I took rather a long time getting through The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed., but the beauty of short fiction collections is that you can do that, without losing your thread.
         Having realized decades ago that I would never be able to keep up with all the magazines and books in the ( Read more... )

         Most of my students have read Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, so I had it on my list of things I should probably read to "keep up" with their writing influences. When the movie came out, I saw it, and was annoyed by what I felt was the phony moral choice set up for the main character: she's in a situation where she needs to kill ( Read more... )

          Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection is my most recent conquest. It contains 33 of the best short stories from the year 2010; at least twice that number of typos; and probably two dozen occurrences of the word "grimace" (Aliette de Bodard's piece has four of them), which tells you it wasn't a ( Read more... )

          I bought Ares Express, by Ian McDonald, several years back. My copy is the Earthlight paperback, because McDonald wasn't being reprinted in the States much back then. I had already read Out on Blue Six, Terminal Café and Desolation Road. But my bookstore, and the SF conventions, never seemed to have anything new. So I looked on AmazonUK ( Read more... )

          I've been chipping away at The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (edited, as always, by Gardner Dozois) for months and months. It's not that the collection is bad (despite ten grimaces), because there are some fine stories in here. It's not that it didn't contain any of the stories I'd liked best in the ( Read more... )