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Mostly pretty meh.I don't read that much contemporary SF so I don't necessarily have good callibration for current tastes but most of these stories just didn't grab me.Here's the ones that I liked:"Extracurricular Activities" by Yoon Ha LeePretty fast paced, like an action movie, but also well written, with a good job of world building."Starlight Express" by Michael SwanwickTouching story, also nice and short and to the point."Time Travel is Only For the Poor" by S. L. HuangThis was my favorite
Three and a half, I suppose.I almost gave up on this extremely long compilation after the first story. One would think that in a "Year's Best..." book that the first story would be really really good, like maybe even the best of the batch. I can truthfully say it was, for me at least, truly awful. Stupid plot, stupid characters, bad writing. The plot centered around a tub of goose fat. One thing that irked me (minor, I know) was the author's use of gender-neutral pronouns. Not that this would be...
Too many stories that I found virtually incomprehensible to recommend this. I don't know if (editor) Rich Horton's tastes are just "out there" or if this is the state of sci-fi and fantasy short stories today but for most of the stories I felt like I was dropped into the middle of a much longer book and had to figure out for myself what the heck was going on. On a side note, I'm reading another sci-fi/fantasy best of compilation for 2018 (The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Fifth Annual Coll...
Good, but others are betterThere were some excellent stories in this collection and some that weren't so good. Too long, or too complex. Nevertheless, I read every one.
My favorite story may have been THE SECRET LIFE OF BOTS by Suzanne Palmer.
Normally, I love these Sci-fi anthologies, but this was a tough slog. Out of the 34 stories, I found only a handful compelling or interesting at all. I'd definitely recommend the annual "The Year's Best Science Fiction" by Gardner Dozois over this.
2.5 stars rounding up. Tried to persevere but bounced off a lot of these head-scratching selections. Highlights were “Winter Timeshare” by Ray Nayler, the KJF, Pinsker, McHugh, and Samatar stories, which I’d read before, “Marley and Marley” by JR Dawson, and “ZeroS” by Peter Watts.
Very nice story with some Lovecraftian elements. A short & effective text.
Like most anthologies, some writers grab your attention more than others, but overall, this was a great sampling of a wide variety of writers. I especially appreciated the ethnic and gender diversity of the authors.
I just finished The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. It's a top-notch anthology, made so much better by not being limited to American writers. Rich Horton, the editor, did a great job at getting a good scope of stories. Really impressive stuff is being written in short format SF at the moment, and I encourage anyone to check the genre out.It's a mammoth book (800+ pages & 35 stories!) so here are my recommendations with a short (spoiler free) description (you can find most free onli...
I liked this collection less than the 2017 collection. It's hard to evaluate a collection, but the two that I particularly enjoyed were "Marley and Marley" and "And Then There Were (N-One)"
A good year...Some very interesting stories. Some nice twists on old topics (alternate realities, dystopian worlds, AI). A solid collection that I would recommend to fans of the genre and a comforting yearly ritual for those who have kept up over the years.
Anthologies are hard to rate. Some stories here were really fantastic. I stopped reading others in the middle. Some were pretty good but just sort of fizzled at the end, which was especially disappointing considering all the work I put in to figure out what the heck was going on in the first place. I'm generally a fan of subtlety, and I think less is often more, but sometimes…less really IS less.Overall, I think I'd give the collection four stars, though some stories deserve five, and a few were...
