The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

great book. multiple stories that can be finished in a few hours or less. great for people with busy lives who still need the mental stimulation of a good story.

This is a superb collection, this year. The stories average a massive 4.11. As usual, there is his rather long summation of the year, which people would probably by just by itself. Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Juniper Tree - John Kessel Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Antibodies - Charles Stross Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Birthday of the World - Ursula K. Le Guin Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Savior - Nancy Kress Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Reef - Paul J. McAuley Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Going After Bobo - Susan Palwick Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Crux - Albert E. Cowdrey Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Cure for Everything - Severna Park Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Suspect Genome - Peter F. Hamilton Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O - Michael Swanwick Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Radiant Green Star - Lucius Shepard Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Great Wall of Mars - Alastair Reynolds Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Milo and Sylvie - Eliot Fintushel Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Snowball in Hell - Brian Stableford Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : On the Orion Line - Stephen Baxter 18 : Oracle - Greg Egan Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Obsidian Harvest - Rick Cook and Ernest Hogan Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Patient Zero - Tananarive Due Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : A Colder War - Charles Stross Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Real World - Steven Utley Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Thing About Benny - M. Shayne Bell Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : The Great Goodbye - Robert Charles Wilson Year's Best Science Fiction 18 : Tendeléo's Story - Ian McDonald Colony murder mystery reconstruction results. 4.5 out of 5 Worldline AI technology overrun. 5 out of 5 Conquering godhood changes. 3.5 out of 5 Humans a bit slow on the uptake about alien craft, muddle through disasters, and must have lost all the Stargate episodes when they tried the replicator thing. Oh, and AI's are quite fast. 5 out of 5 24 hour deep sea proxy people. 4 out of 5 Cat rescue not worth it. 4 out of 5 Terrorist investigation, timelines and tarts. 4 out of 5 Pharmaceutical breakthroughs rely heavily on the individual. 4 out of 5 Mandel's celebrity murder investigation. 4.5 out of 5 Archetypal creation. 4.5 out of 5 Mutant circus major's minder seeks permanent paternal punishment. 4.5 out of 5 Only a damaged but brilliant child is allowing the Conjoiners to continue to hold out, delaying the end of a battle that they cannot win. 4.5 out of 5 Shapeshifting kids. 3 out of 5 Transhumanism to posthumanish through violence and fire. 4.5 out of 5 Human expansion is slowed by a race of aliens, causing economic problems when the advanced alien technology is able to monkey with the laws of physics. A not too bright teenager makes it out of the wreckage of a ship and from inside an enemy fortress with the help of the rest of his crew, with

Each year I look forward to this volume, and it never disappoints. Granted, some years are better than others, but often that reflects the quality of the fiction that appeared in a particular year. I thought last year's volume (#17) was a real high, and I was afraid this volume couldn't be as good. I'm glad to say I enjoyed this volume just as much.For me, the stand-out story was "Oracle", by Greg Egan. It is a beaurifully researched and written story about a traveler from the future coming into the past and interceding in the life of Alan Turing. Turing's life moves in a somewhat different path than in our history, and leads him to have a public debate with C. S. Lewis on the possibility of machine intelligence. (Greg Egan does not use their actual names, but sticks close to their biographies, so the correlation is obvious)."The Juniper Tree" by John Kessel started out as a well-written re-exploration of what I thought were pretty well-trodden SF themes, then manages to throw in a moral twist that left me reeling. A great story.Great Wall of Mars by Alistair Reynolds is a pyrotechnic roller-coaster ride of a story. I mean literally. It contains two of the most memorable "rides" I can remember in science fiction. It's a slam-bang adventure that left me dazed."Antibodies" by Charles Stross was a nice surprise. It felt like reading a classic 50's SF story, but brought up-to-date. He's one of my favorite discoveries of the last year, and you get another great story by him in the same volume.Other excllent stories include "Tendelo's Story" by Ian McDonald, "The Suspect Genome" by Peter F. Hamilton, "Radiant Green Star" by the amazing wordsmith Lucius Shepard, "Crux" by Albert Cowdrey, "The Real World" by Steven Utley, and "The Birthday of the World" by Ursula K. LeGuin. If you seriously enjoy speculative fiction, buy this book.

This latest edition of Gardner Dozois' long-running Year's Best SF anthology series is worth every penny. I enjoyed nearly every story in the volume and found it to be, on the whole, much stronger than previous year's editions.Highlights of the volume include 'The Birthday of the World' by Ursula Le Guin; in which a race of 'gods' struggle for power, 'Crux' by Albert Cowdrey; a time travel adventure that has more similarities to the old pulp stories than most recent SF, 'Radiant Green Star' by Lucius Shepard; a fabulous story about an orphan's search for his father while he performs in a circus in Vietnam, 'Great Wall of Mars' by Alastair Reynolds; the story of a renegade colony on Mars and attempts to eradicate it, 'On the Orion Line' by Stephen Baxter; a story of war in space that I found to be one of Baxter's most literate and readable stories, 'A Colder War' by Charles Stross; a brilliant meld of Cthulu fiction and Cold War politics, and my favorite story in the volume 'Tendeleo's Story' by Ian McDonald; the story of a young girl in Africa who grows up amid invasion by alien spores. Like all anthologies, not all stories will please all readers. I found 'Milo and Sylvie' by Eliot Fintushel to be WAY overlong, boring, and without a coherent plot. 'Snowball in Hell' by Brian Stableford bogged down with too much gengineering talk...too many big words, not enough plot extrapolation. This truly is a collection of the Best SF of the year. There are only a handful of stories that didn't make the book that may have been deserving (stories by Jeffrey Ford, Kage Baker, Charles Sheffield, & Robert Reed spring immediately to mind). By and large the stories in this book are extremely well-written with fascinating plots. Consider 'Oracle' by Greg Egan, a story with thinly veiled characterizations of C.S. Lewis and Alan Turing...this is a story that science fiction is all about. With the exception of the two stories I mentioned earlier, there isn't a sub-par story in this collection. Highly recommended.

I've only read the first six stories, but it's excellent so far. A very wide variety of styles and themes thus far.