesudden appearance of two pretty good ultra-small press anthologiesfrom Hadley Rille Books, edited by Eric T. Reynolds, VisualJourneys and Ruins Extraterrestrial. Reynolds broughtout another three anthologies this year, Return to Luna(Hadley Rille Books), Desolate Places (Hadley RilleBooks—co-edited with Adam Nakama), and Barren Worlds(Hadley Rille Books—co-edited with Adam Nakama), but unfortunatelythey were much weaker, with some decent work but nothingparticularly memorable. Return to Luna was marginally thestrongest of the three.

Noted without comment is GalacticEmpires (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by GardnerDozois.

The best fantasy anthology was probablyFast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade), edited by Ann andJeff VanderMeer. Playful and a lot of fun, it’s an anthology oforiginal pirate story/fantasy crosses, pirate/slipstream crosses,and even a few pirate/SF crosses. If some authors here give theimpression that the whole of their research into pirates consistedof watching a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean, othersclearly know their stuff, and, for the mostpart, even the stories that are the sketchiest on the pirate stuffmake up for it with the colorful fantasy element. There’sfirst-rate work here by Garth Nix, Elizabeth Bear and SarahMonette, Kage Baker, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Naomi Novik, HowardWaldrop, Carrie Vaughn, and others. Also excellent isSubterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (Subterranean), editedby William Schafer. The stories here are fairly representative ofthe kind of stories usually to be found on theSubterranean Web site, although none of them actuallyappeared there, being published for the first time here instead:fantasy, dark fantasy sometimes shading into horror, a smatteringof science fiction, all extremely well crafted. The best storieshere are by William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, Patrick Rothfuss,Kage Baker, although there’s also good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan,Joe R. Landsdale, Mike Carey, and others. Also good was A Bookof Wizards (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Marvin Kaye,which featured novellas by Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Patricia A.McKillip, and others. There was also another installment in along-running fantasy anthology series, Swords and SorceressXXIII (Norilana), edited by Elizabeth Waters.

Pleasant but minor fantasy anthologiesincluded Warrior Wisewoman (Norilana), edited by RobyJames; Enchantment Place (DAW), edited by Denise Little;Fellowship Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenbergand Kerrie Hughes; Mystery Date (DAW), edited by DeniseLittle; Something Magic This Way Comes (DAW), edited byMartin H. Greenberg and Sarah Hoyt; Witch High (DAW),edited by Denise Little; Catopolis (DAW), edited by MartinH. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack; My Big Fat SupernaturalHoneymoon (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by P. N. Elrod;Magic in the Mirrorstone: Tales of Fantasy (Mirrorstone),edited by Steve Berman; and Lace and Blade (Lada), afantasy/romance cross edited by Deborah J. Ross.

It’s worth mentioning here that some of theanthologies mentioned above as SF anthologies, such asClockwork Phoenix, Dreaming Again, and the Whatesanthologies, had substantial amounts of good fantasy in them aswell, sometimes nearly half the contents.

The line between fantasy and slipstream isoften hard to draw rigorously, but anthologies that seemed to memore slipstream than fantasy (in spite of some of their titles)included: Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy(Five Senses Press), edited by Ekaterina Sedia; SubtleEdens (Elastic Press), edited by Allen Ashley;Alembical (Paper Golem), edited by Lawrence M. Shoen andArthur Dorrance; Spicy Slipstream Stories (Lethe Press),edited by Nick Mamatas and Jay Lake; A Field Guide to SurrealBiology (Two Cranes Press), edited by Janet Chui and JasonErik Lundberg; and Tesseracts Twelve (Edge), edited byClaude Lalumiere.

Shared world anthologies, many of themsuperhero oriented, included Wild Cards: Inside Straight(Tor), edited by George R.R. Martin; Wild Cards: BustedFlush (Tor), edited by George R.R. Martin; Hellboy: OddestJobs (Dark Horse), edited by Christopher Golden; and Ringof Fire II (Baen), edited by Eric Flint.

As usual, novice work by beginning writers,some of whom may later turn out to be important talents, wasfeatured in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future,Volume XXIV (Galaxy), the last in this long-running series tobe edited by the late Algis Budrys. No word yet on whether theseries will continue under different editor-ship.

There were lots of stories about robots thisyear, and lots of stories about zombies, including adedicated zombie anthology. There were at least three retropunkSpace Pirate stories, and two stories about really nasty mermaidswho kill people. There were two or threepastiches of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and twogritty retellings of Hansel and Gretel. Stories appeared that wereobviously inspired by Second Life, as well as by MMORPGslike Worlds of Warcraft, and by anime. There were severalstories that tried to put new twists on the idea of people’s mindsbeing uploaded into a computer, including several where survivorswere not happy about having to continue to deal with naggingrelatives who were now “virtual.” In addition to the dedicatedAlternate History magazine, Paradox, there was also lotsof Alternate History stuff published elsewhere, most of it leaningtoward steampunk—there were three Alternate History anthologies,Sideways in Crime, Extraordinary Engines, andSteampunk, but almost every market featured steampunkishAlternate History stories this year, including a few AlternateHistory/Mystery crosses in Interzone, Postscripts, andelsewhere that could just as easily have fit into Sideways inCrime.

Science fiction continued to pop up inunexpected places, both in print and online, from the Australianscience magazine Cosmos to the MIT TechnologyReview. Even The New Yorker published two storiesthis year that could be considered to be genuine SF, an unheard ofoccurrence that made some observers glance at Hell to see if it hadfrozen over (there have been stories by SF writers in the TheNew Yorker before, but they’ve usually beenslipstream/surrealist/literary pieces of the sort that is moretypical of the magazine).

(Finding individual pricings for all of theitems from small-presses mentioned in the Summation has become tootime-intensive, and since several of the same small presses publishanthologies, novels, and short story collections, it seemssilly to repeat addresses for them in section after section.Therefore, I’m going to attempt to list here, in one place, all theaddresses for small presses that have books mentioned here or therein the Summation, whether from the anthologies section, the novelsection, or the short-story-collection section, and, where known,their Web site addresses. That should make it easy enough for thereader to look up the individual price of any book mentioned thatisn’t from a regular trade-publisher; such books are less likely tobe found in your average bookstore or even in a chain superstore,and so will probably have to be mail-ordered. Many publishers seemto sell only online, through their Web sites, and some will onlyaccept payment through PayPal. Many books, even from some of thesmaller presses, are also available through Amazon.com.)

Addresses: PSPublishing, Grosvener House, 1 New Road, Hornsea,West Yorkshire, HU18 1PG, England, UK, pspublishing.co.uk; GoldenGryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802,goldengryphon.com;NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framinghan, MA01701-0809, nesfa.org;Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI48519, subterraneanpress.com;Solaris, via solarisbooks.com; Old EarthBooks, P.O. Box 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211-0951, oldearthbooks.com; TachyonPress, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107,tachyonpublications.com;Night Shade Books, 1470 NW Saltzman Road,Portland, OR 97229, night-shadebooks.com;Five Star Books, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive,Waterville, ME 04901, galegroup.com/fivestar;NewCon Press, via newconpress.com; Small BeerPress, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060, smallbeerpress.com; LocusPress, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, locusmag.com; CrescentBooks, Mercat Press Ltd., 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh,Scotland EH3 7AL, crescentfiction.com;Wildside Press/Cosmos Books/Borgo Press, P.O. Box301, Holicong, PA 18928-0301, or go to wildsidepress.com for pricing andordering; Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc.and Tesseract Books, Ltd., P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada, edgewebsite.com; AqueductPress, P.O. Box 95787, Seattle, WA 98145-2787, aqueductpress.com; PhobosBooks, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, phobosweb.com; FairwoodPress, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092, fairwoodpress.com; BenBellaBooks, 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 508, Dallas, TX75206, benbellabooks.com;Darkside Press, 13320 27th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA98125, darksidepress.com;Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Rd., Suite 35, RoyalOak, MI 48073-1239, haffnerpress.com; NorthAtlantic Press, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701;Prime, P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH 44735, primebooks.net; FairwoodPress, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Auburn, WA 98092, fairwoodpress.com;MonkeyBrain Books, 11204 Crossland Drive, Austin,TX 78726, monkeybrainbooks.com;Wesleyan University Press, University Press of NewEngland, Order Dept., 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon NH 03766-1405,wesleyan.edu/wespress; Agog! Press, P.O. Box U302,University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia,uow.ed.au/~rhood/agogpress; Wheatland Press, viawheatlandpress.com;MirrorDanse Books, P.O. Box 3542, Parramatta NSW2124, tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse; Arsenal PulpPress, 103–1014 Homer Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B2W9, arsenalpress.com;DreamHaven Books, 912 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis,MN 55408, dreamhavenbooks.com; ElderSigns Press/Dimensions Books, order through dimensionsbooks.com;Chaosium, via chaosium.com; SpyreBooks, P.O. Box 3005, Radford, VA 24143; SCIFI,Inc., P.O. Box 8442, Van Nuys, CA 91409-8442;Omnidawn Publishing, order through omnidawn.com; CSFG,Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, csfg.org.au/publishing/anthologies/the_outcast;Hadley Rille Books, via hadleyrillebooks.com;ISFiC Press, 707 Sapling Lane, Deerfield, IL60015-3969, or isficpress.com;Suddenly Press, via suddenlypress@yahoo.com;Sandstone Press, P.O. Box 5725, One High St.,Dingwall, Ross-shire, IV15 9WJ UK, sandstonepress.com; TropismPress, via tropismpress.com; SF PoetryAssociation/Dark Regions Press, sfpoetry.com, checks to Helena Bell, SFPATrea sur er, 1225 West Freeman St., Apt. 12, Carbondale, IL 62401;DH Press, via diamond bookdistributors.com;Kurodahan Press, via Web site kurodahan.com; RambleHouse, 443 Gladstone Blvd., Shreveport, LA 71104, ramble house.com;Interstitial Arts Foundation, via interstitialarts.org; RawDog Screaming, via rawdogscreaming.com; ThreeLegged Fox Books, 98 Hythe Road, Brighton, BN1 6JS, UK;Norilana Books, via norilana.com; coeur delion, via coeurdelion.com.au;PARSECink, via parsecink.org; Robert J. SawyerBooks, via sfwriter.com/rjsbooks.htm;Rackstraw Press, via rackstrawpress;Candlewick, via candlewick.com;Zubaan, via zubaan-books.com; UtterTower, via threeleggedfox.co.uk;Spilt Milk Press, via electricvelocipede.com;Paper Golem, via papergolem.com; GalaxyPress, via galaxypress.com; TwelfthPlanet Press, via twelfthplanetpress.com;Five Senses Press, via sensefive.com; ElasticPress, via elasticpress.com; LethePress, via lethepressbooks.com; TwoCranes Press, via twocranespress.com;Wordcraft of Oregon, via word-craftoforegon.com;Down East, via downeast.com.

If I’ve missed some, as is quite possible,try Googling the name of the publisher.

Once again, there were a lot of novelspublished in the SF/fantasy genres during the year, and althoughthe recession-driven recent upheavals in the publishing world mayreduce their numbers somewhat next year, they’re certainly notgoing to vanish from the bookstore shelves in 2009.

According to thenewsmagazine Locus, there were a record 2,843 books “ofinterest to the SF field” published in 2008, up 4 percent from2,723 titles in 2007. (This total doesn’t count media tie-innovels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, mostPrint-On-Demand books, or novels offered as downloads on theInternet—all of which would swell the total by hundreds ifcounted.) Paranormal romances continued to boom, both in number oftitles published (there were 328 paranormal romances this year, upfrom 290 last year) and in robustness of sales; several of thebestselling writers in America—Stephanie Meyers, Charline Harris,Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher—are paranormal romance writers.Original books were down slightly, by 2 percent, to 1,671 from lastyear’s total of 1,710. Reprint books were up by 16 percent, to1,172 compared to last year’s total of 1,013. The number of new SFnovels was down by a statistically insignificant amount, one book,to 249 from last year’s total of 250. The number of new fantasynovels was down by 5 percent to 439 from last year’s total of 460.Horror dropped by 12 percent, to 175 titles, as opposed to lastyear’s total of 198, still up from 2002’s total of 112.

Busy with all the reading I have to do atshorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself thisyear, so, as usual, I’ll limit myself to mentioning that novelsthat received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2008 include:

Saturn’s Children (Ace), by CharlesStross; The Dragons of Babel (Tor), by Michael Swanwick;The Quiet War (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; The LastTheorem (Del Rey), by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl;Lavinia (Harcourt), by Ursula K. Le Guin; LittleBrother (Tor), by Cory Doctorow; Matter (Orbit), byIain M. Banks; Going Under (Pyr), by Jusina Robson;Navigator (Ace), by Stephen Baxter; Weaver (Ace),by Stephen Baxter; The Dragon’s Nine Sons (Solaris), byChris Roberson; Incandescence (Gollancz), by Greg Egan;House of the Stag (Tor), by Kage Baker; The NightSessions (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Marsbound (Ace), byJoe Haldeman; A Dance with Dragons (Bantam), by GeorgeR.R. Martin; Hunter’s Run (HarperCollins), by George R.R.Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham; City at the End ofTime (Del Rey), by Greg Bear; The Prefect (Ace), byAlastair Reynolds; House of Suns (Gollancz), by AlastairReynolds; Zoe’s Tale (Tor), by John Scalzi; TheGraveyard Book (HarperCollins), by Neil Gaiman; Victory ofEagles (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; Pirate Sun (Tor),by Karl Schroeder; Judge (Eos), by Karen Traviss;Earth Ascendant (Ace), by Sean Williams;Firstborn (Del Rey), by Arthur C. Clarke and StephenBaxter; An Evil Guest (Tor), by Gene Wolfe; RollingThunder (Ace), by John Varley; The Ghost in Love(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Carroll;Anathem (Morrow), by Neal Stephenson; Flora’sDare (Harcourt), by Ysabeau S. Wilce; Misspent Youth(Del Rey), by Peter F. Hamilton; Ender in Exile (Tor), byOrson Scott Card; Keeper of Dreams (Tor), by Orson ScottCard; Null-A Continuum (Tor), by John C. Wright;Valor’s Trial (DAW), by Tanya Huff; Shadowbridge(Del Rey), by Gregory Frost; Lord Tophet (Del Rey), byGregory Frost; An Autumn War (Tor), by Daniel Abraham;The Martian General’s Daughter (Pyr), by Theodore Judson;The Steel Remains (Gollancz), by Richard Morgan; TheValley-Westside War (Tor), by Harry Turtledove; SlantedJack (Baen), by Mark L. Van Name; The Hidden World(Tor), by Paul Park; Stalking the Vampire (Pyr), by MikeResnick; Victory Conditions (Del Rey), by Elizabeth Moon;The Edge of Reason (Tor), by Melinda Snodgrass; BoneSong (Bantam Spectra), by John Meaney; The Philosopher’sApprentice (Morrow), by James Morrow; The TimeEngine. (Tor), by Sean McMullen; The Engine’s Child(Del Rey), by Holly Phillips; January Dancer (Tor), by Michael F. Flynn; VeryHard Choices (Baen), by Spider Robinson; The Stars DownUnder (Tor), by Sandra McDonald; Renegade’s Magic(Eos), by Robin Hobb; Escapement (Tor), by Jay Lake;Before They Are Hanged (Pyr), by Joe Abercrombie; Halfa Crown (Tor), by Jo Walton; Juggler of Worlds (Tor),by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner; Nation(HarperCollins), by Terry Pratchett; and Duma Key(Scribner), by Stephen King.

Small presses once published mostlycollections and anthologies, but these days they’re active in thenovel market as well. Novels issued by small presses this year,some of them among the year’s best, included: Or Else My LadyKeeps the Key (Subterranean), by Kage Baker; ImpliedSpaces (Night Shade), by Walter Jon Williams; The BirdShaman (Bascom Hill), by Judy Moffett; The Word of God:or, Holy Writ Rewritten (Tachyon), by Thomas M. Disch; TheSong of Time (PS Publishing), by Ian R. MacLeod;Hespira (Night Shade), by Matthew Hughes; Dogs(Tachyon), by Nancy Kress; The King’s Last Song (SmallBeer Press), by Geoff Ryman; The Shadow Pavilion (NightShade), by Liz Williams; Leaving Fortusa: A Novel in TenEpisodes (Norilana), by John Grant; Shadow of theScorpion (Night Shade), by Neal Asher; and The Madness ofFlowers (Night Shade), by Jay Lake.

The year’s first novels included:Singularity’s Ring (Tor), by Paul Melko;Pandemonium (Del Rey), by Daryl Gregory; BlackShips (Orbit), by Jo Graham; The Magicians and Mrs.Quent (Bantam Spectra), by Galen Beckett; The NinthCircle (Gollancz), by Alex Bell; A Darkness Forged inFire (Pocket), by Chris Evans; Apricot Brandy (Juno),by Lynn Cesar; Seekers of the Chalice (Tor), by BrianCullen; Thunderer (Bantam), by Felix Gilman;Havemercy (Bantam), by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett;Whitechapel Gods (Roc), by S. M. Peters; MadKestrel (Tor), by Misty Massey; Gordath Wood (Ace),by Sarath Patrice; Superpowers (Three Rivers Press), byDavid J. Schwartz; Immortal (Delta), by Traci C. Slatton;The Mirrored Heavens (Bantam), by David J. Williams; andParaworld Zero (Blue World), by Matthew Peterson. TheMelko and the Gregory probably attracted the most attention ofthese.

Associational novels by people connectedwith the science fiction and fantasy fields included: Wit’sEnd (Putnam), by Karen Joy Fowler; White Sands, RedMenace (Viking), by Ellen Klages; Black and White(Subterranean), by Lewis Shiner; The Somnambulist(Morrow), by Jonathan Barnes; Tigerheart (Del Rey), byPeter David; and The Shadow Year (Morrow), by JeffreyFord. Ventures into the genre by well-known mainstream authors,included: The Island of Eternal Love (Riverhead), by DainaChaviano; The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf), by John Updike;and The Enchantress of Florence (Random House), by SalmanRushdie.

Individual novellas published as stand-alonechapbooks were not as strong this year as they’ve been in otheryears, but there were still some good ones out. Subterraneanpublished: Kilimanjaro: A Fable of Utopia, by MikeResnick; Muse of Fire, by Dan Simmons;Stonefather, by Orson Scott Card; and ConversationHearts, by John Crowley. PS Publishing brought out: TheEconomy of Light, by Jack Dann; Gunpowder, by JoeHill; Planet of Mystery, by Terry Bisson;Template, by Matthew Hughes; Mystery Hill, byAlex Irvine; The City in These Pages, by John Grant;The Situation, by Jeff VanderMeer; Revolvo, bySteve Erikson; Val/Orson, by Marly Youmans; The Book,the Writer, the Reader, by Zoran Zivkovic; TheBridge, by Zoran Zivkovic; Living with the Dead, byDarrell Schweitzer; and Camp Desolation and An Eschatalogy ofSalt, by Uncle River. Aqueduct Press producedDistances, by Vandana Singh. WyrmPublishing produced Memorare, by Gene Wolfe. Norilanapublished The Duke in His Castle, by Vera Nazarian. Knopfpublished Once Upon a Time in the North, by PhilipPullman. And Monkeybrain published Escape from Hell!, byHall Duncan.

Novel omnibuses this year included: TheJack Vance Reader (Subterranean), by Jack Vance; FiveNovels of the 1960s and 1970s (Library of America), by PhilipK. Dick; Books of the South: Tales of the Black Corridor(Tor), by Glen Cook; and The Chronicles of Master Li and NumberOne Ox (Subterranean), as well as many omnibus novel volumespublished by the Science Fiction Book Club. (Omnibuses that containboth short stories and novels can be found listed in theshort story section.)

As has been true for the last couple ofyears, after the long drought of the nineties, when almost nothingout-of-print got back into it, this is the best time in decades topick up reissued editions of formerly long-out-of-print novels, noteven counting Print On Demand books from places such as WildsidePress, the reprints issued by The Science Fiction Book Club, andthe availability of out-of-print books as electronic downloads fromInternet sources such as Fictionwise. Here are some out-of-printtitles that came back into print this year, althoughproducing a definitive list of reissued novels is probablydifficult to impossible:

Tor reissued: Pebble in the Sky, byIsasc Asimov; The Dragon in the Sea, by Frank Herbert;Starfish, by Peter Watts; The Risen Empire andThe Killing of Worlds, both by Scott Westerfeld; and theassociational novel In Milton Lumky Territory, by PhilipK. Dick. Orb reissued: Make Room! Make Room!, by HarryHarrison; Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear; and Inferno, byJerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Baen reissued: Farmer in theSky and Between Planets, both by Robert A. Heinlein.Orbit reissued: The Reality Dysfunction, by Peter F.Hamilton; and Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, andUse of Weapons, all by Iain Banks. Cosmos reissued:Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper; The Black StarPasses, by John W. Campbell, Jr.; and Planet of theDamned, by Harry Harrison. Tachyon reissued: The Stress ofHer Regard, by Tim Powers. Paizo/Planet Stories reissued:The Ginjer Star, by Leigh Brackett; and Lord of theSpiders, by Michael Moorco*ck. Overlook reissued: TitusAlone, by Mervyn Peake. Golden Gryphon Press reissued: ThePhysiognomy, The Beyond, and Memoranda, all byJeffrey Ford.

Lots of science fiction and even hardscience fiction here, as usual, although there are also fantasynovels and odd-genre-mixing hybrids on the list as well. Althoughwe often hear the lament that science fiction has been driven offthe bookstore shelves, it just isn’t true. There’s still lots of itout there to be found.

This was another good year for short storycollections. The year’s best collections included: The Best ofMichael Swanwick (Subterranean), by Michael Swanwick; Eastof the Sun and West of Fort Smith (Norilana Books), by WilliamSanders; Dark Integers and Other Stories (Subterranean),by Greg Egan; Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard WaldropReader (Old Earth Books), by Howard Waldrop; Pump Six andOther Stories (Night Shade), by Paolo Bacigalupi; TheWreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon), byJames Patrick Kelly; The Best of Lucius Shepard(Subterranean), by Lucius Shepard; Nano Comes to CliffordFalls (Golden Gryphon), by Nancy Kress; The Baum Plan forFinancial Independence and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), by John Kessel;and Pretty Monsters (Viking), by Kelly Link. Other goodcollections included: Harsh Oases (PS Publishing), by PaulDi Fillipo; The Ant King and Other Stories (Small BeerPress), by Benjamin Rosenbaum; Strange Roads (Dreamhaven),by Peter S. Beagle; The Garble and Other Stories (Tor UK),by Neal Asher; Starlady and Fast-Friend (Subterranean), byGeorge R.R. Martin; Space Magic: Stories by David D.Levine (Wheatland Press), by David D. Levine; The Wall ofAmerica (Tachyon), by Thomas M. Disch; The Autopsy andOther Tales, by Michael Shea; Binding Energy (ElasticPress), by Daniel Marcus; Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction ofJack McDevitt (Subterranean), by Jack McDevitt; Temptingthe Gods (Wildside Press), by Tanith Lee; The Adventuresof Langdon St. Ives (Subterranean), by James Blaylock;Crazy Love (Wordcraft of Oregon), by Leslie What;Walking to the Moon (Wildside), by Sean McMullen;Billy’s Book (PS Publishing), by Terry Bisson; LongWalks, Last Flights, and Other Journeys (Fairwood Press), byKen Scholes; What the Mouse Found and Other Stories(Subterranean), by Charles de Lint; and Just After Sunset(Scribner), by Stephen King.

As has become common, there were also a lotof good retrospective collections by older writers (as specialtypress hardcovers, many of them may be too expensive for casualreaders, although there are a few less-expensive paperbacks here aswell), including: The Van Rijn Method (Baen—an omnibus ofstories about Falstaffian space adventurer Nicolas Van Rijn, plusthe well-known novel The Man Who Counts), by PoulAnderson; David Falkayn: Star Trader—The TechnicCivilization Saga (Baen—another ominibus of stories and anovel), by Poul Anderson; Works of Art (NESFA Press), byJames Bliss; Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances(Haffner Press), by Leigh Brackett; Northwest of Earth: TheComplete Northwest Smith (Prize/Planet Stories), by LeighBrackett; H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (Barnes &Noble), by H. P. Lovecraft; The Worlds of Jack Williamson: ACentennial Tribute 1908–2008 (Haffner Press), Jack Williamson,edited by Stephen Haffner; Gateway to Paradise: The CollectedStories of Jack Williamson, Volume Six (Haffner Press), JackWilliamson; The Metal Giants and Others: The Collected EdmondHamilton, Volume One (Haffner Press), by Edmond Hamilton;The Star Stealers: The Complete Adventures of the InterstellarPatrol: The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Two (HaffnerPress), by Edmond Hamilton; The Collected Captain Future:Volume One: Captain Future and the Space Emperor (HaffnerPress), by Edmond Hamilton; Venus on the Half-Shell andOthers (Subterranean—an omnibus of stories and the eponymousnovel, written as by “Kilgore Trout”), by Philip José Farmer;Laugh Lines (Tor—an omnibus of six stories and twonovels), by Ben Bova; Button, Button: Uncanny Stories(Tor), by Richard Matheson; Boy in Darkness and OtherStories (Peter Owen), by Mervyn Peake; Elric: The Stealerof Souls (Del Rey—an omnibus of stories and novels), byMichael Moorco*ck; Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn (Del Rey—anomnibus of stories and novels), by Michael Moorco*ck; ViewpointsCritical: Selected Stories (Tor), by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.;Skeleton in the Closet and Other Stories (Subterranean),by Robert Bloch; Summer Morning, Summer Night (PSPublishing), by Ray Bradbury; Skeletons (Subterranean), byRay Bradbury; and Project Moon-base and Others(Subterranean—an omnibus of screenplays and never-filmedadaptations of early Heinlein stories), by Robert A. Heinlein.

The most expensive of these is Bradbury’sSummer Morning, Summer Night, which sells for $750.00 (!);one wonders if they’re flying out the door at that price, althoughthere probably are a few collectors willing to pay thatmuch. The bulk of the retrospectivecollections sell somewhere in the $40 range. The paperbacks fromBaen and Tor are much less expensive.

As usual, small press publishers wereimportant—indispensable, really—to the short story collectionmarket, since, with only a few occasional exceptions, the big tradepublishers largely don’t do them anymore. Without them, collectionswould barely exist. As you can see, Subterranean (with the morecontemporary stuff) and Haffner Press (with the retrospectivestuff) had especially active years. Among trade publishers, Baenseems the most active, particularly in publishing omnibus volumesthat contain both short stories and novels.

A wide variety of “electronic collections,”often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here,are also available for downloading online, at sites such asFictionwise and ElectricStory, and The ScienceFiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.

The reprint anthology market seemed a bit weakeroverall this year than last year. As usual, the bumper crop of“Best of the Year” anthologies were probably your best bet for yourmoney in this market. It’s sometimes hard to tell how many of thesethere are, as they come and go so quickly, but the field seems tohave been winnowed a bit from last year’s record total of fourteen.Science fiction was covered by three and a half anthologies, downfrom six anthologies last year: the one you are reading at themoment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St.Martin’s, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its twenty-sixthannual collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Eos), editedby David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its Thirteenthannual volume; Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007(Prime), edited by Richard Horton; and The Best Science Fictionand Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (Night Shade Books),edited by Jonathan Strahan (this is where the “half a book” comesin, although I doubt that it’ll divide that neatly in practice).Jonathan Strahan’s Best Short Novels series has died, ashas Richard Horton’s announced but never appearing SpaceOpera Best series. The annual Nebula Awards anthology usuallycovers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts,functioning as a de facto “Best of the Year” anthology, althoughit’s not usually counted among them (and thanks to SFWA’s bizarre“rolling eligibility” practice, the stories in it are often storiesthat everybody else saw a year and sometimes even two yearsbefore); this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase2008 (Roc), edited by Ben Bova. There were two and a half Bestof the Year anthologies covering horror: the latest edition in theBritish series, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror(Robinson, Caroll & Graff), edited by Stephen Jones, up to itsNineteenth volume; Horror: The Best of the Year 2008Edition (Prime), edited by John Gregory Betancourt and SeanWallace; and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering bothhorror and fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror(St. Martin’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link andGavin Grant, this year up to its Twenty-First Annual Collection.Fantasy was covered by four anthologies (if you add two halvestogether): by the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant half of theDatlow/Link & Grant anthology; by Year’s Best Fantasy8 (Tachyon) edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer;by Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (Prime), edited byRich Horton; by Best American Fantasy (Prime), edited byAnn and Jeff VanderMeer; and by the fantasy half of The BestScience Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (NightShade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan.There was also The 2008 Rhysling Anthology (ScienceFiction Poetry Association/Prime), edited by Drew Morse, whichcompiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year. If youcount the Nebula anthology and the Rhysling anthology, there wereeleven “Best of the Year” anthology series of one sort or anotheron offer this year, down from last year’s fourteen.

At the beginning of 2009 it was announcedthat the long-running Datlow/Link & Grant Year’s BestFantasy and Horror series had died. Ellen Datlow has announcedthat she will begin doing a different “Best Horror” series forNight Shade Books, exact title as yet undetermined, to be publishedsometime in 2009 and covering stories published in 2008. So nextyear we’ll be half a book down in this category, losing the KellyLink and Gavin Grant half of the former Year’s Best Fantasy andHorror book.

The last few years have featured bigretrospective anthologies, but there were none of them this yearand, as a result, fewer stand-alone reprint anthologies ofexceptional merit. The best of the reprint anthologies was probablySteampunk (Tachyon), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer,which featured good reprint stories by Michael Chabon, JamesBlaylock, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian R. MacLeod, Neal Stephenson, MaryGentle, Ted Chiang, and others. Also good was Wastelands:Stories of the Apocalypse (Night Shades Books), edited by JohnJoseph Adams, which featured stories about the you-know-what andits aftermath by George R.R. Martin, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe,Octavia Butler, and others. If you like zombies (which were sofrequently encountered this year, even in the science fictionanthologies, that they seemed to be taking over the field), you’llwant The Living Dead (Night Shade Books), edited by JohnJoseph Adams and packed full of zombie stories by Dan Simmons,Michael Swanwick, George R.R. Martin, Stephen King, Andy Duncan,and others. Another attempt at subgenre definition andcanon-forming was The New Weird (Tachyon), edited by Annand Jeff VanderMeer, a mixed anthology of reprint stories (the bestby M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, and Jeff Ford), some originalmaterial, critical essays, and transcribed blog entries which hadsome good stuff in it but which ultimately left me just as confusedas to what exactly The New Weird consisted of when I went out asI’d been when I went in. Good work was also to be found in TheBest of Jim Baen’s Universe II (Baen), edited by Eric Flintand Mike Resnick, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic MedicineShow, Volume 2 (Tor), edited by Edmund R. Schubert and OrsonScott Card, volumes of stories from two of the most prominentezines.

Otherworldly Maine (Down East),edited by Noreen Doyle, was a mixed reprint (mostly) and originalanthology which featured strong reprints by Edgar Pangborn, StephenKing, Elizabeth Hand, and others, as well as good original work byGregory Feeley, Lee Allred, and Jessica Reisman. Just exactly whatqualifies one to be a Savage Humanist is a bit unclear, in spite ofa long analytical introduction, but The Savage Humanists(Robert J. Sawyer Books), edited by Fiona Kelleghan, features goodreprint stories by Tim Sullivan, Greg Frost, John Kessel, JamesPatrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others. When DiplomacyFails (Isfic Press), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, isa reprint anthology of military SF by Harry Turtledove, Gene Wolfe,David Weber, Tanya Huff, Resnick and Flint themselves, and others.The Best of Abyss & Apex: Volume One (Hadley RilleBooks), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, is drawn from the Web site ofthe same name. And a perspective on SF fromanother part of the world is given by The Black Mirror andOther Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany andAustria (Wesleyan University Press), edited by FranzRottensteiner.

Reprint fantasy anthologies includedTales Before Narnia (Del Rey), edited by Douglas A.Anderson; and The Dragon Done It (Baen), edited by EricFlint and Mike Resnick, a mixed reprint (mostly) and originalanthology of fantasy/mystery crosses. There was a big retrospectivereprint horror anthology, Poe’s Children: The New Horror(Doubleday), edited by Peter Straub, featuring reprints byElizabeth Hand, Stephen King, Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Straubhimself, and others.

Reissued anthologies of merit this yearincluded The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2B(Tor), edited by Ben Bova; The Mammoth Book of ExtremeFantasy (Running Press), edited by Mike Ashley; A ScienceFiction Omnibus (Penguin Modern Classics), edited by Brian W.Aldiss; and The Reel Stuff (DAW), edited by Brian Thomsenand Martin H. Greenberg.

There were almost no SF-and-fantasy-orientedreference books this year, with the closest approach probably beingLexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, SecondEdition (Sirius Fiction), by Michael Andre-Driussi. There werea number of critical books about SF and fantasy, including Mapsand Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along theBorderlands (McSweeneys), by Michael Chabon; Rhetorics ofFantasy (Wesleyan University Press), by Farah Mendlesohn;The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 2 (Aqueduct), by Eileen Gunnand L. Timmel Duchamp; and What Is It We Do When We ReadScience Fiction? (Beccon), by Paul Kincaid. There wereautobiographies by or biographies/critical studies of specificauthors, including Miracles of Life: Shanghai toShepperton (HarperCollinsUK), by J. G. Ballad; H. BeamPiper: A Biography (McFarland), by John F. Carr; AnUnofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett(Greenwood), by Andrew M. Butler; Anthony Boucher: ABiobibliography (McFarland), by Jeffrey Marks; TheVorkosigan Companion (Baen), by Lillian Stewart Carl andMartin H. Greenberg (a guide to the work of Lois McMaster Bujold);Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (St.Martin’s Press), by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R.Bissette; Basil Cooper: A Life in Books (PS Publishing),edited by Stephen Jones; The Richard Matheson Companion(Gauntlet Press), by Stanley Wiater and Matthew R. Bradley; and aposthumously published collection of articles on diverse subjectsby Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect (Putnam).

The year also saw the publication of twobooks of a kind that I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of:collections of articles previously published electronically onlinein blogs and in other Internet sources. They were Your HateMail Is Being Graded: Ten Years of Whatever (SubterraneanPress), by John Scalzi, Whatever being the very popularblog that Scalzi won a best fanwriter Hugo for his work in thisyear, and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,Copyright, and the Future of the Future (Tachyon), by CoryDoctorow.

It was another weak year in the art bookfield, after several fairly strong ones earlier in the decade. Onceagain your best buy was probably Spectrum 15: The Best inContemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fennerand Arnie Fenner, the latest edition in a Best of the Year–likeretrospective of the year in fantastic art. Also worthwhile were The Other Visions:Ralph McQuarrie (Titan Books), by Ralph McQuarrie; ThePaintings of J. Allen St. John: Grand Master of Fantasy(Vanguard), by Stephen A. Korshak; As I See: The FantasticWorld of Boris Artzybashoff (Titan Books), by BorisArtzybashoff; Virgil Finlay: Future/Past (UnderwoodBooks), by Virgil Finlay; A Lovecraft Retrospective: ArtistsInspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Centipede Press), edited by JeradWalter; Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess(Dark Horse Books), by Charles Vess; and Telling Stories: TheComic Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), edited byEdward Mason.

There were a fair number of genre-relatednonfiction books of interest this year. The most central of thesewas probably Year Million: Science at the Far Edge ofKnowledge (Atlas), a collection of futurist articles, many byscientists or SF writers, edited by Damien Broderick. The edges ofthe possible in science, as we understand them today, is alsoexplored in Physics of the Impossible (Doubleday), byphysicist Michio Kaku, and in 13 Things That Don’t MakeSense (Doubleday), by Michael Brooks. Fans may also beinterested in an examination of superhero science,Superheroes! (I. B. Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by morebitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (followingseveral similar volumes last year), You Call This theFuture? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, andAndrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioningLife in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by DavidAttenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas aboutreally alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worsethan look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldbloodedcreatures described herein dwell.

There were lots of genre movies that did bigbox-office business this year, although few critical darlings orfilms thought of as “serious” movies.

According to the Box Office Mojo site(boxofficemojo.com), nineout of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of onesort or another (counting in stuff like Indiana Jones and theKingdom of the Crystal Skull as fantasy/SF—Hell, it’s even gotaliens!—rather than “action/adventure,” and including animatedmovies but excluding the new James Bond movie, Quantum ofSolace, which is probably stretching the definition of “genremovie” too far); thirteen out of twenty of the year’s top-earningmovies were genre films; and at least twenty-seven out of thehundred top-earning movies (depending on where you draw thelines—and for reasons of my own personal prejudicies, I’m notcounting horror/slasher/thriller movies)—were genre films.

In fact, it’s clear that genre films of onesort or another have come to dominate Hollywood at the box-office,producing most of the year’s really big money-makers, and that’sbeen true for a while now. During the last decade, each year’stop-grossing film has been a genre film of some sort: superheromovies (three of this year’s top-earners are superhero movies, and2007’s biggest earner was Spider Man 3, a lesson that Idoubt has been lost on the movie-makers), or fantasy/adventuressuch as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or TheReturn of the King, or SF/adventures such Star Wars: ThePhantom Menace, or even fantasy movies ostensibly for childrensuch as Shrek 2 or The Grinch Who StoleChristmas. You have to go all the way back to 1998 before youfind a non-genre film as the year’s top-earner, Saving PrivateRyan.

Of course, the kickeris, what do you mean by “genre film”?

Of the year’s top ten highest-grossingfilms, of the nine that can be considered to be genre movies of onesort or another, three are superhero movies (The Dark Knight,Iron Man, and Hanco*ck, with The Incredible Hulkfinishing in fourteenth place and Hellboy II: The GoldenArmy finishing in thirty-eighth place); one isfantasy/adventure (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the CrystalSkull, with the comparable The Chronicles of Narnia:Prince Caspian finishing in thirteenth place); four areanimated films (Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2Africa, and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, withsuperhero—sort of—animated feature Bolt finishing innineteenth place, and The Tale of Despereaux, released atthe end of the year, perhaps destined to climb the charts); and oneis a glossy vampire/romance movie (Twilight). (For thoseinterested, other than Quantum of Solace, the twohighest-earning non-genre films were Sex and the City and MammaMia!, which finished in eleventh and twelfth placesrespectively—unless you want to make the somewhat arch argumentthat they’re fantasy films as well.)

Like last year, there were almost no actualscience fiction films on the list at all, even in the tophundred, let alone the top ten. The closest approach to a real SFfilm out this year was the animated film Wall-E, which didmake the top ten list, in fifth place, in fact, and although itsscience was a bit shaky (you can’t make an ecosystem out of oneplant and one co*ckroach), for the most part it treated its sciencefiction tropes with respect and intelligence, and what satiricneedling there was at the genre was affectionate. In fact, with itshumans who have become so pampered and constantly waited on bymachines that they’ve lost the ability to walk, it may be thepurest expression of 1950s’ Galaxy-era social satire ofthe Pohl/Kornbluth variety ever put before the general public.Wall-E itself got treated with an amazing amount ofrespect for an animated film ostensibly for children, asRatatouille and The Incredibles had been beforeit, and is probably the one out of the top-grossing genre filmsthat came the closest to being treated as a “serious movie.” Atleast some animated films are big money-makers these days and areclearly not being watched only by children anymore (if they everwere only watched solely by children in the first place, which Idoubt).

The year’s other Great White Hope as far asSF movies were concerned was a glossy $80-million remake of the oldfifties’ movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which, inspite of a good opening weekend, made it only to thirty-ninthplace. Some fans protested that the movie wasn’t a faithful remakeof the original film—but, of course, the original filmitself wasn’t faithful to the ostensible source material,Harry Bates’s Astounding story “Welcome to the Master,” sothat’s nothing new. Major plot-logic holes were the realproblem here. Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animatedcontinuation or at least elaboration of the Star Warssaga, looking at stuff that happened between the cracks of themajor movies, may have gone to the Star Wars well once toooften, or perhaps people were thrown by the change in medium fromlive-action to animated, since it only finished seventy-ninth onthe list of year’s top-earners. A remake of the classic Jules Vernenovel Journey to the Center of the Earth was not even aswatchable as the fifties’ version, in spite of having betterspecial effects and the considerable advantage of not having PatBoone in it. The only other science fiction film I could find(unless you count Space Chimps, which I don’t intend to)was Jumper, adapted with very little fidelity from a YA SFnovel by Steven Gould, although it could withexcellent justification be considered to be a superhero movieinstead; it was supposed to be the start of a franchise, but sinceit earned $80 million but cost $85 million to make, that seemsdubious—although the foreign revenues were better.

That was it for science fiction films, asfar as I can tell. When I say “genre film” from here on down, we’retalking about fantasy films or superhero movies.

The top-grossing film of the year, by a hugemargin, was The Dark Knight, which also got treated with agood deal of respect by critics for a superhero movie, mostlybecause of the late Heath Ledger’s riveting turn as the Joker,bringing a scary intensity to the part that surpassed and probablysupplanted even Jack Nicholson’s famous interpretation of the role.You have to wonder if Christian Bale, who played Batman, and whosemovie this ostensibly was, was bemused at the fact that nearlyevery review of the film spent all of its time raving about HeathLedger and often didn’t mention Bale at all. (Still, at leasthe gets to collect his residuals, which may be someconsolation.) Ledger’s performance will be long remembered by fansand would alone push The Dark Knight into the realm ofclassic superhero movies such as Spiderman and TheX-Men, although the rest of the movie is pretty good too, darkand creepily elegant, but overlong and perhaps a bit muddled. Thesly and frequently amusing Iron Man finished in secondplace in the top-grossing list, mostly because of a snarkyperformance by Robert Downey, Jr. The Big Green Angry Guy didbetter in his second outing as a film star, The IncredibleHulk, easily outdrawing Ang Lee’s muddled and overly complexprevious Hulk movie, although not doing as well as his fellowsuperhero and Avengers teammate Iron Man (you could seethem setting up the forthcoming Avengers movie throughoutboth Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, by theway). Although it seemed like two movies jammed together, neitherof which the filmmakers really knew what to do with, Will Smithdelivered enough of a star turn as a degenerate drunken superheroto put Hanco*ck into fourth place. Wanted wasabout a guild of super-powered assassins.

(These totals are somewhat misleading, sincethey’re only talking about domestic grosses. If you add theforeign grosses to the domestic grosses, you have toshuffle the rankings around some. Indiana Jones (combinedtotal: $786,001,411), Hanco*ck ($624,386,476), and evenKung Fu Panda, which only finished sixth on thedomestic-gross list (combined total: $631,465,619), coming in aheadof Iron Man ($581,804,570). Nothing can come close tounseating The Dark Knight, though, whose combined total is$997,012,892! And top-selling computer games such as Worldof Warcraft and other MMORPGs make even more money than themovies do. Little wonder that print science fiction, and even printfantasy, have come to be seen by many as poor cousins, with evenprint bestsellers not coming even remotely close to earning what SFand fantasy do in other media.)

Sequels or new installments of establishedfranchises often did only so-so this year. The Dark Knightand Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didthe best of any of them at the box-office (although even fans ofthe franchise seemed only lukewarm about the new Indiana Jones;Harrison Ford looked tired throughout, and I suspect that theproducers would like to carry on the franchise using Shia LaBeoufinstead, but he doesn’t show enough charisma here to convince me hecould carry the franchise by himself). Below this point, things getdicier. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian placed arespectable thirteenth on the top-ten domesticearners list, but although it earned $141,621,490, it cost$200 million to make, which might have been bad news for thecontinuation of this franchise, except that foreign revenues bumpedits combined total to $419,646,109, which might have saved it, asforeign revenues have saved a couple of movies in the last fewyears. It was a similar scenario with The Mummy: Tomb of theDragon Emperor, which cost $145 million to make but earnedonly $102,277,510, until foreign revenues boosted its combinedtotal to $290,903,563; of course, this franchise has been goingsteadily downhill since the original movie. Things were even morestark with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, in atthirty-eighth place, which cost $85 million to make but earned backonly $75,791,785, and even with foreign revenues, could make it“only” to $158,954,785, which might have made it a failure inHollywood terms. Too bad, as the original movie, Hellboy,was one of the most successful films of its year, both commerciallyand artistically; but the sequel, although it featured absolutelystunning visual effects, lacked the headlong narrative momentum andmuch of the rough humor of the original movie, and often got boggeddown in confusing and perhaps unneccesary subplots. Star Wars:The Clone Wars could only make it to seventy-ninth place, inspite of the Star Wars name. And the “long-awaited” sequelto the last X-Files movie, this one called TheX-Files: I Want To Believe, fell out of the top hundred listaltogether, only managing to make it to one hundred and seventhplace, not enough people wanted to believe that this was somethingthey really wanted to see, and this may well have been acase of waiting too long, until after interest and enthusiasm hadcooled, before trying to do another sequel.

Cloverfield, a postmodern versionof an old-fashioned giant-monster-trampling-through-a-city movie,widely referred to as “the Blair Witch Project meetsGodzilla,” hauled in a combined total of $170,764,026 butcost only $25 million to make, rock-bottom cheap by today’sstandards, so I’m sure that its producers are happy with itsperformance. There actually were some scary moments in this, if theconstantly swirling and somersaulting camera didn’t make you fleethe theater with nausea or vertigo first. The execrable 10,000B.C. is what you get when you’re sitting around in a pitchmeeting and somebody says, “Hey! Egyptians meet mammoths!” The evenmore dreadful Speed Racer was another misguided attempt tomake a live-action version of a campy old animated TV show, notunlike last year’s Underdog. The Happening wasanother fundamentally incoherent and not-particularly-scary M.Night Shyamalan movie, and Igor and the propheticallytitled The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything were the year’sanimated movies that didn’t make lots of money. There wasa YA steampunk movie called City of Ember released late inthe year that I haven’t seen, and a film version of another wellknown Young Adult fantasy novel, The SpiderwickChronicles, which ditto.

The Magic Realist movie The Curious Caseof Benjamin Button, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald,came out right at the end of the year, to mixed but generallypretty good reviews; you’re on your own there, since I haven’t seenit either.

The best hope for a science fiction moviefor next year seems to be the upcoming Star Trekprequel—which is kind of sad. Not surprisingly, there are a numberof superhero movies in store for lucky audiences as well.

Coming up on the more-distant horizon are aversion of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, directed byRidley Scott, and a version of John Wyndham’s Chocky,directed by Steven Spielberg. On the evenmore distant horizon is a version of Isaac Asimov’sFoundation, directed by Roland Emmerich.

The Writers Guild of America strike swept over thetelevision industry early in 2008, leaving downed trees andwreckage in its wake, and probably contributing to the demise of afew already shaky shows—but even though some of the biggest genreshows on television, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who,Torchwood, were forced by the strike to go “on hiatus” until2009 or even (in the case of Dr. Who) until 2010 (as weresome lesser shows such as Kyle XY and Fear Itself)—ratingsare down across the board this season and some of last season’sbiggest hits are wobbling in the ratings and in danger of beingcanceled—there’s still plenty of genre shows to watch, with a largenumber of hopeful replacements waiting in the wings, and yetanother row of potential shows looming beyond that. In fact, it’sclear that genre shows—mostly fantasy shows, although there arestill actually a few science fiction shows left here and there—havecome to dominate the TV airways to almost as great a degree as theydominate the Hollywood top-grossing films list, althoughcop/forensic/detective shows are still holding their own (lastyear’s wave of hybrid fantasy/SF cop shows largely failed toestablish itself, with only Saving Grace surviving).

Shows like Moonlight, New Amsterdam,Cavemen, The Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Flash Gordon, andUFO Hunters were swept out to sea by the writers’ strike,and show no sign of coming back; many of them, like thejaw-droppingly awful Caveman, probably wouldn’t have madeit even without the strike.

Jericho, a watchableafter-the-atomic war show that had been given a new lease on lifeafter a massive fan write-in campaign, was granted a partial newseason, still failed to attract audiences large enough for thenetwork, and finally died for good, although the usual rumors thatit might be picked up by another network swirled around for a whilebefore fading away. One of last season’s big hits, Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has struggled in the ratings thisyear, having become even more grim and apocalyptic than it wasbefore, and may be in jeopardy; I’d like to see it survive becauseit’s one of the few new SF shows in a sea of fantasy shows.Eureka, another SF show, seems to be doing well, althoughit’s pleasantly quirky and even comic instead of dark, intense, andviolent, which may explain why.

They also seem to be darkeningHeroes, which made it through the strike intact, but whichhas been taking substantial hits in the ratings recently, which maybe cause and effect (in economic hard times, audiences don’tparticularly want grim and depressing, getting enough of that ineveryday life; the show has also become recomplicated enough thatit’s almost impossible to keep track of the plot, which probablydoesn’t help), and which has sunk low enough quickly enough that itmay actually be in danger of being canceled, in spite of itsMega-Hit status last year; toward the end of the year, there was abig shake-up at Heroes, with several writers and producersfired, and we’ll see if that helps, although it may be too late.Smallville lost villain Lex Luthor when Michael Rosenbaum,the actor who has played him so vividly since the beginning of theseries, decided to move on, a major blow that may eventually sinkthe show, although they’re gamely carrying on at the moment.Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis, bothon hiatus at the moment, have announced that their upcoming seasonswill be their last, although heartbroken fans can consolethemselves with the fact that each show will be followed by “two-hour special events” set in the sameuniverse, and later by new spinoff shows, Caprica forBattlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe for StargateAtlantis.

Perhaps the best of the new SF series is BBCAmerica’s Primeval, which has been accurately referred toas “Torchwood meets Jurassic Park,” with aTorchwood-like team of investigators dealing with theincursions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts who for someunknown reason are popping through “anomalies” and wreaking havocin the modern world. It’s a cleverly written show, intense andfast-moving, and the producers have been smart enough to vary thePrehistoric-Monster-of-the-Week formula with the occasional monsterfrom the future, as well as bringing in time-travelparadoxes and Alternate Reality scenarios. Dr. Who andTorchwood are on hiatus (although, unlike most shows thatgo “on hiatus,” they’re expected to actually return), but BBCAmerica also has a Young Adult Dr. Who spinoff, The Sarah JaneAdventures, ongoing as well.

If last year was The Year of the Cop,this year seems to be the year of the updatedX-Files clones, with new shows Fringe,Eleventh Hour, and, to some degree, Sanctuary(with a splash of Hellboy thrown in), all repeatingvariations of The X-Files formula, some pretty blatantly.It’s too early to say if any of these shows are going to establishthemselves, but although Fringe has the biggest gunsbehind it and has gotten the most praise and press coverage todate, Eleventh Hour seems to actually be edging it in theratings. A hangover from the Year of the Cop is Life onMars, about a present-day cop who’s mysteriously thrown backin time to 1973; this is actually the American version of thepopular British limited series of the same name, and,unsurprisingly, I’ve already heard connoisseurs saying that theBritish version was better, but the American version may yetestablish itself.

The campy old seventies’ show KnightRider, about a crime-fighting boy and his talking robot car,has come roaring back from oblivion revved up and ready for action,although the question that haunted the old series haunts this oneas well: With everything the car can do, what do you needthe boy for? (The answer: for the love scenes and theoccasional fistfight.) So far, its ratings have been unspectacular,and it may be sent back to the garage. Star Wars: The CloneWars is the series TV version of this year’s feature film withthe same name, and so far seems to be doing better than the moviedid.

My Own Worst Enemy andChuck danced on the borderline between SF and the spythriller, with My Own Worst Enemy having perhaps the mostSF-like element, technology that can infuse two very differentpersonalities into the same person’s body, which they time-shareunwittingly until the barriers between them start to break down; inspite of an interesting premise, though, My Own WorstEnemy has already been canceled, while Chuck seems tobe doing fairly well.

Pushing Daisies was still much tooself-consciously and self-congratulatory “weird” for my taste, andperhaps wore out its welcome with the rest of its audience as well,since ratings plummeted from last season, and its was canceled latein the year. Perhaps inspired by the initial success of PushingDaisies last season are two new supernatural shows morelighthearted in tone than the rather grim Medium andThe Ghost Whisperer, a Thorne Smith–like show calledValentine, about the problems faced by lingeringmythological figures in dealing with the modern world, kind of likeThe Beverley Hillbillies with Greek gods instead ofhillbillies, and The Ex-List, about a woman inspired by aprophecy to seek her One True Love. Valentine is doingvery poorly in the ratings, and its future is doubtful, and TheEx-List has already been canceled.Legend of the Seeker, a rare high fantasy show, somethingnot often seen on TV, is based on a Terry Goodkind novel,Wizard’s First Rule; and HBO is giving us a small-townSouthern take on vampires, True Blood, based on thebestselling “Sookie Stack house” novels of Charlaine Harris. Istill can’t deal with the returning Saving Grace (coptalks with her own personal angel) either, and I never warmed tothe lawyer-has-vivid-hallucinations-or-visions-perhaps-sent-by-Godshow Eli Stone—which was canceled by the end of the yearanyway. I don’t pay much attention to the long-established“supernatural” shows such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer,and Supernatural, but they all seem to be doing fine, asare a number of “reality” shows based on investigating weirdphenomena, such as Ghost Hunters, Monster Quest, andParanormal State. The newer supernatural showReaper is wobbling in the ratings a bit but still has achance to survive.

Most of the buzz about upcoming shows seemsto be being generated by Josh Whedon’s Dollhouse. Thecreator of former mega-hit Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,Whedon gained a huge cult following for Buffy and forother shows such as Angel and Firefly, and a lotof people have high hopes that Whedon’s return to series TV, whosecast is peppered with Buffy and Angel alumni,will produce something similarly good. The premise doesn’t lookpromising to me, and its “downloading fake personalities andmemories into spies to make them more effective agents” gimmick hasalready been preempted to some extent by My Own WorseEnemy, but Whedon is an extremely talented writer who has spununlikely thread into gold before, so it’ll be interesting to see ifhe can do it again with Dollhouse.

A TV mini-series version of TerryPratchett’s The Colour of Magic was released in the UnitedKingdom, but if it’s gotten on to the airwaves in the U.S. yet, Iso far haven’t been able to find it.

Coming up from AMC is a new version of theold British show The Prisoner, another cult favorite,which Prisoner fans seem to be either dreading or lookingforward to with anticipation, depending on who you talk to, andmini-series versions of George R.R. Martin’s A Game ofThrones from HBO and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Marsfrom AMC. Let’s hope that they can do a better job with them thanthe Sci Fi Channel did with Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard ofEarthsea.

The 66th World Science Fiction Convention,Denvention 3, was held in Denver, Colorado, from August 6 to August11, 2008. The 2008 Hugo Awards, presented at Denvention 3, were:Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by MichaelChabon; Best Novella, All Seated on the Ground, by ConnieWillis; Best Novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’sGate, by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Tideline,” byElizabeth Bear; Best Related Book, Brave New Words: The OxfordDictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher; BestProfessional Editor, Long Form, David G. Hartwell; BestProfessional Editor, Short Form, Gordon Van Gelder; BestProfessional Artist, Stephan Martiniere; Best Dramatic Pre sen tation (short form), Doctor Who, “Blink”; Best DramaticPresentation (long form), Stardust; Best Semi-prozine,Locus, edited by Kristen Gong-Wong and Lisa Groen Trombi;Best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, JohnScalzi; Best Fan Artist, Brad Foster; plus the John W. CampbellAward for Best New Writer to Mary Robinette Kowal.

The 2007 Nebula Awards, presented at abanquet at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Texas, onApril 26, 2008, were: Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’sUnion, by Michael Chabon; Best Novella,Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress; Best Novelette, TheMerchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang; Best ShortStory, “Always,” by Karen Joy Fowler; Best Script, Pan’sLabyrinth, by Guillermo Del Toro; the Andre Norton Award toHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling;plus the Author Emeritus Award to Ardath Mayhar and the GrandMaster Award to Michael Moorco*ck.

The 2008 World Fantasy Awards, presented ata banquet in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on November 2, 2008, duringthe Seventeenth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel,Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay; Best Novella,Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand; Best Short Fiction, “Singingof Mount Abora,” by Theodore Goss; Best Collection, TinyDeaths, by Robert Shearman; Best Anthology, Inferno,edited by Ellen Datlow; Best Artist, Edward Miller; Special Award(Professional), to Peter Crowther, for PS Publishing; Special Award(Non-Professional), to Midori Syner and Terri Windling for theEndicott Studios Web site; plus the Life Achievement Award toPatricia McKillip and Leo and Diane Dillon.

The 2008 Bram Stoker Awards, presented bythe Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the DowntownRadisson Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 29, 2008, were:Best Novel, The Missing, by Sarah Langan; Best FirstNovel, Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill; Best Long Fiction,“Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best ShortFiction, “The Gentle Brush of Wings,” by David Niall Wilson; BestCollection, Proverbs For Monsters, by Michael A. Anzen and5 Stories, by Peter Straub (tie); Best Anthology, FiveStrokes to Midnight, edited by Gary Braunbeck and HankSchwaeble; Non-Fiction, The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of theWeird, Strange & Downright Bizarre, by Jonathan Maberryand David F. Kramer; Best Poetry Collection, Being Full ofLight, Insubstantial, by Linda Addison, and Vectors: AWeek in the Death of a Planet, by Charlee Jacob and Marge B.Simon (tie); plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to John Carpenter andRobert Weinberg.

The 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award waswon by In War Times, by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

The 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awardfor Best Short Story was won by “Finisterra,” by David Moles, and“Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear (tie).

The 2007 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award wentto Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison.

The 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award was won byBlack Man, by Richard Morgan.

The 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Awardwas won by The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall.

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award wentto Stanley G. Weinbaum.

Death hit the SF and fantasy fields hard again thisyear. Dead in 2008 and early 2009 were:

Sir ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 91,one of the founding giants of modern science fiction, the lastsurviving member of the genre’s Big Three, which consisted ofClarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, multiple winner ofthe Hugo and Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master Award, asfamous for predicting the development of telecommunicationssatellites as for being involved in the production of StanleyKubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, author of such classicsas Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama,The Fountains of Paradise, The Sands of Mars, A Fall ofMoondust, and The City and the Stars; ALGISBUDRYS, 77, author, critic, and editor, author of theclassic novel Rogue Moon, which many thought should havewon the Hugo in its year, plus Who?, Michaelmas, HardLanding, and distinguished short stories such as “A Scrapingat the Bones,” “Be Merry,” “Nobody Bothers Gus,” “The Master of theHounds,” and “The Silent Eyes of Time”; THOMAS M.DISCH, 68, writer and poet, one of the most acclaimed andrespected of the New Wave authors who shook up SF in themid-sixties, also considered to be a major American poet, author ofthe brilliant 334, Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, alarge body of biting and sardonic short fiction, and the acerbiccritical study of SF The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of,which, ironically, finally won him a Hugo; JANETKAGAN, 63, author of the wildly popular “Mama Jason”stories, which were collected in Mirabile, as well as thenovel Hellspark, and one of the most popular StarTrek novels ever, Uhura’s Song, winner of the HugoAward for “The Nutcracker Coup”; a close personal friend;BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY, 71, British SF author whosehighly inventive novels such as The Fall of Chronopolis, ThePillars of Eternity, and The Zap Gun were a stronginfluence on the British New Space Opera of the eighties andnineties; MICHAEL CRICHTON, 66, bestselling authorof such technothrillers as The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park,Timeline, Rising Sun, Eaters of the Dead, and others, most ofwhich were made into successful movies (Eaters of the Deadwas filmed, pretty faithfully, as The Thirteenth Warrior);JOHN UPDIKE, 76, major American novelist, poet,and critic, author of literary novels such as Rabbit, Runand Rabbit Redux, perhaps best known to genre audiences asthe author of fantasy novels The Witches of Eastwick(which was filmed under the same name) and The Widows ofEastwick; ROBERT ASPRIN, 62, creator andeditor of the popular Thieves’ World series of braidedanthologies and novels by many hands, as well as an author of comicnovels such as Another Fine Myth, Phule’s Company, andtheir sequels; DONALD WESTLAKE, 75, who wrote someSF, including the novel Anarchaos under the name “CurtClark,” but who was much better known as a multiple EdgarAward–winning mystery writer, author of two of the most importantmystery series of our day, the Parker novels, under the name“Richard Stark,” and the John Dortmunder novels under his own name,plus many stand-alone novels; GEORGE W. PROCTOR,61, author of sixteen SF and fantasy novels and two co-editedanthologies; JAMES KILLUS, 58, SF writer,atmospheric scientist, and technical writer, author of SF novelsBook of Shadows and SunSmoke; RICHARD K.LYON, 75, SF novelist and research chemist; HUGHCOOK, 52, SF/fantasy writer, author of the ten-volumeChronicles of an Age of Darkness series; LEOFRANKOWSKI, 65, SF writer, author of The Cross TimeEngineer and its many sequels; STEPHENMARLOWE, 79, prominent mystery novelist who alsooccasionally wrote SF as Milton Lesser; JODYSCOTT, 85, author of Passing for Human and I,Vampire; MICHAEL de LARRABEITI, 73, author ofthe surprisingly dark and violent YA Borribles trilogy;BRIAN THOMSEN, 49, SF editor, writer, andanthologist; EDWARD D. HOCK, 77, well-knownmystery writer who also dabbled in fantasy and SF; GARYGYGAX, 69, sometimes called the father of fantasy gaming,co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons andDragons, author also of fantasy novels The AnnubisMurders and The Samarkand Solution; DAVIDFOSTER WALLACE, 46, novelist and essayist, author ofInfinite Jest; JOHNNY BYRNE, 73, veteranBritish SF/writer; LINO ALDANI, 83, Italian SF writer; WERNER KURT GIESA, 53,German SF, fantasy, and horror writer; JOSE B.ADOLPH, 74, Peruvian author, playwright, and scholar;LYUBEN DILOV, 80, Bulgarian SF writer;HUGO CORREA, 81, Chilean SF author; GEORGEC. CHESBRO, 68, SF writer; SYDNEY C.LONG, 63, SF writer and Clarion Workshop graduate;EDD CARTIER, 94, veteran pulp illustrator,especially known for his many black-and-white illustrations for thepioneering fantasy magazine Unknown Worlds; JOHNBERKEY, 76, prominent SF cover artist; DAVESTEVENS, 52, cartoonist and comics writer, creator of thecharacter The Rocketeer; ROBERT LEGAULT,58, SF reader, professional copy editor, and former managing editorof Tor Books; a friend; FORREST J. ACKERMAN, 92,longtime fan and enthusiastic booster of horror films, also anagent and occasional writer/anthologist, found er of thelong-running Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, coinerof the term “sci-fi,” which is loathed in some genre circles,although mostly ubiquitous these days outside them; famed fantasyartist and illustrator JAMES CAWTHORN, 79;MURIEL R. BECKER, 83, SF scholar; JOSEPHPEVNEY, 97, film and TV director who directed many of theepisodes of the original Star Trek series; BEBEBARRON, 82, who, with husband Lewis Barron, created thestriking electronic score for Forbidden Planet;ALEXANDER COURAGE, 85, composer of the theme musicfor the original Star Trek series; ROBERT H.JUSTMAN, 82, supervising producer of Star Trek: TheNext Generation; CHARLTON HESTON, 84, filmactor best known to genre audiences for his roles in Planet ofthe Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green; PAULNEWMAN, 83, one of the most famous film actors of thetwentieth century, whose genre connections were actually somewhatweak, limited to voiceover work in the animated film Cars,the unsuccessful SF movie Quintet, and The Hud-suckerProxy, which had some fantastic elements; ROYSCHEIDER, 76, film actor best known to genre audiences forhis roles in 2010 and Jaws; JAMESWHIT-MORE, 87, probably best known to genre audiences forhis roles in Them! and Planet of the Apes;JOHN PHILLIP LAW, 71, film actor best known togenre audiences for his role as the blind “angel” inBarbarella; HEATH LEDGER, 28, film actorno doubt to be recalled for a long time by genre audiences for hisrole as the Joker in The Dark Knight; film actorVAN JOHNSON, 92, best known to genre audiences forroles in Brigadoon and The Purple Rose of Cairo; comicfilm actor HARVEY KORMAN, 81, who had some minorgenre connections for voiceover work on TV’s TheFlintstones, but who is known by practically everybody for hisrole as Hedly Lamarr in Blazing Saddles; MAJELBARRETT RODDENBERRY, 76, wife of Star Trekcreator Gene Roddenberry, and also an actress in her own right,appearing in several Star Trek episodes and providing thevoice of the Enterprise’s computer; PATRICKMcGOOHAN, 80, acclaimed stage, television, and film actor,best known to genre audiences for his role as Number Six in TV’sThe Prisoner; RICARDO MONTALBAN, 88, filmand television actor, best known to genre audiences for his rolesin TV’s Fantasy Island and as the villianous Khan in themovie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; BOBMAY, 69, who played the Robot on TV’s Lost inSpace; JACK SPEER, 88, longtime SF fan whowrote the first history of fandom, Up to Now, plus theFancyclopedia; HARRY TURNER, 88,acclaimed British fan artist; KEN SLATER, 90,longtime SF fan who operated the UK mail-order list OperationFantast; NORMA VANCE, 81, wife of SF writer JackVance; RAYMOND J. SMITH, 77, husband of writerJoyce Carol Oates; Dr. CHRISTINE HAYco*ck, 84,widow of SF critic Sam Moskowitz; ANGELINA CANALEKONINGISOR, 84, mother of SFwriter Nancy Kress; EVA S. WILLIAMS, 92, mother ofSF writer Walter Jon Williams; BARNET EDELMAN, 77,father of SF editor and writer Scott Edelman; HAZELPEARSON, 77, mother of SF writer William Barton;CLAUDIA LIGHTFOOT, 58, mother of SF writer ChinaMiéville; MARION HOLMAN, 88, mother of SF editorand publisher Rachel Holman; and DANTON BURROUGHS,64, grandson of SF writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I can think ofno genre justification for mentioning them, but I can’t let theobituary section close without mentioning the deaths ofTONY HILLERMAN, 83, one of the great mysterywriters of the last half of the twentieth century, author of theadventures of Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, such asDance Hall of the Dead, Thief of Time, andSkinwalkers; JAMES CRUMLEY, 68, mysterywriter who in some ways was the natural heir to Raymond Chandler,author of one of the ten best mystery novels of all time, TheLast Good Kiss, as well as other hard-edged detective novelssuch as Dancing Bear and The Mexican Tree Duck;STUDS TERKEL, 96, compiler of books of interviewson topics of historic significance, such as The Good Warand Working; and Nobel Prize–winner ALEKSANDRSOLZHENITSYN, 89, probably the most famous of modernRussian writers, author of The Gulag Archipelago, The FirstCircle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,among others, and who I suspect was an influence on SF writers suchas Ursula K. Le Guin (there, a genre connection at last!).