the handicap of only appearing as a serial in Spectrum SF magazine, and not yet in book form; in spite of this, it got a lot of notice). Other first novels included: Solitaire (Eos), Kelly Eskridge; The Summer Country (Ace), James A. Hetley; Fires of the Faithful (Bantam Spectra), Naomi Kritzer; The Red Church (Pinnacle), Scott Nicholson; The Eve of Night (Bantam Spectra), Pauline J. Alama; Altered Carbon (Del Rey), Richard Morgan; Warchild (Warner Aspect), Karin Lowachee; Just Like Beauty (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Lisa Lerner; and The God Who Beget a Jackal (Picador USA), Nega Mezlekia.
Looking over these lists, it’s clear that Tor, Eos, and Ace had strong years, although Del Rey had a pretty good year as well. And in spite of the usual critical chorus about how science fiction is “dying” or being driven off the shelves by fantasy, it’s clear that the majority of novels here are center-core science fiction. Even omitting the fantasy of novels and the borderline genre-straddling work from the list, the Egan, the Kress, the two Baxters, the Reynolds, the McDevitt, the Swanwick, the Stablefords, the Barnes, the Goonan, the Harrison, the Bear, the Bova, the Sheffield, the Silverberg, the McDonald, the McDevitt, the Williams, the MacLeod, the Brin, the Card, the Steele, and almost a dozen others are clearly and unmistakably science fiction, many of them “hard science fiction” at that. Pretty fair numbers for an endangered species!
Meanwhile, this is the best time in decades to pick up new editions of long out-of-print classics of science fiction and fantasy, books that have been unavailable to the average reader since the ’70s in some cases. Throughout the last two decades, reissues had become as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth, as shortsighted bottom-line corporate publishing practices meant that books almost never came back into print once they had gone out of it, and that reprints of even older classics were out of the question. Now, however, the ice is beginning to break up a bit. The SF Masterworks and the Fantasy Masterworks reprint series, from English publisher Millennium, have brought forth slews of classic reprints during the last few years, joined by American lines such as Tor Orb, Del Rey Impact, Baen Books, and Vintage, as well as print-on-demand publishers such as Wildside and Big Engine, and Internet sites such as Fictionwise and Electric Story, where classic novels and stories are available for purchase in downloadable form. This year, ibooks joined in with a wave of classic reprints, including Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, Up the Line, and The Man in the Maze, Brian W. Aldiss’s Helliconia triology, Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Strength of Stories, William Rotsler’s Patron of the Arts, Roger Zelazny’s collection The Last Defender of Camelot, an omnibus of three Barry Malzberg novels collected as On a Planet Alien, and Harlan Ellison’s famous anthology Dangerous Visions; Vintage reissued a flood of Philip K. Dick titles, including Time Out of Joint, Dr. Bloodmoney, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Simulacra, Counter-Clock World, The Man Who Japed, and The Zap Gun (if you can afford only one of these, make it Time Out of Joint, one of Dick’s best; some of the others are rather minor), as well as reprints of Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (one of the best and most influential books of its decade) and a combination volume consisting of his Babel-17/Empire Star. Orb published an omnibus by Hal Clement, Heavy Planet, containing his novels Mission of Gravity and Star Light, plus other related material, and an omnibus of three of James White’s “Sector General” novels, Alien Emergencies, as well as a reissue of A E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A. Tor reprinted Frank Herbert’s The Green Brain and The Santaroga Barrier, as well as releasing omnibus collections of “Stainless Steel Rat” novels by Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio, and of “Dorsai” novels by Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai Spirit. Baen released an omnibus collection of “Lord Darcy” stories and novels by Randall Garrett, Lord Darcy, as well as an omnibus of “Miles Vorkesigan” novels by Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles Errant, and a collection of stories and novels by James H. Schmitz, Eternal Frontier. Gollancz reprinted Jack Vance’s Big Planet, Joe Haldeman’s Worlds, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewels of Aptor, Robert Silverberg’s The Masks of Time, John Sladek’s Tik-Tok, and Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit. Big Engine made available an omnibus of Brian Stableford novels, Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection, as well as Leigh Kennedy’s novel The Journal of Nicholas the American; Perennial reprinted John Crowley’s Little, Big, and issued an omnibus of three other Crowley novels, Otherwise. NESFA Press issued an omnibus of novels by Fredric Brown, Martians and Madness: The Complete SF Novels of Fredric Brown, and an omnibus of Robert Sheckley novels, Dimensions of Sheckley. Tachyon Publications reissued Pat Murphy’s The Shadow Hunter and Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror. Overlook Press reissued Evangeline Walton’s The Maginogion Tetralogy; Del Rey reissued Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite; and Starscape reprinted Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.
And no doubt there were other reprints that I’ve missed.
As I said, this is the best time in decades to pick up new editions of long out-of-print work, so go out and get them while you can!
I’ve almost given up trying to guess which novels are going to win the year’s major awards, especially as SFWA’s weird and dysfunctional “rolling eligibility” rule means that books that already won a Hugo last year, such as Neil Caiman’s American Gods, get to go head-to-head with new novels such as Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. To be fair, it’s hard to see a clear or obvious winner for the Hugo, either. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Small-press original novels of interest this year included Charles L. Harness’s Cybele, with Bluebonnets (NESFA Press), an autobiographical novel with some fantastic elements, and Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount (Small Beer Press).
Associational novels by SF writers this year included a mystery novel by Ray Bradbury, Let’s All Kill Constance (HarperCollins/Morrow).
Mail-order information: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Frammghan, MA 01701-0809-$21 (plus $2.50 shipping in all cases) for Cybele, with Bluebonnets, by Charles Harness, $29.00 (plus $2.50 shipping) for Martians and Madness: The Complete SF Novels of Fredric Brown, $29.00 for Dimensions of Sheckley, by Robert Sheckley; Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB #132, Brooklyn, NY 112117-$16 for The Mount, by Carol Em-shwiller; Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA 94107-$14.95 for The Shadow Hunter, by Pat Murphy, $15.00 for The Phoenix and the Mirror, by Avram Davidson.
It was another good year for short-story collections. The year’s best collections included: The Birthday of the World (HarperCollins), by Ursula K. Le Guin; Black Projects, White Nights; The Company Dossiers (Golden Gryphon), by Kage Baker; Toast and Other Rusted Futures (Cosmos), by Charles Stress; Worlds Enough amp; Time (Subterranean), by Dan Simmons; Strange But Not a Stranger (Golden Gryphon), by James Patrick Kelly; The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories (Five Star), by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (Voyager), In Another Country and Other Short Novels (Five Star), by Robert Silverberg; Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor), by Ted Chiang; The Lady Vanishes and Other Oddities of Nature (Five Star), by Charles Sheffield; Everything’s Eventual (Scribner), by Stephen King, Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories (Five Star), by L. Sprague de Camp; and Phase Space (Voyager), by Stephen Baxter. (It’s worth noting that the Le Guin, the Baker, the Stress, the Simmons, the Kelly, the Rusch, and the Chiang collections all contain original stories.)
Other good collections included The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon), by Jeffery Ford; The Great Escape (Golden Gryphon), by Ian Watson; Strangers and Beggars (Fairwood Press), by James Van Pelt; Hunting the Snark and Other Short Novels (Five Star), by Mike Resnick; Rosetti Song: Four Stories (Small Beer Press), by Alex Irvine; Dragon’s Island and Other Stories (Five Star), by Jack Williamson; The Mountain Cage and Other Stories (Meisha Merlin), by Pamela Sargent; Human Voices (Five Star), by James Gunn; Counting Up, Counting Down (Del Rey), by Harry Turtledove; The Ogre’s Wife (Obscura Press), by Richard Parks; Babylon Sisters and Other Posthuman Stories (Prime), by Paul Di Filippo; God Is an Iron and Other Stories (Five Star), by Spider Robinson; Little Doors (Four Walls, Eight Windows), by Paul Di Filippo; Generation Gap and Other Stories (Five Star), by Stanley Schmidt; If Lions Could Speak (Cosmos), by Paul Park; Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), by Carol Emshwiller; Death and the Librarian and Other Stories (Five Stars), by Esther Friesner; Waifs and Strays (Viking), by Charles de Lint; Through My Glasses Darkly (KaCSFFS Press), by Frank Robinson, selected and edited by Robin Wayne Bailey; Claremont Tales II (Golden Gryphon), by Richard Lupoff; Swift Thoughts (Golden Gryphon), by George Zebrowski; and Lord Stink and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), Judith Berman.
The year also featured excellent retrospective collections such as The Collected Stories of Greg Bear (Tor), by Greg Bear; Smoke Ghost amp; Other Apparitions (Midnight House), by Fritz Leiber; Going For Infinity (Tor), by Poul Anderson; Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side (Baen), by Keith Laumer; One More for the Road (Morrow), by Ray Bradbury; The Amazing Dr. Darwin (Baen), by Charles Sheffield; Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Pantheon), by Philip K. Dick; Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (Tor), by Richard Matheson; Med Ship (Baen), by Murry Leinster; The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson; Volume Four: Spider Island and Other Stories, by Jack Williamson; The Emperor of Dreams (Gollancz), by Clark Ashton Smith; Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (Big Engine), by John Sladek; and Bright Segment: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VIII (North Atlantic), by
