The Year's Best Science Fiction : Thirty-Third Annual Collection

I'd like to finish this, probably got through a third of the stories. May adjust my rating if I return to it.

I'm making an effort to read a wider range of science fiction, especially hard SF, space opera, anything outside my comfort zone of anthropological planetary romance.

I usually find Best Of

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anthologies a mixed bag. Don't get me wrong, none of these stories was bad by any stretch, but I felt several were held back by slight characters and conservative story arcs. I really look for a short story to elicit a strong emotional response and take me somewhere I didn't expect to go.

"The Falls: A Luna Story" and "Another Word for World" were two well-told stories that met this criteria. The ones I read that really knocked it out of the park, however, were Gwyneth Jones's "Emergence" and Carter Scholz's "Gypsy."

"Emergence" is a challenging work about transhumanism and artificial intelligence. The weird language is just right for a narrative about the boundaries of human experience. What's more, the protagonist goes on a physical and emotional journey that is deeply moving, even though we strain to imagine the characters and the world they inhabit. It's not a perfect story - some of Jones' parallels between transhumanism and the transgender experience fall flat - but it was ambitious and I loved that.

Meanwhile, "Gypsy" is the most grimdark antidote to technological optimism I've ever read, a very bleak fable about space travel. It's heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative and I kind of adore Scholz for writing it. As a polemic, it's inherently an imperfect story, but goddamn does it make a contribution to science fiction literature.

What I want more of, and didn't find in these stories: aliens! stories set in the far future! general weirdness! If I pick this one up again, we'll see what I get.

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