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An absolutely cracking collection that mixes fantasy, horror and science fiction in what are often very dark but well- conceived stories. Not a single one was a failure, though there were a couple that felt more like tasters for novels than true short stories. My favourite was a steam punk retelling of Peter Pan with more than a little Island of Dr Moreau thrown in. Delicious.
So...this says it's the best british fantasy of 2013....Well, this is a bit of a curate's egg, to be honest: there are some excellent stories in here, & some that are just-well, ordinary, frankly. The best tales here are from Lisa Tuttle, Alison Littlewood, & Simon Bestwick, with good efforts from E J Swift & Mark Morris. However, where are the tales from people like Sarah Pinborough, Christopher Fowler, Gareth L Powell? I would have expected to see more "names" in a volume proclaiming it "The B...
I won this in a raffle run by a local writer's club a few months ago. My rating isn't so much a reflection on the quality of the stories, more on their inclusion in an anthology of fantasy. From a collection of seventeen stories; the first five are pure sci-fi, and the last eight are horror. Again, the quality of the writing isn't an issue, but the way the collection is organised, one can't help but feel that the majority of it is padding - works that couldn't be shoe-horned into an more appropr...
Uninspiring. I quite enjoyed Tyler Keevil's "Fearful Symmetry" but the rest were either average of below.
This rating pertains to the 16 stories in this collection which I didn’t write.And it’s five stars because the anthology is so damn eclectic and so damn good. Steve Haynes has, very consciously I suspect, edged out onto an untested limb of the Fantasy Tree when choosing these tales. He’s an editor who favours the dark side of literature and that bent is very plain here. I think he took a big risk and, in my opinion, it has more than paid off. Anthologies are a tricky thing to put together and, q...
I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have a copy of this book."The Best British Fantasy 2013" is an engaging collection of 17 stories, with "fantasy" being interpreted generously - I've seen endless nitpicking discussions about the differences between fantasy, SF and other genres. If you wanted to you could argue that some of these stories are equally SF, or horror, or ghost stories, or... but really that misses the point. They all feature the fantastical. The stories are all well chosen...
This was an excellent collection. I really enjoyed the majority of the stories, and even the ones I didn't enjoy that much were still average rather than bad or, in one case, too disturbing for my tastes. I will say that I'm not sure how I feel about calling this a collection of the best fantasy stories, since the editor seems to have a fairly loose definition of fantasy. It would perhaps be better called The Best British Speculative Fiction or some such. However, I'm actually kinda glad to see
Hayes sets out his stall in the introduction: specifically, that he's interpreting the word 'fantasy' in a broad sense to create a diverse and interesting collection, a goal he largely achieves with seventeen entries ranging from classic ghost stories to steampunk. Really the most 'traditional' fantasy story here is Steph Swainston's entry, a tie-in to her 'Fourlands' works - and if Swainston is your 'traditional' fantasy, you know your compilation is going to the edges.It's hard to pick out bes...
I was very disappointed in this book. Considering it's a fantasy anthology, there's very little actual fantasy in it. Had it been named The Best of Contemporary British Fantasy or something similar, I may have been more forgiving but, well, it wasn't and so I'm not in a forgiving mood.There are still a few decent stories in there, but too many rely on similar themes and predictable twists (what is it with short stories relying on twists as a hook?) so it just felt a chore to read a lot of the ti...
The authors featured in this anthology are not remotely f*****g about. Thrills, chills and twists aplenty. Just don't go in expecting lots of Trad. High Fantasy.
