Year's Best SF 6

Name: Year's Best SF 6
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780061757815

By David G. Hartwell

Publisher Description

Get Ready To Expand Your Mind...

Acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell is back with the sixth annual collection of the year's most impressive, thought-provoking, and just plain great science fiction.

Year's Best SF 6 includes contributions from the greatest stars of the field as well as remarkable newcomers -- galaxies and into unexplored territory deep within your own soul.

Here are stories from:

Brian W. Aldiss

Stephen Baxter

David Brin

Nancy Kress

Ursula K. Le Guin

Robert Silverberg

and many more...

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Year's Best SF 6 Reviews

4.0

Katrine Myra

Created about 11 years ago

Steve Stuart

Created over 13 years ago

“In hindsight, you might expect that sci-fi written at the cusp of the millennium should be a little more far-looking than the standard fare; that authors would have been inspired to think on an even grander scale than usual. Or perhaps not. This collection of stories from the year 2000 is relatively indistinguishable from the sci-fi of neighboring years, proving perhaps that authors are exercising their futurological powers to their fullest in any given year. There are a few stories set as far as another thousand years in the future ("The Millennium Express") or in times or places so distant there is no discernible connection to the present ("The Marriage of Sky and Sea", "The Birthday of the World"). But no more than in a typical collection, and for each far-future story there are others set in the past ("Oracle" and "Seventy-Two Letters") or sometime indistinguishable from the present ("The New Horla", "Built Upon The Sands of Time"). One trend that is noteworthy in this collection is the prevalence of short-short stories, with more than half a dozen taken from Nature's "Futures" series. In this collection, these tend to be brief elaborations of a gimmicky concept (e.g. the present is a VR sim, or bacteria become sentient and join the UN, etc). This subgenre is anthologized much effectively in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1003695.Futures_from_Nature . As with any best-of anthology, a few stories left me confused or expecting more. ("Our Mortal Coil", "Steppenpferd") They're written well, but either have no point or else I missed its significance. Given that they were championed by an editor who plucked them from the sea of more mediocre stories, I suspect it must be the latter. I also didn't enjoy either of the alternate-history stories here ("Oracle" and "Seventy-Two Letters"). https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/130698.Ted_Chiang 's "Seventy-Two Letters", in particular, was very frustrating. The story is written superbly, set in a very believable Victorian-era society, and features ambitious and enticing subthemes about information theory, Platonic essentialism, thermodynamics and class warfare. But why would I want to read about these fascinating ideas all tangled up with animated clay golems and medieval claims that sperm contain fully formed homunculi?? This story, along with "The New Horla" stray far enough from the confines of sci-fit to leave me disappointed. There were several standouts, of course, as would be expected from any best-of anthology. For me, the most noteworthy stories were: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/23417.Tananarive_Due 's "Patient Zero", a poignant story about a boy living through a devastating plague; https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19443.David_Langford 's tale of "Different Kinds of Darkness", in which a team of plucky young kids stumble across a way to fight back against futuristic psychoweapons; https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/874602.Ursula_K__Le_Guin 's "Birthday of the World" which (like most of her best work) juxtaposes essentially human values with a completely alien society; https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20295.Stephen_Baxter 's "Sheena 5" about sentient squid that rise above their human benefactors in more ways than one; https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/57814.Robert_Reed 's story about "Grandma's Jumpman", a very well written story about prejudice that I'm sure I will appreciate even more on additional reading; and https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/126502.Michael_Flynn 's "Built Upon The Sands of Time", an entertaining twist on how changes to the past affect the future. All in all, this collection is just what you'd expect from a "Year's Best" sci-fi anthology: lots of solid stories, with a few that don't resonate, but more than enough gems to be worth the effort.”

Ohyn

Created about 17 years ago

About David G. Hartwell

David G. Hartwell is a senior editor of Tor/Forge Books. His doctorate is in Comparative Medieval Literature. He is the proprietor of Dragon Press, publisher and bookseller, which publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction, and the president of David G. Hartwell, Inc. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, The Hard SF Renaissance, The Space Opera Renaissance, and a number of Christmas anthologies, among others. Recently he co-edited his fifteenth annual paperback volume of Year's Best SF, and co-edited the ninth Year's Best Fantasy. John Updike, reviewing The World Treasury of Science Fiction in The New Yorker, characterized him as a "loving expert." He is on the board of the IAFA, is co-chairman of the board of the World Fantasy Convention, and an administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award forty times to date, winning as Best Editor in 2006, 2008, and 2009.