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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection |
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Reviews |
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Rating: Summary: Dozois finds good sf stories for his readers. Review: Dozois's third Bluejay annual (1986, for 1985 work) follows the same format as his second. You can read no other sf-related book in a given year and still have a very good idea of what is happening in the current sf scene. Dozois believes that short fiction is the heart of the genre; it takes as much originality to execute an effective story as it does a genre novel, which generally spins out an equivalent concept at greater length. Moreover, the concentation of the short form forces writers into a concise presentation of their material. In an age of elephantine media-based novel series, that's a pleasure. This anthology picks up 24 stories, several of them long. I most liked Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things," a haunting meditation on Vietnam in which a woman interacts with a virtual version of a man she knew who died in the war. Another very good story included here, which won an award, is Frederik Pohl's "Fermi and Frost," a less satiric than usual portrait of surviving beyond armageddon. Additional stories I liked here include Robert Silverberg's long "Sailing to Byzantium," another award-winner in which Byzantium turns out not what it seems to be; Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars," which became the basis for his Mars trilogy; S. C. Sykes's "Rockabye Baby," a moving story about a severely injured man who enters an experimental program to regenerate his body; and Lucius Shepard's "A Spanish Lesson," a picaresque mood piece about an expatriate American in Europe who finally confronts his own shallowness. Two other award winners reprinted are Nancy Springer's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" and James Blaylock's "Paper Dragons." One of the tensions in genre fiction of this period was the conflict between the cyberpunkers and the rest of the writers. Robinson was accused of being a fuddy-duddy for not joining the punker bandwagon. I think he had the last laugh.
Rating: Summary: Dozois finds good sf stories for his readers. Review: Dozois's third Bluejay annual (1986, for 1985 work) follows the same format as his second. You can read no other sf-related book in a given year and still have a very good idea of what is happening in the current sf scene. Dozois believes that short fiction is the heart of the genre; it takes as much originality to execute an effective story as it does a genre novel, which generally spins out an equivalent concept at greater length. Moreover, the concentation of the short form forces writers into a concise presentation of their material. In an age of elephantine media-based novel series, that's a pleasure. This anthology picks up 24 stories, several of them long. I most liked Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things," a haunting meditation on Vietnam in which a woman interacts with a virtual version of a man she knew who died in the war. Another very good story included here, which won an award, is Frederik Pohl's "Fermi and Frost," a less satiric than usual portrait of surviving beyond armageddon. Additional stories I liked here include Robert Silverberg's long "Sailing to Byzantium," another award-winner in which Byzantium turns out not what it seems to be; Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars," which became the basis for his Mars trilogy; S. C. Sykes's "Rockabye Baby," a moving story about a severely injured man who enters an experimental program to regenerate his body; and Lucius Shepard's "A Spanish Lesson," a picaresque mood piece about an expatriate American in Europe who finally confronts his own shallowness. Two other award winners reprinted are Nancy Springer's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" and James Blaylock's "Paper Dragons." One of the tensions in genre fiction of this period was the conflict between the cyberpunkers and the rest of the writers. Robinson was accused of being a fuddy-duddy for not joining the punker bandwagon. I think he had the last laugh.
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