Year's Best SF 5

Hartwell notes in his introduction that stories from New Horizons were contractually not allowed to be in this volume. Bastards to be one of you people, then. This volume is down a bit in quality for a Year's Best, only a 3.5 average. It starts really well, with the two best stories, Egan's outstanding Border Guards and Reed's excellent Game of the Century to be found. Then the middle has a whole batch of decent but not good work that slows it down. Year's Best SF 05 : Everywhere - Geoff Ryman Year's Best SF 05 : Evolution Never Sleeps - Elisabeth Malartre Year's Best SF 05 : Sexual Dimorphism - Kim Stanley Robinson Year's Best SF 05 : Game of the Century - Robert Reed Year's Best SF 05 : Kinds of Strangers - Sarah Zettel Year's Best SF 05 : Visit the Sins - Cory Doctorow Year's Best SF 05 : Border Guards - Greg Egan Year's Best SF 05 : macs - Terry Bisson Year's Best SF 05 : Written in Blood - Chris Lawson Year's Best SF 05 : Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon? - Gene Wolfe Year's Best SF 05 : The Blue Planet - Robert J. Sawyer Year's Best SF 05 : Lifework - Mary Soon Lee Year's Best SF 05 : Rosetta Stone - Fred Lerner Year's Best SF 05 : An Apollo Asteroid - Brian Aldiss Year's Best SF 05 : 100 Candles - Curt Wohleber Year's Best SF 05 : Democritus' Violin - G. David Nordley Year's Best SF 05 : Fossil Games - Tom Purdom Year's Best SF 05 : Valour - Chris Beckett Year's Best SF 05 : Huddle - Stephen Baxter Year's Best SF 05 : Ashes and Tombstones - Brian M. Stableford Year's Best SF 05 : Ancient Engines - Michael Swanwick Year's Best SF 05 : Freckled Figure [1992] - Hiroe Suga Year's Best SF 05 : Shiva - Barry N. Malzberg Year's Best SF 05 : The Queen of Erewhon - Lucy Sussex Fun family. 3.5 out of 5 Attack of the killer chipmunks. 4 out of 5 Women, men, pretty similar most of the time. Boobs float differently while swimming, apparently. 4 out of 5 Animal girls and boys are in a football league of their own. 4.5 out of 5 Stuck in space sooicide staving-off. 3 out of 5 Switched off Grampa. 3.5 out of 5 It is about human immortals, and how they deal with people and society when living so long. One man joins back into life, and meets the best quantum soccer player going around, and loses a friend. The discovery is made is that she is one of the earliest immortals, instrumental in posthuman travel to other planets, and knows what death is actually like, and has to work out how to relate to the new people. Now, I can't get this story out of my head, like happens with songs sometimes, so, I am upgrading this, 5 stars, given I reread it recently and hadn't read it for quite a while. And, as far as Australian goes, as far as pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, well, I'd hate to be caught paraphasing the Devil Went Down to Georgia, but, he's the best there's even been. 5 out of 5 Victim gets clone crim delivery punishment. 4 out of 5 Religious DNA transcription is a killer vulnerability. 4.5 out of 5 Weighty loss. 3 ou

I bought this book in order to study the kinds of short science fiction that are considered top-of-the-line to give me an idea on how I should write my science fiction. What I found overwhelmed me. Strict application of `science' to the fiction is common; most stories have discussions of scientific principles in them, even in the most simple of tales. Rare are the stories you see the science only applied and not discussed. Even Gene Wolfe's simplistic protagonist in `Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?' describes a scientific discussion on gravity. So with the primitive Night-Dawn in Stephen Baxter's `Huddle', who puts forth a theorem in a scientific manner, though it was done simply; I take the message to be that whatever humanity mutates into, it will retain scientific reasoning. I hope this does not aggravate the impression of science fiction being `hifalooting'. A couple of stories are mostly talk (Stableford's and Swanwick's); action and movement does not seem to be a looked-for element in a sci-fi story. Of course, I do not disagree that science can be left out of SF, but the acronym can mean just `speculative fiction', and the science need not necessarily be flatly explained. But I do assume that `hard' sci-fi, with scientific explanations, is what most editors are looking for. For me, it seems that applauded sci-fi stories can be hard to understand; I barely got what the authors were trying to put across in `Sexual Dimorphism' and `Everywhere' (The former is especially heavy in scientific jargon). Michael Bishop's poem is a mystery to me. Guess I'm not that sharp a reader of SF as I thought. Traditional themes can be found, like space opera, alternative history, time travel and cyberpunk, but are not easily identifiable unless you've really read between the lines. But there is a trend. Most of the stories here project humanity in various future situations, having moved to new states of life, gone to new places or using new technology, but they still have to deal with problems spawned by these new states. We have human-animals specifically bred for a brutal sport, people living for thousands of years and trying to bear with it, an Attention Deficit Disorder sufferer being treated with a cyborg implant, people living on a threatened moon, among others. New ideas have ceased to appear, so the themes are now more on problems caused by these ideas, and how to solve them. With regard to the editor's comments, I would say that Hartwell gives pertinent info on background. Revealing where the story was first published helps to identify those markets. Analog looks for problem-solving stories, Artemis is about the moon, so forth. His picks were also as varied as possible; different themes, different styles, different origins (Nice to know that there was one Japanese work there, one of those I liked more in this collection). But I wish he'd tell simply why those stories he chose were the best for him. Anyhow, I have an idea on what the