The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Read Online Free PDF Page B

movies, TV shows, and magazines, plus a huge archive of past reviews, and Best SF (bestsf.net/), which boasts another great archive of reviews and which is one of the few places that makes any attempt to regularly review short fiction venues. Pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent Online was inactive throughout 2008, and editor David Truesdale finally announced at the end of the year that, as many of us suspected, it was not going to return; a pity. But a new short-fiction review site, The Fix (thefix-online.com), launched by a former Tangent Online staffer, is still going strong, and short-fiction reviews can also be accessed on The Internet Review of Science Fiction (irosf.com), which also features novel reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, and critical articles. Other good general-interest sites include SFRevu (sfsite.com/sfrevu), where you’ll find lots of novel and media reviews, as well as interviews and general news; SFF NET (sff.net), which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com), another valuable review site; The Agony Column (trashotron.com/agony), media and book reviews and interviews; SFFWorld (sffworld.com), more literary and media reviews; SFReader (sfreader.com), which features reviews of SF books; SFWatcher (sfwatcher.com), which features reviews of SF movies; SFCrowsnest (sficrowsnest.com); newcomer SFScope (sfscope.com), edited by former Chronicle news editor Ian Randal Strock, which concentrates on SF and writing business news; Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (fantasyhotlist. blogspot.com), io9 (io9.com); and SciFiPedia (scifipedia.scifi.com), a Wiki-style genre-oriented online encyclopedia. One of the most entertaining SF sites on the Internet is Ansible (dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible . SF-oriented radio plays and podcasts can also be accessed at Audible (audi-ble.com), Escape Pod (escapepod.org), Star Ship Sofa (starship-sofa.com), and Pod Castle (podcastle.org). Long-running writing-advice and market news site Speculations has died.
    This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit , New Dimensions , and Universe in the 1970s. All of the new annual original series launched last year – Lou Anders’s Fast Forward , Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse , and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction – produced second volumes stronger than the initial volumes had been, a good sign. Even 2008’s second-tier anthologies – there were a lot of anthologies published this year – were often good enough to have been in contention for the title of year’s best anthology in other years.
    It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing – none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet and, in fact, a few are rumoured to not be selling so well. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies at hand to choose from.
    The best of them was probably Eclipse Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan, although there was only a whisker’s thickness of difference between it and Fast Forward 2 (Pyr), edited by Lou Anders. A half-step below them was The Starry Rift (Viking), edited by Jonathan Strahan; Sideways in Time (Solaris), edited by Lou Anders; The Solaris Book of Science Fiction: Volume 2 (Solaris), edited by George Mann; and Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction (Eos), edited by Jack Dann, all of them strong enough to have carried off the prize in a weaker year. Postscripts 15 , edited by Nick Gevers, a