Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've only gotten 22% of the way through this collection of scifi/fantasy short stories so I'm not wholly qualified to give a review. But I'm giving up on the book. The stories themselves are fine. It's a generous amount of reading and would be well worth the $5 Kindle price if the Kindle version didn't have one major flaw that's making me set this book aside: the word "body" appears to be mass deleted from the book.

Having consumed a few dozen Kindle books I considered myself desensitized to formatting and OCR errors. Under the Dome by Stephen King had a hilarious amount of minor errors and I wholly enjoyed that book.

But when the dragon in "The Logic of the World" tells Parsival at loc 1212: "I know what everyis, and everywas, and some part of what everywill be" and then a few paragraphs later: "Everytalks about God" it gets just a little ridiculous.

The last straw was during "As Women Fight", a story about married men and women exchanging bodies. I should've skipped this story once the premise became clear. It's riddled with phrases such as "Or has that precious woman's changed your mind?" at loc 2464.

If you're the patient type, this book is probably worth reading. If you get annoyed at major errors like this, the Kindle version at least deserves a pass. There are lots of excellent scifi/fantasy anthologies around. I've read the 2009 and 2011 editions of this series on the Kindle and they were solid.

I should preface this review by pointing out that I am, in spite of my preference for science fiction, not particularly intellectual: I'm the kind of person who had to look up "pareidolia" and everything in Latin while reading this. All in all this is an excellent collection for someone with my tastes, but I couldn't give it a full five stars simply because I couldn't actually recall a single story that really "grabbed" me, though the average quality is very high. The Endangered Camp, the one about space-traveling dinosaurs, was as entertaining as promised but a little short considering the hype (not surprisingly, the cover illustration has virtually nothing to do with the content, like someone called the artist at 2 AM and said, "give me sci-fi dinosaurs!") Of the fantasy, Sylgarmo's Proclamation had the most fun with the genre, inserting helpful footnotes about the various oddities and monsters casually mentioned in the story, while there were several different amusing takes on battling weird aliens, including Bear and Monette's charming science-fiction Lewis Carroll tribute, Mongoose. The Peter Watts story, "The Island", was predictably heartless but interesting nonetheless, the obligatory Paul Park inclusion was mercifully short (sorry fans of "meta fiction", you may be disappointed by this collection) and Eugene Mirabelli's Catolog felt like a nice throwback to the old Philip K. Dick/Ted Sturgeon style. There's a creepy alternate history, a fair amount of sci-fi/fantasy crossover material (do they call that "steam punk"?), a surprisingly touching piece about robots (Eros, Phillia, Agape) and just a few stories that didn't do much at all for me. Not a totally mind-blowing collection but a welcome change from the more intellectual, "literary" style that seems to have replaced most of what I enjoy about science fiction.

I could not get caught up in any of the pieces I read in this collection. Some were OK, but only OK. When I get a collection of short stories, I want them to be just that, short. In this collection, many stories went on and on and------. For me, none of the stories I read were great science fiction. One thing this collection did do was make me appreciate the older collections I have read over the last many years. While I am not a strong believer in, "nothing new under the sun," perhaps the individual who put this collection together needs to do a better job of finding the real sci-fi writing talent, out there. For the most part, these stories were either a variation on a theme long overdone, or so "out there" as to be unenjoyable to read, for me.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix SF and fantasy. At 540 pages and thirty stories it's too much and some of the stories were too long. If you're reading an anthology to see if you've been missing a great writer then short is better. I bought it partly because I'm being told to get rid of my ten year accumulation of Asimov's. I tend to be put off by archaic diction in dialog, and even more put off when it intrudes into exposition and the narrator of the story gives us flowery passages such as "an eloquent man is said to have a tongue as sweet as the crimson nectar of the lindal flowers." (Theodore Goss in "Child-Empress of Mars.") But that's just my taste. I call it "yeah, verily, yeah" (YVY for short) in the list that follows. I've used OP for other planets outside the solar system, SSP for solar system planets, OSS for On (or mostly on) Space Ships, AH for alternative history, ENF for Earth Near Future, HoEFF for Humans or Earth Far Future, TT for Time Travel, SP for Steam Punk, D for dragon, and MF for metafiction. I thought the MF stories were best. It's a new trend. This collection was low on alien visitors to Earth and on mutants with special powers. Are they out of style?
(I'm hanging on to the old Asimovs).

Story with Beans ENF
Child Empress of Mars SSP, YVY
The Island OSS
The Logic of the World YVY, D
The Long Cold Goodbye ENF, SP
The Endangered Camp ENF, SP,YVY
Dragon's Teeth YVY, D
As Women Fight AH
Sylgarmo's Proclamation YVY, SP
Three Twilight Tales YVY, MF
Necroflux Day AH
The Persistence of Memory MF
This Peacable Land AH, SP
On the Human Plan HoEFF
Technicolor MF
Catalog MF
Crimes and Glory OSS
Eros, Philia,Agape ENF
A Painter, a Sheep and a Boa Constrictor OP
Glister OSS
The Qualia Engine ENF
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew SP
Wife Stealing Time OP
Images of Anna
Mongoose OSS
Living Curiosities
The Death of Sugar DaddyENF, TT
Secret Identity MF
Bespoke TT
Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance AH, ENF