The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5
edited by Neil Clarke

After enjoying volume 4 of this series so much, I decided to collect past and future volumes as well. I get a lot of exposure to contemporary short sf&f by voting in the Hugos, but those have a fantasy tilt of late, and I find Clarke's selections more to my taste; of the 28 stories collected here, there is just ones that overlaps with the 18 short fiction Hugo finalists for the same period! I decided to read a story over lunch every day that I worked on campus, but I was less than diligent about this, and then also took a break to catch up on my Doctor Who Magazine back issues, so this volume ended up being stretched out in my reading from October 2020 to January 2022! As a result, my memory of some of the volume's early stories is a little murky.

Collection published: 2020
Contents published: 2019
Acquired: October 2020
Read: January 2022

"Best of"s are always a mixed bag, and I found many of the volume's earlier stories not to my taste, especially Cixin Liu's "Moonlight," which treats as novel the kind of time-travel shenanigans any 21st-century sf reader/viewer is well used to at this point. But I soon got into it, and there was definitely enough to like here to justify the volume. Highlights included:

• Marie Vibbert's "Knit Three, Save Four" (from F&SF) is a cute story where knitting saves a spaceship from disintegrating.
• Tobias S. Buckell's "By the Warmth of Their Calculus" (from Mission Critical) is a bit vague in my memory now... but I do remember trying to figure out if he had written more stories in this milieu, so I must have liked it.
  
• Alastair Reynolds's "Permafrost" (from Tor.com) is a great, clever, involving time travel story about people who are projecting their minds back in time to head off a disaster. It's a Tor.com novella, which I like to complain about a lot, but it doesn't fit their usual style/ethos at all, thankfully. I guess they do publish unique stuff, it just doesn't make the Hugo ballot when they do.
• Tegan Moore's "The Work of Wolves" (from Asimov's) was my absolute favorite story from the volume, a cool story of an augmented search-and-rescue dog that really captures the canine perspective, and has a great, clever ending. I don't think I'd ever read anything from Moore before, but I hope to read more.
• A Que's "Song Xiuyun" (from Clarkesworld) was a neat story. (Again, I don't remember it much anymore, but I do remember recommending it to someone!)

There were lots of other decent ones, and even things I disliked were most just not to my taste I think; only one other than Cixin Liu's flat-out annoyed me, and that was "On the Shores of Ligeia" by Carolyn Ives Gilman, which had a sort of leap/turn in it that I found utterly implausible, and sunk what had been up until that point a decent tale. I look forward to the pandemic-delayed volume 6, and I hope I can get through it more quickly!