Reviews for The year's best science fiction

The average rating for The year's best science fiction based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-01 00:00:00 Michael Mazes GARDNER DOZOIS - ANOTHER FRIEND I NEVER MET I thought the internet was supposed to tell me everything I need to know instantly, as soon as I log on, but I only just discovered that Gardner Dozois died this year, on the 27th of May. He was 70. On three shelves of a bookcase right behind me are 26 volumes of The Year's Best Science Fiction, the giant annual anthology, stretching from number three in 1986 (you can't get the first two) to number 28 in 2011 - at that point I decided I really ought to get round to actually reading all this stuff before I got any more. It's a slow but ongoing project. But these weren't just great one-stop anthologies, no. They were where Gardner laid down his version of The Truth. Usually the Truth about Science Fiction, but other stuff would creep in too. Every one of these books has a SUMMATION at the beginning. It followed a strict pattern - he never deviated in all those years. Gardner would tell you which publishers and which magazines went down the drain that year, and which hopeless idealists had started up new ventures. He mapped the uncomfortable attempted transition from print to online fiction. He also charted the often horrible story of How Science Fiction Ate Planet Earth, that is, how it moved from the tiny despised ghetto it was in the 1950s to become the almost boringly mainstream entertainment it is now. Then he would survey the original and best-of short fiction anthologies - typical comment from the one I'm looking at now : "There seemed to be fewer slipstream/fabulist/New Weird/whatever anthologies this year". After that came the novels - Gardner always apologised for not having read many of these, but he was busy reading every single short science fiction story so he never did have the time for that many novels. Then came consideration of original short story collections and SF & fantasy reference books, and then - movies! The War of the Worlds was fast-paced and suspenseful… that being said, I regretted the fact that Spielberg somehow managed to skew the movie into being yet another Spielberg "small child in jeopardy (Dakota Fanning sure does scream a lot in this film)/self-centred-immature-father-in-a-dysfunctional-family-learns-to-value-his-children-over-himself" movie rather than really focusing on the disaster that's overcoming humanity at large… in some ways it's more faithful to HG Wells' novel than the previous Hollywood version was - and yet at the same time gave me the feeling that in spite of all that faithfulness to the text, Spielberg had somehow ended up missing the point of the novel altogether. After movies he checks out TV shows, writes about the SF conventions and the annual awards, Hugos, Locus, Nebula, etc and after all that we get the Obituaries which in 2005/6 started with Robert Sheckley and ended with Tammy Vance, described as the daughter-in-law of Jack Vance. So the word for obituaries was : comprehensive. If you were an extra on a Doctor Who episode from 1975, or a beloved writer's daughter-in-law, you got mentioned. And then Gardner would equally garrulously introduce each story, usually as if it was a pearl beyond price. In the 23rd annual collection in front of me he introduces stories like this : In the skin crawlingly tense adventure that follows... In the bittersweet story that follows... In the powerful novella that follows... In the ingenious and suspenseful story that follows… In the dazzling, crammed, high-bit-rate story that follows... Gardner was the superfan I never could have been, he had a strong opinion about absolutely everything, and I loved his energy and his seeming ability to be able to encompass the whole of science fiction, which each year, like a galaxy, seemed to expand enormously. Now I'm going to get all the Year's Bests I'm missing. I hope they're not too expensive. It'll take years to get round to reading them, but I'll immediately check out each yearly SUMMATION, just to hear his voice again.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-31 00:00:00 Thomas Block Partial reread, Aug 2020 My favorites this time: • "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Hugo novelette and World Fantasy award wins, Nebula nominee. If this isn't UKL's best short, it's close. On the surface, a talking-animal fantasy, but way, way more. Umpteenth re-read, each time with pleasure. 6 stars! If you have somehow missed reading this one, a real treat awaits you. Here's a list of the many reprints: • "The Moon Of Popping Trees" by R. Garcia y Robertson. Aftermath of the Custer massacre, with a thin veneer of SF (which doesn't add anything). 4+ stars, highly recommended. This is something of a first draft for his best novel, "American Woman" (1998): • "Mother Goddess Of The World" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Hugo Novella Nominee. Companion-story to "Escape from Kathmandu", and not quite so good as that, but still a top-notch story, one that I kept me chuckling. First reread in 30+ years, I think. 4.5 stars. • "The Forest Of Time" by Michael Flynn. Hugo Novella Nominee. A man lost in time ends up in a cell in a fortress in an alternate Pennsylvania. Classic time-travel story that may remind you of other, similar ones. 4+ stars There are more first-rate stories here that I'm not in the mood to reread right now. And a bunch of others that just plain turned me off when I started re-reading them. So I'll take another look at the anthology before I turn it in, but I'm pretty sure my list of favorites won't change. All of the Dozois anthologies are worth reading, but this is one of the weaker ones, I think. Where "weaker" = more stories not to my taste. 😎 TOC and story details: Synopses and award winners/nominees: