F/SF

I skipped some stories, but it was a good read. The Octavia Butler story creeped me out the more I thought about it. The Nancy Kress was good--she might be better in short form than novels. This was the first I'd read by Angélica Gorodischer, clearly a different voice. Always glad to read more Gene Wolfe. What a delight to find a Kage Baker story from The Company that I had not read. ( )

This is the second of the Hartwell/Cramer anthologies I've read since my "reintroduction" to SciFi, and I continue to be thoroughly impressed by the selection of material. This volume is for 2003, so I would guess they're up to 19 now…I have some catching up to do, obviously.

As with most such collections, it's inevitable that the reader may find some of the stories just aren't palatable, but from my point of view there's nothing here anyone would consider "filler". There's no accounting for taste, true, but quality is quality, and it runs amazingly consistent throughout…if the first 150 pages don't convince you, well, nothing I could say would change your mind. It's just one amazing story after another and could easily be a "Best of the Best" in itself…I won't point to one story in particular, except to say that Nancy Kress's "Ej-Es" left me in tears, and Joe Haldeman packed an amazing wallop in four very short "do-overs" of famous novels. Wish I'd have thought of that one! And "The Violet Embryos"…wow! I can't successfully describe that one in the limited space I am allotting myself here.

I was impressed with Cory Doctorow's effort, also that of Kage Baker. Great stuff from new names, for me at least. Add to those Nigel Brown's "Annuity Clinic", which shows the downside of "assisted living" in the future (yikes!) and Allen Steele's introduction to his world of Coyote (the planet, not the Native American trickster…though that Coyote DOES put in a surprise appearance earlier in this collection) and you've got just shy of 500 pages of great SF entertainment.

And then finally there is Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes". Now, the editors' notes preceding this suggest it was the best short story of the year. Well, maybe. It's lengthy and wordy, but you'd have to read it to understand why it is thus, and I hope you do. I will confess it was at times a chore to wade through it all but ultimately it paid off. Best short story of the year? I might disagree, but then again what do I know? Either way, it definitely belongs in this collection, which we have now managed to find 11 of the 19 volumes, and if the quality stays this high I expect we'll keep getting them once we get caught up.

I am on what is apparently going to be an eternal search for the perfect “Year’s Best of” collection. It all started many, many years ago when I discovered the Wollheim series (and to give you an idea how many “many’s” I’m talking about, I discovered it in the mid-70s.) The selections were the perfect blend of all aspects of science fiction, and a perfect blend of award winners with unknown discoveries. And I have every single year of this collection up to the final one in 1990. And so I go on with my search, looking for a perfect replacement. At its root, the biggest problem I have is trying to find that blend. The Dozois collections and the Hartwell/Cramer series seem too invested in hard science fiction. Yet, to get any of the softer side, you seem to have to go into fantasy collections, and that is just a little too much elf, wizards, and quests for me.

And so, with that background, you can already tell I’m not overly pleased with this collection. It has some good stories and it is an overall somewhat satisfying read, but it is not the next great set of collections; it is not the “Year’s Best of” that I will make sure I collect from the past and collect into the future. To Hartwell/Cramer’s credit, they seem to have done a very good job looking outside the traditional publication routes to find the stories they selected, including internet publication and foreign language. There are nice choices in here - good reads, satisfying reads - but not rush to the award ballot caliber. And, as often happens with anthologies, some not so good, including one I could not finish. (Keep in mind, I do my best to finish EVERYTHING I start reading. Shoot, I even finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I should have gotten a purple heart for that.) However, as the author notes in the introduction, “…the average paperback anthology of fantasy or SF does not contain as many good stories as the average issue of Asimov’s or Fantasy & Science Fiction.” And so it is with this hardcover collection – it has about the same hit and miss ratio as those magazines.

And, as to the search for the perfect “Year’s Best”, I guess I’ll continue with the one sure source I’ve found; the annual publication of the Nebula Award winners. I’ve got them all, and I’m still buying them ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/220669.html

Much the most interesting of the 2003 SF anthologies. The Dozois one remains definitive, and best value for money, and the Haber/Strahan one I found a bit disappointing. But this has a couple of my favourite stories from the Dozois again (none in common with Haber/Strahan, interestingly) and a number of gems. This includes two stories translated from Spanish, one of which I'm afraid I just couldn't get into, but the other one a fascinating riff on altering history (in this case, enduring that the post-Franco transition to democracy is not prevented). Lots of good stuff here which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to read. Recommended. ( )