INTRODUCTION
JONATHAN STRAHAN
More than anything else 2012 was an interesting year for science fiction and fantasy. While people concerned with the business of the genre—publishers, editors, publicists—looked for ways to innovate and expand, to find new ways to get stories before the eyes of readers, those of us who are interested in the artistic health of the genre—writers, artists, critics, readers—were looking carefully at how things were proceeding as well.
Probably the single most interesting discussion of science fiction and fantasy during the year was prompted by “The Widening Gyre,” a fascinating and worthwhile review essay by UK critic Paul Kincaid published in the LA Review of Books where he examined a handful of “best of the year” anthologies like this one. In his essay Kincaid raised the question of whether science fiction had grown “exhausted,” not in the sense of becoming tired or rundown, but rather of having run short on compelling ideas, possibly having lost faith in or connection to the future.
In the extensive online discussions that followed, this sense of “exhaustion” seemed to be prompted by a number of recent works that could be said to be nostalgic, hearkening back to the way the future was, rather than attempting to engage meaningfully with the world we live in today, with all of its economic, climatic, and political upheavals and radical scientific discoveries. If a central mission of science fiction is to connect our world to meaningful believable futures, Kincaid and others asked, are too few writers currently addressing that mission? Kincaid also raised the question of whether fantasy might be losing touch with its mission as well. Touching on stories like K. J. Parker’s excellent novella “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”—which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in November—Kincaid asked in what sense such works, with no overtly fantastical events or beings at all, were in any sense even “fantasy.” Couldn’t such a tale be transplanted into a historical setting with little apparent change?
I do think science fiction—at least at the experimental/developmental end of the spectrum—is in a period of self-examination. Some of this is just our field’s constant navel gazing, but some is a deliberate attempt to find a way to imagine any kind of science fictional future at all. It is certainly imaginatively less innovative to revisit 1940s-style SF adventures, with those bright futures that now seem to have failed us, than to try to envision another kind of future from our own less optimistic age. And yet that is the challenge, surely. Not to imagine the way the future was, but the way the future might be. While I don’t think answers to this exist yet, I do think you can see the beginnings of attempts to find them.
The fantasy question vexes me a little more. I am not attracted to litmus tests and lab results for genre, but I do understand and accept the need to be able to meaningfully connect slipstream works to the field, to explain how quasi-historical fiction like that by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or K. J. Parker belongs in fantasy at all. Discussing his novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale on The Coode Street Podcast recently, Graham Joyce talked about how he used the intrusion of the fantastic into our own world as a tool to interrogate our world, the people and relationships within it. Similarly, Kay has often claimed that placing historical events and people in a secondary world, as he does in major works like Tigana and Under Heaven, allows him to interrogate those events in new and worthwhile ways. I find myself convinced by this and, while I agree with Kincaid that it is valuable to have some idea of what fantasy is and what its mission might be, it’s equally valuable to be able to use it in the ways it has been by Kay, Parker, Joyce, and many others.
As always is the case each year, I couldn’t help but observe a number of interesting and encouraging trends. In 2012 science fiction and fantasy continued to move slowly but hopefully away from the white male Anglo Saxon Mayberry of its youth and towards a more mature, diverse, and inclusive future. This trend was nowhere better evidenced than in the brace of strong original anthologies that focused on fiction from other points of view. The best of these included Nick Mamatas & Matsumi Washington’s The Future Is Japanese, Anil Menon & Vandana Singh’s Breaking the Bow, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown’s Three Messages and a Warning, Ivor Hartmann’s AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Lavie Tidhar’s The Apex Book of World SF, and Brit Mandelo’s Beyond Binary. While “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu, included here, was originally from The Future Is Japanese, it was only one of many on a fairly long shortlist of stories from these books that were actively considered for this book. The fact that these books were published and discussed during the last twelve months shows that, if nothing else, science fiction and fantasy is looking to become more inclusive, something which is long past due, even if there is still a long way to go.
The other trend I noticed was that writers, editors, and publishers, attempting to come to terms with the ever changing face of publishing today, looked to some interesting and slightly different ways to get their stories into the hands of readers. During the year David Hartwell and Tor.com published a short ebook-only anthology, The Palencar Project, that featured five stories based on a painting by John Jude Palencar. The stories were also offered free of charge on Tor.com. At around the same time Solaris Books in the UK published Solaris Rising 1.5, an ebook only anthology that was positioned as a “bridge” volume between the first and second books in the Ian Whates edited series. Finally, award-winning editor Gardner Dozois published Rip-Offs!, a very strong audio-only anthology which came out at the very end of the year, something John Scalzi did successfully several years ago with METAtropolis. While none of these approaches were new—and they stand in for countless similar examples—they nonetheless demonstrate creative ways of addressing an increasingly volatile and multifaceted market.
I could also point out how, with more and more venues for short fiction appearing, and others just a Kickstarter away, we continue to live through an extraordinary time for short story collections, with books like Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace, Margo Lanagan’s Cracklescape, Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule, Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry and Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, all able to stand with the very best the field has produced. I could also touch on how, despite strong books like Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk III: Steampunk Reloaded, it struck me as a weaker year for original anthologies. The short fiction scene also continues its inevitable change, with the distinction between print and online publication become more and more meaningless, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean Magazine establishing themselves as the new Big Four magazines to watch, although Beneath Ceaseless Skies was easily the most improved venue of 2012 and is nipping at their heels along with GigaNotoSaurus and others.
I think further evidence of ongoing vitality can be found in some of the fine novels I managed to read—among so many, many short stories—like Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling 2312—all very different works from different corners of our field.
Despite all of the challenges this field may face, despite its occasional failings, if work like this and much of the other work I saw during 2012 was anything to go by, science fiction and fantasy are in pretty good shape. As always, more good, interesting work was published than any one person could hope to read, let alone collect in a volume such as this, and as always, more was just around the corner. Some of that bounty is presented here. And to close, if there is value to be had from volumes like this one, and in discussions like the one that followed Paul Kincaid’s essay, it is that they prove there is still a lot to say about our field, and still enough people interested in having that conversation. I’ll be fascinated to see what discussions this book, and the ones that will follow it in coming years, might start.
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
December 2012