"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 10th Annual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

the yearтАЩs events.

Yes, things of ill omen happened in 1992тАФthere were major corporate
shakeups and cutbacks at Bantam and at Pulphouse Publishing, for instance, with
unadmitted buying slowdowns or freezes clearly in place at other publishing houses,
and there may be worse to come. Some book editors were fired, or participated in
the usual game of Editorial Musical Chairs, with former Roc editor John Silbersack
moving to Warner, for instance, former Warner editor Brian Thomsen moving to
TSR, former Bantam editor Amy Stout going to Roc, and former Ace editor Peter
Heck going from Ace back to editing the Waldenbooks SF newsletter. For the first
time in several years, the overall number of books in the related SF/fantasy/horror
genres did not increase, and even began to creep back a little. Money was generally
tight this year, and many mid-list writers were forced to take part-time or full-time
jobsтАФif they could find themтАФin order to make ends meet. Fewer writers and
editors went to conventions and professional gatherings, and when they did go, they
were more likely to spend their time glumly sitting around discussing how depressing
everything was.

And yet, certainly things could have been a lot worse. The American SF
publishing industry has yet to be hit with the kind of really major and crippling
collapse that afflicted British SF publishing in l99l (although, of course, it could
always be still to come), and even the British SF publishing industry is showing a
few tentative signs of at least partial recovery. It certainly couldnтАЩt be true to say that
the SF publishing world in general had gone bust this yearтАФthe decline in the
number of titles published overall is really quite minor so far, in the United States, at
least, and although most of the major publishers did cut their lines back in 1992,
many of the small-press publishers and smaller publishing houses were expanding at
the sane time, so that the overall decline in titles is almost negligible. Some genre
books continued to sell quite well, and there were many genre titles on nationwide
bestseller lists throughout l992 (although, increasingly, many of these are
TV/movie-related books, or gaming books, which is worrisome). The magazine
market suffered (the imminent death and vanishing of the science fiction magazine
was predicted again, as it has been predicted nearly every year since I first entered
the SF world professionally, in the late sixties), the yearтАЩs anthologies were rather
weak, and overall it wasnтАЩt a terribly good year for short fiction in general (although
so many stories now appear in the field annually, hundreds and hundreds of them,
that even in a weak year thereтАЩs still more than enough good stories among the chaff
to fill a volume of this size easily), or for genre movies either (although it was a fairly
strong year for novels).
 Still, as someone whoтАЩs been assembling Best of the Year anthologies, and
Summations, since 1976, I can assure you that science fiction has seen a number of
considerably worse years. Nevertheless, industry people did seem to be gloom-ier
than usual this year, perhaps gloomier than they ought to have been realisti-cally.
Perhaps it was the fact that several of the most beloved figures in the field died this
year, including Isaac Asimov and Fritz Leiber; perhaps it was the deepening of the
nationwide recession generally, throughout 1992, or the Los Angeles riots, or the
Presidential elections, about which many people were depressed right up until they
heated up at last, almost to November. Whatever it was, several commentators were
predicting the imminent death of the science fiction genre this year, in articles in
semiprozines and fanzines, in letters and in postings on the electronic computer