The Year's Best Science Fiction

The first half of this book was a massive trial, a showcase of the worst tendencies of back-in-the-day science fiction (a nerdy boyscout attitude to science, grim attitudes to women, a disturbing eagerness to sentimentalize "primitive" cultures, and above all the length, the length, my god the way some of these buggers just go ON.) The concise and darkly ironic "The Last Homosexual" by Paul Park was the only good bit.

Things do pick up in the second part, with some good stories by Gwyneth Jones (I mean, I've yet to read a bad story by her), Steven Utley and Cherry Wilder. Stephen Baxter, who I'd come to associate with long-winded "hard" sci-fi impresses with a very short, very hard-hitting and emotional story called "MSOB", and the long final story, "The Robot's Twilight Companion" by Tony Daniels, was also quite engrossing. It's very jargon-heavy - if stories were bags and gee-look-at-this technical terminology were rocks, Daniels' story would be a guaranteed puppy-drowner - but crucially the science in this is something I actually care about, i.e. geology and a splash of mining engineering. The mining robot whose growing awareness forms the meat of the narrative is a goody-goody little sod, a poem-reading, dead-kid-mourning machine, and there are times when this almost makes the whole story tip over like ED209, but Daniels displays several great writing styles (unlike many of the clodhoppers in this anthology) and there are enough plots twists and turns to keep the show on the road.

But overall this was an exhausting read and I'm never going to pick up a Dozois anthology again. This is the second one I've read and baby, I'm done. From that era I much prefer the Omni/Datlow type of writers like Lucius Shepherd, Elizabeth Hand and Terry Dowlin

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.