This second volume of The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy features over a quarter million words of fiction by some of the genre's greatest authors, as selected by Rich Horton, a well-known and well-received contributor to many of the field's most respected magazines.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Generally a good-to-great collection,
By David "I read science fiction and fantasy, bu... (LAUREL, MD, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition (Paperback)
This is a thick reprint of short stories published elsewhere, from lots of big names in the field. My rating is based on the average rating I gave to each individual story -- overall, it's a very good collection, with only six out of the thirty stories that I gave a rating of less than 4. It's a sci-fi and fantasy collection, but the majority of stories are science fiction, and only a couple that I'd call straight fantasy. My preferences tend to be more towards sci-fi, so keeping that in mind, here are the stories which I gave 5 stars:
"The Island" by Peter Watts. This is a hard-SF story about a spaceship crew building a wormhole network for the post-humans who have forgotten about them. After really enjoying Watts's novel "Blindsight," I will have to start looking for more from him. "The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. Alternate universe in which dinosaurs evolved to sentence and begin space exploration. "Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. A weird horror-punk sort of sci-fi/fantasy story about a world where souls are an energy source. "This Peaceable Land, Or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. Set in an alternate history in which the American Civil War never happened. As real-world Southern apologists are so fond of claiming, this led to the eventual death of slavery as it became economically unfeasible, but not in the humane and peaceful manner that those pro-Confederate fantasists imagine. "Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. A good-old fashioned space adventure, with a law enforcement officer pursuing a mad genius across solar systems. "Glister" by Dominic Green. A group of roughnecks on a space colony trying to escape, some really alien fauna. "Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. A sort of pulp space adventure with American Indian tribes living on Barsoom, granting hunting licenses to offworlders who come to hunt the native wildlife. "Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. This tale of a "pest control specialist" working on a space station has nods to Lewis Carroll and H.P. Lovecraft; both his "pet" and the vermin it hunts are strange, other-dimensional creatures. "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A monk of an ancient religious order has to steal something that will free their planet from a conquering empire. Lots of high-tech adventure and ancient artifacts.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best of 2009: Don't expect amazing, but do expect good,
By
This review is from: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition (Paperback)
There's nothing really outstanding in Rich Horton's "The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010", but, fortunately, there's nothing really bad either. There is, of course, no overall theme to the volume, but there are connections between some of the stories -- e.g., two involve dragons, two riff on silly tropes from early sci-fi, two focus on African Americans, and nearly half feature or assume some form of space travel. Alas, there's nothing here aimed at "hard" sci-fi fans, and there's only one robot story and one time travel story, but there are half a dozen contemporary fantasy pieces, at least three that qualify as space opera, and at least two alternate histories.
Despite a preponderance of sci-fi (20 of 30, depending on how you count), the overlap with Gardner Dozois' science fiction anthology for the same year (the 27th annual) is small -- only 4 pieces: Gould's near-future post-apocalyptic yarn, "Story with Beans", Peter Watts' Hugo-winning far future novella "The Island", Bear and Monette's enjoyable monsters-on-a-space-station piece "Mongoose", and John Kessel's far future thief-with-a-god-in-his-head tale, "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance". For hard core sci-fi fans, this makes Horton's book a good complement to Dozois'. The only story that really stood out for me was Kelly Link's funny and poignant "Secret Identity", in which a 15-year-old girl pretending to be her 35-year-old sister attempts to rendezvous with an older man at a hotel hosting a superhero convention. Other highlights included the aforementioned "Mongoose"; John Meany's mildly strange "Necroflux Day", where spacecraft run on energy siphoned from the dead; and Eugene Mirabelli's "Catalog", in which a confused graphic artist searches for his dream date -- a woman he saw in an L.L.Bean catalog -- from the inside of print ads, photo spreads, and children's books. Three other notable stories are Toiya Kristen Finley's "The Death of Sugar Daddy", where the literal unraveling of a ghetto community turns out to have a very frightening cause; Robert Charles Wilson's "The Peaceable Land; Or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe," a solid Civil War alternate history piece that suggests the costs of peace may sometimes be too high; and Catherynne M. Valente's difficult and thoroughly weird "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew", which takes the form of a script for a film documentary about a famous documentarian who studied whales on Venus. (I suspect that readers of "Sparrows" will divide evenly between those who love it, those who hate it, and those who give up in confusion.) None of the remaining stories are truly bad, but a couple don't really seem to belong, despite being smart and well-written: In Paul Park's "The Persistence of Memory; Or This Space For Sale", the author auctions off spots in his story, which he then constructs around them -- this is straight up metafiction. John Langan's clever but overly-long "Technicolor" is both metafiction and horror; it begins as an undergraduate lecture on Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and slowly becomes an exercise in the bizarre and macabre. Bottom Line: Rich Horton is not you. (If he is you: Hi, Rich!) Because you are not Rich and you don't share his tastes, you almost certainly would have picked a completely different set of stories and novelettes. My point? Don't expect to love this anthology, don't expect amazing, don't expect astounding, but do expect a reasonable sampling of the year's best shorts. That's good enough for me.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Missing words,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition (Kindle Edition)
I agree with the first several reviews, in that while there were (for me) some really brilliant short stories, there were also some very on par and I thought boring stories (I skipped about 4 stories). Most best of anthologies I read are filled with really great stories, but this is a bit of a hodgepodge. I'd say still worth it, but for one thing....
In my version, the word 'body' was missing. I'm not kidding. In sentences that would read 'everybody ran', it would read instead 'everyran'. I did not read the word 'body' once! THis was very disconcerting and frankly I thought spoiled some otherwise excellent stories, and gave me a sour taste in this book. I've been very happy with the kindle until this book.
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