Элинор Арнасон - The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

According to the newsmagazine Locus , there were 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” published in 2017, down 6 percent from 2,858 titles in 2016. New titles were down 7 percent to 1,820 from 2016’s 1,957, while reprints dropped 3 percent to 874 titles from 2016’s 910. Hardcovers dropped by 5 percent to 883 titles from 2016’s record high of 856. Trade paperbacks dropped to 1,433 titles, down 7 percent from 2016’s 1,539. Mass-market paperbacks, the format facing the most competition from ebooks, continued to drop for the ninth year in a row, down 2 percent to 378 titles from 2016’s 385. The number of new SF novels was down 7 percent to 396 titles from 2016’s 425 titles. The number of new fantasy novels was down 6 percent to 694 titles from 2016’s 737, which climbed up 8 percent from 2015’s 682 titles, with 246 of those titles being YA fantasy novels. Horror novels were down 10 percent to 154 from 2016’s 171 titles. Paranormal romances rose to 122 titles from 2016’s 107, still down considerably from 2011’s 416 titles at the height of the paranormal romance boom.

It’s legitimate to say that 2017 saw a drop across all novel categories—but those drops were minor. Yet 2,694 books “of interest to the SF field” is still an enormous number of books, probably more than some small-town libraries contain of books in general. Even if you consider only the 396 new SF titles, that’s still a lot of books, more than 2009’s total of 232 titles, and considerably larger than the total number of SF novels published in prior decades—probably more than most people are going to have time to read (or the desire to read, either). And these totals don’t count many ebooks, media tie-in novels, gaming novels, novelizations of genre movies, print-on-demand books, or self-published novels—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 those novels that received a lot of attention and acclaim in 2017.

Luna: Wolf Moon, by Ian McDonald (Tor); Austral, by Paul McAuley (Gollancz); New York 2140 , by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit); The House of Binding Thorns , by Aliette de Bodard (Ace); The Moon and the Other , by John Kessel (Saga); Tomorrow’s Kin , by Nancy Kress (Tor); Persepolis Rising (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; Convergence , by C. J. Cherryh (DAW); Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga), by John Crowley; The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Orbit), by Ken MacLeod; Guomon (Heinemann), by Nick Harkaway; The Wrong Stars (Angry Robot), by Tim Pratt; The Stone in the Skull , by Elizabeth Bear (Tor); Akata Warrior , by Nndi Okorafor (Viking); Tool of War , by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown); The Real-Town Murders, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz); Provenance , by Ann Leckie (Orbit); Quillifer , by Walter Jon Williams (Saga); The Stone Sky , by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit); Raven Stratagem , by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris); The Uploaded, by Ferrett Steinmetz (Angry Robot); Spoonbenders , by Daryl Gregory (Knopf); Bannerless , by Carrie Vaughn (John Joseph Adams); The Masacre of Mankind , by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz); The Man in the Tree , by Sage Walker (Tor); The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor); Cold Welcome, by Elizabeth Moon (Del Rey); Assassin’s Fate, by Robin Hobb (Del Ray); Walkaway , by Cory Doctorow (Tor); and Empire Games (Tor), by Charles Stross.

It’s worth noting that in spite of decades of fretting about how fantasy is going to drive all SF from the bookshelves, in the list above the McDonald, the McAuley, the Kessel, the Robinson, the Cherryh, the Corey, the Leckie, the Yoon Ha Lee, the Scalzi, the Baxter, and many others are pure-quill center-core SF.

For a long time, small presses published mostly short-story collections, but in recent years they’ve begun publishing novels as well. Novels by well-known authors published by small presses this year included: Mother Go , by James Patrick Kelly (Audible); The River Bank , by Kij Johnson (Small Beer Press); Infinity Engine , by Neal Asher (Night Shade); Fire , by Elizabeth Hand (PM Press); Upon This Rock: Book 1—First Contact , by David Marusek (A Stack of Firewood Press); The Last Good Man , by Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press); In Evil Times , by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan); and The Rift (Titan) by Nina Allan.

The year’s first novels included: The Art of Starving , by Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen), Autonomous , by Annalee Newitz (Tor), The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter , by Theodora Goss (Saga), Lotus Blue , by Cat Sparks (Talos), Tropic of Kansas , by Christopher Brown (Harper Voyager), Amatka , by Karin Tidbeck (Vintage), The City of Brass , by S. A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager), Amberlough , by Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor), Hunger Makes the Wolf , by Alex Wells (Angry Robot), Blackwing , by Ed McDonald (Gollancz), Wintersong , by S. Jae-Jones (Thomas Dunne Books), Found Audio , by N. J Cambell (Two Dollar Radio), Aberrant , by Marek Sindelka and translated by Nathan Fields (Twisted Spoon), Weave a Circle Round: A Novel , by Kari Maaren (Tor), The Tiger’s Daughter , by K. Arsenault Rivera (Tor), An Unkindness of Ghosts , by Rivers Solomon (Akashic), All Our Wrong Todays , by Elan Mastai (Dutton), An Excess Male , by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager), Ghost Garages , by Erin M. Hartshorn (Eimarra), Strange Practice , by Vivian Shaw (Orbit), The Bear and the Nightingale , by Katherine Arden (Del Rey), The Prey of Gods , by Nicky Drayden (Harper Voyager), The Guns Above , by Robyn Bennis (Tor), An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors , by Curtis Craddock (Tor), Knucklebones , by Marni Scofidio (PS Publishing), Starfire: A Red Peace , by Spencer Ellsworth (Tor), The Mercy of the Tide , by Keith Rosson (Meerkat), The Space Between the Stars , by Anne Corlett (Berkley), Three Years with the Rat: A Novel , by Jay Hosking (Thomas Dunne Books), and Witchy Eye , by D. J. Butler (Baen).

None of these seemed to draw any large amount of attention.

The few novel omnibuses available this year included: The Hainish Novels and Stories (Library of America), by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Dosadi Experiment and The Eyes of Heisenberg (Tor), by Frank Herbert; and Armageddon—2419 A.D and The Airlords of Han (Dover), by Philip Francis Nowlan.

Novel omnibuses are also frequently made available through the Science Fiction Book Club.

Not even counting print on demand books and the availability of out-of-print books as ebooks or as electronic downloads from internet sources, a lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Here’s some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably impossible.

Gollancz reissued Neuromancer , Count Zero , and Mona Lisa Overdrive, all by William Gibson; Tor reissued Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, From the Two Rivers : The Eye of the World, Part One, by Robert Jordan, Old Man’s War , by John Scalzi, Whiteout , by Sage Walker, Icehenge , by Kim Stanley Robinson, and The Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction , by David G. Hartwell; Penguin Classics reissued Ice , by Anna Kavan; Baen reissued None But Man , by Gordon R. Dickson, Wolfling , by Gordon R. Dickson, Honor Among Enemies , by David Weber, and Borders of Infinity , by Lois McMaster Bujold; DAW reissued The Storm Lord , Anackire , The White Serpent , Night’s Sorceries , Redder than Blood , Delirium’s Mistress , and Delusion’s Master , all by Tanith Lee; Valancourt Books reissued One , by David Karp; Harper Classics reissued The Graveyard Book , by Neil Gaiman; Dover reissued The Ant-Men , by Eric North, The Mindwarpers, by Eric Frank Russell, Eclipse , by John Shirley, The Ghost Pirates , by William Hope Hodgson, Worlds of the Imperium , by Keith Laumer, and In the Drift , by Michael Swanwick; Fairwood Press reissued Transfigurations , by Michael Bishop; Angry Robot reissued Infernal Devices , Fiendish Schemes , and released Grim Expectations , all by K. W. Jeter; Open Road reissued Bring the Jubilee , by Ward Moore; Pegasus reissued Rosemary’s Baby , by Ira Levin; Chicago Review Press reissued Monday Starts on Saturday , by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky; CreateSpace reissued The Star Rover , by Jack London; Simon & Schuster reissued Gloriana: Or, the Unfulfill’d Queen , by Michael Moorcock and Something Wicked This Way Comes , by Ray Bradbury; and Tachyon reissued The Forgotten Beasts of Eld , by Patricia A. McKillip.