Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Off On a Starship, William Barton. Raunchy account of hormonal `60's teenager accidentally whisked away to distant yet eerily familiar points unknown. Clever parody of old pulp sci-fi, complete with crazy cosmic ending. B

It's All True, John Kessel. 1940's cinema legend wooed by time traveling 2048 talent scout. Sizzling narrative doused by lukewarm ending. B

Rogue Farm, Charles Stoss. Future farmer harassed by bizarre genetically engineered squatter(s?). B

The Ice, Steven Popkes. Does a man's past determine his future? This question takes on new complexity for a clone of Gordie Howe in this richly textured character study. A

Ej-Es, Nancy Kress. For the strangely afflicted colonists on a remote planet, the line is sharp between disease and cure...but which is which? B

The Bellman, John Varley. Serial killer of pregnant women pursued by pregnant cop on the extensively colonized Moon. Gore galore. B

The Bear's Baby, Judith Moffett. Environmentally correct aliens clean up Mother Earth, but play dirty with humans. Snappy narrative, intriguing plot. A

Calling Your Name, Howard Waldrop. Droll widower pops into an alternate reality where everything's the same, except completely different. Comically composed, elegantly ended. A

June Sixteenth at Anna's, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Melancholy widower deteriorates watching his wife in a holographic history. Melancholy. C

The Green Leopard Plague, Walter Jon Williams. Intrepid widower, this one a brilliant academic, postulates a new world order after some mayhem over a breakthrough in bioengineering. Long tunnel, no cheese. C

The Fluted Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi. In a far future fiefdom, servants are cruelly and bizarrely bioengineered at the whim of their lord. One victim plots an escape-of sorts. B

Dead Worlds, Jack Skillingstead. Man sacrifices his life for science, then has a tough life. A poignant and philosophical love story, remarkably compact. A+

King Dragon, Michael Swawnick. Curious mix of SF and fantasy as a downed fighter jet's nasty computer lords it over of a village full of elves. A

Singletons in Love, Paul Melko. Group consciousness makes falling in love problematic for future humans. C

Anomalous Structures of My Dreams, M. Shayne Bell. Stop whining! A hospital patient dying of AIDS gets a roomie who's really sick. B

The Cookie Monster, Vernon Vinge. Zzzz.

Joe Steele, Harry Turtledove. Stalin-type beats FDR in 1932 and all hell breaks loose. B

Birth Days, Geoff Ryman. Recessive homosexuality gene turns out to be dominant. Dubious Darwinian premise merely prop-for-ganda. D

Awake in the Night, John C. Wright. Eons hence, Earth languishes in perpetual darkness, the light of civilization a mere flicker as well. A man battles inscrutable monsters and the very weight of time in this haunting and surreal tale of adventure. A+

The Long Way Home, James Van Pelt. Mankind's recovery from nuclear holocaust takes centuries, and for a few men, so it does also. B

The Eyes of America, Geoffrey A. Landis. Technology and satire rage on when the presidential race pits Thomas Edison and Samuel Clemens against William Jennings Bryan and Nikola Tesla. A+

Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst, Kage Baker. Immortal sales rep for a future corporation does some supernatural horse trading with William Randolph Hearst. B

Night of Time, Robert Reed. Memory retrieval in a far future corner of the Milky Way reveals an alien's fantastic secret. B

Strong Medicine, William Shunn. In this ironic and incisive vignette, a 2037 surgeon contemplates suicide after being rendered obsolete by nanotechnology. Well, almost. A+

Send Me a Mentagram, Dominic Green. Passengers on a 2010 Antarctic cruise ship die suddenly, gruesomely, and mysteriously. Can a maverick doctor figure it out in time? B

And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, Paul Di Filippo. It could happen to you. In the near future, everyday products form creepy wireless networks and harass humans a little and a lot. A+

Flashmen, Terry Dowling. Humans battle inscrutable aliens while readers battle inscrutable lingo-laced narrative. I think there's a good story in here somewhere. C

Dragonhead, Nick DiChario. WARNING. Digital uploading may be hazardous to your health. C

Dear Abbey, Terry Bisson. Two scientists travel to the end of time and bear witness to the ecological sins of man. Well constructed, sweeping and lighthearted novelette aptly closes this volume. A

All of these stories are well-written, in the English-major sense. Rather fewer of them are of much interest as science fiction. I found myself reading dutifully but without excessive enjoyment; the "wow!" factor is largely absent.

Further, most of the stories are remorselessly downbeat. I don't claim that we need to return to 100% naive technological "Ralph 124C41"-style optimism, but this much gloom and doom smacks of Conventional Wisdom at work.

Most of the stories made little or no impression on me, for better or worse. A few of the exceptions:

William Barton's "Off on a Starship," the first story, has an interesting setup but a truly pointless ending. It's perhaps unfortunate as a tone-setter in that it mentions quite a lot of classic SF works, most of which very noticably outshine both this story and the rest of the collection.

Not one but two of these stories deal with time travelers cutting deals with 20th-century media figures: Orson Wells in _It's All True_, William Randolph Hearst in "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst." The first has some point but is not very original. The second is witty and amusing; however, it's weakened by the sense that (reading between the lines) the events of the story are predestined to happen.

Nancy Kress's "Ej-Es" is well-written, needlessly depressing, and a bit too predictable. A little more work could have made it into a stunner, but you'll probably guess what's going to happen as soon as the situation is made clear. Good idea, indifferent execution.

"June Sixteenth at Anna's," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Boring, boring, boring. Mainstream fiction dressed up with SF sauce.

"The Green Leopard Plague," by Walter Jon Williams, was a Hugo nominee last year. Why? I don't know. There's no there there.

"King Dragon," is what I think of as typical Michael Swanwick fantasy: very well written, a fascinating setup, and so remarkably unpleasant that I'd rather stick my head in a toilet bowl than re-read it. Your mileage will vary, depending on how much style and originality count for you.

Last year Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" won a Hugo award. It's good enough computer-oriented SF, but it's far from his best work. It is, however, one of the few pieces in the book that could be described as "classical SF."

John C. Wright follows his "Golden Oecumene" novels with "Awake in the Night," one of the few real standouts of this collection. Harks back to Poe, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and maybe a few others, with original touches as well. A creepy and absorbing far-future fantasy that raises interesting questions about free will.

A welcome light-hearted exception to the general tone of the collection is Geoffrey Landis's "The Eyes of America." It's early-twentieth-century alt-hist techno-futurism with some clever extrapolation and nice comic characters. Not a heavyweight story, perhaps, but genuinely fun to read.

The remaining stories mostly roused me to a fever pitch of apathy. Possibly my reading tastes are fossiliferous, but I can't help feeling that most of these stories are going to be forgotten awfully quickly. Someone needs to phone Ted Chiang--see his fabulous collection _Stories of Your Life and Others_--and tell him to write more.

I've been a fan of these collections since number four lo those many years ago. 21 is a good, thick set of readings. Dozois does a very good job of rounding up the year with his cogent "summation" essay (again scifi is not dead). His choices for best writing last year lean heavily on material published by several of the big names and only a few new voices, but the picks are here for good reasons.

William Barton's wonderful "Off on a starship" leads off and Terry Bisson's longish but good "Dear Abbey" bookends the set of 29 stories. Several of these are more than short stories -- why is novella a bad word these days? Turtledove, Vinge and Varley turn in excellent work here but without covering all the stories the math should be obvious... 29 stories, a high quality review essay, and for how much? Less than a bad movie and popcorn (and wow are there some bad movies out there).

Buy this, read some stories, find an author you like, buy their books, support the genre.

The annual collection of the best of science fiction edited by Gardner Dozois (until recently, the editor of Asimov's magazine) is always eagerly awaited. This year's, the 21st edition of it, was of special interest to me, as it has another "Company" story by Kage Baker. So I just had to read it. While I am normally more of a fantasy fan then a science fiction one, I am finding more of an interest in science fiction than I used to have. This collection, however, looked very imposing. Twenty-nine stories in all, over 600 pages. Would I be able to get through it, or would the Baker story be the only thing of interest for me?

The fact that I'm reviewing it should tell you that I found it at least acceptable, if not brilliant. However, I can tell you that I enjoyed almost every story in the book. Sure, there are some that are better than others (Terry Bisson's story, "Dear Abbey," is decent, but not really my cup of tea), but I can't say that any of them didn't deserve to be in the collection. Surprisingly, there wasn't much of what I would consider "hard" science fiction, where the story depends more on the science than on the characters, which made the collection even better for me.

While there were many strong stories in this collection, I'd have to say that the best ones were Kage Baker's "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst", Steven Popkes' "The Ice", and Paul Di Filippo's "And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon." As stated earlier, Baker's story is another Company story, this time with the immortals Joseph and Lewis trying to get William Randolph Hearst to agree to do some storage for some of the Company's rescued items. Joseph has orders to negotiate other things with Hearst that Lewis isn't even aware of, but Hearst drives a hard bargain. He won't take anything less than the immortality that Joseph and the rest of the Company operatives have. The problem is, the immortality solution does not work for anybody older than 5 or 6 years old. In his negotiations, Joseph makes a startling discovery about Hearst that will have far-reaching consequences. This story is simply a delight, and it's longer than a lot of Baker's shorts. There's also a sub-plot of a signed Rudolph Valentino script being stolen from Lewis' room, and their efforts to get it back. With a mixture of real and imagined characters (Greta Garbo and Clark Gable make an appearance, along with Hearst), the characterization and the humour is nothing short of marvelous. It also adds a bit to the backstory of Baker's universe, including adding another piece to the future that we've only seen snippets of. I adored this story.

"The Ice" is another winner for Popkes, whose "A Fable of Savior and Reptile" in Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy 3 was one of the best of that collection. In "The Ice," we're in the near future, and somebody has successfully cloned hockey player Gordie Howe. This does not come out until a reporter digs up the truth when the kid is in high school. The revelation has a horrible effect on the boy's life as he fights to get out of the shadow of his predecessor. He makes some very strange choices, getting drummed out of hockey and embarking on a journey of discovery that will lead him to love, tragedy, and ultimately back to the first love of his life, hockey. It's a wonderful story that asks "How much of who we are do we owe to our genes?" It's also a poignant tale of love and loss. The ending is simply marvelous, but of course I won't go into that here. Probably the best scene in the story is when the main character meets the other attempted clone, one that didn't work out quite as well as it did for him.

Finally, there is "And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon," which is just thoroughly funny and entertaining. It's a cautionary tale of what could happen if we make our household, and all of the products inside it, too intelligent. In the future, everything has a form of intelligence, from the clothes on our backs to our cuisinarts and toothbrushes. Unfortunately, a by-product of all this is that they can sometimes join together to make a new form. Usually, these are harmless. However, one of these combinations, called a "bleb," was responsible for Kaz's parents' deaths. He's understandably paranoid about them. So when his girlfriend, Cody, says they should move in together, he's very worried about what blebs will form from the combination of their two households. While his worries are legitimate, they come true in a way that he could never have imagined. I laughed out loud a few times when I read this story, such images as two toothbrushes and a bathroom drinking glass running away on its brushy little feet causing me to giggle. The idea of losing your girlfriend because a bleb treats her better (and this is not a spoiler as it's mentioned in the very first paragraph) is just hilarious and it's interesting to see just how this comes about.

All in all, every story in this collection is worth reading at least once. If you're a science fiction fan at all, you owe it to yourself to pick up this collection. I know there are some of you who just don't do fiction in the short form. If that is so, then at least pick it up at the library for some of the novellas that are included. Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster," just won the Hugo award for Best Novella. So you know it has to be good.

David Roy

The quality of the proof-reading and editing almost defies description. Shame on Amazon for selling this book in this condition. Stories are good, but puh-leeze have some check the text first.

I love this series. Every yearly edition is full of great short fiction. Loved it!

I have only rated one of these stories as average, which I don't think has happened before, but it didn't quite make it to the magic 4.00 average. 3.98, pretty bloody close though!

As such, a whole pile of good, with four standouts, including the 5 star Flashmen.

The usual excellent introduction, too.

Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Off on a Starship - William Barton
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : It's All True - John Kessel
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Rogue Farm - Charles Stross
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Ice - Steven Popkes
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : EJ-ES - Nancy Kress
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Bellman - John Varley
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Bear's Baby - Judith Moffett
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Calling Your Name - Howard Waldrop
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : June Sixteenth at Anna's - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Green Leopard Plague - Walter Jon Williams
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Fluted Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Dead Worlds - Jack Skillingstead
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : King Dragon - Michael Swanwick
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Singletons in Love - Paul Melko
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Anomalous Structures of My Dreams - M. Shayne Bell
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Cookie Monster - Vernor Vinge
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Joe Steele - Harry Turtledove
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Birth Days - Geoff Ryman
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Awake in the Night - John C. Wright
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Long Way Home - James Van Pelt
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : The Eyes of America - Geoffrey A. Landis
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Welcome to Olympus Mr. Hearst - Kage Baker
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Night of Time - Robert Reed
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Strong Medicine - William Shunn
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Send Me a Mentagram - Dominic Green
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon - Paul Di Filippo
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Flashmen - Terry Dowling
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Dragonhead - Nick DiChario
Year's Best Science Fiction 21 : Dear Abbey - Terry Bisson


Space home tour, robot girlfriend included.

4 out of 5


Welles into the negative.

3.5 out of 5


Pastoral life breakdown.

3.5 out of 5


Hockey clone life.

4.5 out of 5


Medical remains.

4 out of 5


Unborn dead baby humans. Yum!

4 out of 5


Alien overlord breeding ban can be barely tolerated.

4 out of 5


Wrong president.

4 out of 5


Mundane recording time.

3 out of 5


Plant people economic overthrow research romance revenge.

4.5 out of 5


Pufnstuf probably wouldn't stand for this.

3.5 out of 5


Too trippy.

4.5 out of 5


Just plane die.

3.5 out of 5


Community clusterfrack.

4 out of 5


Nanolung breakout.

4 out of 5


Upload iteration revenge.

4 out of 5


Evil president.

4 out of 5


Reproductive success strategies.

4 out of 5


Preparing for weird.

4 out of 5


Attenuated nuclear circumstances.

3.5 out of 5


Television sales variety.

4 out of 5


Media baron longevity.

4 out of 5


Ancient inhabitant needed.

4 out of 5


Failed to kill myself, time to cut some people instead

3.5 out of 5


Mini mite man masticators.

4 out of 5


Needy girlfriend and too much combined junk a very bad situation.

4 out of 5


Dowling has again produced a stunning sf story that retains a distinctly alien flavour, as an old Flashmen team reassembles with a rookie as its focus, to deal with the landing of yet another craft.

Old allies, friends and rivals have to try and get along, and not die while saving thousands of people from the incursion.

5 out of 5


Implant overload.

4 out of 5


End of the World Blues.

4 out of 5

This series sets a high standard for science fiction short story writing and this collection is no exception. You will find a variety of styles and approaches in these stories and I find them a great way to discover writers I have never heard of.

I'm not sure I would classify every story in this collection as "the best" of the year, but that's in no way intended as a slight against what is contained in this collection. The book contains a large and varied collection of science fiction stories, each unique and varied in both scope and style. There were no stories in this perennially excellent book, but there were some particular standouts for me.

Ironically, the very first story was my favorite of all of them. "Off On A Starship" by William Barton, despite the undertones of an adolescent boy coming of age sexually during his wild and fascinating adventures in space, Barton's tone and style reminded me very much of the classic juvenile adventures of Robert Heinlein. This story is far more mature than Heinlein's YA books, but it's definitely got the same sense of wonder, the captures the youthful imagination that all of us have, regardless of our age. For me, this was by far the most enjoyable story in the book.

Other highlights for me include the absurdly funny "Rogue Farm" by Charles Stross, where he takes the future notion of "evolution" to a wildly funny extreme; "The Ice" by Stephen Popkes, which is an intriguing, moving, and hauntingly realistic take on one possible way that the issue of cloning might manifest itself in the not too distant future; and the gut-wrenchingly sad tale, "The Fluted Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi, in which a child is enslaved by a cruel woman who has turned her into a sick and twisted for of "art."

As a lifetime science fiction reader and having recently become a writer, I love reading stories that touch upon something within me, and/or open my eyes up to an issue that we either face today or will likely face in the coming years. This collection has stories that do all of those things. It's a book with a little something for everybody.

- Gregory Bernard Banks, author of "Phoenix Tales: Stories of Death & Life"

Its hard to believe these are the best science fiction stories of the year. Where's the sense of wonder? I don't know, call me old-fashioned, but many of these stories are chosen, I think, for political reasons by editors who were chosen for political reasons.