Gardner Dozois
Science fiction
This anthology is a mixed bag, which gives it a leg up on a some other contemporary counterparts that I've read. At least it's not universally depressing. I don't think any of the stories here rises to the level of an instant classic--Ted Chiang is your best bet for that nowadays--but some of them are pretty good. I observe that the verb "print," in the sense of 3D printing, is overused; that having at least one character with non-quotidian sexuality and/or gender is is très hip; and that, contrarily, anything -punk seems to have fallen off the radar.
The stories I'd give an actual "I liked this" to are:
- "Dear Sarah", Nancy Kress. Not totally original, but a good (and topical) inverted view of the friendly-aliens-are-here setting.
- "Night Passage", Alastair Reynolds. Very nice plotting.
- "The Martian Job", Jaine Fenn. Nothing groundbreaking, but an entertaining heist tale.
- "The Proving Ground", Alec Nevala-Lee. Great Scott! A science-fiction story that revolves around actual science! The message is hoary, but the development is good.
- "Number Thirty-Nine Skink", Suzanne Palmer. Disclaimer: Suzanne is a friend of mine. A very oddball . . . love story? . . . between a probe and a man.
- "A Series of Steaks", Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Cute crime story (with 3D printing that's actually intrinsic to the story!).
- "Nexus", Michael F. Flynn. I'm not quite sure what this story is trying to do, but it does it in an amusing way.
| Title | Author | Attributes | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Moon is Not a Battlefield | Indrapramit Das | D, U | War is bad, and grunts get the worst of it both during and after. Who knew? |
| Vanguard 2.0 | Carter Scholz | NP | Substantially weakened by a lady-or-the-tiger ending. |
| Starlight Express | Michael Swanwick | NP | |
| We Who Live in the Heart | Kelly Robson | AP, DF | |
| The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun | Aliette de Bodard | NP, U | |
| Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty's Place Cafe | Naomi Kritzer | MS, U | Confronted by major external crisis, woman learns what's really important. It's been done. |
| The Hunger After You're Fed | James S. A. Corey | AP, NP | |
| The Wordless | Indrapramit Das | D, NP | |
| Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics | Jessica Barber and Sara Saab | AP, NP | Star-crossed lovers are star-crossed. Repeat. |
| Zigeuner | Harry Turtledove | U | An enjoyable read, well-written, with excellent detail, but hopelessly predictable. |
| The Influence Machine | Sean McMullen | U | Sexism, like war, is bad. |
| Prime Meridian | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | AP, DF | |
| Triceratops | Ian McHugh | WTF | |
| There Used to be Olive Trees | Rich Larson | AP, D | |
| Death on Mars | Madeline Ashby | AP, MS | Could be set anywhere. |
| Elephant on Table | Bruce Sterling | DF | I got less than five pages into this before I gave up. |
| The Residue of Fire | Robert Reed | WTF | |
| Sidewalks | Mareen F. McHugh | U | Did I say the Turtledove story was hopelessly predictable? I take it back. |
- AP: Annoying protagonist (or main viewpoint character)
- D: Depressing
- DF: Didn't finish (or skimmed)
- MS: Mainstream fiction masquerading as SF
- NP: No point that I could discover
- U: Unoriginal
- WTF: WTF
Even if not all the stories are (in my humble (but obviously correct) opinion) winners, I tip my hat to the authors. They're doing something hard.
I've read Dozois anthologies in the past, and been very satisfied. I've also read some (more recently) that made me wonder how the stories even got published, much less made it into a "best of" anthology. Not sure if I am becoming a more discerning reader or if the quality of the writing is just not as good.
ReplyDeleteI can't venture to speak for you, but for myself I know that my tastes in fiction are increasingly old-fashioned. This is natural enough; the field is always evolving, whereas my preferences aren't. The kind of thing I like is an ever-decreasing fraction of what gets published.
DeleteA second thing, though, is that as time goes on some ideas get harder to write about. The first time anyone wrote an alt-history story, the idea itself was enough. After the twentieth time, the idea was old hat, and to get published you'd have to do something different with it. After the thousandth time . . .