Year’s Best SF 14: Introduction

Editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer provide a brief summary of the year 2008 in science fiction. Most of the economic news is predictably grim. Much of the information about print magazines and online magazines is now out of date.

Interestingly, the only novel and single-author collection mentioned in the entire introduction is emphasized here: “High points Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s first collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, possibly the two most important first books in our field in 2008.” Gregory’s book is moving up the “to be read” pile and readers of this blog have already seen mention of Bacigalupi.

Overall, Hartwell and Cramer say, 2008 was a fine year for short fiction, pointing to the magazines and original anthologies. They single out The Starry Rift, Eclipse 2, Fast Forward 2, and Clockwork Phoenix, published in the United States. They also cite original anthologies from Australia and Canada, Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again and Claude Lalumière’s Tesseracts 12 respectively.

They present their editorial philosophy, which has appeared in some form in each volume: “This book is full of science fiction -- every story in this book is clearly that and not something else. We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life.”

Link: Year's Best SF 14 summation and table of contents