"Gardner Dozois - The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Although cyber-optimists of the "Print books will be extinct by 2004! With Internet
shopping, nobody will ever bother leaving their homes again!" sort may have been a
bit too giddy, those semi-Luddites who have spent the last few months smugly
anticipating the forecast demise of Amazon.com (proving that all this Internet stuff
was "just a fad") are probably going to be disappointed as well. Amazon.com may
(or may not) die, but there will still be online booksellers. That's not going to change,
not now; too many people have become accustomed to the ease of ordering books
online, one of the most rapidly growing areas in the whole book-selling industry,
and somebody will appear to take up the slack and provide that service for them,
even if Amazon.com and all the other present online booksellers went down. Books
will continue to be produced and sold online, in one form or another, in one way or
another, no matter how the fortunes of an individual publisher rise or fall; the
technology is just too easy and too seductive not to use, and sooner or later
somebody will figure out a reliable way to make money doing so. Although it may
not be the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of starry-eyed would-be dot.com
millionaires, the High Road to Effortless Business Success, the Internet is not going
away. ItтАФor its successor technologies тАФ will be a part of our lives (probably an
ever-more-integral, indispensable, and yet taken-for-granted-and-largely-ignored part)
for the foreseeable future, and for our children's future as well. Barring all-out war,
an asteroid strike, a universally potent pesti-lence, environmental collapse, or some
other disaster that sends civilization reeling back to the Dark Ages or worse, things
are not going to go back to The Way They Were. The clock cannot be turned back,
once you set it tickingтАФyour only option is to smash the clock altogether.

So fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy decade. But it just mightтАФwith
luck тАФ end up taking us to some places worth going to.

****

It was another bad year in the magazine market, with sales down again almost across
the board (in areas far outside the genre, as well), and with only a few hopeful notes
to be found here and there.

There were two major losses in the magazine market in 2000, the demise of Science
Fiction Age (which happened early enough in 2000 that we covered it in last year's
anthology) and then, towards the end of the year, the death of Amazing StoriesтАФ
which was axed in its recent incarnation as a glossy mixed SF/media magazine soon
after parent company Wizards of the Coast was sold to Hasbro (Hasbro also axed
its card-gaming magazine, Top Deck; apparently a severe slump in the card-gaming
market was responsible for both decisions). This was perhaps not quite as much of
a hammer blow to the market as the cancellation of Science Fiction Age, since
Amazing Stories in its current version was less central and important to the genre
than Science Fiction Age had become, but it still sent shock waves through the field.
There was a flicker of hope late in the year, as the online site Galaxy OnLine
announced that they were going to buy Amazing Stories and reinvent it as an online
site selling versions of the magazine in CD format, but this deal fell through when
Galaxy OnLine itself died (see below). Amazing Stories has died and then come
miraculously back to life several times in the twenty-five years I've been editing Best
of the Year anthologies, but this may finally be the end of the line for the grand old