The Year's Best Science Fiction Vol. 20 Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION TWENTIETH ANNUAL COLLECTION. Copyright © 2003 by Gardner Dozois. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN 0-312-30859-0 (he)

  0-312-30860-4 (tp)

  FIRST EDITION: JULY 2003

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following materials

  “Breathmoss,” by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Susan Ann Protter.

  “The Most Famous Little Girl in the World,” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 2002 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, May 8, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Passenger,” by Paul McAuley. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Political Officer,” by Charles Coleman Finlay. Copyright © 2002 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lambing Season,” by Molly Gloss. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Coelacanths,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 2002 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Presence,” by Maureen F. McHugh. Copyright © 2002 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Halo,” by Charles Stress. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “In Paradise,” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 2002 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars,” by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 2002 by Ian McDonald. First published in Mars Probes (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Stories For Men,” by John Kessel. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “To Become a Warrior,” by Chris Beckett. Copyright © 2002 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, June/July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Clear Blue Seas of Luna,” by Gregory Benford. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “V.A.O.,” by Geoff Ryman. Copyright © 2002 by Geoff Ryman. First published as a chapbook, V.A.O. (PS Publishing). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “At the Money,” by Richard Wadholm. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Singleton,” by Greg Egan. Copyright © 2002 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, February 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Slow Life,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Flock of Birds,” by James Van Pelt. Copyright © 2002 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically in SCI FICTION, August 28, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Potter of Bones,” by Eleanor Arnason. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agents, The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “The Whisper of Disks,” by John Meaney. Copyright © 2002 by Interzone. First published in Interzone., October 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing,” by Kage Baker. Copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. First published in Black Projects, White Knights (Golden Gryphon). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “Winters Are Hard,” by Steven Popkes. Copyright © 2002 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, November 13, 2002, Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Agent Provocateur,” by Alexander Irvine. Copyright © 2002 by Alexander Irvine. First published electronically on Strange Horizons, April 1, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Millennium Party,” by Walter Jon Williams. Copyright © 2002 by Walter Jon Williams. First published electronically on The Infinite Matrix, May 8, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Turquoise Days,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds. First published as a chapbook, Turquoise Days (Golden Gryphon). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Contents

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Summation: 2002

  Breathmoss

  The Most Famous Little Girl in the World

  The Passenger

  The Political Officer

  Lambing Season

  Coelacanths

  Presence

  Halo

  In Paradise

  The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars

  Stories for Men

  To Become a Warrior

  The Clear Blue Seas of Luna

  V.A.O

  Winters Are Hard

  At the Money

  Agent Provocateur

  Singleton

  Slow Life

  A Flock of Birds

  The Potter of Bones

  The Whisper of Disks

  The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing

  The Millennium Party

  Turquoise Days

  Honorable Mentions 2002

  About the e-Book

  Acknowledgments

  The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, David Pringle, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Mark Watson, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Paul Frazier, Mark R. Kelly, Mark Watson, Gary Turner, Marty Halpern, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Byron R. Tetrick, Richard Freeborn, Robert Silverberg, Cory Doctorow, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross, Craig Engler, Linn Prentis, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Jed Hartman, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Susan Marie Groppi, Patrick Swenson, Tom Vander Neut, Andy Cox, Steve Pendergrast, Laura Ann Gilman, Alastair Reynolds, Warren Lapine, Shawna McCarthy, David Hartwell, Darrell Schweitzer, Robert Sawyer, Jennifer A. Hall, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus [Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $49 for a one-year subscription (twelve issues) via second class; credit card orders (510) 339-9198] was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the Summation; Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), edited by Mark Kelly, has also become a key reference source. Thanks are also due to the editors of Science Fiction Chronicle (DNA Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24143-2988, $45 for a one-year/ twelve-issue subscription via second class) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  Summation: 2002

  Although critics conti
nued to talk about the “Death of Science Fiction” throughout 2002 (some of them with ill-disguised longing), the unpalatable fact (for them) is that science fiction didn’t die this year, and doesn’t even look particularly sick. In fact, sales for many genre titles were brisk, and not only were there not fewer books published this year than last, several new book lines were added that swelled the total and are going to swell it more next year (and this isn’t even counting print-on-demand titles and books sold as electronic downloads from internet Web sites, things much more difficult to keep track of than traditionally printed-and-distributed books). Nor, to my eyes anyway, was there any noticeable fall-off in literary quality. Sure, there’s plenty of crap out there on the bookstore shelves, just as there’s always been. But there’s also more quality SF of many different flavors and varieties (to say nothing of the equally diverse range of quality fantasy titles) available out there this year than any one person is going to be able to read, unless they make a full-time job out of doing so (even the professional reviewers have difficulty keeping up!). In fact, an incredibly wide spectrum of good SF and fantasy, both new titles and formerly long-out-of-print older books, are probably more readily available to the average reader now—in many different forms and formats—than at any other time in history. All of which indicate to me that nailing the coffin-lid shut on the genre, smearing ashes on your face, and trotting out the obituaries might be just a bit premature.

  In fact, 2002 was a rather quiet year in the genre market. There were few major changes this year. The slowing economy has yet to hit the genre too hard (knock on wood), although there are signs of possible trouble ahead for conglomerates, such as AOL-Time Warner and Bertelsmann; the difficulties are on high corporate levels and not directly caused by anything happening on the genre level, although they may eventually impact it. There were even some signs of expansion: Five Star Books added a vigorous new SF line, with the emphasis on short-story collections edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor added a new Young Adult science fiction and fantasy line, Starscape, and by early in 2003 had added a second YA mass-market line, Tor Teen; Tor is also planning to start a “paranormal romance” line, as yet unnamed, in 2004; Penguin Putnam started a new line of science fiction and fantasy books, Firebird, aimed at young readers; Del Rey introduced a new YA line, Imagine; and HarperCollins started Children’s and YA Eos in the beginning of 2003.

  Although all of this sudden interest in producing books for young adults is, of course, attributable to the immense success of the Harry Potter novels, it pleases me to see it, especially in science fiction, since novels aimed at the young adult market more-or-less ceased to exist (or at least became very thin on the ground) after the high days of the Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein “juvenile” novels of the ’50s and ’60s. This was short-sighted of science fiction publishers; I think that one reason why fantasy may have had an edge in popularity over science fiction in the last few decades is that fantasy has continued its tradition of easily findable, high-quality YA work—giving young readers somewhere to start, somewhere to become hooked on the form, before they eventually move up to reading more challenging adult-level work—while SF largely abandoned that whole share of the audience. Ironically, the much despised media novels, such as Star Trek and Star Wars books, may have been one of the few things left to play this role to a limited extent for potential new SF readers during the last twenty years, a service that they’ve hardly received any credit for from critics. Good new non-media-specific YA SF would, I think, do an even better job of funneling young new readers directly into the core of the genre, and, with luck, some of those readers might stick around when they get older. The operative word here, though, is “good.” Most of the deliberate attempts to create YA SF novels in the past few years have produced only dull, pompous, and condescending books, usually stuffed to the gunwales with didactic libertarian propaganda. This isn’t going to do it for kids raised on MTV, CGI-drenched movies, and computer games. You need something that will be as exciting to kids in the Oughts as Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels were to kids in the ’50s. And, frankly, rather than being as safe and politically correct as possible, a whiff of nonconformist rebellion and outlaw danger wouldn’t hurt either. So let’s hope that these new YA lines will help. If SF as a genre can find stuff that kids are actually eager to read, rather than having it prescribed for them medicinally, then that will go a long way to assuring that there are people around who still want to read the stuff even in the middle decades of the new century ahead.

  2002 was another tough year in the magazine market, but at least the overall losses in circulation were relatively small as opposed to the huge plunges we’ve seen in other years, and there were small gains to partially balance off the losses—although these varied from magazine to magazine, so that Asimov’s Science Fiction gained in subscriptions but lost in newsstand sales, while The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction lost subscriptions but gained in newsstand sales, and so forth.

  Last year I went into great detail explaining the publishing factors that were battering the whole magazine industry, regardless of genre, far beyond the boundaries of the science fiction field, including former mega-sellers such as Playboy and TV Guide, and some of the technical reasons why things might not be quite as bad in the SF magazine world as they appeared to be—and, as I’d feared going in, it was largely a waste of time, as I still spent the rest of the year fielding questions in interviews and convention panels about the “Death of Science Fiction” as indicated by declining magazine circulation and listening to remarks about how the editors must be buying the wrong kinds of stories or the circulations wouldn’t be going down. I can’t summon the strength to go through all that again (read the Summation for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Nineteenth Annual Collection, if you’d like to see the arguments). So I’ll settle for mentioning that while it’s tough to put too positive a spin on the situation in the current SF magazine market, and, of course, no magazine editor is happy to see his overall circulation decline, one factor that is often overlooked is that while circulation decreased by small amounts at most magazines this year, sell-through, the number of magazines that must be put out in the marketplace to sell one, has increased, increased dramatically in some cases—at Asimov’s, sell-through was up to a record 56% last year; at Analog, sell-through was up to a record 55%; and at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, sell-through was up to 37%. This is a factor that goes straight to the profitability of a magazine. To achieve a 35% sell-through, for instance, means that three times as many magazines are printed and put on the newsstands as actually sell: if you can cut-back on the number of unsold copies you have to put out there in order to actually sell one, your sell-through increases, and you save a lot of money in production costs by not having to print and distribute as many “extra” copies that no one is going to buy. This is one of the hidden factors, along with how cheap digest-sized magazines are to produce in the first place, that is, so far anyway, helping to keep the SF magazine market afloat.

  If you had a 100% sell-through, you wouldn’t print any more copies of an issue than you were actually going to sell—and you’d probably be a subscription-only magazine, where they know in advance exactly how many copies of an issue they need to print. It may well be that the SF magazines, the digest magazines in particular, are eventually going to go this route, as newsstands themselves dwindle in numbers, and the ones that are still around become ever more reluctant to display fiction magazines—especially digest-sized magazines that don’t really fit into the physical format of most newsstands very well. And most of the digests could probably survive as subscription-only magazines, considering how much newsstand sales have fallen off over the last ten years anyway (the same problem being faced by many other magazines, not just genre magazines). The problem is that the purpose of putting more copies out on the newsstand than you expect to sell in the first place is that the extra copies act as advertising, tempting potential new subscribers i
nto picking them up. If you only print as many copies as your existent subscriber-base, nobody ever chances across a copy somewhere of a magazine they might not even have known existed until that moment, and that makes it hard to gain new subscribers—and eventually your subscription-base is eroded away, as old subscribers die or fall away and are not replaced by new ones.

  Can use of the Internet, supplemented by distribution to bookstores rather than to newsstands, solve the advertising/promotional problem of attracting new subscribers that used to be solved by putting extra copies out on the newsstand? No one yet knows—but most of the magazine editors I know are giving it their best shot.

  As use of Internet Web sites to push sales of the physical product through subscriptions is becoming increasingly important, I’m going to list the URLs for those magazines that have Web sites: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf/. Interzone’s site is at www.sfsite.com/interzone/. Realms of Fantasy doesn’t have a Web site per se, although content from it can be found on www.scifi.now.com The amount of activity varies widely from site to site, but the important thing about all of the sites is that you can subscribe to the magazines there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no stamps, no envelopes, and no trips to the post-office required. And you can subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something that was formerly difficult-to-impossible. Internet sites such as Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com) and Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), which sell electronic downloadable versions of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, are also becoming important.

  At any rate, to get down to hard figures, Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 1.7 loss in overall circulation in 2002, gaining 504 in subscriptions, but losing 1,078 in newsstand sales. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 2.4% loss in overall circulation in 2002, gaining 490 in newsstand sales but losing 1,504 in subscriptions. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 10.1% loss in overall circulation, gaining 374 in newsstand sales, but losing 3,038 in subscriptions. Interzone held steady at a circulation of about 4,000 copies, as it has for several years, more or less evenly split between subscriptions and newsstand sales. No circulation figures for Realms of Fantasy were available.