Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

The online magazine Subterranean ( http://subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, perhaps didn’t have quite as strong a year as they did last year, but still published good stuff, SF and fantasy both, by Jay Lake, K. J. Parker, Catherynne M. Valente, Robert Silverberg, Daniel Abraham, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others.

Clarkesworld Magazine ( www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), had a strong year, publishing good SF, fantasy, and slipstream stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Ken Liu, David Klecha and Tobias S. Bucknell, Cat Rambo, Jason Chapman, Nnedi Okorafor, Gord Sellar, and others. Sean Wallace, who announced that he was stepping down in 2010, is returning to join publisher and editor Neil Clarke as an editor on the magazine; apparently he has been working unofficially on Clarkesworld behind the scenes throughout 2011.

The new online magazine Lightspeed ( www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, was weaker in its sophomore year than it had been in its freshman year, although it still published worthwhile stuff by Robert Reed, David Farland, Vyler Kaftan, An Owomoyele, and Genevieve Valentine. The online magazine Fantasy , on the other hand, recently taken over by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams, had a strong year, publishing good fiction by Lavie Tidhar, James Alan Gardner, Sarah Monette, Cat Rambo, Tim Pratt, Kit Howard, Jeremiah Tolbert, Genevieve Valentine, and others. As mentioned earlier, Fantasy has now been merged with Lightspeed into one electronic magazine, called Lightspeed , that publishes both fantasy and science fiction.

I’d still like to see the long-running online magazine Strange Horizons ( www.strangehorizons.com) publish more SF and less fantasy and slipstream, but they did run good stuff by Lewis Shiner, Gavin J. Grant, Nisi Shawl, Genevieve Valentine, Charlie Jane Anders, Tracey Canfield, and others. Karen Meisner stepped down as fiction editor of Strange Horizons .

Tor.com ( www.tor.com) has established itself as one of the most eclectic genre-oriented sites on the Internet, a Web site that regularly publishes SF, fantasy, and slipstream, as well as articles, comics, graphics, blog entries, print and media reviews, and commentary. It’s become a regular stop for me, even when they don’t have new fiction posted. This year, they published too many promotional slices of upcoming novels, but also some good fiction by Michael Swanwick, Michael F. Flynn, Harry Turtledove, Catherynne M. Valente, Charlie Jane Anders, and others.

Abyss & Apex, ( www.abyssapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, featured strong work by Howard V. Hendrix, Cat Rambo, C. W. Johnson, and others.

Apex Magazine ( www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online) had good stuff by Elizabeth Bear, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and others. Catherynne M. Valente stepped down as editor of Apex Magazine after a brief tenure, and was replaced by Lynne M. Thomas.

An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies ( http://beneath-ceaseless-skies), edited by Scott H. Andrews, had worthwhile fiction by Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, Geoffrey Maloney, Siobhan Carroll, and others.

Ideomancer Speculative Fiction ( www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF, by Erica Satifka, Georgina Bruce, Alter S. Reiss, and Anatoly Belilovsky.

The flamboyantly titled Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show ( www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, seemed somewhat weak this year, although they still ran interesting stuff from Aliette de Bodard, Stephen Kotowych, Naomi Kritzer, Jeffrey Lyman, and Tony Pi.

New SF and fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction ( http://dailysciencefiction.com) devotes itself to the perhaps overly ambitious task of publishing one new SF or fantasy story every day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, most are undistinguished, but there were some good ones by Lavie Tidhar, Jay Lake, and others.

New SF e-zine M-Brane ( www.mbranesf.com) is “on hiatus,” which usually means “out of business,” but we’ll see.

Fantasy magazine Zahir ( www.zahirtales.com), which had transitioned from print to electronic in 2009, went out of business.

E-zine Redstone Science Fiction ( http://redstonesciencefiction.com), edited by a collective, published interesting stuff by Lavie Tidhar, Jeremiah Tolbert, and others.

E-zine GigaNotoSaurus ( http://giganotosaurus.org), edited by Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Katherine Sparrow, Cat Rambo, Ferrett Steinmetz, and Vylar Kaftan.

The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos ( www.cosmosmagazine.com) is not an SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine on their Web site). Fiction editor Damien Broderick stepped down this year, but was replaced by SF writer Cat Sparks. Interesting stuff by Thoraiya Dyer, Greg Mellor, and others appeared there this year.

Shadow Unit ( www.shadowunit.org) is a Web site devoted to publishing stories, often by top-level professionals such as Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull, drawn from an imaginary TV show, sort of a cross between CSI and The X-Files . It seems to be inactive at the moment, or at least nobody has posted anything there since October of last year.

The e-zine Futurismic ( http://futurismic.com) seems to no longer be publishing fiction. As far as I can tell, Escape Velocity ( www.escapevelocitymagazine.com) and Shareable Futures ( http://shareable.net/blog/shareable-futures) are defunct.

The World SF Blog ( http://worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, is a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also publishes news, links, roundtable discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.”

Weird Fiction Review ( http://weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, and most of the stories are slipstream or literary surrealism. Sites that feature those, as well as the occasional fantasy (and, even more occasionally, some SF) include Rudy Rucker’s Flurb ( www.flurb.net), Revolution SF ( www.revolutionsf.com), Coyote Wild ( www.coyotewildmag.com); Heliotrope ( www.heliotropemag.com); and the somewhat less slipstreamish Bewildering Stories ( www.bewilderingstories.com).

In addition to original work, there’s also a lot of good reprint SF and fantasy stories out there on the Internet too, usually available for free. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free, Strange Horizons , Tor.com, Fantasy , Subterranean, Abyss & Apex, and so on, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue.” Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s , Analog , and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, make previously published fiction and nonfiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from Project Gutenberg ( http://promo.net/pc/), and a large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the Baen Free Library (www.baen.com/library). Sites such as Infinity Plus ( http://www.infinityplus.co.uk) and The Infinite Matrix ( www.infinitematrix.net) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessable.