Gardner Dozois, for it was he writing in the first of his The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (now in its twenty-eighth year), followed that assessment with two dozen stories—from established writers like Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson, alongside an incredible array of writers I’d never heard of like Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson—which rather seemed to make those gloomy assessments irrelevant. How could a field that was producing stories like “Cicada Queen,” “Hardfought,” “Carrion Comfort” and “Black Air” be anything other than healthy?

I could appreciate then, as I do now, that he was talking about the health of the publishing industry as it was experienced by writers , rather than the state of the art of SF and fantasy writing as it was experienced by readers , but I still did wonder at the time how the caution of the introduction reconciled with the optimism of the story selection.

I was confronted with this myself when, unexpectedly, in the summer of 1997I found myself drafting an introduction to The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy with my co-editor Jeremy G. Byrne and falling into exactly the same kind of assessment, talking about the publishing business rather than the art. I’ve now sat down on sixteen separate occasions, both by myself and with others, and I still struggle to balance the urge to talk about the state of the publishing business rather than focus on the year in short fiction, probably because of a simple but fundamental problem: the year in short fiction is barely done and in many ways is too close to meaningfully assess, even as I attempt to do just that.