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David G. Hartwell

Year's Best SF 13 (Year's Best SF Series) Mass Market Paperback – May 27, 2008

by David G. Hartwell (Author), Kathryn Cramer (Author)

22 ratings

Book 12 of 17: Year's Best SF Series

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The thirteenth annual collection of the previous year's finest short-form sf is at hand. Once again, award-winning editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered together a stunning array of science fiction that spans a veritable universe of astonishing visions and bold ideas. Hitherto unexplored galaxies of the mind are courageously traversed by some of the most exciting new talents in the field—while well-established masters rocket to remarkable new heights of artistry and originality. The stars are closer and more breathtaking than ever before—and a miraculous future now rests in your hands—within the pages of Year's Best SF 13.

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Voyager
Publication date

May 27, 2008
Dimensions

4.19 x 1.02 x 6.75 inches
ISBN-10

0061252093
ISBN-13

978-0061252099
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David G. Hartwell is a senior editor of Tor/Forge Books. His doctorate is in Comparative Medieval Literature. He is the proprietor of Dragon Press, publisher and bookseller, which publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction, and the president of David G. Hartwell, Inc. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, The Hard SF Renaissance, The Space Opera Renaissance, and a number of Christmas anthologies, among others. Recently he co-edited his fifteenth annual paperback volume of Year's Best SF, and co-edited the ninth Year's Best Fantasy. John Updike, reviewing The World Treasury of Science Fiction in The New Yorker, characterized him as a "loving expert." He is on the board of the IAFA, is co-chairman of the board of the World Fantasy Convention, and an administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award forty times to date, winning as Best Editor in 2006, 2008, and 2009.

Kathryn Cramer is a writer, critic, and anthologist, and was coeditor of the Year's Best Fantasy and Year's Best SF series. A consulting editor at Tor Books, she won a World Fantasy Award for her anthology The Architecture of Fear.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Voyager; 1- edition (May 27, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061252093
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061252099
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1.02 x 6.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,185,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,899 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
- #37,851 in Short Stories Anthologies
- #200,364 in American Literature (Books)

Customer Reviews:
22 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		53%
4 star		17%
3 star		17%
2 star		4%
1 star		8%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Robert Maxwell

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2014

Great Collection

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2011

Verified Purchase

The thirteenth in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best SF series was hard to find, even as a used paperback--there is no Kindle version. I found several of the 25 stories enjoyable, but the collection as a whole had less sparkle than I've grown used to reading the other fourteen books. Perhaps this book is cursed, somehow.

If this faint praise makes you reluctant to pick up the thirteenth book, let me try to entice you. Here are the five shortest stories in the book. It's a minimal investment of your time to try one or two of them. Maybe you will be hooked. Or trapped, somehow.

Tony Ballantyne's "Aristotle OS" is about upgrading the main character's computer, if not his expectations.

Peter Watts' "Repeating the Past" is about the emotional cost of playing video games. There's some sort of moral lesson there, too, if you can put your finger on it.

Robyn Hitchcock's "They Came from the Future" is a poem, for crying out loud--it's hard to know what it's about. It's hard to even keep the tenses straight.

Tim Pratt's "Artifice and Intelligence" is about coping with the world's first machine intelligence. It poses a challenge.

John Hemry's "As You Know, Bob" seems to be about Bill's continual fascination with Jane's breasts, as much as it is about anything. Like Hartwell and Cramer, I find that it reminds me of "The Nine Billion Names of God." No, not that one. The other one.

You might as well read the collection; you've probably invoked the curse already by reading this review. If it matters, my favorite stories were Gene Wolfe's "Memorare" and Kage Baker's "Plotters and Shooters." They can speak to you for themselves. If you find yourself spending time with them.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

Not Free SF Reader

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 4, 2008

The thirteenth volume of this series is down on quality from the twelfth, which was outstanding, at 3.90. This one averages 3.71.

However, there is one great story, Terry Bisson's 'Pirates of the Somali Coast'. When they are that good I suppose you can forgive the fact that it may only be SF in the nearest of near future senses, perhaps. However, you could call it a horror story, or satire so black you have to find out what call the Old Ones from Out Of Space call their colour darker than black to categorise it.
The weakest part of the book is after this story, where it trails off in quality from there.

The other standout is Kage Baker's amusing Plotters and Shooters.

It was a pleasant surprise to find the ebook of this after not seeing one for volume 12, meaning no waiting around, not paying someone with a plane the same price as the cost of the book to get it here, or more, etc. So well done publishers for bringing that back.

There's the usual brief overview at the start, pointing out JBU and Strange Horizons online, and several original anthologies being good - New Space Opera, Fast Forward, Solaris 1, etc. They also included a poem.

The editors are also quite keen on Tony Ballantyne this year, mentioning him multiple times - but neither of these stories I thought were that good.

So, call this volume a bit over a 4.25, or 4.5 on the usual scale.

Year's Best SF 13 : Baby Doll - Johanna Sinisalo
Year's Best SF 13 : Aristotle OS - Tony Ballantyne
Year's Best SF 13 : The Last American - John Kessel
Year's Best SF 13 : Memorare - Gene Wolfe
Year's Best SF 13 : Plotters and Shooters - Kage Baker
Year's Best SF 13 : Repeating the Past - Peter Watts
Year's Best SF 13 : No More Stories - Stephen Baxter
Year's Best SF 13 : The Tomb Wife - Gwyneth Jones
Year's Best SF 13 : An Evening's Honest Peril - Marc Laidlaw
Year's Best SF 13 : End Game - Nancy Kress
Year's Best SF 13 : Induction - Greg Egan
Year's Best SF 13 : A Blue and Cloudless Sky - Bernard Ribbeck
Year's Best SF 13 : Reasons not to Publish - Gregory Benford
Year's Best SF 13 : Objective Impermeability in a Closed System - William Shunn
Year's Best SF 13 : Always - Karen Joy Fowler
Year's Best SF 13 : Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? - Ken MacLeod
Year's Best SF 13 : Artifice and Intelligence - Tim Pratt
Year's Best SF 13 : Pirates of the Somali Coast - Terry Bisson
Year's Best SF 13 : Sanjeev and Robotwallah - Ian McDonald
Year's Best SF 13 : Third Person - Tony Ballantyne
Year's Best SF 13 : The Bridge - Kathleen Ann Goonan
Year's Best SF 13 : As You Know Bob - John Hemry
Year's Best SF 13 : The Lustration - Bruce Sterling
Year's Best SF 13 : How Music Begins - James Van Pelt

Accelerated cradle snatching.

3.5 out of 5

Accelerated cradle snatching.

3 out of 5

DAS Biography.

4 out of 5

Space vault menace.

3.5 out of 5

Deathlok defense defeat predicted, Avenger!

4.5 out of 5

Holocaust memories, game boy.

4 out of 5

Interbreeding expansion remnant conversation.

3.5 out of 5

Extradimensional big brain spaceflight fun, Batman.

4 out of 5

Multiplayer tomb raid.

3.5 out of 5

Grandmaster class tunnel vision.

4 out of 5

Orchid Flower followup Duty.

4 out of 5

Colonization time adjustments.

3 out of 5

Omnipotence? Bah. Pass the grog.

3 out of 5

Possible past wife hookup system.

4 out of 5

Static cult life.

3.5 out of 5

Empire threat impetus attack gives boomerang inspiration.

4 out of 5

Bad ghosts, bad machine, bad game.

4 out of 5

Yo Ho Ho, and many machine guns. With internet access, hats, and a lot less relatives than at the beginning.

5 out of 5

Battletech comes and goes, but pizza always popular.

4 out of 5

A walk-on part in the war, a lead role in the Sarge.

3.5 out of 5

Artificial revelation recreation.

3.5 out of 5

Genre written commercial adjustment.

3.5 out of 5

"You've secretly discussed artificial intelligence for forty thousand years?" "Thirty thousand," the metaphysician admitted. "Unfortunately, it took us ten thousand years to admit that the system's behavior had some unaccountable aspects."

3 out of 5

Band camp space shanghaied.

3 out of 5

4.5 out of 5

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Good selection...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 28, 2010

The collection started slow, with the first few stories actually disappointing me. However, somewhere along, the stories got better and I started liking most of the rest. A few of my favorites include "Memorare" by Gene Wolfe, "End Game" by Nancy Kress (this one was particularly scary), and "The Bridge" by Kathleen Ann Goonan. One especially disturbing story I didn't like for its theme was "Pirates of Somali Coast" - not because it was not well written, but because it's just plain disturbing. All in all, it's a book with a good selection.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

ellison

Collection of Science Fiction Stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 11, 2021

Features a collection of various stories usually about some kind of darkness. Begins with youth exploited, Dictatorship, some space stories, end of life, and more. A horrible pirate story. Swearing.

Helpful

Jay P. Francis

Not Very Interesting Stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 7, 2009

Verified Purchase

I don't know. Maybe I'm spoiled by John Varley, but none of the stories in this collection were that interesting, including the Gene Wolfe one that they felt was "the best sci-fi story of the year."

Very 'meh' collection, my opinion. Very disappointed.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Enough good stories to get by

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 27, 2009

The collection was rather disappointing for a "best of" and got off (to me) with a terrible start with the somewhat offensive "Baby Doll", which doesn't even seem to qualify as SF and is very heavy-handed in its message. The start wasn't helped by "Memorae", by Gene Wolfe, in the fourth slot, a story with excellent potential marred by the romantic and anti-romantic interactions of the characters.

"Plotters and Shooters" may be the best, snappy and amusing. Another favorite, "How Music Begins", was a very fresh (to me) take on alien abduction with an unusally dominant role for music for a SF story.

The others range from a few that are pretty good to some with no appeal, leading to an overall average rating. Don't be afraid to skim or abandon some of the stories if they don't engage fairly early.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful