The Year's Best Science Fiction 14. [antikvár]

SUMMATION: 1996Nineteen ninety-six was a year when some of the birds that have been hovering ominously over the genre for a number of years came home to roost. It would be premature to say that the recession/bust/slump that some pessimistic genre pundits have been predicting for more than a decade has finally arrivedscience fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror are still large and varied genres, with over 1,100 "books of interest" to the three fields published in 1996, according to the newsmagazine Locwi, some of which sold very well indeed. There are still many contradictory omens out there to be read (the number of science fiction books published this year actually increased for instance, from 239 to 253, although there were declines in fantasy and horror, working out to a 6 percent drop overall), with new publishing lines being launched even as some of the old ones dwindle, and it is still possible to read the same signs and make either pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the future, depending on what evidence you look at and what weight you arbitrarily decide to give it.Nevertheless, SF has had better years than 1996, which saw an extremely bad year in the magazine market, and saw the sale of mass market paperbacks plummet dramatically (although some hardcovers and trade paperbacks continued to sell well), with record returns, to the point where many industry insiders were saying that mass market was no longer a viable publishing category. Domestic distribution networks, responsible for getting books and magazines to newsstands and bookstores, underwent major upheavals this year and last, with some disappearing and others merging or swallowing up smaller independent distributors, all with very significant consequences, particularly in the precarious magazine market. There were some major changes at the very top levels of publishing houses, and some big mergers, the consequences of which may take years to work themselves out. And the dream of electronic publishing remained still largely a promise for the future, although its prophets are still vocal (and there were interesting developments here and therethis anthology, for instance, features three stories that have never been published in print form before, existing before then only as phosphor dots on a screen, an indication that the electronic market is becoming a more viable and more important place to search for quality SF).So, the long-predicted Big Bust has not come yet (the comics and gaming industries were hit much harder last year than SF has been to date), and SF remains a big genre, but of course all of the above omens make publishers nervous. The poor sales of mass-market originals that aren't media tie-ins are particularly worrisome, and there's likely to be some belt-tightening and line-trinraiing going on next year, as publishers either react to poor sales or try to dodge the bullet. Some publishers seem to think that they can boost the reliability of performance by shifting their emphasis away from adult SF to media tie-in books of various sorts, which are considered a "safe sale," and this may work for a whileuntil they glut and oversell the market with such items, and readers abruptly get tired of media tie-ins . . . and then the shit will really hit the fan. (Something similar seems to be happening in early 1997 with the once-booming Goose-