M. Valente, Charlie Jane Anders, and others.
Abyss & Apex, (www.abyssapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater, featured strong work by Howard V. Hendrix, Cat Rambo, C. W. Johnson, and others.
Apex Magazine (www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online) had good stuff by Elizabeth Bear, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and others. Catherynne M. Valente stepped down as editor of Apex Magazine after a brief tenure, and was replaced by Lynne M. Thomas.
An e-zine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (http://beneath-ceaseless-skies), edited by Scott H. Andrews, had worthwhile fiction by Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, Geoffrey Maloney, Siobhan Carroll, and others.
Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet, published interesting work, usually more slipstream than SF, by Erica Satifka, Georgina Bruce, Alter S. Reiss, and Anatoly Belilovsky.
The flamboyantly titled Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself, seemed somewhat weak this year, although they still ran interesting stuff from Aliette de Bodard, Stephen Kotowych, Naomi Kritzer, Jeffrey Lyman, and Tony Pi.
New SF and fantasy e-zine Daily Science Fiction (http://dailysciencefiction.com) devotes itself to the perhaps overly ambitious task of publishing one new SF or fantasy story every day for the entire year. Unsurprisingly, most are undistinguished, but there were some good ones by Lavie Tidhar, Jay Lake, and others.
New SF e-zine M-Brane (www.mbranesf.com) is “on hiatus,” which usually means “out of business,” but we’ll see.
Fantasy magazine Zahir (www.zahirtales.com), which had transitioned from print to electronic in 2009, went out of business.
E-zine Redstone Science Fiction (http://redstonesciencefiction.com), edited by a collective, published interesting stuff by Lavie Tidhar, Jeremiah Tolbert, and others.
E-zine GigaNotoSaurus (http://giganotosaurus.org), edited by Ann Leckie, published one story a month by writers such as Katherine Sparrow, Cat Rambo, Ferrett Steinmetz, and Vylar Kaftan.
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 Web site). 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 Web site 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 e-zine 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 slipstreamish 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 nonfiction 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 accessable.
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 e-books 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),
