From Amazon.com
Gardner Dozois once again proves himself to be among the best editors in science fiction with
The Year's Best Science Fiction Sixteenth Annual Collection. Whether you like your SF hard or soft, with a twist or straight, you'll find something to love in here. Dozois picked perfect 1998 stories from the likes of Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, and Ursula K. Le Guin for celebrity sparkle, but he didn't overlook relative newcomers either. It's hard to pick favorites from such a varied and delightful bunch. Paul J. McAuley's "Sea Change, with Monsters" is a thriller taking place in the icy seas of Europa, where genetically engineered weapon-creatures battle humans for survival. Cory Doctorow weighs in with the funny and poignant "Craphound," a tale of two secondhand junk entrepreneurs who find out that the love of good kitsch transcends all barriers. Liz Williams's "Voivodoi" explores one family's anguish and triumph in an Eastern Europe scarred by mutagens. And as usual, Dozois provides a stylish wrap-up of the previous year in science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing. It speaks well for the health of the genre that Dozois picked these winners from hundreds of stellar nominees (he lists them in the back). And it's a rare treat to enjoy every single story in a collection.
--Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
Dozois, the most celebrated editor in SF (10 Hugo Awards and counting) and himself a story writer of great distinction, has for the 16th time gleaned some of the most interesting and literate short fiction of the year for this most respected of best-of's. The 25 chosen works encompass pyrotechnic cyberpunk in dystopic future worlds, alien landscapes and transgalactic politics rigorously extrapolated, cutting-edge physics, metaphysics, comedy low and high, and a touch of fantasy, all of it carried off with wonderful style. And many are the styles. Ursula K. Le Guin is represented by a fantasy in the classic mode, "The Island of the Immortals," a meditation on a theme of Swift's: the true consequences of immortality. Allen Steele's comic Martian Christmas story, "Zwarte Piet's Tale," reads like a Reader's Digest essay, and that is part of its artAto make the alien seem utterly familiar. By contrast, Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" implies the existence in things most familiar of something deeply alien. There are hard SF stories by Greg Egan, Geoffrey Landis and the prolific Robert Reed. Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," one of only four ever published by him, typifies Dozois's editorial aesthetic, offering genuine scientific insights in an emotionally rich contextAthe nature of causality itself is illumined through a careful dialogue with extraterrestrials and the tragic death of a child. Some of the stories trace modern trends to their horrible future conclusionsAthe evil results of genetic engineering, the continued evolution of weaponry, the depletion of world resources. Others point to solutions outside Earth: the colonization of other worlds, the mining of the asteroids or the branching proliferation of whole quantum universes. Once again, Dozois delivers an exemplary volume of exemplary SF.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
