Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
From ISSUE #246, February 2009
No one is yet privy to all the information shaking the industry; all we know are fragments, puzzle pieces, and snapshots. Among these: Doubleday and Bantam are no longer publishers, and some imprints and some employees of other publishers are gone, too. Gordon Van Gelder has announced that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is now bi-monthly, not monthly. It is rumored that other magazines are for sale. Some editors are promoted, some are out of work. If any company in sf publishing met or exceeded sales expectations in the second half of 2008, we are not aware of it. No one is bailing out publishers. What everyone knows is that this is near the start, not near the end, of all the changes.
One sign of the times for us is that after Year’s Best Fantasy #8 received the most enthusiastic reception so far for a volume of YBF, sales decreased in bookstores; and in a surprising development, we got a contract to continue the book via Tor.com as their first book. Year’s Best Fantasy #9 will be primarily an electronic publication, but physical copies are planned under the Tor.com brand—Tor.com is associated with Tor Books but is not an imprint of Tor.
Another signpost is that we have gotten thus far only enthusiasm from our non-US subscribers for our PDF project, which begins with this issue.
Once again at this time of year, a snowstorm has impeded but not prevented the NYRSF work weekend. And that comes a mere three days after an ice storm that knocked over one hundred-foot high tree in our back yard and caused another to split and lean. Ah, winter.
Kathryn and I are finishing this month as usual the Year’s Best SF and the Year’s Best Fantasy, so we can make some comments on the short fiction of 2008. In our opinion, it was an especially good year for science fiction and only a decent year for short fantasy. There were a bunch of really good anthologies of original fiction in the US and UK. Australia and Canada each produced high spots (Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again and Claude Lalumière’s Tesseracts 12). What was particularly noticeable to us was that these days Peter S. Beagle is a one-person fantasy renaissance in short fiction. Other high points include Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s first collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, possibly the two most important first books our field in 2008. We should probably single out Subterranean and PS as particularly distinguished small presses this year, with Night Shade and Small Beer of equal quality to them, though with fewer titles. Three cool original anthologies from the UK you might otherwise miss are Celebrations, Myth-Understandings, and Subterfuge, all edited by Ian Whates under the Newcon imprint, and all containing interesting selections of fantasy & sf. Among the magazines, F& SF had a particularly good year, Interzone got darker, Asimov’s and Analog got smaller (fewer pages per issue by the end of the year), and Postscripts bigger, morphing into an anthology series. In the aether (online), Helix ceased publication, Subterranean switched from print to electronic, Strange Horizons persisted, Lone Star Fiction and Flurb continued and improved.
A lighter than usual travel schedule ahead: I am headed to Boskone in February and then the ICFA in March. Much of the NYRSF staff will be at one, or the other, or both as well; see you there!
—David G. Hartwell
& the Editors