Gardner Dozois: The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com/chat) every other Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST (Sci Fiction chats conducted by Ellen Datlow are also featured on the Sci-Fi Channel at irregular intervals, usually on Thursdays, check the site for details); regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (www.cybling.com); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (www.talkcity.com). Many Bulletin Board Services, such as Delphi, CompuServe, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate. The SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on F.net, and probably on other BBSs as well.

Nobody in this market has as yet figured out a good, steady, reliable way to make money by publishing fiction online, and until that happens, many of these sites and e-zines are going to die from lack of capital and funds (production costs may be a lot lower for “publishing” an e-zine than for publishing an old-fashioned print magazine, but at the very least you still have to have money to pay for the stories, to say nothing of money to pay your staff-and it adds up), and the online market is not going to reach its full potential, which is considerable. Maybe the Fictionwise model, selling individual stories and books in the form of downloads for your PDA, or the Oceans of the Mind model, selling subscriptions to purchase whole issues of a magazine in downloadable form at regular intervals, will prove to be commercially viable, and become the wave of the future. Or maybe not. Only time will tell.

It was at best a so-so year in the print semiprozine market. Nothing has been heard from the once-prominent fiction semiprozine Century for more than two years now, and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re ever going to hear from it again. The acclaimed and long-running Australian fiction semiprozine Eidolon died this year, and Orb, Altair, and Terra Incognita have all gone “on hiatus,” a limbo from which few magazines ever return in the semiprozine world.

The titles consolidated under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications- Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; and Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures -were all still having trouble keeping to their announced publishing schedules this year, except for Chronicle, which met it, and which seemed to have held steady in circulation as well. The other DNA magazines all registered slight drops in circulation, although no disastrous plunges, and the sell-through for most of them was high as well. An ominous note was struck, though, by a note from publisher Warren Lapine in recent renewal notices to subscribers, which warns that unless subscribers not only renew but subscribe to an additional magazine or purchase a book listed on the back of the renewal flyer, DNA will have to cut costs, including the possibility that at least two magazines will be dropped. This doesn’t sound good.

The most stable of the fiction semiprozines seem to be the long-running Canadian semiprozine On Spec and the leading British semiprozine The Third Alternative, which were among the very few magazines in the entire semipro market to meet their announced production schedules this year. The slick, large-format The Third Alternative is one of the handsomest magazines out there, semiprozine or pro, and seems to just keep getting better, publishing fiction at a fully professional level, most of which remains slipstream and horror, although they’ve been adding a bit of science fiction to the mix of late as well-good stuff by John Grant, Ian Watson, Graham Joyce, Douglas Lain, and others, appeared in The Third Alternative this year. On Spec is another handsome magazine, and also published some good stuff this year by Charles Coleman Finlay, Karen Traviss, Kate Riedel, and others. Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge managed only two issues out of a scheduled four this year, but the editors had the best of excuses: the birth of a new baby. Talebones remains a lively little magazine, steadily improving, and published good fiction this year from William Barton, James Van Pelt, James Sallis, Beverly Suarez-Beard, and others.

Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society again managed only two issues this year out of their scheduled four; I like the fact that Artemis features center-core science fiction in a marketplace where the bulk of the fiction semiprozines run mostly slipstream or horror instead, but they need to work on making their stories more vivid and powerful; much of the work here this year was rather gray, although there were interesting stories by Edward Willett and Roxanne Hutton. A magazine which couldn’t be more different from Artemis in editorial personality is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (about all they have in common is that they both only managed to get two issues out this year), which almost never publishes core science-fiction, but does publish some good slipstream stuff, including stories by Jeffrey Ford, Greg Van Eekhout, and others. The other long-running Australian semiprozine, Aurealis, was taken over by a new editor, and managed two of its scheduled four issues this year, with interesting stories by Robert N. Stephenson and Lee Battersby; it’s good to see it surviving, since the fear last year was that it would follow Eidelon into the grave. A new Australian fiction semiprozine, the oddly titled Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, launched this year, but is already reported to be in financial trouble; we’ll see if it makes it. I saw one issue of the quirky Irish semiprozine Albedo One this year and heard rumors that there was a Tales of the Unanticipated, but I never saw it.

Black Gate, the new large-format fantasy magazine, managed two fat issues out of a scheduled four. Although ostensibly a fantasy magazine, they remain very broad-church in their definition of fantasy, but the magazine did feature good stories this year, whatever you define them as, by Ellen Klages, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, Bill Johnson, Gail Sproule, and others.

I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market anymore, but the most prominent magazine there, as usual, seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance.

Your best bets in the critical magazine market, and by far the most reliably published, are the two “newszines,” Locus and Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), and David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine, perhaps the best critical magazine out there at the moment, The New York Review of Science Fiction. There have been a few changes here, at least with the newszines: Locus’s longtime and multiple Hugo-winning editor, Charles N. Brown, supposedly retired in 2002, turning the editorial reins over to Jennifer A. Hall, but since the magazine is still put together in his living room, most insiders guess that he won’t actually “retire” until they pry the magazine from his cold dead fingers. Science Fiction Chronicle was taken over by Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing Group last year, and this year, longtime editor and Hugo-winner Andy Porter left the magazine he’d founded, among swirling rumors that he’d been fired; he was replaced as News Editor by John Douglas, the title of the magazine was changed to Chronicle, and its formerly erratic publishing schedule was stabilized. One issue of Lawrence Person’s playful Nova Express was published this year, but the editor is considering turning the magazine into an online “electronic magazine” (which I suspect will eventually be the fate of most critical semiprozines). There were several issues of The Fix this year, a welcome new short-fiction review magazine brought to you by the people who put out The Third Alternative.