The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection
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contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SUMMATION: 2013
THE DISCOVERED COUNTRY • Ian R. MacLeod
THE BOOK SELLER • Lavie Tidhar
PATHWAYS • Nancy Kress
A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES • Sunny Moraine
ROCK OF AGES • Jay Lake
ROSARY AND GOLDENSTAR • Geoff Ryman
GRAY WINGS • Karl Bunker
THE BEST WE CAN • Carrie Vaughn
TRANSITIONAL FORMS • Paul J. McAuley
PRECIOUS MENTAL • Robert Reed
MARTIAN BLOOD • Allen M. Steele
ZERO FOR CONDUCT • Greg Egan
THE WAITING STARS • Aliette de Bodard
A MAP OF MERCURY • Alastair Reynolds
ONE • Nancy Kress
MURDER ON THE ALDRIN EXPRESS • Martin L. Shoemaker
BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENTS OF THE LIFE OF JULIAN PRINCE • Jake Kerr
THE PLAGUE • Ken Liu
FLEET • Sandra McDonald
THE SHE-WOLF’S HIDDEN GRIN • Michael Swanwick
BAD DAY ON BOSCOBEL • Alexander Jablokov
THE IRISH ASTRONAUT • Val Nolan
THE OTHER GUN • Neal Asher
ONLY HUMAN • Lavie Tidhar
ENTANGLED • Ian R. MacLeod
EARTH 1 • Stephen Baxter
TECHNARION • Sean McMullen
FINDERS • Melissa Scott
THE QUEEN OF NIGHT’S ARIA • Ian McDonald
HARD STARS • Brendan DuBois
THE PROMISE OF SPACE • James Patrick Kelly
QUICKEN • Damien Broderick
HONORABLE MENTIONS: 2013
PERMISSIONS
ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
COPYRIGHT
acknowledgments
The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Jonathan Strahan, Sean Wallace, Gordon Van Gelder, Andy Cox, John Joseph Adams, Ellen Datlow, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jay Lake, Sheila Williams, Trevor Quachri, John Klima, Peter Crowther, Nick Gevers, William Shaffer, Ian Whates, Paula Guran, Tony Daniel, Liza Trombi, Mike Resnick, Niall Harrison, Pat Cadigan, Peter Coleborn, Brian White, Shahid Mahud, Mecurio R. Rivera, Jerimy Colbert, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Allyson Longeuira, David Moore, Michael Smith, C. Joshua Villines, A. C. Wise, David Sweeney, Charlene Brusso, Fran Wilde, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Carl Engle-Laird, Steve Cameron, Stephen Cass, Robert Wexler, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tom Bouman, Amanda Brown, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Vandana Singh, Susan Palwick, Matthew Kressel, Paul Cornell, Mathew Bennado, Alec Nevala-Lee, Russell B. Farr, Brian White, Eric Reynolds, Ivor W. Hartman, Correio do Fantastico, Steve Dameron, Robert Mendes, Athena Andreadis, Carl Rafala, Christopher Barzak, Edwina Harvey, Roger Gray, Erin Underwood, Gabrielle Harbowy, Torie Atkinson, George Mann, Jennifer Brehl, Peter Tennant, Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, Wendy S. Delmater, Jed Hartman, Rich Horton, Mark R. Kelly, Tehani Wessely, Michael Smith, Tod McCoy, Brian White, Andrew Wilson, Robert T. Wexler, Ian R. MacLeod, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, Nancy Kress, Sunny Moraine, Geoff Ryman, Paul McAuley, Robert Reed, Sean McMullen, Carrie Vaughn, Alastair Reynolds, Ken Liu, James Patrick Kelly, Allen M. Steele, Greg Egan, Martin L. Shoemaker, Jake Kerr, Sandra McDonald, Michael Swanwick, Alexander Jablokov, Val Nolan, Neal Asher, Stephen Baxter, Melissa Scott, Ian McDonald, Brendan DuBois, Damien Broderick, Liz Gorinsky, Jeff VanderMeer, David Hartwell, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, John O’Neill, Charles Tan, Rodger Turner, Tyree Campbell, Stuart Mayne, John Kenny, Edmund Schubert, Tehani Croft, Karl Johanson, Ian Randall Strock, Nick Wood, Sally Beasley, Tony Lee, Joe Vas, John Pickrell, Ian Redman, Anne Zanoni, Kaolin Fire, Ralph Benko, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Wood, Mike Allen, Jason Sizemore, Karl Johanson, Sue Miller, David Lee Summers, Christopher M. Cevasco, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Mark Watson, Katherine Canfield, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.
Thanks are also due to the late, lamented Charles N. Brown and to all his staff, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661; $60 in the United States for a one-year subscription, twelve issues, via second class; credit card orders: [510] 339-9198) was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the summation. Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source.
summation: 2013
Some commentators have been predicting for several years now that digital books, e-books, are going to drive physical print books into extinction, and although e-books continue to gain an increasing share of the market, the driving-print-books-into-extinction thing didn’t happen in 2013—and I don’t think it is going to happen. What seems to be happening instead is that we’re reaching some kind of equilibrium, where people who buy e-books continue to buy print books as well.
A study by PEW Research Center, released at the beginning of 2014, noted that half of American adults now own either a tablet or an e-reader, and even those who don’t own either a tablet or an e-reader sometimes read e-books on their cell phones or smartphones. The percentage of adults who have read an e-book in the past year has risen to 28 percent, up from 23 percent at the end of 2012, and 14 percent of adults have listened to an audiobook.
However, the study also says: “Though e-books are rising in popularity, print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits. Most people who read e-books also read print books, and just 4 percent of readers are ‘e-book only.’ Among adults who read at least one book in the past year, just 5 percent said they read an e-book in the last year without also reading a print book.”
The PEW Research study goes on to elaborate that “87 percent of e-book readers also read a print book in the past twelve months, and 29 percent listened to an audiobook. “Eighty-four percent of audiobook listeners also read a print book in the past year, and 56 percent also read an e-book.
“A majority of print readers read only in that format, although 35 percent of print book readers also read an e-book and 17 percent listened to an audiobook.
“Overall, about half (52 percent) of readers only read a print book, 4 percent only read an e-book, and just 2 percent only listened to an audiobook. Nine percent of readers said they read books in all three formats.”
So it seems fairly obvious to me that none of these formats is going to drive the others into extinction anytime soon. For the foreseeable future, most readers will buy books both in electronic and print forms during the year, choosing one format or the other depending on the circumstances, convenience, their needs of the moment, even their whim. There are strong indications that in some cases people will buy both e-book and print versions of the same book.
Far from killing literacy, as prophets back in the ’eighties and nineties were confidently assuring us that it was going to, the Internet and e-books may actually be enhancing it.
Brick-and-mortar bookstores are not going to disappear either (although online bookselling is certainly not “a passing fad,” as some people were claiming only a decade or so back). An odd but interesting fact is that although big chain stores like Barnes & Noble have closed some of their stores, independent bookstores are springing up again in many places. Bookstore sales held moderately stable in
2013. U.S. Census Bureau figures for September show bookstore sales of $1.298 billion, up 6.3 percent from September 2012. For the year-to-date, bookstore sales were down slightly, but only by 1.6 percent, to $13.19 billion. Pretty good for an industry that was supposed to be extinct by now, according to some cyberprophets.
The biggest story in the publishing world in 2013 was certainly the merger of publishing giants Random House and Penguin to form Penguin Random House, something that was announced in 2012 but only finalized this year, at a stroke reducing the so-called “Big Six” publishing houses to the “Big Five.” Rumors of further possible mergers to come constantly swirl, so it’s entirely possible that we could end up with the “Big Four” or even the “Big Three” eventually. What effect all of this will have on the genre, and on publishing as a whole, remains to be seen. In the year’s other big news, Simon & Schuster has announced a new imprint, not yet named, that will focus on science fiction, fantasy, and horror for “YA and above”; Justin Chanda is publisher, Joe Monti is executive editor, and Navah Wolfe of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers has been promoted to full-time editor for the new line. Springer has also announced a new science fiction book line. On the downhill side, the busy genre publisher Night Shade Books went bankrupt and was purchased by Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing, who will split print publishing and digital publishing of future Night Shade Books between them; Night Shade founders Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen will work for Skyhorse and Start as consultants, under an editor to be named later. Start also purchased Salvo Press. Underland Press was purchased by Resurrection House. Hachette Book Group purchased most of the Hyperion adult backlist from Disney. David Fickling left Random House Children’s UK to found his own imprint, David Fickling Books. Longtime editor James Frenkel left Tor.
Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet year, with the other prominent news being the scramble of print publishing houses to establish digital imprints to publish e-books. Prime Books is launching a digital imprint called Masque Books. Bloomsbury Children’s launched a new digital imprint, Bloomsbury Spark. Harlequin UK announced a new digital imprint, Carina UK. Telos Publishing launched a new digital imprint, Telos Moonrise. Audiobook publisher Brilliance is branching out into print and e-books with their new Grand Harbor Press imprint.
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It was another fairly stable year in the professional print magazine market, after years of sometimes precipitous decline. Sales of electronic subscriptions to the magazines are continuing to creep up, as well as sales of individual electronic copies of each issue, and this is making a big difference to profitability. It may be that the Internet will ultimately save the genre print magazine market, as I predicted it might years ago when I first agitated for the Asimov’s Web site and Forum to be created.
Asimov’s Science Fiction had another strong year, probably the strongest of the genre print magazines, publishing excellent fiction by Ian R. MacLeod, Robert Reed, Neal Asher, Kristine Kathyrn Rusch, Karl Bunker, Lavie Tidhar, Alexander Jablokov, M. Bennardo, Carrie Vaughn, Tom Purdom, and others. As usual, their SF was considerably stronger than their fantasy, the reverse of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 7.3 percent loss in overall circulation, down to 23,192 from 2012’s 25,025. Subscriptions were 20,327, down from 21,380. Newsstand sales were down to 2,385 copies from 2012’s 3,207, plus 480 digital copies sold on average each month in 2013, up from 438 in 2012. Sell-through fell from 42 percent to 39 percent. Sheila Williams completed her ninth year as Asimov’s editor.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact published good work by Lavie Tidhar, Martin L. Shoemaker, Alec Nevala-Lee, Joe Pitkin, Sean McMullen, Linda Nagata, Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, and others. Analog registered a 2.0 percent loss in overall circulation, down to 27,248 from 2012’s 27,803. There were 23,630 subscriptions, down slightly from 2012’s 24,503 subscriptions; newsstand sales were up to 3,235 from 2012’s 2,854; digital sales were down from 446 digital copies sold on average each month in 2013 to 383 copies. Sell-through rose from 31 percent to 41 percent. Stanley Schmidt, who had been editor there for thirty-three years, retired in 2012, winning his first Hugo Award at the 2013 Worldcon. He has been replaced by Trevor Quachri. The magazine’s eighty-third anniversary was in 2013.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was almost exactly the reverse of Asimov’s—lots of good fantasy work appeared there in 2013, but relatively little strong SF. F&SF had first-class work by Geoff Ryman, Eleanor Arnason, Rachel Pollack, Brendan DuBois, Robert Reed, Susan Palwick, Alex Irvine, Andy Stewart, and others. F&SF registered a 7.2 percent drop in overall circulation from 11,510 to 10,678, slowing the previous year’s precipitous drop of 20.4 percent. Subscriptions dropped from 8,300 to 7,762. Newsstand sales dropped from 3,210 to 2,916. Sell-through fell from 39 percent to 23 percent. Figures are not available for digital subscriptions and digital copies sold, but editor and publisher Gordon Van Gelder said that they were “healthy.” Gordon Van Gelder is in his seventeenth year as editor, and thirteenth year as owner and publisher.
Interzone is technically not a “professional magazine,” by the definition of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), because of its low rates and circulation, but the literary quality of the work published there is so high that it would be ludicrous to omit it. Interzone had good work by Lavie Tidhar, Sean McMullen, Aliette de Bodard, Jim Hawkins, John Shirley, Jason Sanford, Tim Lees, Sarah Dodd, and others this year. Exact circulation figures are not available, but it is guessed to be in the 2,000 copy range. TTA Press, Interzone’s publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine Black Static, which is beyond our purview here, but has a similar level of professional quality. Interzone and Black Static changed to a smaller trim size in 2011, but maintained their slick look, switching from the old 73⁄4"-by-103⁄4" saddle-stitched semigloss color cover sixty-four-page format to a 61⁄2"-by-91⁄4" perfect-bound glossy color cover ninety-six-page format. The editors include publisher Andy Cox and Andy Hedgecock.
If you’d like to see lots of good SF and fantasy published every year, the survival of these magazines is essential, and one important way that you can help them survive is by subscribing to them. It’s never been easier to do so, something that these days can be done with just the click of a few buttons, nor has it ever before been possible to subscribe to the magazines in as many different formats, from the traditional print copy arriving by mail to downloads for your desktop or laptop available from places like Amazon (www.amazon.com), to versions you can read on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. You can also now subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult to impossible.
So in hopes of making it easier for you to subscribe, I’m going to list both the Internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com, and subscribing online might be the easiest thing to do, and there’s also a discounted rate for online subscriptions; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y., 10007–2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007–2352—$34.97 for annual subscription in the U.S., $44.97 overseas. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, N.J., 07030, annual subscription—$36.97 in the U.S., $48.97 overseas. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, 45.00 Pounds Sterling each for a twelve-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of 80.00 Pounds Sterling for both magazines for twelve issues; make checks payable to “TTA Pr
ess.”
Most of these magazines are also available in various electronic formats through the Kindle, Nook, and other handheld readers.
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The print semiprozine market continues to shrink. Many have transitioned to online all-electronic formats, although that’s not a guarantee of success either—in 2011, Zahir, Electric Velocipede, and Black Gate made the switch to only-online format; Zahir and Electric Velocipede have subsequently died, and Black Gate has stopped posting fiction on a regular basis, although it continues to refresh its nonfiction content. Australian semiprozine Aurealis has transitioned to a downloadable format. Bull Spec has announced that 2014 will be their last year of publication.
Many of the semiprozines that remain in print format struggle to bring out their scheduled issues. The Canadian On Spec, the longest-running and most reliably published of all the print fiction semiprozines, which is edited by a collective under general editor, Diane L. Walton, met their production schedule as usual, bringing out four issues in 2013. Another collective-run SF magazine with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine managed only two issues this year. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the long-running slipstream magazine edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, managed two issues in 2013, as did Shimmer, Ireland’s long-running Albedo One, Space and Time Magazine, and the small British SF magazine Jupiter. Weird Tales, under new editor Marvin Kaye, managed one issue, as did Neo-opsis. Tales of the Talisman, edited by David Lee Summers, produced three issues this year.
Little really memorable fiction appeared in any of the surviving print semiprozines this year, which were far outstripped by the online magazines (see below).
The venerable newszine Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, now in its forty-seventh year of publication, is about all that’s left of the popular print critical magazine market, following the departure of The New York Review of Science Fiction to the electronic world in mid-2012. It has long been your best bet for value in this category anyway, a multiple Hugo winner, for decades an indispensible source of news, information, and reviews. The magazine has survived the death of founder, publisher, and longtime editor Charles N. Brown and has continued strongly and successfully under the guidance of a staff of editors headed by Liza Groen Trombi, and including Kirsten Gong-Wong, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Jonathan Strahan, Francesca Myman, Heather Shaw, and many others.