[UPDATED with fiction links]
Editor Rich Horton has posted the (preliminary but close-to-final) contents of Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2009 Edition:
Comments (3)
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Posted by John DeNardo at Monday December 08, 2008 at 12:47 PM
© 2008 SF Signal
This title (and the Fantasy volume) irks me. Best of 2009? Huh? It is December 2008! It's bad enough each "best of" anthology comes out earlier and is really a combination of two half years...this is getting silly!
Posted by Fred Kiesche on Monday December 08, 2008 at 2:15 PM
The 2009 is the year it will be published and covers fiction seen in the prior year.
Posted by John on Monday December 08, 2008 at 3:27 PM
In a way, I agree with Fred, because I'm also a stickler for accuracy in matters of chronology. Nine years on, I still chafe at the recollection of "millennium" celebrations well over a year early.
But you get older, and you learn to live with it.
Look at it this way: mr. Horton's task was to choose stories published in 2008. As far as the magazines are concerned, that means that he surveyed magazines with cover dates up to December 2008. And these were, of course, available long before December of 2008!
As far as books are concerned, he probably had access to advance copies of all the books published later in the year.
So, I agree that the advance cover dating tradition is faintly annoying, but it's not Rich Horton's fault!
Posted by Peter Nel on Thursday December 11, 2008 at 1:53 AM