The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection [Hardcover]

Good:
"Going After Bobo"--Heartwrenching, poetic character study, but the plot is pretty thin.
"Crux"--Dark detective story/social commentary set in a brutal post-holocaust future dominated by the Orient. Quite violent, with a fast paced and tighty knit plot.
"The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O"--Time travel with two amazing characters. Provocative, in-your-face prose.
"Radiant Green Star"--Another violent future world dominated by the Orient. This time it's a traditional mystery combined with a poetic coming-of-age story.
"Great Wall of Mars"--A cult of humans with networked implants battle unnetworked humans for survival. Lots of action, great speculation on the potential of the human mind.
"A Colder War"--Alternate Cold War history with aliens causing major problems for both sides. Confusing plot, but highly realistic narrative keeps it interesting anyway.

Great:
"The Suspect Genome"--Future world whodunit, set in an England where police work has been somewhat privatized. Brilliant plot construction and writing keep you engaged all the way.
"On the Orion Line"--Man versus powerful and inscrutable aliens deep in space, far in the future. Well developed characters, fast paced and straightforward plot.
"Obsidian Harvest"--Another future world detective story set in England. What makes this one extraordinary is the premise, where the Aztecs dominate the world--human sacrifices, feathered capes, lots of tequila. Add hard-boiled prose in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett (his "Red Harvest" is great) and you have something unforgettable.
"Patient Zero"--Nightmarish account of a dreadful near-future. Great plot, great characters, and makes some strong statements in only fifteen pages.

For me, the stand-out story was "Oracle", by Greg Egan. It is a beaurifully researched and written story about a traveler from the future coming into the past and interceding in the life of Alan Turing. Turing's life moves in a somewhat different path than in our history, and leads him to have a public debate with C. S. Lewis on the possibility of machine intelligence. (Greg Egan does not use their actual names, but sticks close to their biographies, so the correlation is obvious).

"The Juniper Tree" by John Kessel started out as a well-written re-exploration of what I thought were pretty well-trodden SF themes, then manages to throw in a moral twist that left me reeling. A great story.

Great Wall of Mars by Alistair Reynolds is a pyrotechnic roller-coaster ride of a story. I mean literally. It contains two of the most memorable "rides" I can remember in science fiction. It's a slam-bang adventure that left me dazed.

"Antibodies" by Charles Stross was a nice surprise. It felt like reading a classic 50's SF story, but brought up-to-date. He's one of my favorite discoveries of the last year, and you get another great story by him in the same volume.

Other excllent stories include "Tendelo's Story" by Ian McDonald, "The Suspect Genome" by Peter F. Hamilton, "Radiant Green Star" by the amazing wordsmith Lucius Shepard, "Crux" by Albert Cowdrey, "The Real World" by Steven Utley, and "The Birthday of the World" by Ursula K. LeGuin.

If you seriously enjoy speculative fiction, buy this book.

Highlights of the volume include 'The Birthday of the World' by Ursula Le Guin; in which a race of 'gods' struggle for power, 'Crux' by Albert Cowdrey; a time travel adventure that has more similarities to the old pulp stories than most recent SF, 'Radiant Green Star' by Lucius Shepard; a fabulous story about an orphan's search for his father while he performs in a circus in Vietnam, 'Great Wall of Mars' by Alastair Reynolds; the story of a renegade colony on Mars and attempts to eradicate it, 'On the Orion Line' by Stephen Baxter; a story of war in space that I found to be one of Baxter's most literate and readable stories, 'A Colder War' by Charles Stross; a brilliant meld of Cthulu fiction and Cold War politics, and my favorite story in the volume 'Tendeleo's Story' by Ian McDonald; the story of a young girl in Africa who grows up amid invasion by alien spores.

Like all anthologies, not all stories will please all readers. I found 'Milo and Sylvie' by Eliot Fintushel to be WAY overlong, boring, and without a coherent plot. 'Snowball in Hell' by Brian Stableford bogged down with too much gengineering talk...too many big words, not enough plot extrapolation.

This truly is a collection of the Best SF of the year. There are only a handful of stories that didn't make the book that may have been deserving (stories by Jeffrey Ford, Kage Baker, Charles Sheffield, & Robert Reed spring immediately to mind). By and large the stories in this book are extremely well-written with fascinating plots. Consider 'Oracle' by Greg Egan, a story with thinly veiled characterizations of C.S. Lewis and Alan Turing...this is a story that science fiction is all about. With the exception of the two stories I mentioned earlier, there isn't a sub-par story in this collection. Highly recommended.