The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (2 page)

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Jonathan Strahan, Gordon Van Gelder, Ellen Datlow, Peter Crowther, Nicolas Gevers, William Shaffer, Ian Whates, Andy Cox, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Torie Atkinson, Jed Hartman, Eric T. Reynolds, George Mann, Jennifer Brehl, Peter Tennant, Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, John Joseph Adams, Wendy S. Delmater, Jed Hartman, Rich Horton, Mark R. Kelly, Andrew Wilson, Damien Broderick, Lou Anders, Patrick Swenson, Jay Lake, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Sean Wallace, Robert T. Wexler, Michael Swan wick, Stephen Baxter, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley, Ted Kosmatka, Michael Poore, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Charles Stross, Damien Broderick, James Patrick Kelly, John Barnes, Nicola Griffith, Mary Rosenblum, Lavie Tidhar, Jo Walton, John C. Wright, Steven Gould, James Van Pelt, Bruce Sterling, Alexander Irvine, Karl Bunker, Ian Creasey, Peter Watts, John Kessel, Albert E. Cowdrey, Robert Charles Wilson, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Alastair Reynolds, Dave Hutchinson, David Marusek, Dario Ciriello, Wilson Da Silva, Keith Brooke, Robert Reed, Vandana Singh, Maureen McHugh, L. Timmel Duchamp, Dominic Green, Geoff Ryman, Paul Brazier, David Hartwell, Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Allison, Shawna McCarthy, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, John Klima, John O’Neill, Charles Tan, Rodger Turner, Stuart Mayne, John Kenny, Edmund Schubert, Tehani Wessely, Tehani Croft, Sally Beasley, Tony Lee, Joe Vas, John Pickrell, Ian Redman, Anne Zanoni, Kaolin Fire, Ralph Benko, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Wood, Mike Allen, Jason Sizemore, Karl Johanson, Sue Miller, David Lee Summers, Christopher M. Cevasco, Tyree Campbell, Andrew Hook, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Mark Watson, Sarah Lumnah, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

Thanks are also due to the late, lamented Charles N. Brown, and to all his staff, whose magazine
Locus
(Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661. $60 in the United States 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 (locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source.

In spite of panic so intense in the publishing world that it was reminiscent of the emotion that caused stockbrokers to throw themselves from windows during the Stock Market Crash of 1929, panic that caused massive editorial layoffs in late 2008 and early 2009 as publishers rushed to reduce expenses in anticipation of the hard times and low sales ahead, the number of books sold in 2009 turned out to be – not so bad.

According to Nielsen BookScan, overall unit sales through 20 December 2009 came in at 724 million, a drop of only 3 per cent compared to the same period in 2008. Much of that drop came in adult nonfiction, which suffered the biggest decline by category, down 7 per cent from the previous year. Sales of adult fiction hardcover books, however, actually
rose
by 3 per cent, while sales of adult fiction trade paperbacks grew by 2 per cent over the prior year.

So rather than crashing disastrously during the Great Recession, sales of fiction books actually went
up.

Furthermore, of three thousand adults questioned in an online poll, three quarters of them said that they would sacrifice holidays, dining out, going to the movies, and even shopping sprees before they would stop buying books.

This shouldn’t really come as a big surprise – historically, books, magazines, and movies do well during recessions, as hard economic times make people search for cheap entertainment to distract themselves from their financial woes.

The questions that are probably going to dominate the publishing world during the next few years are: Where are you going to buy your books? And what form are you going to buy them in?

Pressure from online booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and from the rising tide of digital sales that may become a flood now that portable text readers are increasingly available have already had a dramatic effect on where you can buy your books. Just as the rise of chain bookstores put many in de pen dent bookstores out of business, now business forces are reshaping the chains themselves. The bookstore chain Borders teetered on the brink of bankruptcy toward the end of 2008, and although it managed to avoid that in 2009, Borders UK ceased operation and closed all of its stores, and Borders will soon close two hundred Waldenbooks outlets, while rival bookstore chain Barnes & Noble is closing all of its remaining B. Dalton stores.

This is not the end of the brick-and-mortar bookstore by any means – the chains will still have plenty of ‘superstores’ left, where sales have generally been pretty good, perhaps because of the larger selection of stock available there. And there are even a few independent bookstores left here and there. But it does mean that the era where almost every shopping mall had a small chain bookstore is probably over.

Print books are not going to disappear either – in fact, there were probably more of them published in 2009 than ever before. But the e-book market, which up until now has simmered in the background for several years, not really considered to be a major factor, is probably about to explode, which could bring major changes to the publishing world. The introduction of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007, the first portable text reader, turned the heat up under the e-book market, and now, with the introduction of competing text-reading devices such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iPad and the founding of several other ‘online bookstores’ where products for them can be purchased, that market is really starting to come to the boil. In fact, much of 2009 was taken up with price wars over the pricing both of print books and of e-books, with Amazon clashing with other industry giants such as publisher Macmillan and discount superstore chain Walmart, each player trying to bring enough pressure to bear on its adversary to force concessions; the struggle between Amazon and Macmillan over e-book pricing – Amazon wanting to keep them priced low to encourage sales of the Kindle, Macmillan wanting them priced higher to increase profits – has been particularly bitter and intense, with Amazon recently succumbing to Macmillan’s demands. (The war over the Google Settlement, concerning which books will be available for online accessing via Google, which involved a class-action suit by the Authors’ Guild and the controversial settlement that everyone has been wrangling bitterly about ever since, also continued to rage throughout 2009 and into 2010, but that will probably be of interest to very few readers who are not themselves writers.)

Within the genre publishing world, things were relatively quiet after the turmoil of layoffs and cutbacks at the beginning of 2009 (although there were further big cuts at Penguin UK in August). Most of the major restructuring was at Random House, and could be seen as the working-out of consequences from corporate mergers from a couple of years back rather than as a response to the economic downturn per se. Random House has restructured into three adult trade groups, Crown Trade Group, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and Random House Publishing Group. Random House Publishing Group includes, among others, Ballantine, Bantam, Delacorte, Dell, The Dial Press, and Villard Books, which puts both Random House SF imprints, Del Rey and Spectra, under Ballantine. Party line is that the two imprints will be kept separate, for now anyway. Games Workshop’s publishing arm, BL Publishing, sold their Solaris Books imprint to Rebellion. Wildside Press, Prime, and Juno split up early in the year; Juno ended up as a co-published imprint of Pocket Books, Cosmos Books died, and Prime went back to solo operations. HarperCollins started a new SF imprint, Angry Robot. Harlequin started a new YA fantasy line, Harlequin Teen.

Both within and outside the genre, though, evolutionary forces are at work that could change everything, and I suspect that the publishing world is going to look very different ten years from now than it does today.

The good news in the still-troubled magazine market is that things could have been a lot worse. All of the print magazines survived the year, something which looked a bit chancy at the beginning of 2009 (when, in order to survive, both
F&SF
and
Asimov’s
were forced to economize by changing either their publication schedules or their trim size). One,
Realms of Fantasy
, actually returned from the dead under new ownership after being cancelled. And there were even one or two other mildly positive notes: for one thing, the decline in circulation, drastic to very drastic for most magazines only a few years back, seems to have stabilized at a much slower rate of decline, with most magazines more or less staying even, with only miniscule losses in circulation; for another, electronic subscriptions for reading devices such as the Kindle are starting to have an effect, still relatively minor at the moment, but at least
increasing
the circulation figures, trending in the right direction, something that hasn’t happened in a while.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, celebrating its sixtieth year, published a lot of good fantasy this year, but not much SF. Good stories by Geoff Ryman, Albert E. Cowdrey, Rand B. Lee, Ellen Kushner, Sean McMullen, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Elizabeth Hand, Charles Oberndorf, and others appeared in
F&SF
in 2009.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
registered a 3.4 per cent loss in overall circulation, from 16,044 to 15,491, with subscriptions dropping from 12,374 to 12,045, and newsstand sales dropping from 3,670 to 3,446; sell-through rose from 36 to 37 per cent. Gordon Van Gelder is in his thirteenth year as editor, and ninth year as owner and publisher.

Asimov’s Science Fiction
was almost the reverse of
F&SF
, publishing a lot of good SF, but not as much good fantasy. Good stories by Mary Rosenblum, Damien Broderick, Robert Reed, Nancy Kress, Tom Purdom, James Patrick Kelly, Ian Creasey, and others appeared in
Asimov’s
in 2009.
Asimov’s Science Fiction
registered only a 2.4 percent loss in overall circulation, from 17,102 to 16,696, not bad when compared to past losses, which rose as high as 23 percent in 2005. Subscriptions dropped almost unnoticeably from 13,842 to 13,731, although news-stand sales dropped a bit more substantially, from 3,260 to 2,965; sell-through stayed steady at 31 per cent. Although no hard figures are as yet available, the rumor is that overall circulation actually increased this year when you factor in the addition of ‘about three thousand’ in digital subscriptions sold through the Kindle, Fictionwise, and other providers. Sheila Williams completed her fifth year as
Asimov’s
editor.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact
had an above-average year, publishing good work by James Van Pelt, Steven Gould, Harry Turtledove, Don D’Ammassa, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael F. Flynn, and others.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
registered only a 2.2 per cent loss in overall circulation, from 25,999 to 25,418, with subscriptions dropping from 21,880 to 21,636, and news-stand sales dropping from 4,119 to 3,782; sell-through remained steady at 34 per cent. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there since 1978.

Interzone
also had an above-average year, publishing strong work by Dominic Green, Bruce Sterling, Sarah L. Edwards, Jason Sanford, and others. By the definition
of Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Interzone
doesn’t really qualify as a “professional magazine” because of its low rates and circulation, but as it’s thoroughly professional in the caliber of writers that it attracts and in the quality of the fiction it produces, just about everybody considers it to be a professional magazine anyway. Circulation there seems to have held steady, in the three thousand copy range. The ever-shifting editorial staff included in 2009 publisher Andy Cox, assisted by Andy Hedgecock, Jetse de Vries, and David Mathew. TTA Press,
Interzone’s
publisher, also publishes straight horror or dark suspense magazine
Black Static.