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 Cafe (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 Web site 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 Infinty (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 lastest in a long-running series featuring novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents.
The best of the year’s fantasy anthologies (although an argument could be made for putting it in with the urban fantasy and paranormal anthologies discussed later) was probably Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 (Subterranean Press), edited by William Schafer, and featuring good stories by K. J. Parker, Bruce Sterling, William Browning Spencer, Jay Lake and Shannon Page, Norman Patridge, Kelley Armstrong, and others.
Pleasant but minor fantasy anthologies included Courts of the Fey (DAW Books), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, and Hot and Steamy: Tales of Steampunk
