"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

of Crank!, another eclectic and literarily sophisticated fiction semiprozine, published this year, although
one is promised for early in 1998; let's hope they can hold it together and not follow Century into the
black hole that seems to claim most ambitious fiction semiprozines these days.
The two fiction semiprozines that seem closest to making it up into the ranks of the professional
magazines, and which do get some nationwide distribution on the newsstands, are Absolute Magnitude:
The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures and Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science
Fiction. These are both slick, professional-looking, full-size magazines with full-color covers, both of
them-especially Absolute Magnitude, which often has very spiffy covers-frequently looking better than
any of the professional magazines, including Science Fiction Age. What's on the inside is a lot more
uneven, however, and the fiction in both magazines ranges from good to awful, with little overall
consistency of quality; neither magazine had a particularly good year in 1997 in fact-both being easily
outstripped in the quality of the fiction they published even by much-less prominent semiprozines such as
Tera Incognita and Tales of the Unanticipated-although there were interesting stories by Barry B.
Longyear, William F. Wu, and others in Absolute Magnitude and interesting stories by Paul Di Filippo,
Don D'Ammassa, and others in Pirate Writings.
Absolute Magnitude seems to have had a slight edge in overall quality over Pirate Writings this year,
although other years it has been the other way around. Pirate Writings does get more variety by
publishing mystery and generalized adventure stories as well as science fiction, but they also make the
mistake of devoting a section of the magazine to "short-short" stories, almost all of which have been
dreadful (there are very few good "abort-short" stories published in any given year, and so far Pirate
Writings has not managed to find any of themnot really surprising, since often there are none published at
all). The nonfiction is also uneven in both magazines, but Absolute Magnitude has an edge here because
Allen Steele's regular column is solid and interesting; Pirate Writings, on the other hand, loses points for
publishing the "Surreal World" column, which really should be called "Credulous World" instead, as it
reverentally trots out one old woo-woo chestnut-like the Philadelphia Experiment or the Men in
Black-after another: there's already too much of this crap floating around in the SF readership, and I
don't like to see it encouraged. Both magazines could stand to improve the quality of their book reviews.
Both magazines continued to struggle with their production schedules this year, with Pirate Writings
managing three issues out of their scheduled four and Absolute Magnitude managing two out of their
scheduled four. Absolute Magnitude also went through internal upheavals this year, with the rest of the
business partners involved in the magazine pulling out of the partnership, leaving Warren Lapine as both
editor and sole publisher. Lapine swears that the magazine will continue, though, and I tend to believe
him, especially as Lapine has recently expanded his empire to include Dreams of Decadence, an
all-vampire fiction magazine, and is in the process of reviving Weird Tales. I wish both of these magazines
well, and they deserve to survive and prosper, but they also need to work harder to improve, especially
in the area of making the quality of their fiction more consistant.
The three longest-established fiction semiprozines now are two Australian magazines, Aurealis and
Eidolon, and a Canadian magazine, On Spec. Eidolon was strong again in 1997-not quite as strong as it
had been in 1996, but strong enough to prove itself the best of the three magazines once again this year,
publishing strong fiction by Dirk Strasser, Simon Brown, Sean Williams, Rosaleen L4ove, Russell
Blackford, and others, and publishing a collaboration by Scan Williams and Simon Brown on their
Eidolon Online site that was one of the year's best stories. Perhaps this is a reflection of the recent boom
in Australian science fiction, where they appear to be enjoying an upsurge of creative energy and artistic
excitement. Aurealis also had a good year, publishing strong fiction by Peter Friend, Rick Kennett,
Michael Pryor, and others. As opposed to the Australian magazines, the Canadian magazine On Spec
seems to have gone into a bit of a slump for the last couple of years, and little of really exceptional quality
appeared there in 1997, although they did publish interesting work by Derryl Murphy, Steven R. Laker,
Ursula Pflug, and others. The idea that Canadian science fiction should be gray, depressing, dystopian,
and set in the near-future, that these somehow are defining national characteristics, looks like it's growing
toward codification in recent years, but it seems like a curiously self-limiting set of indicators to choose,