David Hartwell started this series off in 1996 because he thought that science fiction was being seduced away from its true vocation by the sexy better looking aliens of literariness. The giant Gardner Dozois year's best anthology was getting soft. It printed stories which were all style and no machinery. David wanted gadgets and physics. Yeah, hard sf. Yeah, that's right. Wanna make something of that? Step out of this pod into the bleak cold vacuum of space and say that. My two faves in this fi...

[***] Think Like a Dinosaur • (1995) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly[***] Wonders of the Invisible World • (1995) • short story by Patricia A. McKillip[**] Hot Times in Magma City • (1995) • novella by Robert Silverberg[**] Gossamer • [Xeelee] • (1995) • short story by Stephen Baxter[***] A Worm in the Well • (1995) • novelette by Gregory Benford[****] • Downloading Midnight • (1995) • novelette by William Browning Spencer[***] For White Hill • (1995) • novella by Joe Haldeman[**] In Saturn T...

I was really disappointed in this Year's Best. It started off with a bang then slowly deflated like a balloon with a small leak. A leak that lasted far too long in my opinion. "Think Like A Dinosaur" By James Patrick Kelly is a fantastic tale and deservedly won a Hugo Award. "Hot Times In Magma City" by Robert Silverberg was a distant second place winner, In My Opinion, and then the bottom fell out. "The Ziggurat" by Gene Wolf was readable, though not very plausible, the characters never fleshed...

The first of a distinguished series. While I enjoyed most of the stories, now that I sit down to write the review I realise that I don't remember many of them, and I only finished it the other day. The novella Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg is one of the memorable ones. While the premise is unlikely - people in a recovery program acting as emergency responders, as part of their community service in a Los Angeles wracked with volcanic activity - it's a powerful story. Told from the

As noted earlier, this anthology from more than twenty years go shows how the field has declined in recent times. The two standout stories are by Robert Silverber and Gene Wolfe, but this is to be expected. Ursula K LeGuin puts in an appearance with some thing rabbitingh on about menstruation or something in a context of funny names. Nancy Kress produces a story that starts off being about science and ends up being a fictional autobiography of some self-absorbed dumb chick.As much as I castigate...

I enjoyed some of the stories. I like the mystery of wondering where a sci-fi short story is headed.I was really looking forward to the Gene Wolfe story at the end and I enjoyed it ...until... it wrapped up. And then it became a, "Wait, what?" ending... and not the 'oo that was a good plot twist' variety.The suspense was great up to a point.

Great anthology, I had already read most of these in Gardner Dozois's competing Best of series, but it was fun to revisit these classic tales. Highlights: Kelly's Think Like A Dinosaur, Silverberg's Hot Times in Magma City, Wolfe's Ziggurat

Let me preface this with the fact that I'm not a fan of hard science fiction. That said, there were several outstanding stories. Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly was pretty unique. It was a bit shocking. Robert Silverberg's story Hot Times in Magma City was good, but what made it great is his turn of phrase. Nancy Kress-Evolution - her story was excellent - I plan to read more by her. Robert Sheckley's story The Day The Aliens Came was quirky and enjoyable. Joan Slonczewski - Microbe...

For a best-of-the-year annual, THE YEAR'S BEST SF 1 didn't seem to have that many great stories, despite having a lineup of top named authors. There were two standouts in my mind, "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly, which reminds me of "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, and "Coming of Age in Karhide" by Ursula K. Le Guin which is a great supplemental story to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. Second-tier favorites were "Evolution" by Nancy Kress and "The Ziggurat" by Gene Wolfe. I wrote a

This is an oddly modest beginning to what turned out to be a very longrunning series, and to be honest, doesn't have a bad tale in it. (Even the Robert Sheckley is entertaining in its own unique way. The weakest is the McKillip story which is a little too ambivalent about what it's trying to say.)This is possibly because of the comparative brevity of this book compared to its descendants, which are weightier, fulsome beasts; the tyrannosaurs of the Year's Best evolutionary line.The quality stori...

Not worth your timeThe collected stories in this volume aren't great, actually they aren't interesting or good SF. Later volumes have way better stories.

Nice collection of short stories. Not all of them kept my interest, but the good by far outweighed the ok stories. Will likely come back to them again someday.

David Hartwell, who died earlier this year (2016), will be remembered as one of the great anthologists of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Year’s Best SF 1 was the first in a series of eighteen collections of science fiction short stories that Hartwell compiled from 1996 to 2013. At the start of the series Hartwell clarified that he wanted to present stories that were patently genre SF; therefore, no fantasy and no science fantasy. He moaned that other anthologists had so blurred the boundar...

This is the first volume of David G. Hartwell’s exceptional Year’s Best anthology series that would run from 1996 to 2013. Hartwell created this collection because he believed that …For decades, until recently, there was usually one of more good year’s best anthologies available in paperback in the SF field. The last ones vanished with the deaths of distinguished editors Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim. There has been a notable gap. This book fills that need. Hartwell also was convinced that m...

These are the kind of stories I read SF for; solid science, interesting premises, and plausible characters. Everyone of them excellent.

I decided to jump back to the beginning of this series, to see if I'd be more impressed with the first stories Hartwell collected. And you know, I was! Sort of. I enjoyed all of the stories, except for Gene Wolf's, "The Ziggurat". Not sure why, except that I've given Gene SO many chances. His novella "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is one of the best stories I've ever read, so it's taken me years to realize that I've enjoyed NOTHING else that he's written. A shame, really...The rest of the stories

This was a bit hit and miss. I felt Hartwell chose some of the stories mainly because they were by big name authors and less so on the storys own merit. The good thing is that none of the stories feel dated even though they are 25 years old. My favourite stories were by James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress and Gene Wolfe.

Hard to rate/review anthologies of short stories given the range of themes, styles, and quality. This volume by and large gathers a number of mediocre tales, tosses in a couple good ones, and rounds it off with a few stinkers. And given the penchant for packing as much profanity and perversion into 10,000 words, a handful of these stories are downright offensive. I'm glad I stuck with it, as a couple of the best stories in the collection came at the end of the book -- but if I had to do it all o...

A collection of 14 stories from 1995 published in various science fiction magazines from that year and before. This was the first volume of such stories compiled by David Hartwell. He writes in the Introduction these stories are distinguished from fantasy and science fantasy in that the stories are about humans (for the most part) with human feelings in very human situations. The "science fiction" is part of the story but not the focus of the story. These stories are fine stories without the sci...

I find the SciFy short story the most difficult genre to get on top of. But I keep trying. I only finished 7 of the 14 stories in this volume but it was not abandoned. I just ran out of time. I might come back to it. Of those 7 stories read there were two gems. Gossamer Stephen Baxter. Two women in space, Lvov and Cobh are forced to land on Pluto and they find evidence of life which has formed a beautiful web between Pluto and its moon Charon. They realise they won’t be rescued in time if they r...