Reviews for The best science fiction of the year

The average rating for The best science fiction of the year based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-20 00:00:00 Joy Antes I read these two stories as part of a group read on a Facebook SF group; I don't think I'll pick up the other stories in the collection as the group read is almost over and I've read most of the other stories before. Vaster than Empires, and More Slow is damned near perfect as a meditation on how hard it is to love The Other. This story was nominated for the 1972 Hugo for Best Short Story, though I (subjectively, unprovenly) think it's over the 7,500-word limit on the category; the committee didn't give a Novelette Award again until 1973, so I wonder if that's the reason it was included in the shorter category for 1972. I digress. Part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle of stories begun with 1966's Rocannon's World, this tale recounts the events experienced by the League of Worlds's ten-person team to map and study "World 4470" as part of the ongoing effort to re-establish the League's ancestral empire of Humanity. (How is that possible? Read up on panspermia.) There are only Humans in Le Guin's League (later referred to as "the Ekumen") because, well, there are only Humans. Lots of different kinds of them because evolution as well as gene modification, but we're it. That doesn't mean there isn't xenophobia, racism, interpersonal hostility because, again, Human. The team's split into five Terrans (us) and five others. The main actor in the story is the Terran empath, Osden, whose unpleasant personality evokes anger and dislike from everyone he meets. (Social distancing made easy, eh Osden?) The weird title is from Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress"; it gives away the entire point of the story, so read it first before poking about in precincts poeticall. The burden of Otherness that we place on those not like us, or those we simply don't like, falls on Osden in so many unfair ways over the course of his life (he's rather squickily said to have developed his psi-power of empathy while being "treated" for autism). He's chosen to separate himself from the civilization he knows but doesn't love by joining this survey team. None of this crew will ever see anything like "home" again: they're traveling at near-relativistic speeds, elapsing time in hours, days, weeks for themselves but centuries for the planets they've left. No one who does this is a happy camper, eh? Osden's merely the most Othered of these misfits. And, in the end, he's the one best served by an entire lifetime of Othering, he's the one who contacts a truly alien intelligence, and he deserves giant dollops of praise and credit. To their credit, his team members agree. While Effinger's title (reviewed below) won the 1972 Hugo, look at the publication history of this title and tell me which story struck the more lasting chord. I grant it five stars because it is gorgeous prose and profoundly interesting thinking. (Still not squick free, though.) All the Last Wars at Once closely resembles the world of COVID-19 reduced to its absurdest absurdist essence. George Alec Effinger isn't much remembered today, and if he is it's for Marîd Audran's adventures beginning with When Gravity Fails, though he wrote a number of comic books and other short fictions before his 2003 death. (In fact, this story is presented in comic-book format as the Fantastic Four title "All the World Wars at Once!" from issue #161, August 1975.) If you had any fantasy that this iteration of the End of Days was unique, park 'em here. In fifteen pages (PDF), Effinger tells us of the agreement reached between a random pudgy white guy from Kansas and a dialect-spoutin' Negro man named Mary McCloud Bethune Washington to declare all-out, no-holds-barred race war. Later on, we see the "promiseless smile" of the president (Nixon in those days and a better description of the man's emptiness of soul I have never seen) and an elderly Black preacher, Rev. Dr. Roosevelt Wilson, whose affect is such that he's referred to by one and all as "the clean old n-word." They managed between them to interrupt the television and radio silence enveloping the anarchic world to broadcast an appeal to return to pre-race war ways; neither, it seems, has the authority he believed he had. Women's libbers, laboring men, vets, "queers," all come in for their share of guilt in creating, or at least failing to oppose, the bitter and violent fragmentation of society. Effinger, writing in 1970 or 1971 (the collection was published in 1972), was steeped in the outbreak of race/civil war from the Watts Uprising in 1965 through 1970's sort-of ending with the Kent State Massacre. He was extrapolating the logical extremity of the trend unfolding around him. I don't disagree with the technique's use, or with his conclusions; only his timing was off. Should we, then, take notice of this story? No, not really, it's not particularly well-written or trenchantly argued; it's not by a LONG chalk his best work nor up to much compared to the other works in this volume. It's clear, however, that today's George Floyd Revolution isn't unprecedented and that its roots are deep, if there's a story like this from a second-rank talent (and I think I'm being generous with that assessment) that's fifty years old, and wasn't groundbreaking when it was new (ever heard of it? other than The Best Science Fiction of the Year 1 have you run across it in your own casual reading?) despite winning the 1972 Locus Short Fiction and Hugo Short Story honors (see here for citations)? It was a story that spoke to the concerns of the moment, and made sense in its era; it is newly relevant again; and none of that makes it a great read. A grudging three stars of five from me.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-26 00:00:00 Craig Reimer Ratings to come... · Occam's Scalpel · Theodore Sturgeon · The Queen of Air and Darkness · Poul Anderson ***** · In Entropy's Jaws · Robert Silverberg · The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World · Philip José Farmer · A Meeting with Medusa · Arthur C. Clarke · The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time · Lloyd Biggle, Jr. · How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? · Alexei Panshin · No Direction Home · Norman Spinrad · Vaster Than Empires and More Slow · Ursula K. Le Guin *** · All the Last Wars at Once · George Alec Effinger · The Fourth Profession · Larry Niven