Customer Reviews

Year's Best SF 5

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

 

 

This compilation of stories by a assortment of authors surprised me with it's Fifth Edition. I'm more a patron Gardner Dozois' annual collections, but to tide the time till that came out, I read this one and must say it ran the full spectrum of grand to absolutely terrible. First off the utopian "Everywhere" by Geoff Ryman felt like it had something to say about spiritualism, but rather became a predictable jab at spirtualism that was 11 pages too long (it was 11 pages in length) and left me offended greatly. The second story was much better and from a first time writer, no less. "Evolution Never Sleeps" by Elizabeth Malartre tells the tale of chipmunks, the most unassuming creatures in the world, becoming rather combative and violent. Rationalized, the plot was a tad plodding in parts, focusing rather needlessly on wasted character romance but the pay off of the story is rewarding, if abrupt. The third one, an appallingly ignorant story by the otherwise brilliant Kim Stanley Robinson called "Sexual Dimorphism". I loathed a story named "Marrow" last year by Robert Reed, oddly enough one of the best of the years choices by the other collection. "Game of the Century" surprised me though, pleasantly, but I think he should have come up with a much better name for the gene-spliced animal-people than 1-1-2041s. A bit ungangly to say. "Kinds of Strangers" by Sarah Zettel delved a tad too much into madness, but succeeded all in all. My favorite "Visit the Sins" by Cory Doctorow was unique and inventive, focusing on a switch for consciousness and well as the generational gap. Greg Egan's entry "Border Guards" utterly mysterifies the reader with it's setting, a good or a bad thing depending on your viewpoint. Rather mediocre. Terry Bisson's "Macs" had an excellent twist at the end, a dying breed of sci-fi and dealt with profound concepts of morality or culpability for crimes against humanity. "Written in Blood" by newbie Chris Lawson, if nothing else, presented a stark view of the Islamic world. Gene Wolfe's "Has Anyone Seen Junie Moon?" bored me terribly and seemed more like fantasy than sci-fi. Robert J. Saywer's "The Blue Planet" definitely felt like newspaper sci-fi, pre-digested for the masses. "Lifework" by Mary Soon Lee, another gem, presented a world far too close to reality. "Rosetta Stone" by Fred Lerner was a bit tough to swallow, though fascinating. Brian Aldiss' "An Apollo Asteroid" overglofied sex and presented characters no one would much care about losing if the asteroid smacked them right on the head. Curt Wohleber's "100 Candles" was familar, but pleasantly familar. G. David Nordley's "Democritus' Violin" thrilled and showed us that maybe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Tom Purdom's "Fossil Games" plodded along to no avail and felt more like an ad for a long novel which the writer is undoubtedly writing. "Valor" by Chris Beckett proved it's point that no one much cares about a philosophical lesson. Steven Baxter's "Huddle" fit the mold of Baxter's recent ice age fascination. "Ashes and Tombstones" by Brian Stableford actually fascinated me with it's mention the Hardinist Cabal and their far reaching intentions, but perplexed me with its disapproval of their actions. Michael Swanwick's "Ancient Engines" was another one with a twist, but one rather elusive on the surface about immortality. Hiroe Suga's "Freckled Figure" was what Small Soldiers should have been like not a publicity ad to sell toys. Barry N. Malzberg's "Shiva" felt hurried, but had many interesting things to say about the inevitability of history. The last story by Lucy Sussex "The Queen of Erewhon" overglorified alternative lifestyles with absolutely no point to its madness. I got sick about halfway though. Had there been a rhyme or reason to this then I might have been able to get through, but I was fed up. Unfortunately, compared with the other collection, this one disappointed in many ways, far more than the other. That's why I'm currently reading Gardner Dozois' collection with much pleasure. David G. Hartwell, you could learn a thing or two from him.

Working backward, issue by issue, I have arrived at the fifth installment of David Hartwell's annual review of science fiction. The volume contains 25 well-chosen stories, each preceded by an informative introduction to the author, the author's other works, and the story to come. My five favorites are described below.

Robert Reed's "Game of the Century" achieves impressive characterization of the coaches, genetically-engineered players, and parents involved in the most physically--and emotionally--intense game of college football ever.

Greg Egan's "Border Guards" skillfully braids the stories of a game of quantum soccer, the lives of those who compete in it, and the future history which gives them their burdens and releases.

Mary Soon Lee's "Lifework" is an artistic depiction of a woman's life and the support her society provides to change it.

G. David Nordley's "Democritus' Violin" is set in a charming little college with an authentic cast of eager students and self-absorbed faculty. It's hard to believe they invent a down-to-the-molecule matter duplicator. It isn't hard to believe what they do with it.

Michael Swanwick's "Ancient Engines" is a bar conversation between an aging robotics engineer and his two dissimilar children. Each of the three ends with a different perspective on the future.

Fred Lerner's "Rosetta Stone" gets an honorable mention for the story with the best idea that stops short of fulfilling its potential. The main character's expertise in library and information science reveals the path to understanding unseen aliens through the method they use to catalog their large collection of Earth's books. The story would have been my favorite of the collection if it had continued after this insight to intuit a description of these aliens and their society. The abrupt ending left me feeling that the story's characters went on to have all the fun without me.

The book is highly recommended to fans of science fiction, both new and experienced.

Science fiction is an immensely broad category. It encompasses stories as diverse as standard monster fare (the movie ALIEN, for example), social satire (the TV series THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN, the movie THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET), farce (THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS), adventure (STAR WARS) as well as more traditionally science oriented tales of our society (1984) or imaginary worlds far beyond ours (2001) and much more. Editing an anthology which proports to represent the best short science fiction published in a year must be an incredibly demanding task, and David Hartwell is to be commended for attempting to represent a fair share of this variety. But if this book genuinely represents the best of SF published in 1999, I have to wonder if some bizarre millennial fever didn't strike the SF world a bit early. As SF writers are, by definition, imaginative folks, did they as a group get a bit too worked up worrying about Y2K to concentrate on their writing? Well, of course not; and interestingly enough there is no looming sense of catastrophe in the vast majority of this anthology. Instead, the tales generally treasure our humanity over technology and offer a hopeful view of the future (with a few notable exceptions). And yet...

Hartwell's anthology is sizable, containing 25 short stories. Of these, less than half were memorable enough that as I write this review while looking at the table of contents, I actually remember the stories--this only a few days after completing the book. I'm definitely getting older, sure, and more crotchety; but as yet I've no noticable symptoms of Alzheimer's. The one word that comes to mind with regard to most of these stories is "ordinary".

However, about 10 of the stories were worth a read. Of these, the two best were Cory Doctrow's "Visit the Sins", portraying family relationships that developed after an attempt to cure Attention Deficit Disorder goes horribly awry; and Chris Lawson's "Written in Blood" was an engaging look at the border between faith and technology, with prejudice and hope entangling one another.

Robert Reed's "Game of the Century" posited a future in which genetic engineering gives us superhuman athletes, but more importantly explores how they would feel growing up as such. Sarah Zettel's "Kinds of Strangers" follows the psychological breakdown of the crew of a deep-space craft after a devastating equipment failure. Stephen Baxter's bleak "Huddle", about a future molded by genetic engineering and planetary catastrophe was easily the darkest story in the book. Curt Wohleber's "100 Candles" and Chris Beckett's "Valour" were genuinely well written, well conceived stories with interesting characters. Finally, translated from the Japanese, Hiroe Suga's "Freckled Figure" was a beautifully told tale that somehow bound together the spirit of ancient Japanese craftsmanship with the love of anime and technology that drives so much of Japan today.

For the sake of these stories, YEAR'S BEST SF 5 is worth a look. But if you really want great sci-fi, I'd HIGHLY recommend STARFISH by Peter Watts. I've just finished it and have to say it is the best sci-fi books I've read in many many years. I hope that David Hartwell is able to find fiction of that quality for future anthologies.

I bought this book in order to study the kinds of short science fiction that are considered top-of-the-line to give me an idea on how I should write my science fiction. What I found overwhelmed me. Strict application of `science' to the fiction is common; most stories have discussions of scientific principles in them, even in the most simple of tales. Rare are the stories you see the science only applied and not discussed. Even Gene Wolfe's simplistic protagonist in `Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?' describes a scientific discussion on gravity. So with the primitive Night-Dawn in Stephen Baxter's `Huddle', who puts forth a theorem in a scientific manner, though it was done simply; I take the message to be that whatever humanity mutates into, it will retain scientific reasoning. I hope this does not aggravate the impression of science fiction being `hifalooting'. A couple of stories are mostly talk (Stableford's and Swanwick's); action and movement does not seem to be a looked-for element in a sci-fi story. Of course, I do not disagree that science can be left out of SF, but the acronym can mean just `speculative fiction', and the science need not necessarily be flatly explained. But I do assume that `hard' sci-fi, with scientific explanations, is what most editors are looking for. For me, it seems that applauded sci-fi stories can be hard to understand; I barely got what the authors were trying to put across in `Sexual Dimorphism' and `Everywhere' (The former is especially heavy in scientific jargon). Michael Bishop's poem is a mystery to me. Guess I'm not that sharp a reader of SF as I thought. Traditional themes can be found, like space opera, alternative history, time travel and cyberpunk, but are not easily identifiable unless you've really read between the lines. But there is a trend. Most of the stories here project humanity in various future situations, having moved to new states of life, gone to new places or using new technology, but they still have to deal with problems spawned by these new states. We have human-animals specifically bred for a brutal sport, people living for thousands of years and trying to bear with it, an Attention Deficit Disorder sufferer being treated with a cyborg implant, people living on a threatened moon, among others. New ideas have ceased to appear, so the themes are now more on problems caused by these ideas, and how to solve them. With regard to the editor's comments, I would say that Hartwell gives pertinent info on background. Revealing where the story was first published helps to identify those markets. Analog looks for problem-solving stories, Artemis is about the moon, so forth. His picks were also as varied as possible; different themes, different styles, different origins (Nice to know that there was one Japanese work there, one of those I liked more in this collection). But I wish he'd tell simply why those stories he chose were the best for him. Anyhow, I have an idea on what the editors of the various Sci-fi magazines are looking for. Thanks, David.

Beginning in the mid nineties and running at least to the present, David Hartwell produces the alternative "year's best" anthologies. The primary series is of course the similarly titled one edited by Gardner Dozois. In some years the Hartwell selection is at least as good as the generally larger Dozois version. In the fifth year of his endeavours though he missed the mark and this book is not so good. Certainly it is not up to the standards of some of the earlier anthologies.

Of course, there are some good stories in here. A competant editor could hardly gather together 25 tales and disappoint with them all but the truth is that less than a dozen of them are better than average for current SF and that hardly counts as "year's best" even if you take into account the fact that there is no overlap with Gardner Dozois' book which presumably gets first choice with the authors.

I think that the best story here is Steven Baxter's "Huddle" which tells of a future Earth stricken in an ice age and populated by people genetically engineered to survive the bitterly cold conditions. Perhaps it is a sign of the times but all of the best stories here deal with the alteration of humans in order to deal with the pressures of life in the future. Terry Bisson's "Macs" introduces the ides of creating clones of criminals just so that they may be killed by the families of their victims while Curt Wohleber's "100 Candles" and Tom Purdom's "Fossil Games" are set in futures in which it is normal for people to be extensively altered and those who have no, or few, alterations feel increasingly excluded from their worlds.

If you are the kind of fan who just cannot get enough short SF then this is worth getting as you will find some interesting stories but otherwise, you might as well give this a miss and hope for a better effort next year.

Hartwell notes in his introduction that stories from New Horizons were contractually not allowed to be in this volume. Bastards to be one of you people, then.

This volume is down a bit in quality for a Year's Best, only a 3.5 average. It starts really well, with the two best stories, Egan's outstanding Border Guards and Reed's excellent Game of the Century to be found. Then the middle has a whole batch of decent but not good work that slows it down.

Year's Best SF 05 : Everywhere - Geoff Ryman
Year's Best SF 05 : Evolution Never Sleeps - Elisabeth Malartre
Year's Best SF 05 : Sexual Dimorphism - Kim Stanley Robinson
Year's Best SF 05 : Game of the Century - Robert Reed
Year's Best SF 05 : Kinds of Strangers - Sarah Zettel
Year's Best SF 05 : Visit the Sins - Cory Doctorow
Year's Best SF 05 : Border Guards - Greg Egan
Year's Best SF 05 : macs - Terry Bisson
Year's Best SF 05 : Written in Blood - Chris Lawson
Year's Best SF 05 : Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon? - Gene Wolfe
Year's Best SF 05 : The Blue Planet - Robert J. Sawyer
Year's Best SF 05 : Lifework - Mary Soon Lee
Year's Best SF 05 : Rosetta Stone - Fred Lerner
Year's Best SF 05 : An Apollo Asteroid - Brian Aldiss
Year's Best SF 05 : 100 Candles - Curt Wohleber
Year's Best SF 05 : Democritus' Violin - G. David Nordley
Year's Best SF 05 : Fossil Games - Tom Purdom
Year's Best SF 05 : Valour - Chris Beckett
Year's Best SF 05 : Huddle - Stephen Baxter
Year's Best SF 05 : Ashes and Tombstones - Brian M. Stableford
Year's Best SF 05 : Ancient Engines - Michael Swanwick
Year's Best SF 05 : Freckled Figure [1992] - Hiroe Suga
Year's Best SF 05 : Shiva - Barry N. Malzberg
Year's Best SF 05 : The Queen of Erewhon - Lucy Sussex


Fun family.

3.5 out of 5


Attack of the killer chipmunks.

4 out of 5


Women, men, pretty similar most of the time. Boobs float differently while swimming, apparently.

4 out of 5


Animal girls and boys are in a football league of their own.

4.5 out of 5


Stuck in space sooicide staving-off.

3 out of 5


Switched off Grampa.

3.5 out of 5


It is about human immortals, and how they deal with people and society when living so long. One man joins back into life, and meets the best quantum soccer player going around, and loses a friend.

The discovery is made is that she is one of the earliest immortals, instrumental in posthuman travel to other planets, and knows what death is actually like, and has to work out how to relate to the new people.

Now, I can't get this story out of my head, like happens with songs sometimes, so, I am upgrading this, 5 stars, given I reread it recently and hadn't read it for quite a while.

And, as far as Australian goes, as far as pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, well, I'd hate to be caught paraphasing the Devil Went Down to Georgia, but, he's the best there's even been.

5 out of 5


Victim gets clone crim delivery punishment.

4 out of 5


Religious DNA transcription is a killer vulnerability.

4.5 out of 5


Weighty loss.

3 out of 5


People probes are better.

3.5 out of 5


Divorce counselling.

3.5 out of 5


Alien library organisation.

3.5 out of 5


New mode.

3 out of 5


Old tapes.

3.5 out of 5


Replication dupe.

4 out of 5


Even for poor man's posthuman asteroid ship bailout, politics is problematic.

4 out of 5


Alien bloody philosophy.

3.5 out of 5


Cold, furry and Bullish.

4 out of 5


Survival payloads.

3.5 out of 5


Immortality breakdown.

4 out of 5


Model character.

3.5 out of 5


Extradimensional calculations.

3 out of 5


Sexual politics in a civilisation in New Zealand after a technological crash.

4 out of 5




4.5 out of 5

At first glance, the cover may not be as appealing as the other volumes. The collection of authors is formidable though, as one takes a glance at the back cover. The book is cheap, and you get more than your share of reading material. It's a pity that only a dozen of the stories are worth much notice.

Robert Reed's "Game of the Century" and Stephen Baxter's "Huddle" are geniuinely engaging, and struck me as two of the best in the anthology. Michael Bishop's poem "Secrets of the Alien Reliquary" is worth a read too. Some, frankly, were dissapointing. Perhaps some tried a notch too hard to be imaginative.

Nevertheless, a pedant of SF would enjoy this throughly, so snap the paperbacks up.

The choices of stories in this book are not very good. Some of them are repeats of other anthologies. Others are do not present very original ideas. I couldn't really get into any stories in this book. It's average at best.

The stories in this book are more like an authors notes than finished work. With the exception of two stories in this collection, they appeared to be a rambling unconnected assortment of pointles writing exercises. Save your money.