Reviews for The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens: First Annual Collection

The average rating for The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens: First Annual Collection based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-04 00:00:00 Michael Perez I think that introducing young people to science fiction and fantasy is something the genres are neglecting. Unfortunately the selection of stories is poor. It is also heavily slanted, very heavily, toward fantasy. There is not one nuts and bolts hard science fiction in the lot. It is also more slanted toward feminine than masculine. I enjoy fantasy, I also see a need for more stories appealing to young females, but not to such an extent as represented here in the first anthology series aimed at teen readers both male and female. Of the stories Bradley Denton's "Sergeant Chip," seems best and is the most typically science fiction. "Sleeping Dragons" is the best fantasy. There is a good alternate history thrown into the mix. Several of the other fantasy stories make a good effort but the ratio of dreck to good stories is unfavorable. For a better anthology of just science fiction try The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction. For better fantasy try The Year's Best Fantasy series by Hartwell and Cramer. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series is also suitable for young adults and includes some fantasy. Jane Yolen's Briar Rose is one of my all time favorite books and Patrick Nielsen Hayden is normally a great editor or co-editor of other collections. I don't know how they messed up so badly in this one.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-12 00:00:00 Mitchell Blount Stuff I Read - The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens: First Annual Collection ed. Jane Yolen Review I picked up this collection mainly to expand my horizons with speculative short fiction, and especially things written for a young adult audience, though to be honest many of these stories don't seem especially Young Adult. They are, though, very good stories, and I found myself liking each one. Which is saying something, that I liked basically every story in the collection. There was one flash fiction that I didn't much care for, but that was it. The vast, vast majority of the collection was very good, and left me wanting more like it. The best story in the collection for me was the first, "The Faerie Handbag," which was great and actually made me rather sad upon completing it. It is not what I would call Young Adult, again, but I suppose young adults can read and enjoy it, so hurrah. It brings up one of the things I liked about the collection, though, and that was how it was constructed. After the downer of a first story (a very good downer, but still...) the collection offers up some more fun and adventurous stories that kept me going and looking forward to reading more. One of the things I noticed and didn't entirely like was just that the stories all tended to be set on Earth. It's not a bad thing, and I like supernatural stories and all that, but I might have wanted a few more second world fantasies or off-world science fictions. I understand that this might just have been popular at the time, but while the stories being similar can be all right, I wanted more variety for something that was supposed to represent diverse stories. As I said, though, there really wasn't a bad story in the bunch. One of the flash fictions, the one by Garth Nix, was what I considered the weakest of the stories present, but even it was short and not much to comment on. And the last story, "Sergeant Chip," was quite long and dragged a little, but even so was good and, placed at the end of the collection, at least offered the end afterward. So in the end the collection was well put together, both in terms of the stories chosen and the order they were arranged in. I might have wanted a bit more diversity in the types of stories representing science fiction and fantasy, but I definitely enjoyed the experience this collection provided, and as such am giving it an 8/10.