Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighteenth Annual Collection

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Every customer review here is for the wrong book. They refer to _last_ year's Dozois collection. Somebody please fix this, so we can start with a clean slate. (I haven't read all the book yet, but it looks pretty good.) -- Joe Haldeman

This is the fifteenth edition I've read, and it's one of the strongest. As always, Dozois includes a wide range of styles and themes, from the lyrical to the hardest of hard science. So...while there's always something for everybody, you can't expect to enjoy every story. My favorites:

Good:
"Going After Bobo"--Heartwrenching, poetic character study, but the plot is pretty thin.
"Crux"--Dark detective story/social commentary set in a brutal post-holocaust future dominated by the Orient. Quite violent, with a fast paced and tighty knit plot.
"The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O"--Time travel with two amazing characters. Provocative, in-your-face prose.
"Radiant Green Star"--Another violent future world dominated by the Orient. This time it's a traditional mystery combined with a poetic coming-of-age story.
"Great Wall of Mars"--A cult of humans with networked implants battle unnetworked humans for survival. Lots of action, great speculation on the potential of the human mind.
"A Colder War"--Alternate Cold War history with aliens causing major problems for both sides. Confusing plot, but highly realistic narrative keeps it interesting anyway.

Great:
"The Suspect Genome"--Future world whodunit, set in an England where police work has been somewhat privatized. Brilliant plot construction and writing keep you engaged all the way.
"On the Orion Line"--Man versus powerful and inscrutable aliens deep in space, far in the future. Well developed characters, fast paced and straightforward plot.
"Obsidian Harvest"--Another future world detective story set in England. What makes this one extraordinary is the premise, where the Aztecs dominate the world--human sacrifices, feathered capes, lots of tequila. Add hard-boiled prose in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett (his "Red Harvest" is great) and you have something unforgettable.
"Patient Zero"--Nightmarish account of a dreadful near-future. Great plot, great characters, and makes some strong statements in only fifteen pages.

This latest edition of Gardner Dozois' long-running Year's Best SF anthology series is worth every penny. I enjoyed nearly every story in the volume and found it to be, on the whole, much stronger than previous year's editions.

Highlights of the volume include 'The Birthday of the World' by Ursula Le Guin; in which a race of 'gods' struggle for power, 'Crux' by Albert Cowdrey; a time travel adventure that has more similarities to the old pulp stories than most recent SF, 'Radiant Green Star' by Lucius Shepard; a fabulous story about an orphan's search for his father while he performs in a circus in Vietnam, 'Great Wall of Mars' by Alastair Reynolds; the story of a renegade colony on Mars and attempts to eradicate it, 'On the Orion Line' by Stephen Baxter; a story of war in space that I found to be one of Baxter's most literate and readable stories, 'A Colder War' by Charles Stross; a brilliant meld of Cthulu fiction and Cold War politics, and my favorite story in the volume 'Tendeleo's Story' by Ian McDonald; the story of a young girl in Africa who grows up amid invasion by alien spores.

Like all anthologies, not all stories will please all readers. I found 'Milo and Sylvie' by Eliot Fintushel to be WAY overlong, boring, and without a coherent plot. 'Snowball in Hell' by Brian Stableford bogged down with too much gengineering talk...too many big words, not enough plot extrapolation.

This truly is a collection of the Best SF of the year. There are only a handful of stories that didn't make the book that may have been deserving (stories by Jeffrey Ford, Kage Baker, Charles Sheffield, & Robert Reed spring immediately to mind). By and large the stories in this book are extremely well-written with fascinating plots. Consider 'Oracle' by Greg Egan, a story with thinly veiled characterizations of C.S. Lewis and Alan Turing...this is a story that science fiction is all about. With the exception of the two stories I mentioned earlier, there isn't a sub-par story in this collection. Highly recommended.

great book. multiple stories that can be finished in a few hours or less. great for people with busy lives who still need the mental stimulation of a good story.

Each year I look forward to this volume, and it never disappoints. Granted, some years are better than others, but often that reflects the quality of the fiction that appeared in a particular year. I thought last year's volume (#17) was a real high, and I was afraid this volume couldn't be as good. I'm glad to say I enjoyed this volume just as much.

For me, the stand-out story was "Oracle", by Greg Egan. It is a beaurifully researched and written story about a traveler from the future coming into the past and interceding in the life of Alan Turing. Turing's life moves in a somewhat different path than in our history, and leads him to have a public debate with C. S. Lewis on the possibility of machine intelligence. (Greg Egan does not use their actual names, but sticks close to their biographies, so the correlation is obvious).

"The Juniper Tree" by John Kessel started out as a well-written re-exploration of what I thought were pretty well-trodden SF themes, then manages to throw in a moral twist that left me reeling. A great story.

Great Wall of Mars by Alistair Reynolds is a pyrotechnic roller-coaster ride of a story. I mean literally. It contains two of the most memorable "rides" I can remember in science fiction. It's a slam-bang adventure that left me dazed.

"Antibodies" by Charles Stross was a nice surprise. It felt like reading a classic 50's SF story, but brought up-to-date. He's one of my favorite discoveries of the last year, and you get another great story by him in the same volume.

Other excllent stories include "Tendelo's Story" by Ian McDonald, "The Suspect Genome" by Peter F. Hamilton, "Radiant Green Star" by the amazing wordsmith Lucius Shepard, "Crux" by Albert Cowdrey, "The Real World" by Steven Utley, and "The Birthday of the World" by Ursula K. LeGuin.

If you seriously enjoy speculative fiction, buy this book.

Once upon a time, there used to be several great SF Year's Best anthologies: Daw Year's Best, Terry Carr's Year's Best and Lester Del Rey's Year's Best, to name a few, not to mention Year's Best selections from various magazines like Analog and Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Now, the Year's Best anthologies are reduced to two in number, one of them being the one in review and the other one edited by Hartwell.

The present anthology is knows for its size. Mammoth is the right word for it. As it says on the cover, it contains more than 250,000 words. The table of content reads like the who's who of modern SF, containing names like Stephen Baxter, Ursula Le Guin, Greg Egan, Michael Swanwick, Peter Hamilton, Lucius Shepard, Brian Stableford.

Gardner Dozois is a good editor and I am sure the fiction presented in this book constitutes some of the better writings in the SF field for the year 2000, but put against the backdrop of SF in general (covering, say, the last 4 or 5 decades) I have to express my disappointment. The stories are adequate but there was not a single story in the book for which I could use superlatives. It makes me concerned about the prevailing standard of SF.

A point of contention: the anthology is unbalanced in at least two ways. First, there is a dirth of short stories here. More than 80% of the contents are novellas and very long stories. Second, once again, the electronic medium has been neglected. The only representation of an online magazine here is through Scifi.com from which two of the stories are taken. In actual fact, there are several professional quality online magazines in existence and it is hard to suppose that these magazines didn't carry stuff comparable to the dead tree magazines.

That said, there are several plus points in the anthology. First, quantitywise, the 617 pages are definitely worth the cover price of $26.95. Contentwise, it gives a good overview of the SF field of present day. In fact, Dozois' excellent introduction, titled Summation: 2000, is worth more than half the price in itself.

[...]

This is a superb collection, this year. The stories average a massive 4.11. As usual, there is his rather long summation of the year, which people would probably by just by itself.

Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Juniper Tree - John Kessel
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Antibodies - Charles Stross
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Birthday of the World - Ursula K. Le Guin
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Savior - Nancy Kress
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Reef - Paul J. McAuley
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Going After Bobo - Susan Palwick
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Crux - Albert E. Cowdrey
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Cure for Everything - Severna Park
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Suspect Genome - Peter F. Hamilton
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O - Michael Swanwick
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Radiant Green Star - Lucius Shepard
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Great Wall of Mars - Alastair Reynolds
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Milo and Sylvie - Eliot Fintushel
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Snowball in Hell - Brian Stableford
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : On the Orion Line - Stephen Baxter
18 : Oracle - Greg Egan
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Obsidian Harvest - Rick Cook and Ernest Hogan
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Patient Zero - Tananarive Due
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : A Colder War - Charles Stross
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Real World - Steven Utley
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Thing About Benny - M. Shayne Bell
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Great Goodbye - Robert Charles Wilson
Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Tendeléo's Story - Ian McDonald


Colony murder mystery reconstruction results.

4.5 out of 5

Worldline AI technology overrun.

5 out of 5


Conquering godhood changes.

3.5 out of 5


Humans a bit slow on the uptake about alien craft, muddle through disasters, and must have lost all the Stargate episodes when they tried the replicator thing. Oh, and AI's are quite fast.

5 out of 5


24 hour deep sea proxy people.

4 out of 5


Cat rescue not worth it.

4 out of 5


Terrorist investigation, timelines and tarts.

4 out of 5


Pharmaceutical breakthroughs rely heavily on the individual.

4 out of 5


Mandel's celebrity murder investigation.

4.5 out of 5


Archetypal creation.

4.5 out of 5


Mutant circus major's minder seeks permanent paternal punishment.

4.5 out of 5


Only a damaged but brilliant child is allowing the Conjoiners to continue to hold out, delaying the end of a battle that they cannot win.

4.5 out of 5


Shapeshifting kids.

3 out of 5


Transhumanism to posthumanish through violence and fire.

4.5 out of 5


Human expansion is slowed by a race of aliens, causing economic problems when the advanced alien technology is able to monkey with the laws of physics.

A not too bright teenager makes it out of the wreckage of a ship and from inside an enemy fortress with the help of the rest of his crew, with some valuable intel.

4 out of 5


In a reality where a man, similar to Alan Turing is working for the government in rather more unpleasant circumstances is visited by a reality hopping android woman things change rapidly. A man somewhat similar to C. S. Lewis has problems coping and believing.

4 out of 5


Aztec noir.

4 out of 5


Immune boy runs out of caretakers.

4.5 out of 5


The US works on highly advanced nuclear weapons programs to stop something far worse that the Soviets have available :

"What exactly are these weapons systems?'' demands the third inquisitor, a quiet, hawk-faced man sitting on the left of the panel.

The shoggot'im, they're called: servitors. There are several kinds of advanced robotic systems made out of molecular components: they can change shape, restructure material at the atomic level -- "

3.5 out of 5


Silurian search maybe entertaining.

3.5 out of 5


Botany with Abba overload.

3.5 out of 5


See ya later granddad, you stock old man.

4 out of 5


A Kenyan woman and her community come to terms with an alien infestation, as the outsider who fancies her adapts as well.

4 out of 5

First of all let me say that since this is a collection it is inevitable that some of it is going to be bad and some of it is going to be good, and there is bound to be a lot of mediocre. On the whole, however, I was a little disapointed at the overall quanilty in this volume. I have found that most of the stories I would have liked to read (Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, Michael Flynn, Dan Simmons)ended up in the "Honorable Mentions," while some of the obvious losers were printed.

On with the list:

Here are the good stories:

The Suspect Genome -- Peter Hamilton
Radiant Green Star -- Lucius Shepard
Great Wall of Mars -- Alastair Reynolds
Snowball in Hell -- Brian Stableford
Patient Zero -- Tananarive Due
The Thing About Benny -- M. Shayne Bell
Tendeleo's Story -- Ian McDonald

Here are the really bad stories:

The Birthday of the World -- LeGuin
Antibodies -- Charles Stross
A Colder War -- Charles Stross
The Juniper Tree -- John Kessel

I've only read the first six stories, but it's excellent so far. A very wide variety of styles and themes thus far.

I'm sorry, but most of the stories in here had little or any connection to science fiction. Some were good, but should have been included in anthologies of other areas of fiction. Most were just long stories.