"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best Fantasy 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

The very small press zines, strongly reminiscent of the fine literary little magazines of the 1970s, and led in
this fantasy generation by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, have been a
growing force for several years, and this year were particularly prominent. Excellent zines include Say…,
Flytrap, Electric Velocipede, and Full Unit Hookup, but there are many others. We have a strong short
fiction field today because the genre small presses and semiprofessional magazines (such as Alchemy,
Talebones, Weird Tales, and Orb) are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality short stories
published in fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

In early 2005, as we write, professional fantasy and science fiction publishing as we have always known
it is still concentrated in ten mass market and hardcover publishing lines (Ace, Bantam, Baen, DAW, Del
Rey, Eos, Pocket, which distributes Ibooks, Roc, Tor, and Warner), and those lines are publishing fewer
titles in paperback. But they do publish a significant number of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, and all
the established name writers, at least, appear in hardcover first. The Print-on-Demand field is beginning
to sort itself out, and Wildside Press (and its many imprints, such as Prime) is clearly the umbrella for
many of the better publications, including original novels and story collections.

The small press has been since the 1980s a force of growing strength and importance in the field, in part
due to the availability of computers within reach of the average fannish budget and in part due to the new
economies of instant print, now prevalent in the U.S. A perceptible increase in the number and quality of
small press publications helped to create the impression that the fantasy fiction field is growing.

And in 2004 the small press was the most significant publisher of anthologies, though the two best original
anthologies of fantasy—The Faery Reel, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling, and Flights, edited
by Al Sarrantonio—came from big publishers. Those two, and a slew of ok books originating from the
tekno-books packaging operation by various editors and publishers, accounted for a majority of the
production of the trade publishers. The small press, however, originated dozens of good anthologies—for
example, McSweeney’s Astonishing Tales, edited by Michael Chabon, and All Star Zeppelin Stories,
edited by Jay Lake and David Moles.
The continuing small press trend, evident in, for instance, Polyphony #4, edited by Deborah Layne, and
Leviathan 4, edited by Jeff VanderMeer, among others, was toward non-genre, or genre-bending, or
slipstream fantastic fiction. This is not a commercial trend, but a literary one. And it is an ironic
counterpart to the trend evident in McSweeney’s, of established literary writers breaking into genre. The
economics are indistinguishable (the pay is low). There are a lot of promising signs, though, and talented
new writers in unexpected places. Now that we have finished our fifth annual volume, we remain
confident of the quality of future books. Now we invite you to visit the flourishing culture, grand cities,
and beautiful landscapes in Year’s Best Fantasy 5.

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn E. Cramer
Pleasantville, NY

The Dragons of Summer Gulch
Robert Reed

Robert Reed (tribute site: www.starbaseandromeda.com/reed.html) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he
turns out story after high-quality story, seeming inexhaustible. His first collection was The Dragons of
Springplace (1999); a new collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, is out in 2005. He has published a steady
stream of novels since 1987, the most recent of which is Sister Alice (2003), and his new book in 2005
is The Well of Stars, a sequel to his most famous novel, Marrow (2000). This year he appears in both
our Year’s Best Fantasy and our Year’s Best SF volumes, and he had several stories in consideration for