Year's Best SF 12

As usual, David & Kathryn have assembled some of the best short SF of the year [for those stories first appearing in 2006]. This anthology includes the Hugo-nominated "Dawn, and Sunset, and All the Colours of the Earth" by Michael F. Flynn, his moving tale of love, loss, and fortitude of spirit in the face of an inexplicable disaster. [Honesty compels me to confess that myself and a few other regulars of Mr. Flynn's AOL community made small contributions to the story at his request.] The similarly themed "Rwanda" by Robert Reed and Gardner R. Dozois' dazzling "Contrafactual" also stand out.

An excellent anthology found here, with a story average of 3.90, and nothing that I didn't like at all, which is very nifty. The editors also give a short intro/overview of the year in SF short stories, and point out they could have filled several volumes, especially with novellas. If you are talking about 4 star plus stories in a given year for a particular person, sounds reasonable to me. Also each story intro has a little more interest than some other styles of doing this, so all in all, a great job. If you ignore the always interesting Dozois novella-summaries in his Year's Best, on fiction alone this is the best Year's Best of the year, with the highest story average of the four (Dozois, Hartwell/Cramer, Horton, Strahan). Year's Best SF 12 : Nancy Kress - Nano Comes to Clifford Falls Year's Best SF 12 : Terry Bisson - Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Year's Best SF 12 : Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. Year's Best SF 12 : Heather Lindsley - Just Do It. Year's Best SF 12 : Gardner R. Dozois - Counterfactual. Year's Best SF 12 : Edd Vick - Moon Does Run. Year's Best SF 12 : Mary Rosenblum - Home Movies. Year's Best SF 12 : Rudy Rucker - Chu and the Nants. Year's Best SF 12 : Ian Creasey - Silence in Florence. Year's Best SF 12 : Kameron Hurley - The Women of Our Occupation. Year's Best SF 12 : Claude Lalumiere - This is the Ice Age. Year's Best SF 12 : Eileen Gunn - Speak, Geek. Year's Best SF 12 : Joe Haldeman - Expedition, with Recipes. Year's Best SF 12 : Liz Williams - The Age of Ice. Year's Best SF 12 : Michael Flynn - Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth. Year's Best SF 12 : Gregory Benford - Applied Mathematical Theology. Year's Best SF 12 : Carol Emshwiller - Quill. Year's Best SF 12 : Alastair Reynolds - Tiger, Burning. Year's Best SF 12 : Paul J. McAuley - Dead Men Walking. Year's Best SF 12 : Daryl Gregory - Damascus. Year's Best SF 12 : Michael Swanwick - Tin Marsh. Year's Best SF 12 : Ian R. MacLeod - Taking Good Care of Myself. Year's Best SF 12 : Stephen Baxter - The Lowland Expedition. Year's Best SF 12 : Wil McCarthy - Heisenberg Elementary. Year's Best SF 12 : Robert Reed - Rwanda. Year's Best SF 12 : Charlie Rosenkrantz - Preemption. Nano technology is available to all, so people that don't want to work in nasty jobs, like, say, sanitation, or underpaid jobs like teaching and the police don't have to. 3.5 out of 5 If the future is nice, stay. 4 out of 5 Biowar makes geekfu and gruntwork a necessary combination afterwards. 5 out of 5 Behaviour modification commercialisation. 4 out of 5 Twenty year civil war coverage. 4.5 out of 5 Memory recording transfer rejection. 4.5 out of 5 Singularity reversal upload boy. 4 out of 5 Pisspot poor alien discovery speech recovery. 3.5 out of 5 Big bad brutal biatches. 3 out of 5 Quantum Cross creep. 3.5 out of 5 Smart mutt choice. 4 out of 5 Surviving undesirable cuisine. 3.5 out of 5 Incarceration e

Of the various annual SF anthologies, this one and Gardner Dozois's are consistently the best. You should buy both. the 2007 Hartwell is different and perhaps superior to #11, which had an unusal emphasis on short-shorts that is not the case with #12. And if you've never read Hartwell's #8, pick that up too--or all of the prior 11. Great quick reads.