The Year's Best Science Fiction 12. [antikvár]

SUMMATION: 1994For the most part, this was a gray, quiet year, solidly sunk in the traditional mid-decade doldrums. As usual, there were plenty of omens to be found, both positive and negative, and plenty of prognosticators eager to read the entrails for youand again, also as usual, what conclusions you reached about whether things were looking good or looking bad for science fiction depended on which evidence you selectively chose to examine, and what weight you arbitrarily decided to give to it. Sometimes the future of SF publishing seems like Schrodinger's Catnot only can't you know what's going to be in the box until you open it, but I sometimes suspect that our expectations help to determine what we're going to find in there when we finally do pop the lid. Whether we find a live cat or a dead cat in the box is going to be determined, in some small part at least, by our own actions, by how determined we are not to settle for lowest-common-denominator entertainment, by how ready we are to insist loudly and vocally on adult entertainment of intelligence and then to back that demand with cash money out of our wallets, and finally by how resourceful and creative people at every level of the publishing world can be in learning to overcome the daunting (but not, I hope, insurmountable) problems that lie in wait in the new century to come.Whatever's going to happen in that new century, this year, in the closing decade of the current century, was a relatively quiet one. The game of Editorial Musical Chairs that has been underway for the last couple of years seems to have mostly played itself outfor the moment. (There were some exceptions, of courseChris Miller was forced out of Avon by a corporate realignment that did away with her job, Janna Silverstein left Bantam for a job with Wizards of the Coast and Anne L. Groell left Avon to take the empty chair at Bantam.) Some established book lines died, such as the acclaimed Dell Abyss imprint, which was pretty much abandoned after the resignation of editor Jeanne Cávelos, and other lines, such as the last year's newly launched Del Rey Discovery program, are seemingly being allowed to languish away. On the other hand, some lines