I subscribed to quite a few prozines faithfully from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s. I stopped, not because of a loss of interest in short f&sf, but because they were too time-consuming and did not leave me much time to read books. When I started reading prozines, only a few dozen books were published each year which did not originate in the prozines. Nowadays, book publishing dominates f&sf, so I’ve been buying dozens of books each year myself, and that only skims the surface of what are to me the most enticing books published.

Fortunately, it has gotten easier to keep track of what’s happening in the prozines, since best-of-the-year anthologies have sprouted like weeds the past half-dozen years, conveniently for me, since short fiction is still the cutting edge of f&sf in many, although not all, ways. The major annuals (in order of longevity) include:

> SFWA NEBULA SHOWCASE (39 volumes)
> Gardner Dozois’ BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR (22 volumes)
> Ellen Datlow’s (with Windling or Link/Gavin) BEST FANTASY AND HORROR (17 volumes)
> David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer’s YEAR’S BEST SF (8 volumes)
> David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer’s YEAR’S BEST FANTASY (4 volumes)
> Karen Haber’s (with Silverberg or Strahan) SCIENCE FICTION: THE BEST OF... (3 volumes)
> Karen Haber’s (with Silverberg or Strahan) FANTASY: THE BEST OF... (3 volumes)
> Jonathan Strahan’s BEST SHORT NOVELS (1 volume)

Some of those volume tallies might be a year off, but I’m too lazy to verify them all.

Obviously I cannot, and do not want, to read every single series for the same reason I do not read the prozines anymore. I’ll definitely read Dozois since I have a complete run, plus its length makes it the most valuable of the volumes. I’ll probably read Hartwell & Cramer’s fantasy, and Haber & Strahan’s science fiction as well, so between the three of them I should have a good overview of the state of f&sf in 2003.

CURRENTLY LISTENING: MARQUEE MOON, Television’s classic late-70s punk album, well worth its reputation.

CURRENTLY READING: April, 1951, issue of GALAXY MAGAZINE, which has some good stuff in it, especially Cyril Kornbluth’s classic “The Marching Morons”, William Tenn’s “Betelgeuse Bridge” (a typical satire, although I did not particularly like the “humans always win” ending, possibly because it reminded me too much of the “America always wins” philosophy of our current government) and Poul Anderson’s “Inside Earth.”