Year's Best SF #11

In their introduction, Hartwell & Cramer talk about our changing views of the world, particularly in the way we view disasters such as the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and of a very science-fictional war, fought using propaganda as weaponry, "in which information spews as if from a fire hose."

Stories Reflect Changing World View

Many of the thirty stories on display reflect this changing world view. Fully a third of the selection are flash-fiction pieces from Nature, the distinguished science journal, and make the collection somewhat bitty. Nonetheless, Justina Robson's "Dreadnought," set on a far-future troopship carrying its crew of post-human -- or perhaps sub-human -- troops, Tobias Buckell's "Toy Planes," a not so-humorous story about a Carribean space program, and David Langford's wickedly satrical cyberspace bureaucracy in "New Hope for the Dead," are as good as any of the longer pieces. But the overall effect of so many less-than-a-thousand word stories is to make the collection feel more fragmentary than it really needs to.

Many of the stories take far-future settings where humanity is all-but unrecognizable, but nonetheless, Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Third day Lights" is as good a piece of hard SF dressed as fantasy as has been written in some time, in which humanity's descendants are draining the universe of power for a vast project, while "The Edge of Nowhere" by James Patrick Kelly takes a familiar small town-setting and gives it something of the Twilight Zone, and "Beyond The Aquila Rift" is Alastair Reynolds' fine mystery-whydunnit about a recovering starship captain who awakes to see an old flame waiting for him, but things are not what they seem.

Like the Reynolds, several of the better stories also appear in the Dozois volume, but nonetheless, are well worth commenting upon; Darryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense," (a marvellous title on several levels) about an identity-destroying drug taken by teenagers as an act of rebellion, Ken Macleod's marvellous response to the James Blish classic A Case of Consience -- in this instance, "A Case of Consilience," and Hannu Rajaniemi's "Deus Ex Hominie," in which Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is raised to whole new levels all bear repeated re-reading, even for authors familar with the other book -- in fact, several of these stories improve on further exposure.

Save the Best to the Last

Hartwell and Cramer often save the best to last; so it is with Year's Best SF #11, with two of the three stories taking the plaudits as best of the best. Both Joe Haldeman's "Angel of Light," and "I,Robot," by Cory Doctorow explicitly refer back to earlier science fiction for their roots. In Haldeman's case, it this the Summer 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories that Ahmed Abd al-kareem finds in his cellar in our Muslim dominated future, and which unexpectedly brings closeness to an alien visitor. In the Doctorow, it is the title, although little else in the story of a future Canadian cop and his estranged wife bears resemblance to the Asimov classic -- perhaps it's closer to the film version; nonetheless, there is much wit and charm in the story of Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg's gradual education about the realpolitik of his world.

This is not the very best volume in the series, but there is enough on display to make even only a moderately good Hartwell & Cramer worth reading.

Print Article

Email Article

View All Articles

How to subscribe to feeds