The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The Most Famous Little Girl in the World, Nancy Kress. The grim backdrop of war and terrorism over the next seventy years is much more interesting than the story about two cousins who take a lifetime to patch up their differences. C

The Passenger, Paul McAuley. Engaging but essentially routine yarn about a space ship salvage crew whose strange new passenger is either malevolent or cute as a button. C+

The Political Officer, Charles Finlay. Political intrigue aboard a Soviet-flavored military spaceship where each officer seems to have his own insidious agenda. B-

Lambing Season, Molly Gloss. Kindhearted shepherdess encounters alien. Another promising premise wasted in an inconclusive, overly subtle plot. C-

Coelacanths,Robert Reed. Variously constructed humans subsist in a hostile, multi-dimensional far future world. Weighty speculation on the fine line between evolution and devolution, natural and supernatural. B

Presence, Maureen McHugh. Realistic, heartrending character study of a couple dealing with Alzheimer�s, a new cure, and its unsettling side effect. B+

Halo, Charles Stross. Cacophonous, dense, hard science narrative concerns a cybernetic teenager who flees to Jupiter to escape Mom, who just doesn�t understand her! C-

In Paradise, Bruce Sterling. USA circa 2022�Romance in the land of the not so free and the home of Homeland Security. Sorry, but not even close to Sterling offerings from previous volumes. C

The Old Cosmonaut� by Ian McDonald. An old cosmonaut�s pipe dream of pioneering Mars is strangely fulfilled. C

Stories for Men, John Kessel. Men on a vast matriarchal lunar colony must chose between easy, killer sex and socio-political equality. Quite the conundrum! Great characters, plot, social commentary and psychological exploration. A

To Become a Warrior, Chris Beckett. In a socially stratified future England, a gang of world-shifting thugs offers an alienated lowlife some ancient means of payback. Fast-paced narrative with fascinating characters and street jargon. A

The Clear Blue Seas of Luna, Gregory Binford. A (mumbo) jumbo ode to terraforming. Zzzz

V.A.O., Geoff Ryman. Life stinks for Gen-Y geriatrics, so they hack their way out. Vivid characters, snappy dialog, diabolical schemes, and something sorely lacking in this volume�humor. A

Winters Are Hard, Steven Popkes. Man has self physically altered so he can sleep with she-wolves and slaughter wild elk. Can happiness ensue? C

At the Money,Richard Wadholm. Monotonous tale of cosmic radioactive waste arbitrage in an ultra-free market far future. Zzzz

Agent Provacateur, Alexander Irvine. A boy alters and unalters history around WW2. C

Singleton, Greg Egan. All you need to enjoy this AI saga of making babies the new-fashioned way is a couple doctorates in quantum theory and philosophy. C-

Slow Life, Michael Swanick. A plucky explorer discovers life on Titan. Well drawn setting but well worn plot. C

A Flock of Birds, James Van Pelt. Gripping, realistic, poetic, and touching look at the aftermath of an all-out biological war, set in a desolate 2011 Denver. A

The Potter of Bones, Eleanor Arnason. This fantasy story about evolution unfolds about as rapidly. In (yet another) female dominated society, a potter literally pieces together a theory of how her rodent-like race of homosexual furballs came into being. Super. D

The Whisper of Disks, John Meaney. The Bryonic Woman: genius makes jillions thanks to her jazzed up genes. C

The Hotel at Harlan�s Landing, Kage Baker. Ultracreepy goings-on in a remote logging town in the 1930�s. Well crafted horror, and at long last, a crisp, clear ending. B+

The Millennium Party, Walter Jon Williams. A wry and refreshingly brief look at the digitalization of man, far, far in the future. B

Turquoise Days, Alistair Reynolds. Better late than never. A majestic tale of an inscrutably sentient ocean and its interplay with humans both kind and evil. A page-turner with unforgettable imagery. A+

Of course that's only my opinion; more sophisticated readers and graduates of writing seminars and workshops will love the "crafted imagery" and "inspired strangeness" of Dozois' choices.

"BREATHMOSS." On a virtually all-female world, a young girl comes-of-age and recognizes her destiny.

A long, slow story, dense with made-up words with almost no clue or context, and descriptive paragraphs that go on and on, Breathmoss is more of a fantasy novella than a science fiction story. Atmospheric? Yes. Interesting? No.

"STORIES FOR MEN." Seventeen-year-old Erno lives in in a female-dominated moon colony where males are prized mainly for the ability to pleasure women - and yet he's not happy.

This is one of better stories. It's a novella, with a plot, memorable characters, things happening, lives and societies hang in the balance - in a way. The ending was timid, to put it mildly. And maybe I'm too sensitive - but is there some law out there requiring all science fiction stories have strong, intelligent females putting up with weak, spoiled boys?

"TURQUOISE DAYS." Naqi and her sister are scientists on the isolated water-world of Turquoise where the ocean is more aware of outsiders than they realize.

It's a very low-key story of love and loss and so placid that I could hardly stay awake the two times I read it. An evil man comes to this peaceful world with evil intentions. Good ending, though, if you can reach it.

Those three stories account for over 25% of the book. There are 26 stories in total and they're not all so dreary as the novellas, although they do try.

"THE PASSENGER." Maris Delgado and her space-salvage crew find a passenger in a long-abandoned vessel who is more than she appears to be.

Good short story, in comparison to all those "I'm a writer creating atmosphere" stories, but let's face it: the mysterious stranger picked up by a ship isn't a new idea and there's no one moment here that adds much.

"COELACANTHS." Evolution of humanity into several species of brave, self-reliant women burdened with bumbling boys, and cartoonish males.

Four parallel stories with humanity living in some hazy far distant and distinctly unrecognizable universe where they may be no more than a sort of virus or vermin. There's this naked over-the-top male narrator ranting about humanity's advances and I don't know what it all adds up to and I don't care. Stories like this, I think, are more likely than not, jokes on the readers.

I'd just finished reading "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol. 1 1929-1964" and what a contrast! The old-fashioned writers were amazingly entertaining. There are dozens of outstanding memorable stories there.

When I compare "Coelacanths" with James Blish's "Surface Tensions" I see the great gulf between writers trying to show off for other writers and a writer like Blish telling a riveting story.

This anthology is writing seminar and writing workshop stuff. I wince when I think of a casual reader who wants to find out if science fiction is for him or her, and unfortunately finds this book. It's poison.

"A Flock Of Birds" has a great atmosphere, with a handful of individuals wandering the barren landscape of an America after a devastating war. The careful attention to his tasks as a birder parallel his devotion to keeping a fellow survivor alive. The returning flocks of birds become an obvious yet still affecting metaphor against the images of a New York City marathon from a video that is played multiple times over the course of the story. That in ten years, a birder could forget what a pigeon looks like seems ridiculous, but one could argue that this shows the true depth of his psychological damage, which was carefully masked until this point.

"The Potter Of Bones" has an interesting story set in an alternate matriarchal past; however, the narration is very intrusive (e.g. "This story is about...," "At this point, the story needs to describe...," disjointed transitions, indications that this is a work of non-fiction cobbled together from artifacts by some of the characters, followed by lengthy fictive exchanges and descriptions, etc), and (with the exception of some clever debates between the potter and the Goddess in her dreams) the dialogue is reminiscent of the stilted exchanges of characters in a video game. For instance, the most common response people think or say to the red-furred potter is "Hah!"

"The Whisper of Disks" is another strong offering taken from Interzone, taking place through multiple generations of an eccentric family's existence. Though the protagonist becomes one of the most powerful women alive, she is unable to discover much about her past, but through a series of vignettes across time, we see that she intuits what she cannot know about her genetic history.

"The Hotel At Harlan's Landing" is a somewhat entertaining but easily forgettable tale of the supernatural which seems closer to the genre of horror than that of sci-fi.

"The Millennium Party" could probably be called flash fiction, being as it is so short. It is more a skeletal idea put to paper rather than an actual story.

"Turquoise Days" completes the collection, following the shortest story with what appears to be the longest. Published as a chapbook, it seems unnecessarily long, though it has a few memorable passages.