October 07, 2007

Critic At Large: Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

I've always had a special fondness for SF anthologies and I always make it a point to pick up the annual "Year's Best" volume that is edited by the incomparable Gardner Dozois. In Best of the Best, Dozois assembles his picks for the best short stories from the past twenty years' worth of the annual collections. It includes stories from genre luminaries such as Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, and Gene Wolfe. Some of my favorites from the collection are:

• "The Pure Product" by John Kessel: A violent romp of a story that has few nice things to say about the moral fiber of our future descendants. 
  
• "A Dry, Quiet War" by Tony Daniel: A pastiche of the western dime novel set in the far future and told with confident economy. 
  
• "10¹⁶ to 1" by James Patrick Kelly: Kelly crafts a nostalgic tale that is a more grown-up version of something that might have aired on The Twilight Zone.
  

If you have any interest in the science fiction short story, this is a worthy addition to your collection. One might argue that Dozois excluded some classics (the omission of John Varley's "Press Enter" is almost criminal), but anthologies such as this are inherently open to such criticism. I see that Dozois has released a sequel of sorts that collects longer novellas, which I'll be sure to check out.

Posted by wintermute2_0 at October 7, 2007 06:25 PM

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