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The Future Boldly Imagined From Breathtaking New Perspectives The world as we will know it is far different from the future once predicted in simpler times. For this newest collection of the finest short form SF to appear in print over the preceding year, acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered remarkable works that reflect a new sensibility. Courageous and diverse stories from some of the finest authors in the field grace this amazing volume -- adventures and discoveries, parables and warnings, carrying those eager to fly to far ends of a vast, ever-shifting universe of alien worlds, strange cultures, and mind-bending technologies. Tomorrow has never been as spellbinding, terrifying, or transforming as it is here, today, in these extraordinary pages. Hang on! New tales from: Kage Baker * Gregory Benford * Terry BissonRick Moody * Michael Swanwick * John Varley and many more… (more)
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And so, with that background, you can already tell I’m not overly pleased with this collection. It has some good stories and it is an overall somewhat satisfying read, but it is not the next great set of collections; it is not the “Year’s Best of” that I will make sure I collect from the past and collect into the future. To Hartwell/Cramer’s credit, they seem to have done a very good job looking outside the traditional publication routes to find the stories they selected, including internet publication and foreign language. There are nice choices in here - good reads, satisfying reads - but not rush to the award ballot caliber. And, as often happens with anthologies, some not so good, including one I could not finish. (Keep in mind, I do my best to finish EVERYTHING I start reading. Shoot, I even finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I should have gotten a purple heart for that.) However, as the author notes in the introduction, “…the average paperback anthology of fantasy or SF does not contain as many good stories as the average issue of Asimov’s or Fantasy & Science Fiction.” And so it is with this hardcover collection – it has about the same hit and miss ratio as those magazines.
And, as to the search for the perfect “Year’s Best”, I guess I’ll continue with the one sure source I’ve found; the annual publication of the Nebula Award winners. I’ve got them all, and I’m still buying them
As with most such
I was impressed with Cory Doctorow's effort, also that of Kage Baker. Great stuff from new names, for me at least. Add to those Nigel Brown's "Annuity Clinic", which shows the downside of "assisted living" in the future (yikes!) and Allen Steele's introduction to his world of Coyote (the planet, not the Native American trickster…though that Coyote DOES put in a surprise appearance earlier in this collection) and you've got just shy of 500 pages of great SF entertainment.
And then finally there is Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes". Now, the editors' notes preceding this suggest it was the best short story of the year. Well, maybe. It's lengthy and wordy, but you'd have to read it to understand why it is thus, and I hope you do. I will confess it was at times a chore to wade through it all but ultimately it paid off. Best short story of the year? I might disagree, but then again what do I know? Either way, it definitely belongs in this collection, which we have now managed to find 11 of the 19 volumes, and if the quality stays this high I expect we'll keep getting them once we get caught up.