Customer Reviews

Year's Best SF 14 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction))

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Another fantastic book in the most consistently outstanding scifi short story series that I've encountered. I like rich, interesting, mind-bending scifi with good character development. This book delivers.

I purchased this as a gift for my son-in-law who is a sci-fi enthusiast. My daughter said that as soon as it arrived he sat right down that evening and began reading it. He found it an interesting book of short stories as he could finish one in a sitting; also, he was able to read some of the new offerings for the year this way.

I usually make it a (sometimes hurtful) habit to ingest these yearly anthologies. I grabbed this one at the library last week and, as tropish as it sounds, haven't been able to put it down. Reynold's "Fury" is a fun, entirely interesting little space opera with a universe paradoxically well fleshed out for a short; it had me wishing there was an entire saga out there, somewhere. Certainly more upbeat than Reynold's usually plodding fare. "The Scarecrow's Boy", rightly compared to "The Littlest Toaster" I went into with lowered expectations and came out deeply impressed. "N-Words", while a fairly typical story of its type, I enjoyed. Those were the stories that really stuck out to me. The rest were certainly good.

This is a well chosen collection. I enjoy the format for the SF## series. The short introductory bios, with web addresses, allow me to further explore the authors of stories I liked. I have to agree with those that have said the price it right. In contrast to the negative reviewer, I am buying the book so that I *don't* have to explore the internet, reading everything published to find the gems. I am paying for the curatorial effort and for the story in print so I can read it wherever and whenever I care to, and to have someone recommend new authors I may like. This years collection is very satisfying and entertaining.

This anthology is, without a doubt, the best hard sci-fi I have enjoyed in a long time! Each and every story in the book is well-written, intelligent & fun! As a pathologically fast reader I relish anthologies to find new authors & now I have 20 (already read most of Gaiman & he has one in here,too!) Most are hard sci-fi! Several are written by scientists & all of them are fresh!

There are imaginative stories here. I particularly liked "Pump Six" and "The Scarecrow's Boy". But there's also too many clunkers, and they tend to clunk for the same reason.

There are 21 stories total. Not a single one falls in the category of good fighting evil. There is not single soldier in the book carrying out an honorable duty. Instead, we get a rape victim who seeks closure ("Oblivion"); a heavy-handed story about Neanderthal clones becoming a persecuted minority ("N-Words"); and variations on the hackneyed theme of eco-disaster ("Mitigation," and others). The result is that even some nicely done stories ("Memory Dog") have a tired feel because they are surrounded by so much political correctness.

Of 23 listed authors, 9 are female. I don't do this kind of counting up-front; only after the fact when I've been struck by the uniformity of world views. Sorry, I'm not buying that 40% of the best SF stories these days are by women. It's rather clear the editors went out of their way to promote gender balance, which is the sort of thing that tends to go hand-in-hand with selecting PC themes. These are the sort of editors who offer introductions with sentences like these: "she writes aesthetically ambitious, feminist intellectual science fiction and fantasy" (page 356) and "he has been a leading figure in the field in favor of transgressing genre boundaries for at least a decade" (page 436). If these sentences raise warning flags for you, I encourage you to find another anthology. If you see nothing strange about these sentences, you will likely enjoy the book and find my review tendentious.