The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (2 page)

And what of the fiction? Well, as has been the case for the last decade, a lot of excellent fiction was published, and in ever more diverse locations. The seemingly beleaguered major print magazines all had solid if unspectacular years, with
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
continuing to set the standard amongst the digests with fine stories from Geoff Ryman, John Kessel, Ellen Kushner, Alex Irvine, Robert Silverberg, Elizabeth Hand, and others. Almost as good was Sheila Williams's
Asimov's,
which published strong work by James Patrick Kelly, Robert Reed, Nancy Kress, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Damien Broderick (making a welcome splash with some fine new stories), Holly Phillips, and Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling. Williams deserves special note for publishing some challenging newer writers like Sara Genge who had two strong stories in the magazine this year.
Analog
continued very much as it has in recent times, very much being seen as representing an old core kind of science fiction regardless of what it actually published, and featuring excellent stories by Stephen Baxter and Steven Gould. Rounding out the "Big Four" print magazines, if there really is such a thing anymore, was the resurrected
Realms of Fantasy
, which published some solid work by Adam Corbin-Fusco, Cat Rambo and Richard Parks. I remain a little disappointed with it, though, and continue to hope it might be more adventurous.
Interzone
has sat just below the "Big Four" for the last several years, steadily publishing beautifully designed issues (it's easily the best looking fiction magazine in the field), and is a reliable source for good fiction. This year it was a little less impressive than it was last year, but they did publish an excellent story from Bruce Sterling amongst some other good work. There were many, many other print magazines published during the year—far too many to mention here—but I would single out Ann VanderMeer's
Weird Tales
as being especially worthy of your attention. If the magazine can re-establish a regular publication schedule and maintain its high editorial standards it will stand with the "Big Four" within the next few years.

We probably make too much of the difference between print and online magazines: print and online are after all only mediums of distribution and a magazine is a magazine. Under the capable editorship of Patrick Nielsen Hayden,
Tor.com
has very quickly established itself as the best and most reliable source of excellent short fiction on the web, publishing terrific stories by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, Rachel Swirsky, Kij Johnson, Charles Stross, and others. The only criticism I have of
Tor.com
is that I wish they'd publish
more
stories. Sitting only slightly behind it is Neil Clarke's
Clarkesworld Magazine
, which I think along with
Weird Tales
is one of the most improved magazines in the field. Although it mostly publishes quite short stories, what it does publish is of a very high standard with especially good work this year from Catherynne M. Valente, Kij Johnson, and Gord Sellar. And then there's
Shadow Unit
, an intriguing reader contribution-funded website where writers like Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, Holly Black and others regularly publish episodes for an unproduced television show, the eponymous "Shadow Unit". The writing is uniformly excellent, the stories intriguing and several of them would definitely be in this volume were they only shorter (almost all of the stories are quite long novellas).

As has been the case for the past four or five years, anthologies continue to be an excellent source of great short fiction. It doesn't seem appropriate for me to say too much about the anthologies I edit myself, so I'll simply note that
The New Space Opera 2
(co-edited with Gardner Dozois) had strong stories by Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Watts, John C. Wright, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and others, while
Eclipse Three
had good work from Karen Joy Fowler, Nicola Griffith, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ellen Klages, and Ellen Kushner, amongst others. The two best science fiction anthologies of the year were Nick Gevers and Jay Lake's
Other Earths
, which featured outstanding stories by Robert Charles Wilson, Gene Wolfe and others, and George Mann's
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 3
, which had good work by Daniel Abraham and Alastair Reynolds. The best fantasy anthology of the year was Sharyn November's
Firebirds Soaring
, which included outstanding work by Jo Walton, Margo Lanagan, Ellen Klages, and Marly Youmans. It was very closely followed by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois's excellent
The Dragon Book
. Any theme anthology is best dipped into, but this strong outing contained a real diversity of high quality work by Diana Wynne Jones, Cecelia Holland, Andy Duncan, and others. I also admired Dozois and George R.R. Martin's
Songs of the Dying Earth,
which also was a book that you had to dip into rather than read straight through. The stories by Dan Simmons, Neil Gaiman, and Lucius Shepard were particularly good. Ellen Datlow continued to show why she is one of our best editors in 2009, publishing no fewer than three fine anthologies. Her
Poe
,
Lovecraft Unbound
, and
Troll's Eye View
(with Terri Windling) were all outstanding and stories from each of them are reprinted here. Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers'
Postscripts
magazine morphed into a quarterly anthology series in 2009. The best volume was
Postscripts 20/21
which had several excellent stories, but the standout
Postscripts
story of the year was Daniel Abraham's "Balfour and Meriwether in 'The Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance'" from
Postscripts 19
. And finally one or two really interesting books were published back home in Australia this year. Twelfth Planet Press published Peter M. Ball's strong novelette
Horn
, and Tansy Rayner Roberts' highly enjoyable "Siren Beat", which appeared as a double book with World Fantasy Award winner Robert Shearman's "Roadkill" , and Deborah Biancotti's excellent debut collection,
The Book of Endings.
All are recommended. Particularly noteworthy, though, was Keith Stevenson's
X6
, an anthology of novellas that is genuinely one of the year's most interesting books. It features an excoriating piece of work from Paul Haines, "Wives", and a terrific fantasy by Margo Lanagan, that make the book well worth seeking out.

It shouldn't be surprising, given the quality of short fiction in recent years, that this was
another
good year for short story collections. It's never easy to pick the best short story collection of the year, but Ian McDonald's
Cyberabad Days
, Greg Egan's
Oceanic
, Gwyneth Jones's
Grazing the Long Acre
, and Charles Stross's
Wireless
all stand amongst the best science fiction collections of recent times, while Peter S. Beagle's
We Never Talk About My Brother
was easily my favorite fantasy collection of the year. A number of excellent retrospectives were published during the year: standouts include
The Best of Gene Wolfe
,
The Best of Michael Moorcock
, and
Trips
by Robert Silverberg. NESFA Press also published the outstanding six-volume
Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
and two fine volumes of
The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson
. All of these books deserve your attention.

Finally, a personal note. On July 12, 2009,
Locus
co-founder and publisher Charles N. Brown died in his sleep on his way home to California from a science fiction convention in Boston. I first met Charles in the North American summer of 1993 where we made absolutely no impression upon one another. I did, however, spend time romancing his managing editor, which meant he agreed to suffer through a dinner with me the following year. He was
almost
interested. And yet, because of his managing editor, we both persevered. He let me work for him and eventually, possibly because we spent a lot of time eating dim sum and buying CDs together, he became one of my dearest friends. His advice colored every project I've worked on and his support helped make each and every one of them possible in some way or another. He was, I think, science fiction's best and truest advocate. His passion for the field was deep, profound and perspicacious. He influenced me greatly but he influenced the field he loved far more. When I say you wouldn't be reading this book without him, I say it not just because he influenced me, but because he influenced the field so greatly that the stories here would be different had he not lived. The science fiction field will miss him more than it realizes while I am only beginning to come to terms with how much I miss him.

And now, on to the stories! These were the ones that I enjoyed the most during the year, or found to be the best and most delightful. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
November 2009

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women's self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be "in the National Interest" for her to live and work in this country. This didn't thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
, where her case was used as an example of the country's declining moral standards.
In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are
Ammonite
(1993),
Slow River
(1995),
The Blue Place
, (1998),
Stay
(2002), and
Always
(2007). She is the co-editor of the
Bending the Landscape
series of original short fiction. Her short work and non-fiction has appeared in a variety of print and web journals, including
Out, Nature
,
New Scientist
, and
The Huffington Post
. Her awards include the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is a limited-edition, multi-media memoir,
And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: liner notes to a writer's early life
.
Griffith lives and works in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, they run Sterling Editing, helping writers improve their work. Her own works-in-progress include a short story collection, an essay collection, and a novel about Hild, a pivotal figure of the seventh century. She takes enormous delight in everything.

It began, as these things do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle's Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead of the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, "You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal type job, where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?"

"You forgot Friday."

"What?" They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

"I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—"

"Right," Cody said. "Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?" An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. "I just took a job," he said. "A no-travel job."

"Ah, shit."

They had met just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which was wild because he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature.
Like Frankenstein's monster
, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they'd both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn't told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, boot-strapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But a no-travel job meant one thing, and going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. "Where?"

"Chapel Hill. And it's not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really."

"Uh-huh."