The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6
edited by Neil Clarke
Collection published: 2022 Contents published: 2020 Acquired: January 2022 Read: January 2022–January 2023 |
- "The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi. A Neuralink-esque device records all thoughts in the brain (among other things). Some of these memories get packaged and sold; the main character is an old woman dying of cancer who keeps experiencing memories of death to try to come to terms with her own impending death. Good worldbuilding, a little saccharine, but enjoyable.
- "Invisible People" by Nancy Kress. I find that I don't always get on with Kress's writing (and she once complained about me on her blog!), but this I thought was a really interesting story, about parents who discover that their daughter was genetically modified, but in a really interesting way.
- "This World is Made for Monsters" by M. Rickert. I'd never encountered M. Rickert's writing before, I think, but after this I'd like to seek out more. This is a beautifully told story about a spaceship landing in a small town and the way its residents react. Soon there's an annual festival but no aliens, yet the traces of their presence linger on.
- "Salvage" by Andy Dudak. So much going on in this very well told story! Aliens discover that observing the universe harms the universe, so they imprison humans in their own minds, each one not even knowing this has happened, as they're all caught up in their own simulations continuing on from where reality left off. The protagonist (who was on a relativistic ship at the time this happened, and thus protected) "salvages" these people, uploading their consciousnesses into computers. But she has her own secrets, and is soon caught up in issues surrounding the salvage of a notorious dictator. Great stuff.
- "Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air" by Matthew Kressel. Interesting story about people trying to commune with powerful alien intelligences that may or may not be gods. Dark and disturbing.
Of course there are some that didn't work for me, but I could imagine working for others; beyond that, there are the rare ones that I don't get why they were picked at all. Thankfully there were just three of those in this volume... but two were by probably the two most famous authors in the book! "Uma" by Ken Liu, like a number of Ken Liu's stories, felt more like exposition about future technology than an actual story, and James S.A. Corey's "Elsewhere" just didn't have much going on it: neat tech idea, but the story didn't have the depth to make it work. "Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik had a neat idea again, but it was implemented in a way that made absolutely no sense to me and destroyed the storyworld's credibility.
On the whole, this is a strong volume, and shows that short sf is in good health. As always I would rate much of what I read here above the Hugo finalists for the relevant year (e.g., had "An Important Failure" been on the novelette ballot for 2021, I would have ranked it above everything except "Helicopter Story"). I look forward to volume 7, and to eventually going back and reading volume 1-3.
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