Year's Best SF 17
I finished Year's Best SF 17, David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, eds., last week, but the end-of-term frenzy kept me from commenting earlier. As always with these collections, it's a fine anthology of a variety of types of science fiction short story. Not a clunker in the bunch, this time.
There are four stories (Elizabeth Bear's "Dolly"; Karl Schroeder's "Laika's Ghost"; Michael Swanwick's "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again"; Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Ice Owl") that are also in the Dozois anthology; and I'd already read Paul Park's "Ragnarok" in last year's Rhysling Anthology, which brings up the fact that it's a poem. (I'm not quite clear on how "Ragnarok" ends up in annual anthologies for two different years.) Now the poem is the one that I remarked upon in my review of the Rhysling Anthology, but curiously none of the four duplicate stories are the ones I mentioned when reviewing the Dozois.
For the most amusing story, I'd pick "Home Sweet Bi'Ome" by Pat MacEwen. It made me laugh; and the premise, of someone living in a house made of their own tissue, is not that illogical.
My favorites were both at the end of the collection: Yoon Ha Lee's "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" and Genevieve Valentine's "The Nearest Thing." To describe either would be to give them away.
CBsIP: (500 pages of student manuscripts)
Life of the Empress Josephine, anonymous (Cecil B. Hartley?)
Mr. Lincoln's Army, Bruce Catton
There are four stories (Elizabeth Bear's "Dolly"; Karl Schroeder's "Laika's Ghost"; Michael Swanwick's "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again"; Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Ice Owl") that are also in the Dozois anthology; and I'd already read Paul Park's "Ragnarok" in last year's Rhysling Anthology, which brings up the fact that it's a poem. (I'm not quite clear on how "Ragnarok" ends up in annual anthologies for two different years.) Now the poem is the one that I remarked upon in my review of the Rhysling Anthology, but curiously none of the four duplicate stories are the ones I mentioned when reviewing the Dozois.
For the most amusing story, I'd pick "Home Sweet Bi'Ome" by Pat MacEwen. It made me laugh; and the premise, of someone living in a house made of their own tissue, is not that illogical.
My favorites were both at the end of the collection: Yoon Ha Lee's "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" and Genevieve Valentine's "The Nearest Thing." To describe either would be to give them away.
CBsIP: (500 pages of student manuscripts)
Life of the Empress Josephine, anonymous (Cecil B. Hartley?)
Mr. Lincoln's Army, Bruce Catton