The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection
My dozenth completed title for the year is The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.. I buy the Dozois collections every year, but during the current century I've been very irregular about getting around to reading them cover-to-cover. I look, now, over at the teetering pile of books on the corner of my file cabinet where seven of them currently await attention, and then I remember that there's an eighth in the bullpen in the other room, which means I'll get to it in the next four months. Possibly.
I've also stopped reading them in order. The reason I pulled this one, which covers the year 2007, is that I wanted to do a comparison with the mainstream/literary equivalent for the same year: The Best American Short Stories 2008, Salman Rushdie, ed.. It had occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what the arc of the stories tended to be, and so I kept track of the endings in the Best American collection. The result was as follows:
upbeat = 20% (with serious reservations)
status quo = 40%
downbeat = 40%
So now I've read the matching science fiction collection, and the spread is quite different.
upbeat = 79% (with serious reservations)
status quo = 19%
downbeat = 6%
The "serious reservations" in these stories reflect a very common outcome in SF tales; the protagonist succeeds against a backdrop of the end of the world, or the end of the galaxy, or the total collapse (it happens here) of the Universe. It's a metaphorical equivalent of the split outcome you find in literary stories.
I note that there only seems to be one story that appeared in both the Hartwell/Cramer anthology and the Dozois anthology, and yet I found several standouts in each volume.
I always seem to adore any Ted Chang story, and his "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" is no exception. It's a Thousand Nights and a Night time-travel tale. Stephen Baxter's "Last Contact" made me cry. Alastair Reynolds's "The Sledge-Maker's Daughter" is almost Fantasy, but an immersive read; and Ian McDonald's "Sanjeev and Robotwallah" (which I was seeing for the third time) is the piece from both collections.
Loved also: Vandana Singh's "Of Love and Other Monsters"; Greg Egan's dark "Steve Fever"; Pat Cadigan's novella "Nothing Personal", with its late-appearing SF elements; and Elizabeth Bear's excellent "Tideline".
I was surprised to discover how much I enjoyed the story and the writing of Greg Benford's "Dark Heaven". I haven't read a Benford novel in decades, and my memory of his work is dim, but I thought that I liked the ideas and story more than the writing. In this novella, though, I have marked several pages to use as instructional examples for my MFA students on How To Do It.
It's a Southern police procedural, with aliens.
CBsIP: Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections on Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould
Writing Down the Bones (expanded edition), Natalie Goldberg
Plutarch's Lives, Plutarch
Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. II, P. H. Sheridan
Women of Sand and Myrrh, Hanān al-Shaykh