As has been true for at least a decade now, small presses again dominated the list of short-story collections, with only a few trade collections being published. Subterranean Press was particularly active in this area this year.
A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online, at many sites. The Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.
The most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market, as usual, are the various Best of the Year anthologies. At the moment, science fiction is being covered by three anthologies (actually, technically, by two anthologies and by two separate half anthologies): the one you are reading at the moment, The Year’s Best Science Fiction series from St. Martin’s, edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its thirtieth annual Collection; the Year’s Best SF series (Harper Voyager), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, now up to its seventeenth annual volume; by the science fiction half of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan; and by the science fiction half of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton (in practice, of course, these books probably won’t divide neatly in half with their coverage, and there’s likely to be more of one thing than another). The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a de facto Best of the Year anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (Pyr), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. (A similar series covering the Hugo winners began in 2010, but swiftly died.) There were three Best of the Year anthologies covering horror: The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 23 (Running Press), edited by Stephen Jones; and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran. Fantasy, which used to have several series devoted to it, is now, with the apparent death of David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy series, covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan and Horton anthologies, plus whatever stories fall under the Dark Fantasy part of Guran’s anthology. There was also The 2012 Rhysling Anthology (Hadrosaur Productions), edited by Lyn C. A. Gardner, which compiles the Rhysling Award-winning SF poetry of the year.
It was a somewhat weak year for large stand-alone reprint anthologies this year, especially in SF, although there were a fair number of good reprint theme anthologies.
Robots: The Recent A.I. (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, is a strong mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, recent stories about robots and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ’50s). The one original story is a fine one, Lavie Tidhar’s “Under the Eaves,” included in this anthology, but the reprint stories are also strong, including stories by Catherynne M. Valente, Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, Rachel Swirsky, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year.
Another good mixed reprint (mostly) and original SF anthology, by the same editorial team, is War and Space: Recent Combat (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, an anthology of recent Military SF, although their definition of Military SF seems a bit broader than it sometimes is. As with Robots: The Recent A.I., there is one good original story here, Sandra McDonald’s “Mehra and Jiun,” as well as strong reprints by Ken MacLeod, David Moles, Charles Coleman Finlay, Yoon Ha Lee, Paul McAuley, Tom Purdom, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Geoffrey A. Landis, Cat Rambo, and others. Another good value for the money.
Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, is another mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy. Some of the best stories here are by Howard Waldrop, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Norman Spinrad, Edward Bryant, Lewis Shiner, Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Denton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly.
A good reprint anthology of parallel or alternate world stories is Other Worlds Than These (Night Shade Books), edited by John Joseph Adams, which featured good work by Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, Kelly Link, Michael Swanwick, Yoon Ha Lee, Pat Cadigan, George R. R. Martin, Vandana Singh, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, and others.
The Posthuman/Singularity story was never quite cohesive enough to function as a subgenre all its own, but there were lots of them throughout the ’90s and the oughts, including some of the best work of those periods, and the form is still very much an important part of the current SF scene today. Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (Tachyon), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, a reprint anthology, does a good job of providing a historical overview of the Posthuman/Singularity form, taking us from an excerpt from Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John in 1935, through perhaps the first modern posthuman story, Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million,” in 1966, through the cyberpunk days of the ’80s, represented here by Bruce Sterling, and on through the rich harvest of such stories from the ’90s and oughts to the present. The best stories here, other than those already mentioned, are probably the ones by Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenblum, Robert Reed, Justina Robson, and Hannu Rajaniemi. The anthology also contains a reprint of Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” an immensely influential bit of speculation that set many of the concerns and shaped much of the content of this kind of story, and which popularized the term “Singularity” itself; there are also speculative essays by Ray Kurzweil and J. D. Bernal, and other stories by Isaac Asimov, Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Bear, David D. Levine, and Vinge himself.
Retro SF is represented by Tales from Super-Science Fiction (Haffner), edited by Robert Silverberg, which features pulp stories from Jack Vance, Daniel F. Galouye, James Gunn, and Silverberg himself.