Элинор Арнасон: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,951 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2012, down 4 percent from 3,071 titles in 2011, the first year of decline after five years of record numbers. Overall, new titles were down 5 percent to 2,030 from 2011’s 2,140, while reprints dropped 3 percent to 921 from 2011’s 931, cumulatively down 4 percent to 2,951 from 2011’s 3071. Hardcover sales were actually up, from 867 to 875, while the number of trade paperbacks sold saw only a slight decline, from 1,355 to 1,343; the big drop was in mass-market paperbacks, which dipped 14 percent from 849 to 733, probably because of competition with e-books, which seem to be cutting into mass-market sales more than any other category. The number of new SF novels was up 4 percent to 318 titles as opposed to 2011’s 305. The number of new fantasy novels was up by 2 percent, to 670 titles as opposed to 2011’s total of 660. Horror novels were down 10 percent, after a 9 percent drop in 2010, to 207 titles as opposed to 2011’s 229 titles. Paranormal romances were down to 314 titles as opposed to 2011’s 416 titles (although sometimes it’s almost a subjective call whether a particular novel should be pigeonholed as paranormal romance, fantasy, or horror).

Young adult novels continued to boom in SF, while declining in fantasy. YA fantasy novels made up 33 percent of the overall fantasy novel total, down from 35 percent in 2011, while YA SF novels rose from 24 percent of the overall SF novel total in 2011 to 28 percent in 2012. Most of this increase was in dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA SF novels, perhaps driven by the success of The Hunger Games novels and films.

(It’s worth noting that these totals don’t count e-books, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, or print-on-demand books—all of which would swell the overall total by hundreds if counted.)

As usual, busy with all the reading I have to do at shorter lengths, I didn’t have time to read many novels myself this year, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning that novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2012 include:

Blue Remembered Earth (Ace Hardcover), by Alastair Reynolds; 2312 (Orbit), by Kim Stanley Robinson; Intruder (DAW), by C. J. Cherryh: The Fractal Prince (Tor), by Hannu Rajaniemi; The Hydrogen Sonata (Orbit), by Iain M. Banks; Red Country (Orbit), by Joe Abercrombie; Range of Ghosts (Tor), by Elizabeth Bear; In the Mouth of the Whale (Gollancz), by Paul McAuley; Redshirts (Tor), by John Scalzi; The Drowned Cities (Little, Brown), by Paolo Bacigalupi; Be My Enemy (Pyr), by Ian McDonald; Dodger (Harper), by Terry Pratchett; Existence (Tor), by David Brin; The Long Earth (Harper), by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter; The Great Game (Angry Robot), by Lavie Tidhar; Apollo’s Outcasts (Pyr), by Allen Steele; The Apocalypse Codex (Ace), by Charles Stross; Some Kind of Fairy Tale (Doubleday), by Graham Joyce; Harmony (Solaris), by Keith Brooke; The Inexplicables (Tor), by Cherie Priest; Kitty Steals the Show (Tor), by Carrie Vaughn; The Rapture of the Nerds (Tor), Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross; Empty Space (Gollancz), by M. John Harrison; Bowl of Heaven (Tor), by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford; Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Baen), Lois McMaster Bujold; Shadows in Flight (Tor), by Orson Scott Card; Slow Apocalypse (Ace), by John Varley; Caliban’s War (Orbit), by James S.A. Corey; Sharps (Orbit), by K. J. Parker; City of Dragons (Harper Voyager), by Robin Hobb; Great North Road (Del Rey), by Peter F. Hamilton; The Fourth Wall (Orbit), by Walter Jon Williams; Ashes of Candesce (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; Whispers Under Ground (Del Rey), by Ben Aaronovitch; Queen’s Hunt (Tor), by Beth Bernobich; The King’s Blood (Orbit), by Daniel Abraham; Triggers (Ace), by Robert J. Sawyer; Forge of Darkness (Tor), by Steven Erikson; Sea Hearts (Allen & Unwin), by Margo Lanagan; Railsea (Del Rey), by China Mieville; Crucible of Gold (Del Rey), by Naomi Novik; Hide Me Among the Graves (William Morrow), by Tim Powers; The Coldest War (Tor), by Ian Tregillis; and Boneland (Fourth Estate), by Alan Garner.

For at least fifteen years now, I’ve been hearing the complaint that all the SF books have been driven off the bookstore shelves by fantasy books, but there’s still plenty of it around. On the list above, although there’s a number of fantasy titles, there are quite a few undeniably core SF titles there as well: the Robinson, the Reynolds, the McAuley, the Steele, the McDonald, the Bacigalupi, the Schroeder, the Corey, the Cherryh, the Banks, the Hamilton, and many others. Many more could be cited from the lists of small-press novels and first novels. Yes, fantasy is popular, but science fiction has not vanished yet—there’s still more good core SF out there than any one person could possibly have time to read in the course of a year.

Small presses are active in the novel market these days, where once they published mostly collections and anthologies. Novels issued by small presses this year included: The Eternal Flame: Orthogonal Book Two (Night Shade Books Books), by Greg Egan; Time and Robbery (Aqueduct Press), by Rebecca Ore; Zeuglodon (Subterranean Press), by James P. Blaylock; Black Opera (Night Shade Books), by Mary Gentle; Ison of the Isles (ChiZine), Carolyn Ives Gilman; Worldsoul (Prime Books), by Liz Williams; Everything Is Broken (Prime Books), by John Shirley; Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine), by Paul Tremblay; The Architect (PS Publishing), by Brendan Connell; Against the Light (47North), Dave Duncan; Hitchers (Night Shade Books), Will McIntosh; Bullettime (ChiZine), Nick Mamatas; The Croning (Night Shade Books), Laird Barron; and Crandolin (Chomu Press), by Anna Tambour.

The year’s first novels included: The Games (Del Rey), Ted Kosmatka; Throne of the Crescent Moon (DAW), by Saladin Ahmed; Grim (Scholastic), by Anna Waggener; Above (Arthur A. Levine Books), by Leah Bobet; Enchanted (Harcourt), by Alethea Kontis; Alif the Unseen (Grove Press), by G. Willow Wilson; Hidden Things (Harper Voyager), by Doyce Testerman; A Once Crowded Sky (Touchstone), by Tom King; The Minority Council (Orbit), by Kate Griffin; So Close to You (Harper Teen), by Rachel Carter; Blackwood (Strange Chemistry), by Gwenda Bond; Glitch (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Heather Anastasiu; Albert of Adelaide (Twelve), by Howard L. Anderson; Something Strange and Deadly (HarperTeen), by Susan Dennard; Three Parts Dead (Tor), by Max Gladstone; Through to You (Balzer + Bray), by Emily Hainsowrth; Seraphina (Random House), by Rachel Hartman; Shadows Cast by Stars (Atheneum), by Catherine Knutsson; Blood and Feathers (Solaris), by Lou Morgan; Fair Coin (Pyr), by E. C. Myers; Year Zero (Del Rey), by Rob Reid; The Man from Primrose Lane (Sarah Crichton), by James Renner; Something Red (Atria), by Douglas Nicholas; Strange Flesh (Simon & Schuster), by Michael Olson; Starters (Delacorte), by Lissa Price; and Living Proof (Tor), by Kira Peikoff. None of these novels generated an unusual amount of buzz; the most frequently reviewed were probably The Games and Throne of the Crescent Moon .