The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection

There is a vast amount of science fiction published in any given year. For almost thirty years Gardner Dozois has culled through the published stories to compile The Year's Best Science Fiction. This edition contains a breadth of stories that spans from fantasy and horror to hard science fiction

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and space opera. The anthology was included in my reading for a summer course at the University of Chicago. In addition to preparation for our discussion each week the stories share another aspect that kept me reading; they were all well written, some exceptionally so. With thirty-five stories I can only share a list of some of my favorites among them. These included "The Beancounters Cat" by Damien Broderick, "Martian Heart" by John Barnes, "The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter, "After the Apocalypse" by Maureen F. McHugh, "The Smell of Orange Groves" by Lavie Tidhar (perhaps the most poetic of the stories), "Cody" by Pat Cadigan, and "The Boneless One" by Alec Nevala-Lee (This last a true Science Fiction horror story).
For this reader the best story was the last in the collection, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson. I liked it because it won me over in the sense that when I began to read it I thought I would not like it both because it was too long (one of the two longest in the collection) and because it appeared to be too fantasy-oriented for my taste (a taste that runs more to science--believable or not). It defied my expectations with beautiful writing while demonstrating universal themes of love, friendship, achievement, and death while providing a consistent alien background in both the social and scientific sense. Johnson's story proved a worthy capstone to a great collection of twenty-first century Science Fiction.With more than two dozen other stories there are sure to be several that will please the reading palate of any who enjoy Science Fiction.

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Paul McAuley: "The Choice" - dull
David Moles: "A Soldier of the City" - OK
Damien Broderick: "The Beancounter's Cat"
Elizabeth Bear: "Dolly"
John Barnes: "Martian Heart"
Ken MacLeod: "Earth Hour" - OK
Karl Schroeder: "Laika's Ghost"
Michael Swanwick: "The Dala Horse"
Peter S. Beagle: "The Way It Works Out

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and All"
Carolyn Ives Gilman: "The Ice Owl"
Paul Cornell: "The Copenhagen Interpretation" - dull, didn't finish
Stephen Baxter: "The Invasion of Venus"
Ian McDonald: "Digging"
Alastair Reynolds: "Ascension Day"
Maureen McHugh: "After the Apocalypse"
Catherynne M. Valente: "Silently and Very Fast" - dull
Jay Lake: "A Long Way Home"
Dave Hutchinson: "The Incredible Exploding Man"
Geoff Ryman: "What We Found"
Tom Purdom: "A Response from EST17"
Ian R. MacLeod: "The Cold Step Beyond"
David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell: "A Militant Peace"
Robert Reed: "The Ants of Flanders"
Gwyneth Jones: "The Vicar of Mars"
Lavie Tidhar: "The Smell of Orange Groves"
Michael Flynn: "The Iron Shirts" - good
Pat Cadigan: "Cody"
Michael Swanwick: "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again"
Yoon Ha Lee: "Ghostweight"
Jim Hawkins[disambiguation needed]: "Digital Rites"
Alec Nevala-Lee: "The Boneless One"
Peter M. Ball: "Dying Young"
Chris Lawson: "Canterbury Hollow"
Ken MacLeod: "The Vorkuta Event"
Kij Johnson: "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" - very good

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Another annual anthology of 18 sci-fi short stories from a variety of authors. As with most anthologies its a bit of a lucky dip, but there should be something for every sci-fi reader in here. There's some hard SF, a bit of fantasy, some cyberpunk and some that are drifting into niches of their

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own. Its a pretty chunky book so not the sort of thing that most folk will be able to plough through on a single flight or train journey, but ideal holiday reading, as each story will only take up an hour or so to read.

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