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Introduction

Jonathan Strahan

I started reading science fiction (SF) when I was quite young. Like many readers, I discovered the magic and wonder of distant stars and epic voyages on the shelves of my local public library where Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, and so many others awaited me. I was, perhaps, seven.

My earliest recollections of reading involve SF and fantasy and, as far as I can remember, it made up the majority of my reading through my youth and on through my days at university. It was only when I hit my twenties, though, that I began to identify myself as an "SF reader." This may not seem a particularly important realization, but it was at that point—around the same time that I first encountered trade journal Locus—that I became aware that SF was a genre with a history and a body of canonical work.

More importantly, there was this idea that works of SF were in dialogue with one another; that writers read the major works of SF being published and wrote new work in response. For example, clearly Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War was, at least in part, a response to Robert Heinlein's 1959 Hugo Award-winning novel Starship Troopers. This kind of ongoing dialogue gave SF a sense of development, of evolution. A reader could see that modern SF started with something like E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space but progressed to Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space, then to Heinlein's classics and on through the work of Larry Niven, John Varley, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and now writers like Ted Kosmatka and Daryl Gregory.

This idea that SF is in dialogue with itself, that it in some sense progresses and evolves, is an important one. It's what gives readers the sense that SF has an evolutionary centre, a core. In SF this dialogue centers on ideas or concepts, and is reflected in how those ideas or concepts are handled in the fiction itself. A good recent example of this is the way that the Vingean singularity has become a commonplace in the field. It is harder to see this kind of dialogue occurring in fantasy. I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, and most importantly, historically the SF field has involved a small, discrete community of writers who knew one another and discussed their works and ideas regularly. On the surface of it, this seems to have been much less common in fantasy. Secondly, there are definitional problems. Put simply, it's easier to say what SF is and what it's doing, than it is to say what fantasy is and what it's doing. That said, a convincing argument could be made that there is a much less intense and direct dialogue at play, with vampire stories influencing vampire stories, ghost stories influencing ghost stories, and so on.

How does this apply to the book you're now holding? Well, a year's best volume like this one is an attempt by one informed reader to identify the best work published in the field in a given year, to put it in context, and to sketch out where SF and fantasy might be going. There are any number of other ways that the best work in the field can be identified and put in context—through reviews in the pages of magazines like Locus, through awards, and through readers' dialogue with one another—but books like this one are an important part of that process.

Each year, starting in the summer of 2003, I have attempted to read every new SF and fantasy short story published in the English language. I have failed. Locus suggests that there are around 3,000 new stories published every year. I've read close to that number, but each year it has been increasingly clear to me that this only represents a small percentage of the stories being published that could be considered to be SF and fantasy. If you include all of the stories published in books, magazines, newspapers, online, and as audio or visual recordings, there is simply too much material to count, much less consume. This, of course, is not a new observation. It's one I've made myself in introductions to earlier year's best volumes. The real question now is what does that mean for SF or for fantasy? And, how has that enormous increase in the quantity and variety of work being published impacted the book you now hold?

I believe that the flood of new SF and fantasy that has been published over the past decade has played a part in changing the mechanism that allowed SF's dialogue with itself to continue. The enormous volume of work published makes it impossible for a professional writer to keep up with, never mind comment on, the best work in the field. The enormous variety of work being published means that work, no matter how good, is often only relevant to a small part of the work published before it. In effect, the direct dialogue from old to new works has been disrupted, and the nature of the dialogue has broadened enormously. As critic Gary K. Wolfe pointed out to me in conversation last year, there was a time when a novel like Orson Scott Card's Empire would have inspired or provoked any number of works in response. While still a relatively new novel, and while it's still possible that dialogue may still occur, it seems much more likely that it won't. What this means for SF, and to a lesser extent fantasy, is that the centre as we know it can not hold. SF and fantasy are broadening, changing, diverging. I suspect that many of the new movements identified in SF and fantasy over the past few years—steampunk, new space opera, the new weird, and so on—are at least in part a side effect of this.

And you can see it in these pages. A story like Ted Chiang's masterful "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" sits at the boundaries of SF and fantasy. Written in a manner that recalls Scheherazade and her Arabian Nights, we nonetheless get a rigorous, well-thought-out tale of a science fictional device operating in a distant time. Similarly, Daniel Abraham deftly sketches a "fairy tale of economics" that is equally disciplined, while also possessing the stuff of magic, and Theodora Goss happily and effortlessly recasts Coleridge and Kublai Khan in "Singing of Mount Abora." These are stories where you can see the centre not holding, the field broadening.

The purpose of a book like this one is to reflect that change, while also presenting the best in the field. This year's selection of stories covers everything from traditional fantasy with tales of witches, gods, and dragons—in Neil Gaiman's "The Witch's Headstone," Michael Swanwick's "Urdumheim," and Elizabeth Bear's "Orm the Beautiful"—to SF adventures with microcosmic spacecraft, enigmatic alien cultures, and complex personal puzzles—in Greg Egan's "Glory," Chris Roberson's "The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small," and Daryl Gregory's "Dead Horse Point." The stories are in turn dark, funny, adventurous, challenging, and consoling. They do what SF and fantasy are supposed to do.

While I was reading for this book I began to wonder whether the times SF and fantasy are experiencing make The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year more or less relevant and important for readers, and for the field. After twelve months of reading, and far, far too many stories, I'm convinced more than ever than books like this one are important and necessary. Too few readers can afford to, are willing to, or are interested in reading everything published. It's too much, and too hard. But there are still great stories being published, and in these days of dissolution it's more important than ever to try to understand what is happening in the field.

And should all that sound a bit academic, this book, more than anything else, is an attempt to entertain and to engage. The stories collected here are the ones that I enjoyed the most during the year, the best and most delightful. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
October 2007

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