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

Breathmoss - IAN R. MACLEOD

The Most Famous Little Girl in the World - NANCY KRESS

The Passenger - PAUL J. MCAULEY

The Political Officer - CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY

Lambing Season - MOLLY GLOSS

Coelacanths - ROBERT REED

Presence - MAUREEN F. MCHUGH

Halo - CHARLES STROSS

In Paradise - BRUCE STERLING

The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars - IAN MCDONALD

Stories for Men - JOHN KESSEL

To Become a Warrior - CHRIS BECKETT

The Clear Blue Seas of Luna - GREGORY BENFORD

V.A.O. - GEOFF RYMAN

Winters Are Hard - STEVEN POPKES

At the Money - RICHARD WADHOLM

Agent Provocateur - ALEXANDER IRVINE

Singleton - GREG EGAN

Slow Life - MICHAEL SWANWICK

A Flock of Birds - JAMES VAN PELT

The Potter of Bones - ELEANOR ARNASON

The Whisper of Disks - JOHN MEANY

The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing - KAGE BAKER

The Millennium Party - WALTER WILLIAMS

Turquoise Days - ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION TWENTIETH ANNUAL COLLECTION. Copyright © 2003 by Gardner Dozois. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

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FIRST EDITION: JULY 2003

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, David Pringle, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Mark Watson, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Paul Frazier, Mark R. Kelly, Mark Watson, Gary Turner, Marty Halpern, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Byron R. Tetrick, Richard Freeborn, Robert Silverberg, Cory Doctorow, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross, Craig Engler, Linn Prentis, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Jed Hartman, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Susan Marie Groppi, Patrick Swenson, Tom Vander Neut, Andy Cox, Steve Pendergrast, Laura Ann Gilman, Alastair Reynolds, Warren Lapine, Shawna McCarthy, David Hartwell, Darrell Schweitzer, Robert Sawyer, Jennifer A. Hall, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus [Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $49 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 Kelly, has also become a key reference source. Thanks are also due to the editors of Science Fiction Chronicle (DNA Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24143-2988, $45 for a one-year/ twelve-issue subscription via second class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

Although critics continued to talk about the “Death of Science Fiction” throughout 2002 (some of them with ill-disguised longing), the unpalatable fact (for them) is that science fiction didn’t die this year, and doesn’t even look particularly sick. In fact, sales for many genre titles were brisk, and not only were there not fewer books published this year than last, several new book lines were added that swelled the total and are going to swell it more next year (and this isn’t even counting print-on-demand titles and books sold as electronic downloads from internet Web sites, things much more difficult to keep track of than traditionally printed-and-distributed books). Nor, to my eyes anyway, was there any noticeable fall-off in literary quality. Sure, there’s plenty of crap out there on the bookstore shelves, just as there’s always been. But there’s also more quality SF of many different flavors and varieties (to say nothing of the equally diverse range of quality fantasy titles) available out there this year than any one person is going to be able to read, unless they make a full-time job out of doing so (even the professional reviewers have difficulty keeping up!). In fact, an incredibly wide spectrum of good SF and fantasy, both new titles and formerly long-out-of-print older books, are probably more readily available to the average reader now-in many different forms and formats-than at any other time in history. All of which indicate to me that nailing the coffin-lid shut on the genre, smearing ashes on your face, and trotting out the obituaries might be just a bit premature.

In fact, 2002 was a rather quiet year in the genre market. There were few major changes this year. The slowing economy has yet to hit the genre too hard (knock on wood), although there are signs of possible trouble ahead for conglomerates, such as AOL-Time Warner and Bertelsmann; the difficulties are on high corporate levels and not directly caused by anything happening on the genre level, although they may eventually impact it. There were even some signs of expansion: Five Star Books added a vigorous new SF line, with the emphasis on short-story collections edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor added a new Young Adult science fiction and fantasy line, Starscape, and by early in 2003 had added a second YA mass-market line, Tor Teen; Tor is also planning to start a “paranormal romance” line, as yet unnamed, in 2004; Penguin Putnam started a new line of science fiction and fantasy books, Firebird, aimed at young readers; Del Rey introduced a new YA line, Imagine; and HarperCollins started Children’s and YA Eos in the beginning of 2003.

Although all of this sudden interest in producing books for young adults is, of course, attributable to the immense success of the Harry Potter novels, it pleases me to see it, especially in science fiction, since novels aimed at the young adult market more-or-less ceased to exist (or at least became very thin on the ground) after the high days of the Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein “juvenile” novels of the ’50s and ’60s. This was short-sighted of science fiction publishers; I think that one reason why fantasy may have had an edge in popularity over science fiction in the last few decades is that fantasy has continued its tradition of easily findable, high-quality YA work-giving young readers somewhere to start, somewhere to become hooked on the form, before they eventually move up to reading more challenging adult-level work-while SF largely abandoned that whole share of the audience. Ironically, the much despised media novels, such as Star Trek and Star Wars books, may have been one of the few things left to play this role to a limited extent for potential new SF readers during the last twenty years, a service that they’ve hardly received any credit for from critics. Good new non-media-specific YA SF would, I think, do an even better job of funneling young new readers directly into the core of the genre, and, with luck, some of those readers might stick around when they get older. The operative word here, though, is “good.” Most of the deliberate attempts to create YA SF novels in the past few years have produced only dull, pompous, and condescending books, usually stuffed to the gunwales with didactic libertarian propaganda. This isn’t going to do it for kids raised on MTV, CGI-drenched movies, and computer games. You need something that will be as exciting to kids in the Oughts as Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels were to kids in the ’50s. And, frankly, rather than being as safe and politically correct as possible, a whiff of nonconformist rebellion and outlaw danger wouldn’t hurt either. So let’s hope that these new YA lines will help. If SF as a genre can find stuff that kids are actually eager to read, rather than having it prescribed for them medicinally, then that will go a long way to assuring that there are people around who still want to read the stuff even in the middle decades of the new century ahead.