The Year's Best Science Fiction 6. [antikvár]

NTRODUCTIONSummation: 1988This was a year of contradictory signals and ambiguous omens for science fiction. On one hand, it was yet another record year, commercially, for the field. The familiar litany of Big Name SF writersStephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Stephen R. Donaldson, and so forthdominated nationwide bestseller lists again. Some 177 different publishers produced SF or fantasy in 1988, according to the newsmagazine Locus, turning out a record total of 1,936 books (1,186 of them new titles!), up 16 percent from last year. New book lines continued to appear, including a line of Tor Doubles (short novels published back-to-back, in the style of the old Ace Doubles line); a line of softcover reprints of the Isaac Asimov Presents hardcover novels from Worldwide Books; a line packaged by Byron Preiss Productions for Lynx Books, to be called Omeiga Books, edited by Dave Harris; and a new line of up to a dozen tides per year, coming up later in 1989 from Bantam Spectra.On the other hand, an uneasy awareness that a recession of some sizewhether major or minoris almost inevitably on the way seems to have spread over the American publishing industry, and many insiders seem to be emotionally battening down the hatches and waiting to ride out the coming storm, if they can. This uneasiness may be responsible for the buying slowdowns that are rumored to have affected several major publishers. There were plenty of ill omens to be found, if you looked for them. Postal rate increases, for instance, drove up mail-order book prices and magazine subscription rates throughout the field last year. Pageant Booksthe mass-market line produced by Crown Books in partnership with the giant bookstore chain Waldenbooksdied, as did several genre magazines. Tor announced cuts of 25 percent of its mass-market lists, and St. Martin's Press announced that it will drop its entire mass-market SF program. Waldenbooks announced that it will reduce the number of titles it buys, and increase the nonbook display space in its stores at the expense of book space. Sharecropping, the practice of hiring lesser-known authors to create new novels set "in the world of" some famous SF novel (for instance, a novel set in the world of Robert Silverberg's