Jonathan Strahan: The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

This year has been a challenging one and getting this book done has been demanding. I doubt you would be holding it now without the determined assistance of my wife and co-editor Marianne Jablon, who stepped up to the plate and helped get this book ready at the last minute. As always, I’d also like to thank Gary K.Wolfe, whose advice has been invaluable; everyone from Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth who were my companions again on the journey through the year and provided an invaluable sounding board. I’d also like to thank Howard Morhaim, Jason Williams, Jeremy Lassen, Ross Lockhart, Marty Halpern, John Helfers, Martin H. Greenberg, and Gordon Van Gelder. Thanks also to the following good friends and colleagues without whom this book would have been much poorer, and much less fun to do: Lou Anders, Jack Dann, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Sean Williams, and all of the book’s contributors.

As always, my biggest thanks go to my family, Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. Every moment spent working on this book was one stolen from them. I only hope I can repay them.

In the Australian winter of 1985 I was still at university, pursuing a fairly useless if interesting degree during the day while spending most of my waking hours engaged in an excited, breathless and far more useful discovery of the science fiction field. It was during that time that I encountered my first “best of the year” anthology, a sprawling selection of stories that the editor opened with a careful assessment of how things were going wrong in SF, or might be. A boon of some kind, he reported, was possibly coming to an end and there was real fear that bad times might be coming: sales were unreliable, advances were headed south and, in all likelihood, the publishing world would end quite soon.

Gardner Dozois, for it was he writing in the first of his The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (now in its twenty-eighth year), followed that assessment with two dozen stories—from established writers like Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson, alongside an incredible array of writers I’d never heard of like Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson—which rather seemed to make those gloomy assessments irrelevant. How could a field that was producing stories like “Cicada Queen,” “Hardfought,” “Carrion Comfort” and “Black Air” be anything other than healthy?

I could appreciate then, as I do now, that he was talking about the health of the publishing industry as it was experienced by writers , rather than the state of the art of SF and fantasy writing as it was experienced by readers , but I still did wonder at the time how the caution of the introduction reconciled with the optimism of the story selection.

I was confronted with this myself when, unexpectedly, in the summer of 1997I found myself drafting an introduction to The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy with my co-editor Jeremy G. Byrne and falling into exactly the same kind of assessment, talking about the publishing business rather than the art. I’ve now sat down on sixteen separate occasions, both by myself and with others, and I still struggle to balance the urge to talk about the state of the publishing business rather than focus on the year in short fiction, probably because of a simple but fundamental problem: the year in short fiction is barely done and in many ways is too close to meaningfully assess, even as I attempt to do just that.

It would be easy to describe the rather shaky state that SF and fantasy finds itself in as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close as uneasy. Advances are down, sales (especially for short fiction) are down, the midlist (where many fine writers made their livings) is almost completely a thing of the past, booksellers are in trouble and short fiction outlets of all kinds seem to be struggling financially.

As has been the case in the past, large publishers consolidated, reducing staff and focusing on new opportunities. Random House merged Ballantine and Bantam Dell, HarperCollins rebranded Eos and Voyager, HarperCollins sold its new Angry Robot imprint, as did Games Workshop its Solaris Books imprint. The major North American book chains struggled, with reports popping up throughout the year of both Borders and Barnes & Noble being in various kinds of financial trouble. And magazine Realms of Fantasy , having closed and been rescued in 2009, was sold and rescued again late in 2010.

This was also the year when eBook publishing really took off. Early in the year publishers publicly slugged it out with Amazon over eBook pricing, but that was quickly swept aside when Apple released its iPad in April. Apple sold three million devices in less than three months, and went on to sell more than eight million during the year. Those eight million new, very high profile e-readers were soon joined by new, cheaper iterations of the Kindle, the Nook and others. E-readers seemed to become a desirable thing to own, the next “it” gadget, and eBook sales increased accordingly, with some publishers saying as year’s end approached that eBooks accounted for as much as twenty percent of sales.

That was reflected in the decision by mass market publisher Dorchester to move from traditionally printed books to digital-only editions in August. Perhaps more interesting for SF and fantasy, though, was the comparatively quiet announcement that same month that Gollancz, one of the most respected and important SF imprints in the field, had quietly appointed its first digital publisher. There have been some whispers as to what this might mean for the future, and it’s something I for one will be watching with great interest.

But what of the art of short SF and fantasy? How is that doing? I can imagine you asking. Well, as I’ve been saying for close to a decade now, it has become almost impossible to keep track of all of the original short fiction published each year. I don’t have the February issue of Locus to hand, but when I last looked they’d reported close to 3,500 new stories had been published in their most recent year of accounting, and I’ve long felt that underestimated numbers by a factor of four or five. New stories were published in anthologies, collections, magazines (whether printed on paper or presented with pixels) and pamphlets; they came from publishers of all sizes, and they came every single day. One publisher even launched a service that, rather mind-bogglingly, offered a new story every working day (that’s 220 per year, or more than the combined output of Asimov’s , Analog , F&SF , Realms of Fantasy and Interzone ). Year’s best editors whimpered.

While in recent years anthologies seemed to be providing most of our best short fiction, this year the field seemed to level out with a wide variety of venues producing some excellent work, but no single source really dominating. Unlike 2009, though, I probably found more stories I liked in magazines with almost two-thirds of the contents of this book coming from one periodical or another, and just a third coming from the pages of anthologies.

We are early enough in the digital era that we still find ourselves bound, it seems, to discuss whether magazines appear in print or online. This isn’t a particularly useful distinction given that at the end of the day a magazine is a magazine and an issue is an issue. That said, the majority of the stories from magazines that I liked came from online sources. Last year