The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

A site called Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com), also publishes some original fiction, although the bulk of its space is devoted to media and gaming reviews, book reviews, essays, and interviews; the quality of the fiction has been uneven, but some quite interesting stuff has appeared there this year, including stories by Steven Utley, David Hutchinson, and Chris Nakashima-Brown. Short science fiction stories have even been turning up on Salon (www.salon.com) of all places, which has so far published two good SF stories by Cory Doctorow.

Below this point, it becomes difficult to find short original science fiction of any sort of reasonably professional quality on the Internet. Good short reprint SF, though, is not at all hard to find. For starters, most of the sites that are associated with existent print magazines, such as Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Aurealis, and others, will have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, and some of them regularly run teaser excerpts from stories appearing in forthcoming issues. Another great place to read reprint stories for free (although you have to read them on the screen) is the British Infinity Plus (www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good quality reprint stories, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. And don’t forget that extensive archive of classic reprint stories at Sci Fiction that I mentioned, or the archived backlog of stories at The Infinite Matrix and Strange Horizons, all available to be read for free.

If you’re willing to pay a small fee, though, you can access an even greater range of reprint stories, some of which have been unavailable anywhere else for years. Perhaps the best site to do this at is at Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com). Unlike a site like Sci Fiction or The Infinite Matrix, Fictionwise is not an “electronic magazine,” but rather a place to buy downloadable e-books and stories to read on your PDA or home computer-and it’s probably the best place on the Internet to do this (as far as accessing good science fiction is concerned), with most of the stuff of high professional quality. In addition to individual stories, you can also buy “fiction bundles” here, which amount to electronic collections, as well as a selection of novels in several different genres; more important to me, you can also subscribe to downloadable versions of several of the SF magazines-including Asimov’s Science Fiction -here, in a number of different formats (as you can at the Peanut Press site). Another similar site where you can buy downloadable e-books of various lengths by top authors is ElectricStory (www.electricstory.com). But here, as at a site like Infinity Plus, you can also access online for free a large array of critical material, including a regular column by Howard Waldrop, movie reviews by Lucius Shepard, and other things. Access for a small fee to both original and reprint SF stories is also offered by sites such as Mind’s Eye Fiction (tale.com/genres.htm), and Alexandria Digital Literature (alexlit.com) as well.