The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7
edited by Neil Clarke

I have come to look forward to Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes, the only (I think) best-of anthology going to cover all of the sf genre and nothing but the sf genre. I like getting a sense of the best of the genre has to offer, especially from the not free-to-read magazines, which often get a lot less attention online, and the original anthologies, which rarely cross my radar. I pepper the stories from them in among my other reading; this year that meant it took me about six months to get through the thirty-one stories collected in this volume. If I had a complaint, it would simply be that the pandemic has put the series behind and it still hasn't caught up: volume 7 came out in 2023 but collects stories originally published in 2021.

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 2021
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023–March 2024

As always, there's a lot to like here even when every story isn't exactly to my taste, and I appreciate the anthology introducing me to writers I haven't (as far as I remember, anyway) previously experienced. My favorite in this volume was the very first story, "Muallim" by Ray Nayler, which I previously wrote up here, a neat story about the uses to which a remote Asian village puts a UN educational robot that the its benefactors didn't quite intend. But that doesn't mean it was all downhill from there or anything. Other highlights included:

• "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte. This was a 2022 Hugo finalist, so I had read it before, but it's a neat story about digital consciousness uploading and what some of the implications of that might be.
• "The Pizza Boy" by Meg Elison. A neat tale about a pizza delivery boy... in space! Where he works is a war zone, and the lengths he has to go to to gather ingredients are often illegal. Fun but serious at the same time, which is how I like my fiction.
• "I'm Waiting for You" by Kim Bo-young. Complicated story about a man taking a relativistic flight so that he can line up with one being taken by his fiancée, so they will keep their ages consistent at their wedding, only then his flight is delayed, so she has to adjust, so then he has to adjust, and it all gets quite convoluted and sad.
• "Hānai" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Aliens come to Hawaii to track down a woman who allegedly committed an enormous anthropological crime. Well observed character work and strong prose, neat exploration of a variety of cultural differences.
• "The Equations of the Dead" by An Owomoyela. A kid in a criminal organization is supposed to eliminate someone he's fallen in love with... and then ends up getting in way over his head, in a story involving mind uploads.
• "Complete Exhaustion of the Organism" by Rich Larson. I didn't totally know what was happening here but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Two people are on some kind of walk, trying to get away from some kind of weird society, but are followed by a child who comes back no matter how often they abandon it.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer. Like "Proof by Induction," this was a reread, but I find Palmer's Bot 9 stories incredibly charming and well written, so I was happy to reread it. A little robot is the only hope of a massive spaceship that finds itself out of control, its human crew incapacitated, in what is possible hostile territory.

Those are just a few that stick out to on skimming back over the table of contents, but there are a number of other worthwhile stories here. There were only a couple that I did not enjoy; there were several stories included from an anthology called Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, and these I found missed more than they hit, the kind of near-future futurism that dates too quickly because it's too timely; only three years later, I didn't feel like the authors had called it correctly. One of them was my least favorite story in the book, Ken Liu's "Jaunt," which was less a story and more like worldbuilding and background for a story. (It's a bit hermit crabby, actually.) But I have previously established on this blog that Ken Liu works for me much less often than he seems to work for other people.

Some of this content you can get online, of course (I have linked to them above when so), but the benefit of the volume is to get all of it in one place. Hopefully this series catches up soon!