Gardner Dozois twenty-third annual selection of the year's best SF may not reach the heights of his selections from the mid-eighties to a about a decade later, but they are still well worth checking out.
All told, the anthology collects over a third of a million words in thirty stories. There is surprisingly little overlap with Dozois' peers. Only the Rosenblum overlaps with Rich Horton's collection, while four of the stories also appear in the David G. Hartwell volume, and Bruce Sterling's "The Blemmye's Stratagem," together with two others and the marvellous Swanwick story overlaps with Jonathan Strahan's choice. But over half of the volume is unique, and worth a look.
The collection opens with Ian Mcdonald's "The Little Goddess," in which a young girl is selected by a cult as the living embodiment of their god, falls from grace, and then ends with an Artificial Intelligence embedded in her brain, which gives her almost god-like powers in a powerful corrolary to its opening.
Many of the stories are set in a Balkanized near-future world that reflects our current concerns (as indeed has all SF since the 1930s onwards), which has replaced the far-future Big Space Opera of the 1990s as the almost-default-setting for much SF, although the latter still appears, notably in Robert Reed's "Camoflage" about a murder on a huge generation starship in the distant future.
Although some of the stories -- such as David Gerrold's wonderful and poignant "In The quake Zone," about time-travellers careering between Los Angeles of the 1950s and the near-future -- are of almost novel length, the most effective stories tend to be amongst the shortest.
Joe Haldeman's "Angel of Light" is set in a Muslim-dominated future society visited by an alien emissary. Haldeman's narrator finds an ancient copy of Thrilling Wonder Stories which casts both his present and his perception of the past in an entirely new light.
"La Malcontenta" by Liz Williams is a haunting and complex story which takes place on a terraformed Mars where men are all but extinct; this is an excellent example of technology so advanced that it might as well be magic, and is highly recommended.
A future New Orleans altered almost beyond recognition is the setting for Elizabeth Bear's "Two Dreams on Trains," the story of a woman struggling to live and to make a life for her son; he however, has different ideas on what he wants out of life. One of the very best stories of the year.
"Triceratops Summer" is yet another of Michael Swanwick's dinosaur stories (he's very close to making our prehistoric ancestors his very own specialist subject) which this time blends with the plot of Groundhog Day in a warm and poignant examination of how knowing our eventual fate can make us all behave differently.
The anthology ends with the longest story in the book, "Burn" by James Patrick Kelly, a superb way to finish off a very good book.
