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THE YEAR IN SCIENCE FICTION, by Rich Horton

There are two obvious ways of looking at the state of the SF field in any given year. One is to try to assess the quality and concerns of the stories produced: are there any obsessive themes? Was it a particularly special year for great stories? Did any authors spring out of nowhere to suddenly become major? Or did any seem to exert outsize influence through some combinations of quantity and quality of stories?

The other way is more practical in a sense: how is the field doing economically? Are the magazines healthy? Are book sales healthy? Is readership expanding? This latter way is less interesting to me, but it seems the short fiction scene deserves a brief look, if only to mostly mildly echo cries of “doom and gloom.” The magazines are at best stable: circulation continues to drift down, and some new starts of the past couple years didn’t survive long, most notably Paizo Publishing’s somewhat media-oriented relaunch of Amazing. A bit more optimistically, Andy Cox stamped his personality more thoroughly on Interzone, and after a slow start in 2004 he managed six quite strong issues in 2005. The first year of Asimov’s under Sheila Williams’s editorship was a solid year, with much continuity maintained from Gardner Dozois’s reign. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had a good year, and Analog had one of its best recent years. More distressing was the loss of the best-ever online source of new science fiction: Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction, which has been closed down after another strong year. Smaller ’zines often tend to publish fantasy, horror, or slipstream, but there are a few that publish lots of science fiction: in particular I would mention Electric Velocipede, the Australian publication Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and two electronically distributed magazines, Challenging Destiny and Oceans of the Mind.

But what of the stories? I am still delighted year after year by story after story. And this year was no different: I had an agonizing time limiting my selections for this volume. I hope they successfully indicate the breadth and scope of the imagination of contemporary SF writers. A look at common characteristics of these stories reveals a very high percentage that I would call rather “hard” science fiction—something I found somewhat surprising, but refreshing. There are stories on familiar themes, including one that explicitly responds to a nearly fifty-year-old classic. Other stories are engaging current political concerns—though I find that the best of these, like those included here, are really dealing with issues that were important in a century ago, or fifty years ago, and will probably still be nagging us in 2106. They come from a wide variety of sources, too: I saw outstanding pieces from all the traditional SF magazines (though my favorites from F&SF this year were fantasies), from online sources like Sci Fiction and Strange Horizons, from original anthologies, from a scientific journal, and from the fine, long-running, Canadian magazine On Spec, and even from a science fiction convention’s program book.

And of course from a wide spread of writers: veterans and newcomers, writers best known for novels and writers who have only published short fiction, some very prolific writers and some we see much less often. Let’s begin with one writer who, every year it seems, publishes a plethora of potential best of the year selections: Robert Reed. This year we see “Finished,” as with many of Reed’s stories an examination of a familiar science fiction idea, in this case uploading into android bodies, with a fresh viewpoint.

Michael Swanwick is another writer who seems to produce multiple top stories each year (to the extent that I once proposed renaming the short story Hugo the “Swanwick Invitational”). “Triceratops Summer” is a lovely story of dinosaurs in Vermont. (And it is also significant because of its unusual publication venue: a downloadable e-story from Amazon.com.) And James Patrick Kelly is another writer (of roughly the same SF generation as Reed and Swanwick) who is a constant presence on award ballots and in Best of the Year volumes. He’s also a constant presence in the June issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and his June 2005 story, “The Edge of Nowhere,” is a striking story about the sources—and importance—of creativity.

As long as I am mentioning writers who have, let’s say, been around awhile, I’ll bring up Joe Haldeman, who contributes a pointed story about love, “Heartwired,” from the latest series of short-shorts published in the venerable UK scientific journal Nature. Also, Tom Purdom, one of my favorite writers, who began publishing SF in the late ’50s, but who has had a truly remarkable late career surge since about 1990, contributes “Bank Run,” at once an exciting adventure story about finance, and a challenging look at gender roles and, once again, love. I suppose Howard Waldrop qualifies as a “veteran,” too, though his stories are also so individual, so sui-generis, that he seems ever a brand new writer. “The King of Where-I-Go” is a moving look at a Texas childhood, mixing polio and time travel curiously.

Never fear, there are standout new writers to celebrate as well. Leah Bobet’s “Bliss” is a powerful story of drug addiction, and a potential cure with its own downside. Douglas Lain’s “A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story” uses an alien invasion (perhaps) as a means of looking at a marriage in trouble. James Van Pelt’s “The Inn at Mount Either” is a clever and sad story of multiple dimensions, telling of a honeymoon at a hotel built around a door between parallel universes. Daniel Kaysen’s “The Jenna Set” is very smart, and very funny, about a new mathematical theory of human interactions, and an AI telephone answering service. The longest story here is Alastair Reynolds’s deep time story, “Understanding Space and Time,” in which civilization on Earth is destroyed by a weaponized virus, marooning a Martian expedition. One man survives on Mars with the curious help of Elton John, and eventually gets to see the very far future indeed.

Susan Palwick’s “The Fate of Mice” explicitly invokes Daniel Keyes’s classic “Flowers for Algernon” in a story about an enhanced mouse and his relationship with his researcher and the man’s daughter. Wil McCarthy’s “The Policeman’s Daughter” is set in the same “Queendom of Sol” future as his most recent series of novels. It thoughtfully explores questions of identity as a lawyer is forced to oppose a version of himself in court, trying a case about another man who thinks a version of himself is trying to murder him. Stephen Leigh’s “You, by Anonymous” is effectively paranoiac about an alien invasion of a different sort. And finally Mary Rosenblum, happily returned to the field after a number of years concentrating on mysteries, offers “Search Engine,” a powerful story of a man working for a government which is increasingly violating citizens’ privacy by the use of chips to track all transactions.

Science Fiction remains a vital way of not only looking at possible futures, but of looking at the present through the lens of the imagined future. I don’t think truly new ideas are as common as they once were, but fresh treatments of old ideas, even explicit hommages to old stories, can be just as exciting. Our present is ever changing—and the best SF changes with us, as demonstrated in many stories here. This book showcases the very best of 2005’s stories.