Science Fiction: The Best of the Year

I loved most of the stories included, but was confronted by many typos and errors, such as missing words. Not enough to detract from the enjoyment of the story, but enough that I am writing a review. Also about 15 or so pages in the middle of my edition were simply missing...

This book, if you have the paper version, and not the electronic, is not putting you in as much danger of bonebreaking if dropped it seems as some of the others, being a fairly normal sort of book length, leaving room for around a dozen stories. The editor also writes an introduction to explain how he chooses, saying he generally finds a few stories he has to have, has a whole bunch more to select from, then takes a look at those again to try and get a balance of length, and hopefully include a couple of new writers, which is an admirable goal. Some people will then see a story by those writers, really like them, and chase up other work. I have certainly done so. Such a goal perhaps may make the average rating for stories go down a little bit, and perhaps this volume is a touch on the low side for a Year's Best grouping, at 3.67. Slightly under Strahan's for the same year, and a bit under the SF part of that. However, one of the Dozois volumes I have rated was only a 3.50 average, so like anything else, these will vary. He gives a brief story list overview by way of plot, noting that a few stories are weird. On the whole, those are the entries I didn't like quite as much, I think. The other thing is, if you really dislike stories with religious themes or elements there are quite a few of those here, and he does point that out in his intro. The last useful part of the editorial intro is a brief review of the field of publication for the year, and he points out some online publications that have SF stories. Thefore, this is worth a bit of a bonus, ratingwise. The other thing for which the publishers of this book should be congratulated is the no DRM multiformat edition they have for sale at Fictionw1se. For such a small, foreign niche publisher that their books aren't too likely to be on a shelf here, and maybe even not so much in a more specialist shop, if you are lucky enough to have one, this makes it easy to get and read wherever for everyone else. This means you can get the book in pretty much any format you want, turn it into any format you want, and read it on any machine you want, print it out, have text to speech read it to you, or anything else you can think of. To those of you to whom this is important, I definitely suggest supporting these books, and there is an equivalent Fantasy volume for those that prefer that genre, available exactly the same way. Hartwell anthologies are available in a similar format, but the latest I have seen is three years ago. I know publishers can be slow, but this is rather ridiculous. The Dozois volumes are even older, and in DRM laden formats, so if you look at the ratings/sales are nowhere near as popular in this way. Latest I have seen of these is 2002 I think. Bizarre, and, quite frankly, not too smart. To shamelessly misuse James Patrick Kelly's most excellent story title: Think Like A Dinosaur = bad. Get over yourselves publishers, you are leaving money on the table. Hopefully

I just received my copy of the trade paperback yesterday, and the cover copy now reflects the actual contents. From the earlier complaints, I suspect an art director or graphic designer somewhere is even now being flogged...

As J P Rich noted, none of the authors on the cover (Joe Haldeman, Alistair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick) had any material in this book. They all had stories in the 2006 edition and apparently the cover designer just carried their names over on to the new edition.

The cover of the mass market paperback of the 2007 version of this series lists the names "Joe Haldeman, Alastair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick." Yet none of those authors is represented here. Perhaps the publisher used the cover from another year, updated the year, but not the rest of the cover. It's a good collection, but the publisher should have been more careful.