The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (5 page)

The Australian popular-science magazine
Cosmos
(
www.cosmosmagazine.com
) is not an SF magazine per se, but for the last few years it has been running a story per issue (and also putting new fiction not published in the print magazine on their website). Fiction editor Damien Broderick stepped down this year, but was replaced by SF writer Cat Sparks. Interesting stuff by Thoraiya Dyer, Greg Mellor, and others appeared there this year.

Shadow Unit
(
www.shadowunit.org
) is a website devoted to publishing stories, often by top-level professionals such as Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull, drawn from an imaginary TV show, sort of a cross between
CSI
and
The X-Files.
It seems to be inactive at the moment, or at least nobody has posted anything there since October of last year.

The ezine
Futurismic
(
http://futurismic.com
) seems to no longer be publishing fiction. As far as I can tell,
Escape Velocity
(
www.escapevelocitymagazine.com
) and
Shareable Futures
(
http://shareable.net/blog/shareable-futures
) are defunct.

The World SF Blog
(
http://worldsf.wordpress.com
), edited by Lavie Tidhar, is a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also publishes news, links, roundtable discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.”

Weird Fiction Review
(
http://weirdfictionreview.com
), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.

Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, and most of the stories are slipstream or literary surrealism. Sites that feature those, as well as the occasional fantasy (and, even more occasionally, some SF) include Rudy Rucker’s
Flurb
(
www.flurb.net
),
Revolution SF
(
www.revolutionsf.com
),
Coyote Wild
(
www.coyotewildmag.com
);
Heliotrope
(
www.heliotropemag.com
); and the somewhat less slip-streamish
Bewildering Stories
(
www.bewilderingstories.com
).

In addition to original work, there’s also a lot of good
reprint
SF and fantasy stories out there on the Internet too, usually available for free. On all of the sites that make their fiction available for free,
Strange Horizons,
Tor.com
,
Fantasy, Subterranean, Abyss & Apex,
and so on, you can also access large archives of previously published material as well as stuff from the “current issue.” Most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as
Asimov’s, Analog,
and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
make previously published fiction and non-fiction available for access on their sites, and also regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues. Hundreds of out-of-print titles, both genre and mainstream, are also available for free download from
Project Gutenberg
(
http://promo.net/pc/
), and a large selection of novels and a few collections can also be accessed for free, to be either downloaded or read on-screen, at the
Baen Free Library
(
www.baen.com/library
). Sites such as
Infinity Plus
(
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk
) and
The Infinite Matrix
(
www. infinitematrix.net
) may have died as active sites, but their extensive archives of previously published material are still accessible.

An even greater range of reprint stories becomes available if you’re willing to pay a small fee for them. Perhaps the best, and the longest-established, place to find such material is
Fictionwise
(
www.fictionwise.com
), where you can buy downloadable ebooks and stories to read on your PDA, Kindle, or home computer; in addition to individual stories, you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections; as well as a selection of novels in several different genres – you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines here, including
Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF,
and
Interzone,
in a number of different formats. A similar site is
ElectricStory
(
www.electricstory.com
), where in addition to the fiction for sale, you can also access free movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, articles by Howard Waldrop, and other critical material.

Even if you’re not looking for fiction to read, though, there are still plenty of other reasons for SF fans to go on the Internet. There are many general genre-related sites of interest to be found, most of which publish reviews of books as well as of movies and TV shows, sometimes comics or computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is easily
Locus Online
(
http://www.locusmag.com
), the online version of the newsmagazine
Locus,
where you can access an incredible amount of information – including book reviews, critical lists, obituary lists, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards – it’s rare when I don’t find myself accessing Locus Online several times a day. As mentioned earlier,
Tor.com
is giving it a run for its money these days as an interesting place to stop while surfing the web. Other major general-interest sites include
SF Site
(
www.sfsite.com
),
SFRevu
(
http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu
),
SFCrowsnest
(
www.sfcrowsnest.com
),
SFScope
(
www.sfscope.com
),
io9
(
http:io9.com
),
Green Man Review
(
http://greenmanreview.com
),
The Agony Column
(
http://trashotron.com/agony
),
SFFWorld
(
www.sffworld.com
),
SFReader
(
sfreader.com
),
SFWatcher
(
www.sfwatcher.com
),
Salon Futura
(
www.salonfutura.net
), which runs interviews and critical articles; and
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
(
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com
). A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is
Fantastic Fiction
(
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk
). Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of
Locus
and
Locus Online,
but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at
Best SF
(
www.bestsf.net/
), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site
Tangent Online
(
www.tangentonline.com
). Other sites of interest include: SFF NET (
www.sff.net
), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (
www.sfwa.org
) where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed;
SciFiPedia
(
scifipedia.scifi.com
), a Wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia;
Ansible
(
www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible
), the online version of multiple Hugo winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine
Book View Café
(
www.bookviewcafe.com
) is a “consortium of over twenty professional authors,” including Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Ann Gilman, Sarah Zittel, Brenda Clough, and others, who have created a website where work by them – mostly reprints and some novel excerpts – is made available for free.

An ever-expanding area, growing in popularity, are a number of sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed: at
Audible
(
www.audible.com
),
Escape Pod
(
http://escapepod.org
, podcasting mostly SF),
Star Ship Sofa
(
www.starshipsofa.com
),
Pseudopod
(
http://pseudopod.org
, podcasting mostly fantasy), and
PodCastle
(
http://podcastle.org
, podcasting mostly fantasy). There’s also a site that podcasts nonfiction interviews and reviews,
The Dragon Page—Cover to Cover
(
www.dragonpage.com
).

The three best SF anthologies of the year were all edited by Jonathan Strahan:
Engineering Infinity
(Solaris Books),
Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier
(Viking), and
Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Night Shade Books).
Engineering Infinity
(my selection for the year’s single best SF anthology) contained excellent work by David Moles, Gwyneth Jones, Karl Schroeder, and Stephen Baxter, as well as good work by Hannu Rajaniemi, Peter Watts, John Barnes, and others. The YA anthology
Life on Mars
contained first-rate stuff by Ian McDonald, John Barnes, and Kage Baker, as well as good work by Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, Ellen Klages, and others.
Eclipse Four,
which, unlike the first two books mentioned here, features fantasy and slipstream as well as SF, had excellent work of various sorts by Andy Duncan, Damien Broderick, Gwyneth Jones, and Peter M. Ball, as well as good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jo Walton, James Patrick Kelly, Kij Johnson, Rachel Swirsky, and others. All of this would be sufficient to make Strahan a good candidate for the 2011 Best Editor Hugo Short Form, in my opinion – although as an anthology editor whose anthologies may not have been seen by a large-enough proportion of the voting demographic, that may not be likely.

Although not as strong as the anthologies mentioned earlier, the reborn version of the old
Solaris
anthology series, now called
Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction
(Solaris Books) and edited by new editor Ian Whates, turned in a solid debut performance, consisting of almost all center-core SF, and featuring good work by Dave Hutchinson, Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Palmer, Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, and others. Ian Whates also brought out two more minor but enjoyable original anthologies,
Further Conflicts
(NewCon Press) and
Fables from the Fountain
(NewCon). Print magazine
MIT Technology Review
published a special all-fiction issue, supposedly the start of an annual series, which featured intelligent core SF by Pat Cadigan, Ken MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Elizabeth Bear, Vandana Singh, Cory Doctorow, Paul Di Filippo, and others.
Postscripts 24/25
(PS Publishing) featured mostly slipstream, fantasy, and soft horror, too much of it for my taste, but did also feature strong SF stories by Ken MacLeod, Keith Brooke, and Adam Roberts.
Panverse Three
(Panverse Publishing), an all-novella anthology edited by Dario Ciriello, featured strong novellas by Ken Liu and Don D’Ammassa.
Welcome to the Greenhouse
(OR Books), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, was somewhat disappointing overall, although it had interesting work by Chris Lawson, Bruce Sterling, Gregory Benford, Brian W. Aldiss, and others. There were two steampunk anthologies,
Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
(Candlewick Press), edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant and
The Immersion Book of Steampunk
(Immersion Press), edited by Gareth D. Jones and Carmelo Rafala, as well as the steampunkish
Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes
(Hades/EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing), edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec (and, in fantasy, the Dann and Gevers
Ghosts by Gaslight
, mentioned later).

Pleasant but minor SF anthologies included
End of an Aeon
(Fairwood Press), edited by Bridget McKenna and Marti McKenna, an anthology made up of stories leftover in inventory from the now-deceased small press magazine
Aeon
;
Human for a Day
(DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek; and
The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge
(Baen), edited by Mark L. Van Name.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXVII
(Galaxy Press), edited by K. D. Wentworth, is the latest in a long-running series featuring novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.