The Year's Best Science Fiction - Softcover

Summation: 2000

Well, the millennium is definitely at hand (cue the swell of ominous, Apocalyptic music in the background), and even calendar purists can no longer deny that we're living in the twenty-first century.

It'll probably be hard to convey to younger readers a sense of how downright strange that seems to old fogies like me. For most of my life, the twenty-first century was THE FUTURE, that unimaginably distant territory in which most science fiction stories took place; now I find myself living there, in the remote, glittering FUTURE ... (which somehow feels different than you thought it would, more mundane and less goshwow fantastical, once you're actually rubbing up against it, in spite of technological innovations all around us that would have dropped the jaw of anybody in 1950--a lesson many SF writers and futurologists could usefully learn). To paraphrase Mark Twain, I wish the new century well, although I doubt I'll get to see all that much of it--but it's not my century. My century was the previous one.

But the twentieth century is gone, taking its freight of unprecedented and unanticipated horrors and wonders with it, and even dinosaurian refugees from that century, like me, must learn to look ahead, not back. We can go ahead, if we're lucky, for a while anyway--but back there's no returning.

The temptation to try to predict what the new century ahead is going to be like is almost irresistible, and I'll succumb to that temptation here and there in the pages that follow, but what makes me hesitant to really give in to it is realizing how poor a job prognosticators at the beginning of the twentieth century did peering ahead at what lay in store for them. In almost every case, even those who thought that they were being wildly daring and outrageous in their predications fell far short of what actually happened, missing both the marvels and the miseries, the triumphs and the tragedies, the unimaginable progress and the equally unimaginable atrocities that waited ahead. For someone standing in 1901 and peering ahead, these things were literally unimaginable; it was beyond the power of the human imagination to predict or fully appreciate how radical the changes that lay ahead really would be, changes that would come to alter almost out of recognition every aspect of the nineteenth-century world, sweeping it aside and replacing it with a new world instead. And I suspect that people at the beginning of the twenty-second century--if there are any people, as we understand the term, still around by then--will look back at today's predictions of what the twenty-first century is going to be like with similar amusement (if not outright scorn) at how naive and limited our imaginations turned out to be. So then, let's mostly content ourselves with taking a look at 2000, which is safely past, and thus can be confidently examined with 20/20 hindsight.

It was a pretty quiet year, for the most part. Once again, the science fiction genre didn't die, much to the disappointment of some commentators. In fact, the genre seems to be fairly stable at the moment commercially (knock wood!); artistically, even taking into account all of the tie-ins and media and gaming-associated books that crowd the shelves, there are still considerably more science fiction novels of quality being published now than were being published in, say, 1975 (including a few that would probably not have been allowed to be published at all back then), in a very wide range of styles and moods, by a spectrum of writers ranging from Golden Age giants to Young Turks with one book under their belts--quite probably more quality material (including a wide range of short work) than any one reader is going to be able to read in the course of one year, unless they make a full-time job of it. The last couple of years have been dominated by Merger Mania, but this year the corporations were mainly quiescent, like huge snakes digesting the goats they'd swallowed; there were no major changes in publishing, at the genre level, anyway, except in the troubled magazine market--no print SF lines lost or gained. (Most of the major action, both positive and negative, was in the online market, about which see more below.) There were no major changes in editorial personnel this year either, although last year saw a vigorous round of the traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs, with several Big-Time players leaving the scene (most of whom have yet to return in any significant way).

Most of the serious action this year was going on behind the scenes, like the legal battle over Napster--at first glance, something far removed from the SF world ... but not really, eh?, as I strongly suspect that if you want a good model for the problems that the book-publishing business is going to encounter tomorrow, you take a look at the problems that the music industry is dealing with today. (Already, the Science Fiction Writers of America is embroiled in a legal battle with pirate Web sites, with Harlan Ellison--good for you, Harlan!--being one of those leading the rush to the battlements ... although I suspect that as yet we've only seen some very early skirmishes in what's going to be a long and bloody war.) The turmoil in the stock market over the faltering dot.com market--with many big Internet players failing to meet expectations by huge margins and being forced to close up shop, and possible major trouble ahead forecast for others, like the online book-selling (and everything else-selling) superservice Amazon.com--also cast a long shadow into the SF world.

Major changes are looming over the publishing world like thunderheads coming up over the horizon, fundamental changes in the way that books reach the general reading public. This year you could hear those storms of change growling and rumbling off in the distance, mostly as yet producing only occasional gusts of wind and fitful bursts of rain, but not too many commentators would deny that those storms are going to break sooner or later--although you'll hear a wide range of predictions of how severe the weather is going to get, from soak-your-clothes-to-your-skin downpours to barely-wet-your-lawn passing showers. Print-on-demand publishers are appearing like mayflies--as are online sites that sell downloads to PCs, portable handheld computers, and other electronic text-readers--and they may turn out to have the life span of mayflies, too ... but it's a good bet that there will be others coming along behind them to replace those that falter and fall bythe wayside. And just behind these are marching other waves of change: new generations of better and more sophisticated handheld computers and electronic text-readers of all sorts (some of which may already be in stores by the time you read these words); print-on-demand systems in most major bookstores that can print most books in their extensive catalogues for you right on the spot, while you wait, "electronic paper"; genuinely reprogrammable "e-books" that will look and feel as much like print books as possible, and be as easy to carry around (even today, you can call into the Internet with a wireless modem and get new novels or stories downloaded into your handheld, as easily as making a phone call). And, no doubt, behind these changes there'll be coming other innovations and technologies that will end up having a major effect on the publishing world, stuff we haven't even heard of yet.

None but the most wild-eyed prognosticators believe that all this is going to make print books, or regular trade publishers, or bookstores that exist in the physical world, disappear (that's not going to...