Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection

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First off, the other reviewer is reviewing some other edition, NOT the 16th. I should know, as I have the 16th, and to finish the thought I put in the title, if this is the best that the year 1999 had to offer for Sci-Fi, then I don't want to know what the worst was. The collection starts with a story about a naive kid who is strong armed into getting dunked into the ocean to experience "Beatrice" which is the author's very thin veil for God. "Beatrice" died for all humanity in the story world's mythology and the only way to win "Beatrice's" good favor is to be brought to the point of near drowning and then pulled out at the last second. In the end we're somehow supposed to walk away with the message that the idea of God originated because a bunch of our ancestors got high and decided that this must be "God."

And it only gets worse from there.

How is that possible? Allow me to sum up for you "The Days of Solomon Gursky." This is, quite possibly, the worst story I have ever read in my life. This story "chronicles" Solomon Gursky as he is having problems with his bike but finds someone on the trail he was biking on to fix it and stumbles upon an experiment where the person who helped him with his bike is working on resurrecting the dead. In the next scene Gursky is able to perfect this process, only to be betrayed and killed. Except he doesn't truly die. The next scene shows him resurrected as this type of living corpse, who his wife is now very sexually attracted to (apparently all the chicks dig guys who die and come back to life) The author then throws in a bit about how he has no feelings for her back, since after all, he actually died, therefore he cannot feel love for her. He never actually explains the process by which all of this happened, we're just to accept it. Why? Because the author said so, that's why! Anyway, he ends up killing his wife and resurrecting her so they can help with this war that's been going on. Oh, didn't I tell you about that? Oh, no I didn't because the author didn't mention ANYTHING about a war before the third scene started. There's no war in the second, then BOOM there's one in the third. In the fourth scene suddenly Solomon and his wife are in a spaceship fighting enemy spaceships. No context on how they got there or why, they're just there. Then at the end of the next scene we see Solomon on another planet, and he's now a completely different life form. Didn't I tell you how he got to be there or how he changed or why? No? Again.... Anyway he meets a girl, he knocks her up and leaves her with no explanation whatsoever, he transforms AGAIN and is now searching for this same girl, only to finally find her and have a five minute conversation which has the same amount of tension as your average snail race, ending with the girl telling him that they'll never see each other again, followed by the author verifying that and briefly explaining it (poorly) then all of a sudden he closes his eyes and he's back to where he started. At no point after the space ship scene is there any mention of the villain ever again. Nor this war that popped up out of nowhere. Instead we're right back in the present day. The bike is still not working, but this time he goes the other way. Good call there Solomon!

This collection has a few, keyword FEW stories that are interesting, but in most of them the authors were too busy trying to sound "hip" and "avant-garde" to make a decent story. In one of them, the author apparently decided that soldiers no longer say "Received and understood" or "Copy" "Roger Wilco" "Roger" or even "10-4." Instead, the response these soldiers use to basically say "Okay" is "Hearing and obedience." You know I couldn't have possibly made that up.

And what is with all of these authors writing in the present tense? That drives me absolutely insane. To actually read something like "I jump out of bed at the sound. I look around and see nothing. I turn on the light. 'Alice?' my husband asks as he wakes up" jolts me right out of the story. Writing in present tense does NOTHING for the story. Any story that is written in present tense can (and should) be written in past tense, that way I may actually be compelled to read it instead of wondering why the author wrote their story this way! Trust me folks, if your reader is asking themselves questions like that, you haven't written well! They're not engaged in the story! That is not good! You don't want that!

Amidst the rest of the collection are a pile of "stories", many of which hint at a larger conflict that we'll never see because the story ends after an ally the characters are searching for is found. Or we get a story where the characters are given scant characterization then they're thrust into the sci-fi world the author put them into and just when the stories get interesting, they end. As a result of both types, of which there are many examples in this book, there is no emotional payoff. We have no reason to root for these characters. There's no reason to care if they reach the end of their journey with their objective completed. There is just no emotional connection, something that is possibly even more important in sci-fi than it would be in another genre. Characters are, after all, what we, the audience relate to, as such, we look to them, not the sci-fi world the story is set in to find something we can relate to.

Anyway, if you are an extremely avid sci-fi reader and you just must simply have every Gardner Dozois Sci-Fi collection out there, buy this book. Everyone else stay far, far away.

These 24 stories from 1998 are, as usual for this series, a good sample of the year's science fiction. The book opens with a summary of the year's important events in SF. The stories are introduced by well-written author bios, descriptions of other publications and enticing story previews. As Dozois readers have come to expect.

Some of my favorite stories are:

In Bruce Sterling's "Taklamakan" we accompany two deniable government operatives on a high-tech, behind-the-lines, undercover insertion into... something that has gone awry.

In Ursula Le Guin's "Island of the Immortals" we are given a tourists-eye view of an out-of-the-way place where some people never die. As we might expect, these long lives are precious.

In Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" a mother pieces together the narratives of her life and of her daughter's life. It's a little hard to follow without some translation.

In Rob Chilson's "This Side of Independence" we see a future Earth being literally dismantled for its raw materials. The humans doing this feel bad about destroying their home world. So do its inhabitants.

I found all stories readable and worth my time. You may have different favorites, but will likely feel the same about the collection as a whole.