The best science fiction of 1993
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Twenty-four science fiction stories, a collection made in 1993, so most of them were first published in 1991 or 1992. As with any anthology, it's a mixed bag, some long, some short, some good, some mediocre.
Like a lot of science fiction stories they are set in the future, and in some cases, reading them 30 years after publication, the future has become present, and the envisaged social, technological or medical changes have not followed the predicted direction. Many of these are based on the extrapolation of contemporary trends, so that i one read them thirty years ago, one would think "This could happen,", but when one reads them thirty years later, one things, "but this didn't happen."
More than one of the stories concerns identity, how a clone of a person relates to the original, and whether clones or originals are disposable. Such, for example, are "Dust" by Greg Egan, and "The mirror of my youth" by Kathe Koja. Others concern artists, like James Joyce and John Lennon, and how their lives might have been different if circumstances had changed.
I picked up this book in the library because I hadn't read much science fiction since I was a teenager. and the little I had read since then didn't seem to compare well with the classics of the 1940s and 1950s. But the library doesn't seem to have the most up-to-date collections, and many of the books it does have are donations from deceased estates, sometimes with annotations or at least the names of the original owners inscribed in them. So this book was a compromise. I gave up reading much science fiction about 60 years ago, and this one dated from 30 years ago, so it marked a kind of halfway house.
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