The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8

The eighth volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year was released in 2024, collecting the best short fiction of 2022. (The series fell behind a year thanks to COVID and has unfortunately not managed to catch up yet.) As I usually do, I dipped in and out of it, reading a story every now and again between other books, stretching my reading across about five months.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8
edited by Neil Clarke

Collection published: 2024
Contents published: 2022
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024–March 2025

As always I enjoyed the experience of catching up on the year's best short fiction, much of which I had not read. (I think there were just two Hugo finalists in here, even though, as always, much of what's here would have been quite competitive on a Hugo ballot in my opinion.) My very favorite story in the book I've already written up here: "If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt. This tells the story of three women making a transcontinental road race in a postapocalyptic United States. Strong worldbuilding, great characterization. Other highlights included: (I will link to the story in question if it has a free and legal online version somewhere)

• "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer. About genetically engineering custom animals, this story is—like a lot of Kritzer's work—cute and light but effectively done.
• "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim. Neat metafictional piece about being the girlfriend of the main character in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the way she uses tropes to extend her own life. Stylishly told, cleverly written. My second encounter with Kim but hopefully not my last.
• "The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott. Sharp and creepy story about a technology where people can simulate deceased loved ones. Similar premise to "Proof by Induction," I guess, but goes in a very different but just as effective direction.
• "The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell. I feel like I am always enjoying random stories by Buckell that I happen across; I probably should read a collection of them someday. Horrifying but great story about rich kids who adopt a climate refugee from the Earth's surface and are incapable of treating it like a human being.
• "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Nayler. Hard to discuss this one without giving a lot away, but I thought it was beautifully told and went in some unexpected directions. Like Buckell, Nayler seems like someone I should seek out more. 
• "The Past Life Reconstruction Service" by Zen Cho. I always really enjoy Cho's short fiction, and this was no exception; a rich guy keeps exploring past lives to try to get over an ex-lover. Acutely observed characterization.
• "Solidity" by Greg Egan. Over on r/printSF, Egan is praised for the rigor of his hard sf, but this is one of those stories by him that demonstrates he has a more dynamic range than even his devotees often grant him. People start slipping between realities, but in subtle, uneasy ways; you can be replaced, but only by someone who could plausibly be in the same situation. So how do people hang on to reality, and to each other, in such a trying circumstance? What would you do if you could never find your loved one again?
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson. Many years ago, I read and very much enjoyed Richardson's novel Constellation Games, but have never read anything else by him. This was fun but weird. A guy's parents start doing weird stuff because of... alien YouTube videos?

Most years there's at least one story whose inclusion I find inexplicable, but I didn't experience that this time around; indeed, I was skeptical of "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi going in, having read it before, but ended up enjoying it more this time around. Looking over the 2023 Hugo finalists again, I do think there are two notable omissions here (S. L. Huang's "Murder by Pixel" and Samantha Mills's "Rabbit Test") but both are in Clarke's 2021 recommended reading list at the back.

As always, if you like short sf, this is an indispensable read... at this point, it's the only sf best-of still going!

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!

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6
edited by Neil Clarke

I only jumped aboard with volume 4, but I've quickly become a devoted fan of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series. I think Clarke provides a good sampling of what the genre is up to, and his tastes broadly align with my own. Clarke edits Clarkesworld Magazine, and I find that I often particularly like stories that have been "double selected" by him: when a Clarkesworld story turns up in Best SF of the Year, it's almost always excellent. (Plus, there's no fantasy in it!)

Collection published: 2022
Contents published: 2020
Acquired: January 2022
Read: January 2022–January 2023

This collects the best fiction of 2020, but due to pandemic knock-on effects, ended up coming out in 2021. (Similarly, the 2021 volume will see release in 2023, but my understanding is they hope to catch up this year by doing two volumes.) Like volume 5, I read this slowly. I often find that if I read a number of stories from an anthology in quick succession, they blur together and don't leave much of an impression: I think I end up approaching the start of a new story like the start of a new chapter in a novel, and not slowing down to acclimate myself to the new narrative. So I rotated this volume's thirty-plus stories between my other reading, averaging two or three stories per month. I started it in January 2022, and I finished up the last story almost exactly a year later in January 2023!

I found this a strong volume on the whole, slightly stronger than I remember volume 5 being. Indeed, I've already written up four of its stories on this blog in a separate post, so much was I taken by them: Rebecca Campbell's "An Important Failure," Sameem Siddiqui's "AirBody," James Patrick Kelly's "Your Boyfriend Experience," and Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Exile's End." I in particular find myself thinking about "An Important Failure" a lot (a beautiful story about climate change) as well as "Exile's End" (a tragic story about cultural appropriation).

 

While those are definitely the four best stories in the volume (and you can click the link above if you want to know more about them), there were a number of other ones I really enjoyed: (I will link to ones freely available on the Internet)

• "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.

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!

Review: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Neil Clarke

Trade paperback, 599 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 2018)
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4
edited by Neil Clarke

So for the science fiction creative writing class I'm teaching this fall, I wanted a source of short fiction. A lot of the thinking behind my class has been motivated by contemplating what would have helped me at my students' stage of development. I know that when I first started mailing short sf out to magazine, I piled up rejections very quickly. Looking back, it's pretty obvious why. At age 20, my understanding of sf was largely informed by two things: film and tv (especially Star Trek) and sf novels I read when I was a kid (so mostly ones published before I was born). I had no sense at all of what science fiction in the year 2005 was like, and was just churning out sub-Star Trek stories. No wonder I got rejected! So I want my students to see what is happening in print science fiction now. We're only a week in, and it's clear they all have a strong understanding of the genre from film and tv... but even the writing majors have clearly read little written sf. To provide such an overview, I decided to assign the most recent volume of Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year. I've never read any of his anthologies before, but based on the stories from Clarkesworld that I've read, he has a sense of good sf that accords with my own, and he always has sensical things to say on Reddit.

I read the whole anthology the month before classes began. I was impressed. Often, when I review "best of" anthologies, I go story by story and mark each story "thumbs up" (feels like it belongs), "thumbs sideways" (I'm neutral), or "thumbs down" (I don't see why this is here), but at twenty-nine stories, this would get to be a very long review very quickly! But what I can say is that I would stack many of these up against what made the short fiction ballots for the Hugo Awards this year. S. Qiouyi Lu's "Mother Tongues," for example, is better by far than anything that did make the ballot in Best Short Story, with its clever use of the second person and typography. (It did make the longlist, but was pretty far down in fourteenth.) And even though I did really like the Best Novelette ballot this year, Ken Liu's "Byzantine Empathy" would have been a worthy addition to it. There were only two stories both on the Hugo shortlist and in this book, both strong: "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth" by Daryl Gregory. I was also pleased to see Vandana Singh's "Requiem" here, which I nominated, but did not even make the longlist. The advantage that Clarke has over the Hugos is that he clearly reads everything, whereas the Hugos are biased toward free-to-access e-magazines. "Mother Tongues" is from Asimov's, which used to dominate the Hugo ballot but now barely gets a look in; "Byzantine Empathy" is from an original print anthology series; "Requiem" is from a single-author collection (an impressively deep cut, I felt).

I speaks highly that I put all but eleven of them on the syllabus for my class. I put every story I liked on the syllabus, and a few more that I didn't like, but felt were doing something interesting. Just some quick notes on a few other stories here:

• Kelly Robson's "Intervention" (from the anthology Infinity's End) takes place in the same world as her Hugo-nominated Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, and like it, is good at unspooling an sf backstory.
• Alyssa Wong's dark "All the Time We've Left to Spend" (from the anthology Robots vs. Fairies) is a great example of exploring character through an sf lens.
• There are two different stories about people being trapped in smart houses, Madeleine Ashby's "Domestic Violence" (from Slate) and Elizabeth Bear's "Okay, Glory" (from the anthology Twelve Tomorrows), but they're very different, and both very good.
• Vanessa Fogg's "Traces of Us" (from GigaNotoSaurus, an e-mag that just does one story per month) is an interesting example of generic crossover, as it's both a romance and hard sf.
• I wasn't super into Nick Wolven's "Lab B-15" (from Analog), but it's a great example of how to slowly reveal a plot, where each answer just leads to more questions.
• Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War" (from the anthology 2001) isn't a proper story, but a set of rules for a dice game! I think I liked it, but I am curious to see what my students will think.

There's a wide diversity of storytelling styles and subgenres here, and it convinces me that short sf is a thriving field. I also really liked Neil Clarke's introduction on the state of sf in 2018. I'm glad my gamble paid off, and I will be picking up future (and past!) volumes in this series for sure.