The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection

This edition,very hard to find,is seriously in need of reprinting!!"Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling. Court intrigues abound in this highly stylized, far future techno-medieval world at the crossroads. The author's eye for imaginative detail is remarkable. A"Beyond the Dead Reef"¨ by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Spine-tingling science-horror with a diver stranded out beyond a ghostly and ghastly reef. Features one of the most terrifying and palpable images I can recall in science-fiction. A+"Slow Birds" by Ian Watson. Speaking of powerful images, the slow birds inhabiting this far future, pastoral Earth are utterly fascinating, along with the strange doom they portend. Wonderful plot, well crafted characters. A+"Vulcan's Forge" by Poul Anderson. Curmudgeonly scientist on Mercury has an unusual relationship with his female colleague¡and his space probe. Excellent hard science, but alas the plot is predictable. C"Man-Mountain Gentian" by Howard Waldrop. Sumo wrestlers in 2014 find new applications for Zen. Clever, entertaining story with a couple marvelous characters and an appropriately enigmatic, Zen-like finish. A"Hardfought" by Greg Bear. Dozios' preface says it well: "...a brilliant tour-de-force about the interplay between science and history that takes us simultaneously to the far reaches of the universe and deep inside the hearts of our distant descendants--people so changed by the consequence of a millennia-long war that they have become nearly as alien as the enigmatic enemy they fight..." Bear pushes scientific speculation to the imaginative limits. A+ "Manifest Destiny" by Joe Haldeman. After exercising my brain on "Hardfought", I enjoyed taking a breather with this amusing, cleverly written memoir about fortunes--material and ethereal--in the Old West. A"Full Chicken Richness" by Avram Davidson. Quirky, choppy and above all silly time-travel story about an underachieving entrepreneur. C "Multiples", by Richard Silverberg. If you think dating is tough with only one personality each... As always Silverberg writes with great clarity, but here, his premise seems completely implausible. C "Cryptic" by Jack McDevitt. Skillful combination of mystery, suspense, and science as a bored SETI physicist/administrator gets out of his rut grappling with a cryptic message from space and an equally cryptic warning from a predecessor. A"The Sidon in the Mirror" by Connie Willis. Youthful anti-hero takes on cunning villain to aid damsel in distress in a frontier mining town...on a distant dying sun. The offworld dialect is highly distracting, making the whole thing hard to follow. C-"Golden Gate" by R. A. Lafferty. Reality blurs for a man watching a melodrama in a bizarre bar. Although Laffety's idiosyncratic style isn't for me, I did like his description of the villain as having "arms like a python." C"Blind Shemmy" by Jack Dann. Grisly tale about some very literal mind games in a future Paris casino, as two thrill seeking, adversarial gamblers pl

The title says it all actually. I don't have enough space (or time) to tell you about all the wonderful stories and authors collected in this first year bonanza, but I can tell you that it's just as good and illuminating as all the other future years that I've read. Gardner has a flare for picking the writers to watch for that year and beyond.