Year's Best SF 14

I read and enjoyed each of the 21 stories in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's collection from 2008 science fiction stories. The introductions were just the right mix of author bios and pointers to other works. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of web addresses for most authors so I could find out more about them immediately after enjoying one of their stories. My favorite six stories all had a strong character focus, using future settings and new technologies as background to the concerns of interesting people. Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Arkfall" is a planetary romance that follows the developing relationships between crewmembers of a living submarine as it drifts through unmapped territory under an alien ocean. Kathleen Ann Gooman's "Memory Dog" shows how the right dog can be a woman's best friend--and her best link to the past and future. Alastair Reynolds' "Fury" reminds us that our oldest, darkest debts are sometimes paid by those we hold close. Jeff VanderMeer's "Fixing Hannover" shows a castaway engineer's value to those who pull him from the sea--and those who come to take him home. Mary Rickert's "Traitor" and Sue Burke's "Spiders" are each enjoyable on their own, but more so as a contrasting pair. Taking a darker and lighter view, respectively, they illustrate how a child, awash in too much information from the world, can muster the wisdom to focus on what is important. We wonder what becomes of them. I offer my gratitude for the Kindle version that allowed me to read these stories unobtrusively during a series of boring monologues by the senior executives in my agency. Their collective misunderstanding of the smile on my face during their orations is certain to benefit my career. This collection is worth your time in similar or better circumstances.

This is a well chosen collection. I enjoy the format for the SF## series. The short introductory bios, with web addresses, allow me to further explore the authors of stories I liked. I have to agree with those that have said the price it right. In contrast to the negative reviewer, I am buying the book so that I *don't* have to explore the internet, reading everything published to find the gems. I am paying for the curatorial effort and for the story in print so I can read it wherever and whenever I care to, and to have someone recommend new authors I may like. This years collection is very satisfying and entertaining.

This anthology is, without a doubt, the best hard sci-fi I have enjoyed in a long time! Each and every story in the book is well-written, intelligent & fun! As a pathologically fast reader I relish anthologies to find new authors & now I have 20 (already read most of Gaiman & he has one in here,too!) Most are hard sci-fi! Several are written by scientists & all of them are fresh!

One of my complaints with the annual "Year's Best" anthologies is that they usually appear to repeat each other, containing the same stories by the same authors. However, this anthology includes many stories which were overlooked by the other anthologies. Among my favorites which you will only find in this anthology are "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi, "Oblivion: A Journey" by Vandana Singh, "Fury" by Alastair Reynolds, "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain" by Jason Sanford, and "Mitigation" by Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder. As for the previous reviewer's complaint about some of the stories being available online, that's true of every "Year's Best" anthology, while the pricing issue is not something to hold against the quality of this anthology.