24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent collection, May 28, 2009
One of my complaints with the annual "Year's Best" anthologies is that they usually appear to repeat each other, containing the same stories by the same authors. However, this anthology includes many stories which were overlooked by the other anthologies. Among my favorites which you will only find in this anthology are "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi, "Oblivion: A Journey" by Vandana Singh, "Fury" by Alastair Reynolds, "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain" by Jason Sanford, and "Mitigation" by Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder.
As for the previous reviewer's complaint about some of the stories being available online, that's true of every "Year's Best" anthology, while the pricing issue is not something to hold against the quality of this anthology.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Stories, Helpful Introductions, November 1, 2009
This review is from: Year's Best SF 14 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction)) (Kindle Edition)
I read and enjoyed each of the 21 stories in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's collection from 2008 science fiction stories. The introductions were just the right mix of author bios and pointers to other works. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of web addresses for most authors so I could find out more about them immediately after enjoying one of their stories.
My favorite six stories all had a strong character focus, using future settings and new technologies as background to the concerns of interesting people.
Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Arkfall" is a planetary romance that follows the developing relationships between crewmembers of a living submarine as it drifts through unmapped territory under an alien ocean.
Kathleen Ann Gooman's "Memory Dog" shows how the right dog can be a woman's best friend--and her best link to the past and future.
Alastair Reynolds' "Fury" reminds us that our oldest, darkest debts are sometimes paid by those we hold close.
Jeff VanderMeer's "Fixing Hannover" shows a castaway engineer's value to those who pull him from the sea--and those who come to take him home.
Mary Rickert's "Traitor" and Sue Burke's "Spiders" are each enjoyable on their own, but more so as a contrasting pair. Taking a darker and lighter view, respectively, they illustrate how a child, awash in too much information from the world, can muster the wisdom to focus on what is important. We wonder what becomes of them.
I offer my gratitude for the Kindle version that allowed me to read these stories unobtrusively during a series of boring monologues by the senior executives in my agency. Their collective misunderstanding of the smile on my face during their orations is certain to benefit my career. This collection is worth your time in similar or better circumstances.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reviews should be reviews of the book, not the pricing of some alternative form of the book, June 11, 2009
Hartwell's and Cramer's latest annual anthology is yet another an example of their consistently excellent taste in science fiction. I personally agree with the immediately preceding choices for the best stories, though there's not one in the book that's short of being very good. At $7.99, this is an incredible value.
If the other "reviewer" has a problem with the e-book pricing, he should take it elsewhere. That "review" should be removed by Amazon, since it significantly lowers the average stars for this book but has zero to do with the quality of the content.
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