Summary: Jim Baen's Universe, 2008

Jim Baen's Universe has now been around for nearly three years. It continues to be a promising outlet for online fiction, definitely overall in the spirit of Baen the book publishers, though by no means in their fiction restricted to "Baen authors" or to military fiction or to strictly stories that could be parts of Baen novels. The editors are Eric Flint and Mike Resnick.

They published a total of 56 new stories this year, for about 471,000 words of short fiction. There were also two reprints (Todd McCaffrey's "Tribute" from the 2006 anthology Liftport, and Bud Webster's "The Lordly Loofah" from Helix), so just about 465,000 words of regular "new fiction". (They also published stories marked as "classics" each issue.) There were 8 novellas, 11 novelettes, and 37 short stories, of which 3 were "short-short". They also publish the occasional serial. The total number of new stories was a bit lower than last year, but the word count was slightly higher, due to the extra novellas.

This remains a good source of online SF and Fantasy -- consistently enjoyable. The quality seems on a part with what we saw in 2007.

Novellas

My favorite novella this year was by a new writer, Holly Messinger. "End of the Line" (February) is a fantasy Western, about a man who can see ghosts who encounters spooky creatures on a trip west. Messinger is apparently planning more stories in this series. Other good novellas came from David Brin (a very long one, serialized in two parts, "Shoresteading"), Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Julie Czerneda.

Novelettes

By contrast, my two favorite novelettes came from veteran writers. These are Nancy Kress's "First Rites" (October) and David Brin's "The Smartest Mob" (February). The Brin story is moderately revised from "Sky Light", which appeared back in 2004 in All Star Zeppelin Adventure Tales -- it concerns a journalist saving an airship from sabotage with the help of an online "flash mob" of sorts. Kress's "First Rites" is a tense story of a genetic modification that leads to a new form of consciousness -- not necessarily with happy results. I also like Eugie Foster's "A Thread of Silk" (June), in which a Japanese noblewoman enlists the help of the gods to avenge her family, with of course a price to pay. Other good work came from Amber D. Sistla, Jay Lake, Pat Cadigan, and the late Fred Saberhagen.

Short Stories

My favorite short stories included Tobias Buckell's "Manumission" (April), exciting adventure, and backstory for a major character in his novels, as said character tries to escape the company that has him chemically enslaved; another April story, Lou Antonelli's "The Witch of Waxahachie" , an alternate universe story involving the closing of the planned supercollider in Texas; and Tom Purdom's "Madame Pompadour's Blade" (June), a historical fantasy about the famous mistress to the King of France and her machinations involving a potential rival. Other nice work came from Mike Resnick, Jeff Hass, N. K. Jemison, Jason K. Chapman, Beth Bernobich, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Statistics

Gender: of the 56 stories, 19 were by women (34%), quite comparable with last year's numbers.

SF/Fantasy: Jim Baen's Universe has a modest bias towards SF: 34 of the 56 total stories (not counting classics) were SF, about 61%. (I use their categorizations: they list stories as "Science Fiction Stories", "Fantasy Stories", and "Introducing Stories by New Authors". In the last case, I assigned the stories to genre myself.) These numbers are again quite similar to 2007.

Tags: 2008, webzines, yearly summaries