For at least fifteen years now, I’ve been hearing the complaint that all the SF books have been driven off the bookstore shelves by fantasy books, but there’s still plenty of it around. On the list above, although there’s a number of fantasy titles, there are quite a few undeniably core SF titles there as welclass="underline" the Robinson, the Reynolds, the McAuley, the Steele, the McDonald, the Bacigalupi, the Schroeder, the Corey, the Cherryh, the Banks, the Hamilton, and many others. Many more could be cited from the lists of small-press novels and first novels. Yes, fantasy is popular, but science fiction has not vanished yet—there’s still more good core SF out there than any one person could possibly have time to read in the course of a year.
Small presses are active in the novel market these days, where once they published mostly collections and anthologies. Novels issued by small presses this year included: The Eternal Flame: Orthogonal Book Two (Night Shade Books Books), by Greg Egan; Time and Robbery (Aqueduct Press), by Rebecca Ore; Zeuglodon (Subterranean Press), by James P. Blaylock; Black Opera (Night Shade Books), by Mary Gentle; Ison of the Isles (ChiZine), Carolyn Ives Gilman; Worldsoul (Prime Books), by Liz Williams; Everything Is Broken (Prime Books), by John Shirley; Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine), by Paul Tremblay; The Architect (PS Publishing), by Brendan Connell; Against the Light (47North), Dave Duncan; Hitchers (Night Shade Books), Will McIntosh; Bullettime (ChiZine), Nick Mamatas; The Croning (Night Shade Books), Laird Barron; and Crandolin (Chomu Press), by Anna Tambour.
The year’s first novels included: The Games (Del Rey), Ted Kosmatka; Throne of the Crescent Moon (DAW), by Saladin Ahmed; Grim (Scholastic), by Anna Waggener; Above (Arthur A. Levine Books), by Leah Bobet; Enchanted (Harcourt), by Alethea Kontis; Alif the Unseen (Grove Press), by G. Willow Wilson; Hidden Things (Harper Voyager), by Doyce Testerman; A Once Crowded Sky (Touchstone), by Tom King; The Minority Council (Orbit), by Kate Griffin; So Close to You (Harper Teen), by Rachel Carter; Blackwood (Strange Chemistry), by Gwenda Bond; Glitch (St. Martin’s Griffin), by Heather Anastasiu; Albert of Adelaide (Twelve), by Howard L. Anderson; Something Strange and Deadly (HarperTeen), by Susan Dennard; Three Parts Dead (Tor), by Max Gladstone; Through to You (Balzer + Bray), by Emily Hainsowrth; Seraphina (Random House), by Rachel Hartman; Shadows Cast by Stars (Atheneum), by Catherine Knutsson; Blood and Feathers (Solaris), by Lou Morgan; Fair Coin (Pyr), by E. C. Myers; Year Zero (Del Rey), by Rob Reid; The Man from Primrose Lane (Sarah Crichton), by James Renner; Something Red (Atria), by Douglas Nicholas; Strange Flesh (Simon & Schuster), by Michael Olson; Starters (Delacorte), by Lissa Price; and Living Proof (Tor), by Kira Peikoff. None of these novels generated an unusual amount of buzz; the most frequently reviewed were probably The Games and Throne of the Crescent Moon.
The strongest novella chapbooks of the year included On a Red Station, Drifting (Immersion Press), by Aliette de Bodard; Gods of Risk (Orbit), by James S. A. Corey; The Boolean Gate (Subterranean Press), by Walter Jon Williams; The Yellow Cabochon (PS Publishing), by Matthew Hughes; After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon), by Nancy Kress; Mare Ultima (PS Publishing), by Alex Irvine; Starship Winter (PS Publishing), by Eric Brown; An Account of a Voyage from World to World (Jurassic), by Adam Roberts; Indomitable (Subterranean Press), by Terry Brooks; Face in the Crowd (Simon & Schuster), by Stephen King and Steward O’Nan; When the Blue Shift Comes (Phoenix Pick), by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; The Thorn and the Blossom (Quirk Books), by Theodora Goss; From Whence You Came (d.y.m.k. Productions), by Laura Ann Gilman; The Pit of Despair (PS Publishing), by Simon R. Green, and ad eternum (Subterranean Press) and Book of Iron (Subterranean Press), both by Elizabeth Bear.
As you can see, this category is largely dominated by Subterranean Press and PS Publishing.
Novel omnibuses this year included: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s (Library of America), edited by Gary K. Wolfe; Ride the Star Winds (Baen), by A. Bertram Chandler; Thunder in the Void (Haffner), by Henry Kuttner, edited by Stephen Haffner; The Chalice of Death (Paizo/Planet Stories), by Robert Silverberg; The Planet Killers (Paizo/Planet Stories), by Robert Silverberg; A Song Called Youth (Prime Books), by John Shirley; The Ghost Pirates and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson (Night Shade Books), by William Hope Hodgson, edited by Jeremy Lasson (contains short stories as well); Earthblood and Other Stories (Baen), by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (contains short stories as well); and Ice and Shadow (Baen), by Andre Norton. Novel omnibuses are also frequently made available through the Science Fiction Book Club.
Not even counting print-on-demand books and the availability of out-of-print books as e-books or as electronic downloads from Internet sources, a lot of long out-of-print stuff has come back into print in the last couple of years in commercial trade editions. Here are some out-of-print titles that came back into print this year, although producing a definitive list of reissued novels is probably impossible. Tor reissued: Mother of Storms, by John Barnes; Earthseed, by Pamela Sargent; After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Foundation’s Friends, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; The Eye of the World, The Fires of Heaven, The Great Hunt, and Lord of Chaos, all by Robert Jordan. Orb reissued Peace, by Gene Wolfe; Downward to the Earth, by Robert Silverberg; and The Long Price: The Price of War, by Daniel Abraham. Baen reissued When the People Fell, by Cordwainer Smith; Voyage Across the Stars, by David Drake; Strangers, by Gardner Dozois; Nightmare Blue, by Gardner Dozois and George Alec Effinger; The Forerunner Factor, by Andre Norton; and An Assignment in Eternity, Sixth Column, and The Star Beast, all by Robert A. Heinlein. Subterranean Press reissued Dying of the Light, by George R. R. Martin; Phases of Gravity, by Dan Simmons; and Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link. Ace reissued Illegal Alien, by Robert J. Sawyer. Bantam reissued Windhaven, by George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle. William Morrow reissued Stardust: The Gift Edition—Deluxe Signed Limited, by Neil Gaiman. Ballantine/Del Rey reissued: The Annotated Sword of Shannara: 35th Anniversary Edition. Houghton Mifflin reissued The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien; A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Counter-Clock World; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Gather Yourself Together; and Solar Lottery, all by Philip K. Dick. Harcourt/Mariner reissued The Man in the High Castle and Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick. The Library of America reissued A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Fairwood Press reissued Brittle Innings, by Michael Bishop. Roc reissued Majipoor Chronicles, by Robert Silverberg. Arc Manor reissued The Masks of Time and Thebes of the Hundred Gates, by Robert Silverberg. Chicago Review Press reissued Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. PM Press reissued Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Cathage, by Michael Moorcock. Farrar, Straus and Giroux reissued A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Grand Central reissued The New Moon’s Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. Scribner reissued Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Wesleyan University Press reissued Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, by Samuel R. Delany. Open Road reissued Alien Sex, edited by Ellen Datlow. Underland Press reissued Glimmering, by Elizabeth Hand. HiLoBooks reissued When the World Shook, by H. Rider Haggard.