I just finished "The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 4", curated & edited by Neil Clarke (published July 2019 amazon). The series is a relatively newcomer in this market. For many years I have been reading the anthology "The Year`s Best Science Fiction" edited by Gardner Dozois (driveby). His compilations have been the market leader for 3 decades and offered a kaleidoscope of plots, ideas and styles. Dozois catered to a lot of different tastes and showed the state of art in science fiction. Unfortunately Dozois passed away in 2018, ending his series with the number 35. I also used to read & collect the series "Year`s Best SF" edited by David G. Hartwell, which ended with Vol. 18 published in December 2013. Hartwell passed away in 2016. I really miss Hartwell`s selection because he focused on hard science fiction.
It seems that Clarke, who also is the editor of "Clarkesworld Magazine", has now a monopoly for these kinds of collections (624 pages). Like Dozois he begins his collection with a summation of the trends in the scifi world in the respective year and precedes each story with a short introduction of the authors.
I have five favorites:
"Umbernight" by Carolyn Ives Gilman is a thrilling adventure. Human settlers on an inhospitable planet are hiking through unknown land to capture something they need. The hikers have to deal with a bizarre & deadly environment. A masterpiece!
"Mother Tongues" by S. Qiouyi Lu. In this future people can sell their language. A new technology sucks all specific language traits - spelling, pronouncing & grammar - out of the brain and transfer these skill to another person. There is a market for that because people want to acquire a foreign language like Mandarin for business or for pleasure. In this story a Chinese-American mother living in California wants to sell her English - which is second language - to finance the hyper-expensive college for her daughter. A brilliant story which touches linguistic, economics, sociology & other topics, even Ted Chiang would be proud of.
"Different Seas" by Alastair Reynolds. The author is a professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who had worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. Reynolds belongs now to the most successful sci-fi writers and is known for his elaborated space operas. This time he showed his talents in a maritime setting. A women, alone on a high-tech sail ship without a crew, gets into severe distress caused by a fierce solar storm which disrupts electronic systems on our planet. How can she survive?
"Meat and Salt and Sparks" by Rich Larson. The author has been on my radar for years for his highly original stories. Here he delivered a peculiar detective story where the investigator is a chimpanzee who`s brain has been technologically upgraded. Someone had committed a murder following a remote control, who gave the command?
"Okay, Glory" by Elizabeth Bear. A billionaire is trapped in his secluded high-tech mansion in the mountains because some rogues had hacked the controlling house AI to demand ransom.
I also enjoyed:
"Prophet of the Roads" by Naomi Kritzer. A woman wants to revive an ancient AI technology which is dangerous because AIs are out of law and hated.
"Trace of Us" by Vanessa Fogg deals with the question can humans upload their mind onto a computer?
"Theories of Flight" by Linda Nagata is a kind of fairy tale about a young man who remembers past lives which helps him to develop a forbidden technology.
The mentioned 8 gems (out of 29 stories) justify the price of the kindle version which costs in the moment of writing just $9,99 even though the book has way too much stuffing by untalented authors who don`t care much about science fiction. But buying the expensive printed version would be a waste of money & precious forest material.
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