The Year's Best Science Fiction 17. [antikvár]

summation: 1999Well, the dreaded Y2K-crisis deadline is past, and so is the changing of the millennium (except for the calendar purists, who still shoulder the proud and lonely burden of insisting it's not the twenty-first century yet, when everybody else on earth thinks that it is), and, so far, the world has not come to an end, the angel has not descended with the seventh seal, and civilization has not collapsed more to the point for this particular book, the publishing industry has not collapsed either, and science fiction has stubbornly refused to die, although strangely hopeful notices of its imminent demise have been put forth every year for more than a decade now.(Of course, just because these Symbolically Significant Dates have passed, doesn't mean that the human race couldn't still be destroyed by a dinosaur-killer asteroid tomorrow, or that civilization, the economy, and/or publishing couldn't still collapse at any time it wouldn't do to become sanguine. Nevertheless, that's probably not the way to bet it.)Even as you read these words, someone, somewhere, is telling his firiends with gloomy relish that science fiction is dying, is on its deathbed, gurgling its last, is sure to blink out like a guttering candle any second now. So far, though, not only has this not happened, but, all things considered and the proper disclaimers being made, science fiction as a genre actually looks rather healthy, here on the brink of a new century and a new millennium.The next line of defense is to say, well, the science fiction genre may be making a lot of money, but all the quality has been leached out of it, and nothing gets published anymore except for crap and media tie-in books, so that even though the genre may not be about to physically die, its soul and mind and heart are dead, or dying. Except that this isn't true either. Even discounting all of the tie-ins and media and gaming-associated books, there are considerably more science fiction novels of quality being published now than were being published in 1975 (including a few that would not have been allowed to be published back then), possibly more than were being published even ten years ago, and quite probably more than any one reader is going to be able to read in the course of one year, unless he makes a full-time job of it. (And yes, the majority of the stuff on the shelves although probably not as much as the famous 90 percentmay be crap, but then, the majority of the stuff on the shelves has always been crap, no matter what decade you're talking about. Not even getting into the issue that one person's crap is another person's valued entertainmentsome people like media tie-in novels!) Although the widely held belief is that most SF writers can't sell their books anymore, the fact is that more writers, by a large margin, are making far more money fi-om writing SF than was the case in 1975, and that science fiction booksmi:>k M