Customer Reviews

Year's Best SF 7

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

 

 

I've been working my way backward in time, reading progressively older editions of David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's annual collection of the best science fiction stories. This edition did not disappoint. As usual, the story introductions were superbly-written. They contain the right mix of introduction to the author, samples of his or her work, and non-spoiling teasers for the story itself. An unexpected prize in this year's introductory material was a pointer to Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, a critical and intelligent examination of science fictions influences and influence.

My favorite five of the nineteen stories are:

Nancy Kress's "Computer Virus" throws together a rogue artificial intelligence and a mother and two children who are held hostage by it. The outcome depends on human qualities rather than rational ones.

Michael Swanwick's "Under's Game" serves up a wry answer to a question that always nagged at me about Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Edward Lerner's "Creative Distruction" follows Justin Matthews as he solves his friend Alice's murder and uncovers the inter-stellar conspiracy behind it. The long-distance communications between civilizations are interestingly similar to those in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep.

Ursula Le Guin's "The Building" takes an anthropologist's view of two races, the Aq and the Adaqo, who are slowly recovering from the Adaqo's "explosive expansion of population and technology" that decimated their planet. The cultures are ingeniously conceived, the writing admirable, and the moral somehow both understated and heavy-handed.

Alastair Reynolds' "Glacial" was both new and familiar. It stands alone as a classic science fiction mystery. We look over Nevil Clavain's shoulder as he puzzles out the reason everyone on a remote, ice-covered planet suddenly died. As a fan of other Nevil Clavain stories, I have conflicting feelings about encountering Nevil, Galiana and Felka as an odd, but close-knit little family.

All of the stories are good and worth reading. I may not be giving them the full praise they deserve because I am distracted. The prepaid Kindle version of Year's Best SF 15 has just appeared in my iPhone Kindle app. Forgive me as I quickly abandon the past in a leap to new visions of the future in the present.

The editorial pair here single out the 'Red Shift' anthology by Al Sarrantonio for mention a number of times, so likely worth a look.

Overall, it seems 2001 was a really good year for SF stories, and this volume starts brilliantly, and ends almost as well. This anthology averages a hugely impressive 3.97, and that is good enough for full marks. Four standout stories, and only two are average.

Year's Best SF 07 : Computer Virus - Nancy Kress
Year's Best SF 07 : Charlie's Angels - Terry Bisson
Year's Best SF 07 : The Measure of All Things - Richard Chwedyk
Year's Best SF 07 : Russian Vine - Simon Ings
Year's Best SF 07 : Under's Game - Michael Swanwick
Year's Best SF 07 : A Matter of Mathematics - Brian Aldiss
Year's Best SF 07 : Creative Destruction - Edward M. Lerner
Year's Best SF 07 : Resurrection - David Morrell
Year's Best SF 07 : The Cat's Pajamas - James Morrow
Year's Best SF 07 : The Dog Said Bow-Wow - Michael Swanwick
Year's Best SF 07 : The Building - Ursula K. Le Guin
Year's Best SF 07 : Grey Earth - Stephen Baxter
Year's Best SF 07 : The Lagan Fishers - Terry Dowling
Year's Best SF 07 : In Xanadu - Thomas M. Disch
Year's Best SF 07 : The Go-Betweens - Lisa Goldstein
Year's Best SF 07 : Viewpoint - Gene Wolfe
Year's Best SF 07 : Anomalies - Gregory Benford
Year's Best SF 07 : Glacial - Alastair Reynolds
Year's Best SF 07 : Undone - James Patrick Kelly


House arrest.

5 out of 5


Killer robot case definitely not supernatural.

4 out of 5


Killer robot case definitely not supernatural.

4.5 out of 5


Illiterate people are easy, if you are aliens with territorial designs on Terra.

4 out of 5


Space Force firing performance needs junk food.

4 out of 5


Short cut.

3 out of 5


Alien nanotech radio plot.

4 out of 5


Father-son freeze.

4 out of 5


Brain in a jar down on the farm political ethics.

4 out of 5


Canine anti-tech adventures.

4 out of 5


Stonewalling.

3 out of 5


Alternate reality Big Whack human lack.

3.5 out of 5


A UN veteran, honored for his work in fighting a dangerous outbreak in the past, now lives with a new, strange botanical that is very valuable, and not very well understood.

4 out of 5


Welcome To the Pleasure Dome, not Frankie, not alive.

3.5 out of 5


Alien canine diplomacy.

"But you know, the dogs like us. That's got to count for something."

4.5 out of 5


Cash keepings off, rifled.

4 out of 5


Error observation religion.

4 out of 5


Clavain investigates why it is cold and almost all dead on a base.

4 out of 5


Future escape a problem of many dimensions.

4.5 out of 5

SF 7 is a good compulation worth reading. However, "The Measure of All Things" by Richard Chwedyk is exceptional and worth the price of the book all by itself. It has made me want to track down and read more Chwedyk to see if The Measure is a fluke or indicative of his usual work. Read this story! Especially if you are involved in animal rescue.

I'm not a person who has the funds (and probably time) to keep up with all or most of the f/h/sf magazines and original anthologies. I could buy one (or more), certainly, but then I want to receive the others too. Also, I trust that most of the best stories will eventually make their way into book format, anyway. There's always a number of books that collect best stories of a given year; I settle for one of these and all the stories I then read will be brand-new to me.

Each year there are the gems waiting to be read. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (editors of reviewed book) and Dozois (editor of the huge Year's Best SF Stories) are three of the finest editors around, each with his/her own ideas of what are the best stories of a given year.

But, I'm not an admirer of mass-market paperback books (such as the reviewed book is), as they are often made of cheap paper. Worse still is the binding.

Buy the Dozois Best of the Year if you want more stories for a somewhat higher price (but all packaged in trade paperback format). If only Hartwell's and Cramer's Best of the Years would come out in trade paperback, I would add them to my library without hesitation.

Hartwell's not a particularly adept editor. He's taken with a lot of star power and evidently lets a writer's prestige be the only criterion for inclusion in his anthologies. Most of these stories are competently written, but they lack spark, that sense of wonder that used to fill the field until about 15 years ago. It's like a lot of rock music these days: great talent with nothing much to say. How some of these stories made it into a "year's best" book is beyond me, but one thing is clear. The science fiction field is running dry. No story here has a decent (or even a twist) ending. Nothing here is genuinely memorable. I so much wanted these anthologies to be a counterpoint to the drab Dozois anthologies, but they aren't. If this is the best we can do, then I'd say we're in trouble. (And the sad part is that younger readers don't know how good science fiction used to be.)