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

into the next century. The SF community on the Web, in particular, is growing and expanding with
dizzying speed, growing even as you watch it, and is not only getting larger, but is also (perhaps more
importantly) growing more interconnected, forging links from site to site, with traffic moving easily
between them, growing toward becoming a real community-and a community with no physical
boundaries, since it's just as easy to click yourself to a site on the other side of the Atlantic or on the
other side of the world as it is to click to one next door. This growth and evolution of a tightly
interconected on-line SF community is a development that may prove to have significant consequences
in the not-too-distant future. So even though this whole area at the moment probably produces less
worthwhile fiction annually than a couple of good anthologies or a few good issues of a top-level
professional print magazine, it's worth keeping an eye on this developing market, and even taking a closer
look at it.
As has been true for a couple of years now, your best bet for finding good online-only science fiction,
stories published only in electronic format, would be to go to Omni Online http://w.omnimag.com),
where the stories are selected by veteran editor Ellen Datlow, longtime fiction editor of the now-defunct
print version of Omni. To date, Omni Online "publishes" the best fiction I've been able to find on the
Web, including this year's strong stories by Simon Ings, Brian Stableford, Paul Park, Michael Bishop,
Michael Kandel, and others, but it seemed to publish fewer stories this year than last; and with the recent
death of Omni founder Kathy Keeton, a strong supporter of the Omni Online concept, some insiders
have speculated that perhaps General Media is losing interest in the Omni site and that it may be in
danger of being closed down. This conjecture has been officially denied, though, and I hope that the
Omni site stays up and running, as, at the moment, it is the most reliable place I know of on the Internet
to find professional-level SF, fantasy, and horror. (There's other stuff there as well: nonfiction pieces,
interviews, reviews, a place where you can "walk" through a virtual representation of the Titanic, and so
on, and they also do regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or "chats" with various prominent
authors).
A new innovation there this year are "round-robin" stories, written by four authors in collaboration,
each writing a section in turn, and cycling in that fashion until the story is done. "Round-robin" stories
rarely hold up well against " real" stories, since usually some of the pieces don't really match very well,
and these don't either, but they're fun and much better-executed than stories of this sort usually are.
Authors who participated in the round-robins this year included Pat Cadigan, Maureen F. Mchugh, Terry
Bisson, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Murphy, Jonathan Lethem, and others, so at the very least, they offered
you a rare opportunity to watch top creative talents at play.
The only other "on-line magazine" that really rivals Omni Online as a fairly reliable place in which to
find good professional-level SF is Tomorrow SF (http:/ /w.tomorrowsf.com), edited by veteran editor
Algis Budrys, the on-line reincarnation of another former print magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction.
This is also a very interesting and worthwhile site, although the fiction here is not quite as strongly to my
taste as that of the Omni site, something that was true of their respective print incarnations as well. Still,
the stuff here is always solidly professional, and they published ("posted?" "promulgated?") good work
this year by Kandis Elliot, Michael H. Payne, Robert Reed, Paul Janvier, K. D. Wentworth, and others.
Tomorrow SF is also engaged in an experiment that, if successful, could have profound implications for
the whole electronic publishing area. Starting last year, they "published" the first three on-line issues of
Tomorrow SF for free; then, this year, they have begun charging a "subscription fee" for access to the
Web site, hoping that the audience will have been hooked enough by the free samples that they will
continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. The wise money is betting that this will not work,
the argument being that so much stuff is available to be read for free on the Internet-oceans and oceans
of it, in fact-that nobody is going to pay to access a site; they'll just click to a site where they can read
something for free instead. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, however. It's true that there are
oceans and oceans of free fiction available on the Internet, but most of it is dreadful, slush-pile quality at
best, and if Budrys has sufficiently convinced a large-enough proportion of the audience that he can
winnow out the chaff and find the Good Stuff for them, they may well be willing to pay so that they don't