Clarkesworld seemed to switch focus during 2015, moving away from being a general SF and fantasy magazine towards a much more SF-focused approach by year’s end. Although 2015 wasn’t its best year ever, it was a good one, and it featured very strong stories by Naomi Kritzer, Sam J. Miller, Catherynne M. Valente, Quifan Chen, Aliette de Bodard, Kelly Robson, and others.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction changed editors early in the year, with publisher Gordon van Gelder stepping down and handing the editorial reins over to Charles Coleman Finlay. It’s hard to know exactly how much of the work published in 2015 was in inventory, but F&SF did seem to feature a wider variety of writers towards year’s end than it had of late. I was particularly impressed by Carter Scholz’s powerful hard SF novella “Gypsy” (reprinted from his collection Gypsy Plus...), Tamsyn Muir’s Lovecraftian “The Deepwater Bride”, and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Winter Wraith”. It’ll be interesting to see how the magazine continues to evolve during the year ahead. F&SF was once described to me as The New Yorker of the genre, and I’d love to see it restored to that position.
Lightspeed, under the editorship of John Joseph Adams and others, was easily in the top rank, and had its best year yet publishing some great stories by Chaz Brenchley, Sam J. Miller, Nike Sulway, Caroline M. Yoachim, Amal El-Mohtar, and producing several special issues of interest. There were a lot of other magazines out there, and a lot of them published worthwhile work. Andy Cox’s Interzone had a good year, featuring a great story by Alastair Reynolds alongside strong work from many of its regulars. Analog continued to publish strong hard SF with an old school twist as it has for many years now. There are literally too many other magazines to talk about, but I should mention new magazine Uncanny, which had a strong first full year of publication, while Shimmer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Cosmos, and Strange Horizons (which published a fine Kelly Link story) were all worthwhile.
It’s hard for me to say a lot about original anthologies during 2015, if only because I edited one myself. Still, although this year was weaker than last for really outstanding original anthologies, there were some good ones that were worth your time. I thought Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell’s Stories for Chip was one of the three or four best anthologies of 2015, with great stories by Geoff Ryman, Nick Harkaway, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nisi Shawl. Also outstanding was Gardner Dozois and George RR Martin’s nostalgic Old Venus, which featured topnotch SF stories by Ian McDonald, Elizabeth Bear, and Garth Nix, and the Microsoft-published Future Visions, which had some of the year’s best stories by Ann Leckie, Greg Bear, and Seanan McGuire. There weren’t many straight fantasy anthologies published during 2015 that really stood out, though there were some great dark fantasy/ horror anthologies, most notably The Doll Collection from the ever reliable Ellen Datlow. Probably the closest to a fantasy anthology, though, was John Joseph Adams’ Operation Arcana, a military fantasy anthology with good work by Genevieve Valentine, Yoon Ha Lee and Carrie Vaughn. Also well worth noting are Nick Mamatas’ and Matsumi Washington’s Hanzai Japan, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer’s Sisters of the Revolution (my pick for best reprint anthology of the year), and Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton & Brenna Yovanoff’s really interesting writing workshop anthology, The Anatomy of Curiosity.
Given the amount of short fiction being published, it’s hardly surprising that it was another great year for short story collections. Easily the best, or at least my favourite, collection of the year was Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Beneath the Oil-Dark Sea, which features her tour de force novella “Black Helicopters”. There really wasn’t a better book published in 2015. That said, another even longer book really did give it a run for its money. Almost as good and maybe even more important, Leena Krohn’s enormous Collected Fiction was released by the VanderMeers’ Cheeky Frawg Press right at the end of the year and provides a staggering, voluminous insight into this important Finnish writer. Surely another award-nominee.
There were also some outstanding collections from a few better-known writers during the year. Get in Trouble by the playful, unpredictable, and always brilliant Kelly Link was a delight from start to finish. China Mieville’s Three Moments of an Explosion was his first book in a while, and brought together recent stories with a swag of new ones, which gave us the best look at his shorter work so far. I loved “The Dowager of Bees”, but a good handful of the stories here stand amongst the year’s best. Genre superstar Neil Gaiman likes to produce miscellanies rather than collections, books that gather stories, poems, and odd bits and pieces that he’s written over the preceding few years. His latest, Trigger Warning is very much in that tradition, but also manages to collect some of the best stories of his career along with excellent new novelette “Black Dog” (which appears here). Garth Nix, whose short fiction is underappreciated, delivered his first collection for adults, To Hold the Bridge. Led off by a strong ‘Old Kingdom’ novella, To Hold the Bridge features a truly impressive array of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and deserves to be considered amongst the best of 2015.
These, of course, were not the only collections worth your attention. Eleanor Arnason’s Hidden Folk, C.S.E. Cooney’s Bone Swans (which features two terrific new novellas), Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love With Hominids, and Deborah Kalin’s powerful Cherry Crow Children were all excellent and belong on your bookshelf. I’d also recommend The Best of Gregory Benford and James Morrow’s Reality by Other Means. Both are major career retrospectives that deserve your attention.
With all of this fiction to choose from it’s always difficult to whittle down the multitude of stories to the 200,000 odd words that go into this book. In some cases, a magazine or anthology may seem underrepresented because author had better stories elsewhere (this was true of both Kelly Robson and Sam Miller this year); in some cases stories were unavailable (a growing trend alas, and why the Greg Egan and China Mieville stories, for example are not here); and of course some were overlooked in the flood. Still, there’s a balance here of science fiction and fantasy, perhaps liberally defined, and some of the best stories I could find in 365 days of solid reading. And looking back at the range and diversity of what I read in 2015, not all of which is mentioned here, it’s hard not to feel that the genre is in fine fettle, and that any side issues that filled social media and news sites were really nothing of consequence. So, was it a good year? It always is, and I’m already reading for 2016 and it’s looking to be a heck of a ride.
BLACK DOG
Neil Gaiman
NEIL GAIMAN (www.neilgaiman.com) was born in England and worked as a freelance journalist before co-editing Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman) and writing Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. He started writing comics with Violent Cases, and established himself as one of the most important comics writers of his generation with award-winning series The Sandman. His first novel, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), appeared in 1991, and was followed by Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. His most recent book is collection Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. Gaiman’s work has won the Carnegie, Newbery, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Locus, Geffen, International Horror Guild, Mythopoeic and Will Eisner Comic Industry awards.