Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society again managed only two issues this year out of their scheduled four; I like the fact that Artemis features center-core science fiction in a marketplace where the bulk of the fiction semiprozines run mostly slipstream or horror instead, but they need to work on making their stories more vivid and powerful; much of the work here this year was rather gray, although there were interesting stories by Edward Willett and Roxanne Hutton. A magazine which couldn’t be more different from Artemis in editorial personality is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (about all they have in common is that they both only managed to get two issues out this year), which almost never publishes core science-fiction, but does publish some good slipstream stuff, including stories by Jeffrey Ford, Greg Van Eekhout, and others. The other long-running Australian semiprozine, Aurealis, was taken over by a new editor, and managed two of its scheduled four issues this year, with interesting stories by Robert N. Stephenson and Lee Battersby; it’s good to see it surviving, since the fear last year was that it would follow Eidelon into the grave. A new Australian fiction semiprozine, the oddly titled Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, launched this year, but is already reported to be in financial trouble; we’ll see if it makes it. I saw one issue of the quirky Irish semiprozine Albedo One this year and heard rumors that there was a Tales of the Unanticipated, but I never saw it.
Black Gate, the new large-format fantasy magazine, managed two fat issues out of a scheduled four. Although ostensibly a fantasy magazine, they remain very broad-church in their definition of fantasy, but the magazine did feature good stories this year, whatever you define them as, by Ellen Klages, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, Bill Johnson, Gail Sproule, and others.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market anymore, but the most prominent magazine there, as usual, seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance.
Your best bets in the critical magazine market, and by far the most reliably published, are the two “newszines,” Locus and Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle), and David G. Hartwell’s eclectic critical magazine, perhaps the best critical magazine out there at the moment, The New York Review of Science Fiction. There have been a few changes here, at least with the newszines: Locus’s longtime and multiple Hugo-winning editor, Charles N. Brown, supposedly retired in 2002, turning the editorial reins over to Jennifer A. Hall, but since the magazine is still put together in his living room, most insiders guess that he won’t actually “retire” until they pry the magazine from his cold dead fingers. Science Fiction Chronicle was taken over by Warren Lapine’s DNA Publishing Group last year, and this year, longtime editor and Hugo-winner Andy Porter left the magazine he’d founded, among swirling rumors that he’d been fired; he was replaced as News Editor by John Douglas, the title of the magazine was changed to Chronicle, and its formerly erratic publishing schedule was stabilized. One issue of Lawrence Person’s playful Nova Express was published this year, but the editor is considering turning the magazine into an online “electronic magazine” (which I suspect will eventually be the fate of most critical semiprozines). There were several issues of The Fix this year, a welcome new short-fiction review magazine brought to you by the people who put out The Third Alternative.
Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13505, Oakland, CA 94661-$56.00 for a one-year first class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review Of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570-$32.00 per year, 12 issues; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, TX 78755-2231-$12 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6-$18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia-$43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars”; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co., Dublin, Ireland-$34 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make checks payable to “Albedo One”; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery amp; Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, Chronicle -all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988-all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, although you can get a group subscription to all five DNA fiction magazines for $70 a year, with Chronicle $45 a year (12 issues), all checks payable to “D.N.A. Publications”; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408-$15 for a four-issue subscription; Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn NY 11230-6011-$15 for a four-issue subscription, checks payable to LRC Publications; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, 5203 Quincy Ave. SE, Auburn, WA 98092-$18 for four issues; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, UK-$22 for a four-issue subscription, checks made payable to “TTA Press”; Black Gate, New Epoch Press, 815 Oak Street, St. Charles, IL 60174-$25.95 for a one-year (four issue) subscription; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB #132, Brooklyn, NY 11217-$12 for four issues, all checks payable to Gavin Grant; The Fix: The Review of Short Fiction, TTA Press, Wayne Edwards, P.O. Box 219, Olyphant, PA 18447-$28.00 for a six-issue subscription, make checks payable to “TTA Press”; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, P.O. Box 495, Chinchilla QLD 4415 Australia-$35.00 for a one-year subscription. Many of these magazines can also be ordered online, at their Web sites; see the online section for URLs.
Yet again, it was a pretty weak year for original anthologies.
The best original SF anthology of the year, with almost no competition, was Mars Probes (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther. Having said that, I must admit that I found Mars Probes somewhat disappointing overall, in comparison with Crowther’s 1999 anthology Moon Shots. With all the good science fiction that’s been written about Mars at novel-length in recent years, I’d hoped for a really solid, definitive collection of core SF, reflecting some of the recent science fiction thinking about the Red Planet, and there is some of that here-but a great deal of the anthology (too much of it, in my opinion) is devoted to fabulations and homages drawing not on scientific fact but on other fictional versions of Mars, from Bradbury’s “Mars” to Burrough’s “Barsoom,” including an uncannily spot-on pastiche/homage of Leigh Brackett’s pulp-era Martian stories by Michael Moorcock. Even Paul McAuley, who has done some of the best of the recent work about Mars, contributes a near-mainstream story set in a Martian theme park rather than a hard-science story. Most of this stuff is clever, well-crafted, and entertaining, but it makes the anthology as a whole a little more insubstantial as a science fiction anthology than I was hoping it would be (perhaps the problem is with my own expectations rather than with the anthology itself); in spite of these quibbles, though, it’s still easily the best SF anthology of the year. The best story in Mars Probes is Ian McDonald’s “The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars,” but there’s also good work here by Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown, Gene Wolfe, Allen Steele, and others.