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

G. David Nordley тАж Crossing Chao Meng Fu
Greg Egan тАж Yeyuka
Carolyn Ives Gilman тАж Frost Painting
Walter Jon Williams тАж Lethe
Geoffray A. Landis тАж Winter Fire
Ian R. MacLeod тАж Nevermore
Simon Ings тАж Open Veins
Ian McDonald тАж After Kerry
Sean Williams & Simon Brown тАж The Masque of Agamemnon
John Kessel тАж Gulliver at Home
Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malartrez тАж A Cold, Dry Cradle



The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: first and foremost,
Susan Casper, for doing much of the thankless scut work involved in producing this anthology; Michael
Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Vaughns Lee Hansen, Sheila Williams, jared Goldman, David
Pringle, Jonathan Strahan, Charles C. Ryan, Nancy Kress, David G. Hartwell, Jack Dann, Janeen
Webb, Warren Lapine, Ed Mcfadden, Tom Piccirilli, Dave Truesdale, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown,
Liz Holliday, Darrell Schweitzer, Corin See, and special thanks to my own editor, Gordon Van Gelder.
Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box
13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $43.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit
card orders [510] 339-9198) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew
Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730,
Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $35.00 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $42.00 first class) was
also used as a reference source throughout.
Doomsayers continued to predict the imminent demise of science fiction throughout 1997, some of
them even seeming to look forward to it with gloomy, headshaking,
I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn't-listen-to-me relish; but, although there were cutbacks-some of them
serious ones-it seems to me that the actual numbers and the actual real-world situation do not justify
these sorts of gloomy predications. To modify the words of Mark Twain, the Death of Science Fiction
has been greatly exaggerated.
The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for
more than a decade now in fact did not happen in 1997. In spite of cutbacks and even some failing or
faltering imprints (and new imprints, some of them quite major, were being added even as old ones
disappeared), science fiction and the related fields of fantasy and horror remain large and various genres,
with almost a thousand "books of interest" to the three fields published in 1997, according to the
newsmagazine Locus, and science fiction and fantasy books were still making a lot of money for a lot of
different publishers (although the market is changing and evolving, with mass-market titles declining and
trade paperback titles on the rise). Artistically and creatively, the field has never been in better shape,
with an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors producing an amazing spectrum of
first-rate work, ranging all the way from the hardest of hard science fiction through wild baroque Space
Opera and sociological near-future speculation to fantasy of a dozen different sorts, with uncountable
hybrids of all those sorts of stories (and with other genres as well, including the historical novel, the
mystery, and even the Western novel!) filling in the interstices. In terms of there being first-class work of
many different sorts available to be read, this is the Golden Age, nor are we out of it!
As usual, there were many contradictory omens out there to be read, and it is entirely possible to
read the very same signs and make either pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the future, depending
on what evidence you look at and what weight you arbitrarily decide to give it.
There were certainly plenty of Bad Omens around to look at. Original books declined by nearly 100