Customer Reviews

Year's Best SF 12 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction))

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It is really very hard to understand how these editors have managed to survive their own ineptitude. These stories are cliche efforts by minor voices in science fiction. As a reader I feel deceived, robbed, and worst of all, bored. If I were a top notch science fiction writer (Brin, Card, etc.) I would be pissed. Calling this the "best" of the year is a gross insult to the truly talented folks working the field. For someone new to the genre it would be very likely to cause them to decide SF is not their thing. Criminal neglect. I gave it two stars rather than zero because there are a couple of good stories by real SF writers (why did those authors allow their stories to be published alongside hack amateurs?) MOST IRRITATING is that the editors have the gall to tell us, in the preface, that they have careful chosen only true science fiction stories, rather than crossing the line into fantasy. If you can't fix it, lie about it....

There are about 3 or 4 good stories in this anthology. It leans heavily toward aimless, perfunctory end-of-the-world scenarios and bland conceits, and there are the usual "science diction" stories that take standard SF formulas and insert the pop-science buzzwords of the day ("nano" comes up a lot). I think the sense of "best" here is "best story by each author that appeared in some venue somewhere" and I guess a lot of them weren't really concentrating on short fiction that year or something. I will single out the Liz Williams story as memorably worthy.
In short, it could be worth 8 bucks, but don't let the "best" in the title fool you into thinking that this is the "best" in the sense in which we Earthlings normally use the term.

An excellent anthology found here, with a story average of 3.90, and nothing that I didn't like at all, which is very nifty.

The editors also give a short intro/overview of the year in SF short stories, and point out they could have filled several volumes, especially with novellas. If you are talking about 4 star plus stories in a given year for a particular person, sounds reasonable to me.

Also each story intro has a little more interest than some other styles of doing this, so all in all, a great job.

If you ignore the always interesting Dozois novella-summaries in his Year's Best, on fiction alone this is the best Year's Best of the year, with the highest story average of the four (Dozois, Hartwell/Cramer, Horton, Strahan).

Year's Best SF 12 : Nancy Kress - Nano Comes to Clifford Falls
Year's Best SF 12 : Terry Bisson - Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Year's Best SF 12 : Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.
Year's Best SF 12 : Heather Lindsley - Just Do It.
Year's Best SF 12 : Gardner R. Dozois - Counterfactual.
Year's Best SF 12 : Edd Vick - Moon Does Run.
Year's Best SF 12 : Mary Rosenblum - Home Movies.
Year's Best SF 12 : Rudy Rucker - Chu and the Nants.
Year's Best SF 12 : Ian Creasey - Silence in Florence.
Year's Best SF 12 : Kameron Hurley - The Women of Our Occupation.
Year's Best SF 12 : Claude Lalumiere - This is the Ice Age.
Year's Best SF 12 : Eileen Gunn - Speak, Geek.
Year's Best SF 12 : Joe Haldeman - Expedition, with Recipes.
Year's Best SF 12 : Liz Williams - The Age of Ice.
Year's Best SF 12 : Michael Flynn - Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth.
Year's Best SF 12 : Gregory Benford - Applied Mathematical Theology.
Year's Best SF 12 : Carol Emshwiller - Quill.
Year's Best SF 12 : Alastair Reynolds - Tiger, Burning.
Year's Best SF 12 : Paul J. McAuley - Dead Men Walking.
Year's Best SF 12 : Daryl Gregory - Damascus.
Year's Best SF 12 : Michael Swanwick - Tin Marsh.
Year's Best SF 12 : Ian R. MacLeod - Taking Good Care of Myself.
Year's Best SF 12 : Stephen Baxter - The Lowland Expedition.
Year's Best SF 12 : Wil McCarthy - Heisenberg Elementary.
Year's Best SF 12 : Robert Reed - Rwanda.
Year's Best SF 12 : Charlie Rosenkrantz - Preemption.

Nano technology is available to all, so people that don't want to work in nasty jobs, like, say, sanitation, or underpaid jobs like teaching and the police don't have to.

3.5 out of 5


If the future is nice, stay.

4 out of 5


Biowar makes geekfu and gruntwork a necessary combination afterwards.

5 out of 5


Behaviour modification commercialisation.

4 out of 5


Twenty year civil war coverage.

4.5 out of 5


Memory recording transfer rejection.

4.5 out of 5


Singularity reversal upload boy.

4 out of 5


Pisspot poor alien discovery speech recovery.

3.5 out of 5


Big bad brutal biatches.

3 out of 5


Quantum Cross creep.

3.5 out of 5


Smart mutt choice.

4 out of 5


Surviving undesirable cuisine.

3.5 out of 5


Incarceration escape avatar library retrieval liberation deal.

4 out of 5


Ferry removal machine.

3 out of 5


Microwaving g0d.

4 out of 5


Dino alien discovery.

3.5 out of 5


Brane circle future message creator inspiration warning investigation.

4.5 out of 5


Clone killer uncovered confrontation.

4 out of 5


Jaysus, that's a hell of an idea to spread around.

3.5 out of 5


"Naughty girl. Papa spank!" I wish! Wahhh!

4 out of 5


Disposing of yourself.

3.5 out of 5


Gutsy building time.

3.5 out of 5


Time Patrol lesson.

4 out of 5


Takeover migration rejection massacres.

4 out of 5


Alien canine annihilation education evolution protection.

4 out of 5