YEAR'S BEST SF 12 [Unknown Binding]

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• Publisher: SFBC SCIENCE FICTION (2007)
• ISBN-10: 073948544X
• ISBN-13: 978-0739485446
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,189,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kathryn Cramer is a writer, anthologist, & Internet consultant who lives in Pleasantville, New York. She won a World Fantasy Award for best anthology for The Architecture of Fear, co-edited with Peter Pautz; she was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her anthology Walls of Fear. She co-edited several anthologies of Christmas and fantasy stories with David G. Hartwell and now does the annual Year's Best Fantasy and Year's Best SF with him. She is on the editorial board of The New York Review of Science Fiction, (for which she has been nominated for the Hugo Award many times). She is a consultant with the Scientific Information Group for Wolfram Research.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Winner from Hartwell and Cramer, June 9, 2007

By 

J P. Rich "jprich1227" (Los Angeles, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Year's Best SF 12 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction)) (Mass Market Paperback)

Of the various annual SF anthologies, this one and Gardner Dozois's are consistently the best. You should buy both. the 2007 Hartwell is different and perhaps superior to #11, which had an unusal emphasis on short-shorts that is not the case with #12. And if you've never read Hartwell's #8, pick that up too--or all of the prior 11. Great quick reads.

3.0 out of 5 stars Year's Best SF 12 is Good Enough, July 18, 2010

By 

John M. Ford "johnDC" (near DC, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Year's Best SF 12 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction)) (Mass Market Paperback)

David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have assembled 26 science fiction stories from those published in 2006. As usual, the introductions to each story contain author bios, web sites, brief descriptions of other works, and a non-spoiler characterization of the story in this collection. It is a good, but not a great collection. Three of the stories also appear in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection.

My five favorites:

Mary Rosenblum's "Home Movies" introduces a member of one of the world's newest professions, a trained rememberer who stores experiences to be sold and lost completely to her employer. Until she experiences some things worth remembering.

Alastair Reynolds' "Tiger, Burning" sends an investigator to solve a mystery in a different brane where physics is different, but human motivation is much the same. The guilty party is certain to be executed.

Michael Swanwick's "Tin Marsh" comes off a little like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Two prospectors get on each other's nerves while searching for metal deposits on Venus.

In Robert Reed's "Rwanda" a father and son discuss a failed alien invasion of Earth and its aftermath. Some humans found opportunities to be merciful.

In Charlie Rosenkrantz's "Preemption" an fleet of alien assassins arrives to scour the earth of an ambitious species before it can become a galactic threat.

This isn't the best of the Best of SF series, but it is worth reading and provides a measure of enjoyment. I wonder why this book and the Year's Best SF 13 are the only recent books in the series that are not available on the Kindle? It makes reading them surreptitiously a lot more challenging.

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice to be in print, May 22, 2008

By 

J. J. Brannon "JJ Brannon" (Newark, DE United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Year's Best SF 12 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction)) (Mass Market Paperback)

As usual, David & Kathryn have assembled some of the best short SF of the year [for those stories first appearing in 2006].

This anthology includes the Hugo-nominated "Dawn, and Sunset, and All the Colours of the Earth" by Michael F. Flynn, his moving tale of love, loss, and fortitude of spirit in the face of an inexplicable disaster.

[Honesty compels me to confess that myself and a few other regulars of Mr. Flynn's AOL community made small contributions to the story at his request.]

The similarly themed "Rwanda" by Robert Reed and Gardner R. Dozois' dazzling "Contrafactual" also stand out.