The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Subscription addresses follow: The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, annual subscription-$38.97 in U.S.; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO, 80322-4033-$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S., Analog, Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO, 80323-$39.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom-$60.00 for an airmail one year (twelve issues) subscription; Realms of Fantasy, Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA, 17703-$16.95 for an annual subscription in the U.S.; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, P.O. Box 10308, Aberdeen, ABU 6ZR, United Kingdom-17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make checks payable to “Spectrum Publishing”; 3SF, Big Engine Co., Ltd, P.O. Box 185, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 1GR-$45.00 for a six-issue (one year) overseas subscription, or subscribe online at www.3SFmag.co.uk. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various Web sites.

The internet scene evolves with such lightning speed, with new e-magazines and internet sites of general interest being born and dying in what seems a blink of the eye, that it remains possible that everything I say about it here will be obsolete by the time this book makes it into print and gets out on a bookshelf somewhere where you can buy it. The only way you can be sure to keep up with the online world is to check out what’s happening there yourself, and keep checking frequently.

Once again this year, one of the major players in the whole genre short-fiction market, not just the online segment of it, was Hugo-winner Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction page on the internet (www.scifi.com/scifiction/), a fiction site within the larger umbrella of The Sci-Fi Channel site, which published (or “published,” if you insist) a lot of the year’s best fiction, including stories by Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Alex Irvine, Paul McAuley, Steven Popkes, James Van Pelt, Terry Bisson, and others. The site also features classic reprints, and a different original short-short story by Michael Swanwick every week.

Although Sci Fiction is no doubt your best bet on the Internet for good short fiction, it’s not the only place to look. Eileen Gunn’s The Infinite Matrix page (www.infinite matrix.net) also published literate and quirky fiction of high quality this year by Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Michael Swanwick, Walter Jon Williams, John Kessel, Maureen F. McHugh, Neal Barrett, Jr., John Varley, and others. The site also features a weblog from Bruce Sterling, a daily feature by Terry Bisson, a series of short-shorts from Richard Kadrey and the indefatigable Michael Swanwick, reviews by John Clute, and other neat stuff. (How long it will survive is, alas, another question; they’re running low on money again, after a grant from an unnamed benefactor kept them going throughout 2002, and have resorted to trying Public Television-style campaign-drives, offering offbeat prizes in return for contributions; let’s hope it works!) The Strange Horizons site (www.strangehorizons.com) is also worth checking out; as well as reprints, reviews, and articles, they run lots of original science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, and mild horror stories-I tend to like their fantasy better than their science fiction, but they published good stories of all sorts this year by Alex Irvine, Jay Lake, Ellen Klages, Tim Pratt, Ruth Nestvold, Greg Van Eekhout, Michael J. Jasper, Karen L. Abrahamson, and others. Another site where professional-quality stories can be found is at Oceans of the Mind (www.trantor publications.com/oceans.htm), where they’ll sell you an electronic download of one of their four annual issues as a PDF file to be read on your home computer or PDA; they ran good stories last year by Richard Paul Russo, Ryck Neube, John Alfred Taylor, Michelle Sahara, among others, and an additional point in their favor is that most of the stuff seems to be core science fiction (for some reason, original science fiction is relatively hard to find on the Internet, although you can find slipstream and horror by the ton; in fact, slipstream and horror (particularly horror) seem to be the Internet default-setting, as far as original short fiction is concerned). Another promising site, Future Orbits (www.futureorbits.com), which ran on the same principal as Oceans of the Mind, died this year after only having been introduced last year, showing you how quickly things can turnover in the online world.