The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection Read Online Free PDF Page A

computer games or anime, many of which also feature interviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. The best such site is easily Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus , where you can access an incredible amount of information – including book reviews, critical lists, obituaries, links to reviews and essays appearing outside the genre, and links to extensive database archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards – it’s rare when I don’t find myself accessing Locus Online several times a day. Other major general-interest sites include SF Site (www.sfsite.com), SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), SFCrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.com), SFScope (www.sfscope. com), io9 (http://io9.com), Green Man Review (http://greenman review. com), The Agony Column (http://trashotron.com/agony), SFFWorld.com (www.sffworld.com), SFReader.com (www.sfreader.com), SFWatcher.com (www.sfwatcher.com), and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (www.fantasyhotlist.blogs-pot.com). One of the best of the general-interest sites, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, has unfortunately died. Another, Science Fiction Weekly , first merged with news site Sci Fi Wire to form a new site called Sci Fi Wire, and then transformed to Syfy (www.syfy.com) when its parent channel changed its name from the Sci Fi Channel to Syfy as well, dropping all its columnists and book reviews along the way to concentrate exclusively on media news and reviews – and thus making itself largely uninteresting to me. A great research site, invaluable if you want bibliographic information about SF and fantasy writers, is Fantastic Fiction (www. fantasticfiction.co.uk). Reviews of short fiction as opposed to novels are very hard to find anywhere, with the exception of Locus , but you can find reviews of both current and past short fiction at Best SF (www.bestsf net), as well as at pioneering short-fiction review site Tangent (www.tangentonline. com), which had gone on a long hiatus but returned to active status in 2009 – ironically, just as its rival The Fix, launched by a former Tangent staffer, seems to have gone inactive. Other sites of interest include: SFF NET (www.sff.net) which features dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers; the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org), where genre news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Ansible (http://news.ansible. co.uk/), the online version of multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s long-running fanzine Ansible; and a number of sites where podcasts and SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed: Audible.com (www.audible.com), Escape Pod (http://escapepod.org), StarShipSofa (www.starshipsofa.com), and PodCastle (http://podcastle.org).
    The much-heralded ‘New Golden Age’ of original anthologies may have reached its high-water mark in 2008, and even receded a bit. There were still plenty of anthologies out, especially from small presses and books available as downloads online, but several of the most prominent high-end original series, upon which many hopes were pinned, have died. Of the three much-talked-about original anthology series launched in 2007, Fast Forward , edited by Lou Anders, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction , edited by George Mann, and Eclipse , edited by Jonathan Strahan, only Eclipse survives at the end of the year. A shame, because both other series had a lot to recommend them.
    The fact is, although many good individual stories were published, it was something of a lackluster year for original anthologies as a whole, with no clear-cut standouts. In terms of literary quality, judging the stories as stories, without taking genre classification into consideration, the strongest of the year’s anthologies was clearly Eclipse Three (Night Shade Books), edited by Jonathan Strahan – I personally found it somewhat disappointing, though, that