I love science fiction short stories so it’s a pleasure to discover BestScienceFictionStories.com. And yesterday Rusty posts his list of “The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Stories.” Even though the print magazines are losing subscribers short stories are finding new venues on the web. This site is slowly recognizing and reviewing quality short stories and helping their readers find where to read them. What an admirable undertaking. Now I just need to campaign to get all online publishers to create a “Send to Kindle” button.
Over at the new F&SF blog John Joseph Adams has an entry “Free Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi” that I hope becomes a regular feature of the blog. So far JJA has three authors listed at his Free Fiction section. This week he links to three free stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, one of F&SF’s contributors who is making a few online waves in the past few weeks with the release of his new collection. I have already reviewed one of the free stories in my entry “Science Fiction and Global Warming.”
Over at Black Gate Dave Truesdale provides his rather extensive list of 214 stories that he categorizes in various ways for “2007 SF & Fantasy Recommended Reading List.” Damn, I wished I had the time to do this kind of reading. Maybe Rusty at Best Science Fiction Stories can find links for many of these. John Joseph Adams extracts all the F&SF stories from the list which will help me find them in my back issues.
Over at Locus Magazine they have their Recommended Reading: 2007 list – scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see their short fiction favorites.
If you are concerned about the viability of the short fiction market you may want to read “The Rise of the Genre eZine: Will it ever find a profitable model?” over at Bloggasm by I assume Simon Owens. He focuses on online markets, but I wished he had interviewed the print publishers about their status and their plans for co-existing in the online world.
Jason Sanford does cover the health of the print mags in “2007 SF/F magazine circulation numbers.” It doesn’t look good. I was worried back in 1994 when I covered the numbers in “Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories,” when I thought those numbers spelled doom, but the magazines are still surviving even with a fraction of their 1994 subscribers. Please subscribe to a magazine! Support the world of SF short stories.
The best stories of 2007 will be published in print in several annual best of anthologies, but they will all have 2008 in their title. John Joseph Adams at his blog has the lineup for Rich Horton’s SF and Fantasy anthologies in Best of the Year 2008. Over at Asimov’s forum Gardner Dozois gives us a list of stories for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection for 2008. Kathryn Cramer offers a list of what will be in Year’s Best SF 13 edited by Carmer and David Hartwell.
If I had more time and energy I’d cross-tab all those best of 2007 stories to see which ones were cited the most. If anyone is doing that please let me know. I don’t read as much SF as I used to. To be honest I find non-fiction about science more exciting in the years since I turned fifty. But I still love to keep up with the SF short story field. Strangely enough, my Kindle is getting me to read more SF. It’s rather ironic that a science fictional looking device is getting me to read more SF, as well as reading online from a world wide network. If I could some how tell my 1965 self who discovered science fiction short stories in little pulp magazines about how his future self would be reading SF it would be very amusing.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
James,
Thanks for mentioning my post about great places to find SF online. I agree that it is sad to see the print magazines losing subscribers, but I am also excited about all the excellent SF short stories that are available on the web. I, for one, have read loads of SF short stories online – perhaps more than I ever read the printed ones – mostly because of the price. It also allows me to read some excellent stories that haven’t made it to the major magazines. I’m finding that there are quite a few really talented authors out there, and I am quite happily plugging away reading some great stories and telling others where to find them.
I do a “best of year” online listing – but my list of 2008, e.g., is of stories published during 2008. And my lists tend to be much smaller than those of professional anthology editors.
My best of 2008; 2007.
Tinkoo, I like the way you’re organizing your favorite recommended stories year by year. Are you going to go back in time too and fill in the past? I wouldn’t mind doing something like that myself if I had more time and energy.
Yesterday I found this at Listology:
http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.18128
What they started doing was to list the “Best Of” anthologies for each year starting with 1960. They are missing quite a bit so the idea could be improved. They need to start earlier with the Judith Merril’s Year’s Best SF beginning in 1956-1968. Didn’t Groff Conklin do some earlier yearly best anthologies?
Even better would be to list the stories from all those volumes. Maybe someone’s already done it. Be sure and let me know if you have.
Asimov and Greenberg did an anthology of best annual stories starting with 1939 through 1963.
It might be possible with other cross year anthologies to build a list back to 1926.
Jim
I’ve ToCs of some anthologies listed & read portions ranked. Plus a ranking of all sf shorts & novels I’ve read since I began posting. And I’ve a tiny best of 2006 list too.
I don’t have anything similar to Listology, but I do have a listing of most Dozois & Hartwell best of year lists.
Generally, I don’t intend to do annual listings of times gone by. These best of year lists are my own picks; not of anthology editors. Less than 10% of admissible stories I read make it to these best of year lists (I think only one or two from may be two dozen I read from this year’s Nebula list made it here; similar was the case with last year’s Hugo finalists).
Note that anthology editors are constrained in ways I’m not: they need some big name authors on cover to make people pick up the book in stores, & they need to be able to actually license a story they like (not always possible). My lists care only about the story itself, & nothing else. But my reading is much more limited, meant only for my own entertainment – so fewer stories.
Great links. While I love short fiction and much prefer to read it in book format, it is great that so much of it is finally showing up online so that if one does hear about some great story there is actually a chance to go check it out without struggling to find the book or, more often than not, magazine, that the story was published in.