The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Shared-world anthologies this year included Wild Cards: Deuces Down (ibooks), edited by George R. R. Martin; Thieves’ World: Turning Points (Tor), edited by Lynn Abbey; and Deryni Tales (Ace), edited by Katherine Kurtz.

Although I don’t pay a lot of attention to the horror genre anymore, from what I could tell the big original anthology of the year there seemed to be Dark Terrors 6 (Gollancz), edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton. Other original horror anthologies included The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling Tales Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Del Rey), edited by John Polant and Benjamin Adams and The Darker Side: Generations of Horror (Roc), edited by John Pelan.

A new anthology by Peter Crowther and Robert Silverberg’s Legends II is about all there is to look forward to in the original anthology market for next year. Maybe the long-promised Greg Benford anthology will finally appear. Not a lot else on the horizon.

Addresses: PS Publishing, 98 High Ash Drive, Leeds L517 8RE, England, UK-$14.00 for V.A.O., by Geoff Ryman, $14.00 for Riding the Rock, by Stephen Baxter, $14.00 for The Tain, by China Mieville; Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802-$15.95 for Turquoise Days, by Alastair Reynolds; Conjunctions, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-$15 for Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists; Wheatland Press, P.O. Box 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070-$16.95 for Polyphony; Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519-$40.00 for Embrace the Mutation; Ministry of Whimsy Press, P.O. Box 4248, Tallahasse, FL 32315-$21.95 for Leviathan 3; Cumberland House, 431 Harding Industrial Drive, Nashville, TN 37211-$14.95 for In the Shadow of the Wall; DreamHaven Books, 912 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408-$75.00 for Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores; The Bakka Collection, 598 Yonge Street, Toronto, ONT M4Y 1Z3-$30.00 for The Bakka Anthology.

2002 seemed like a pretty strong year for novels, in spite of all the moaning about how SF is dying and there’s nothing worthwhile to read left out there on the bookstore shelves. According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 2,241 books “of interest to the SF field,” both original and reprint, published in 2002, up by 4% from 2001’s total of 2,158. Original books were up by 5% to 1,271 from last year’s total of 1,210; reprint books were up by 2 % to 970 titles over last year’s total of 948. The number of new SF novels was up slightly, with 256 new titles published as opposed to 251 novels published in 2001. The number of new fantasy novels was also up, to 333, as opposed to 282 novels published in 2001. Horror, however, was down, dropping to 112 from last year’s total of 151. And, for the most part, these totals don’t even reflect print-on-demand novels, novels offered as downloads on the internet, media tie-in-novels, novelizations of movies, gaming novels, or novels drawn from TV shows such as Charmed, Angel, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Even sticking to the SF novels alone, that’s a lot of novels. How many of the people who complain that “there’s nothing to read out there” have really sampled even a small percentage of them, let alone all 256?