Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection Paperback – July 15, 2014

This collection contains thirty-two science fiction stories published in 2013 and selected as the best by editor Gardner Dozois. It begins with the usual well-crafted Summation of the significant events and influences of the past year. The Honorable Mentions section at the end of the book is also valuable, giving readers a sense of what other significant fiction saw the light of day in 2013.The stories are the main thing, though. Here are seven that stood out from the rest:Paul McAuley's "Transitional Forms" introduces Ray Roberts, who guards the perimeter of a desert "hot zone" that contains mutated--and mutating--organisms. It is crucial that these organisms not be allowed to contaminate the surrounding ecosystem. Roy's job is complicated by organizations who want to obtain a sample and commercialize the mutant forms. One day Roy meets Janine and they end up having some beer.In Allen Steele's "Martian Blood" a researcher arrives on Mars and arranges to meet some of the natives. He has some theories he has about Martian culture he wants to discuss with the Martians themselves. It makes sense to hire a local guide to help approach the proud and violent Martian tribesmen. Fortunately he finds a guide who grasps the unique nature of his mission.In Aliette de Bodard's "The Waiting Stars" we join a deep space mission to recover a lost warship and, perhaps, its crew. Mission success is complicated by how embedded one of the warship's crew has become in the culture of her captors.Nancy Kress's "One" is one of those "inner space" stories. Following his recovery from a serious accident, Zack discovers that he has an unusual mental ability. As the story unfolds, he strives to understand and control it. This makes him somewhat difficult to live with.Melissa Scott's "Finders" is about a salvage operation in a remote region of our solar system. The Carabossa's crew speculates that a recently-located high-tech artifact has been undervalued by those who discovered it. They take a chance to recover enough advanced technology from it to get them out of debt and allow them to stake out a better future. The odds are good. In the beginning, that is.Brendan DuBois's "Hard Stars" follows a squad of American security personnel as they seek a safe haven from swarms of lethal drones. Their customary tools are unavailable because of the drones' abilities to detect and destroy any kind of electronic activity. The human element becomes the key to success.James Patrick Kelly's "The Promise of Space" is my favorite story in this year's collection. It is built from transcripts of an ongoing conversation between a hospital patient and his visitor. It becomes clear that they have a certain shared history.This is one of those good-but-not-great collections. I doubt this is due to any lessening of the Dozois editorial talent, so I'll conclude that 2013 must have been a thinner-than-usual year for short SF. I'm looking forward to the possibility that 2014 will turn out a little better.

Four-and-a-half stars would be perfect. Of course, I liked some stories better than others. I read the book (all 693 pages) from front to back. It kept me interested. Like all good SF, these stories frequently made me admire the rich imagination of the authors. I wondered why some stories were included - tiresomely didactic structures with teachers and obstinate students who explain things to each other at great length), while others enchanted me. If you want a kaleidoscope of images, ideas, and alternative worlds, I can recommend this collection highly.

This anthology kicks ass. Gardner Dozois has a keen eye for science fiction, and most of the stories in this collection will transport you in time and space to more exciting landscapes than our little Earth. A few of the stories struck me as not too imaginative, or not very exciting, but most were excellent. In addition, Dozois does a report in the beginning of the book on the state of science fiction in America over the last year, which is always an interesting read. He covers books, short stories and movies and touches on fantasy as well as science fiction. Now, I am mostly a fantasy fan, but this collection is so good that I read it every year just to get my fill of science fiction. I figure if I recommend specific stories you won't like them, and you'll take to other stories instead. Read this anthology, and find the ones you like best, for yourself. The cover art is also quite good, and I have spent a fair amount of time studying this image over and over again, finding new details to enjoy. Right now I'm on the last story, and when I'm done I will give the book to a friend of mine to enjoy. There is a wide variety of stories in this collection, covering a lot of different subjects, and you're sure to find a dozen stories you really like. There are a whopping 32 stories in this book, enough for a month's reading at one story a day. Get this book now, and enjoy!

I used to rave about Dozois' Years Best, but quality has dropped in the last few issues. I guess there are so many year's best anthologies to compete with nowadays. I'm 3/4 through and only one story really knocked my socks off, "One" by Nancy Kress. A few others were absorbing, and a couple too mediocre to read. Looking forward to the long one at the end, usually it's pretty good.

This is a large anthology with a year end analysis by Gardner Dozois of the year's trends in science fiction. He covers books, magazines, and movies in his foreword for the previous year, and intros the stories done by the various authors. A mixed bag of course, as any anthology would be, but it's something to look forward to every year. Highly recommended.

I tried to read several stories but found them boring. I question if several of the stories are actually Science Fiction.

It's an anthology. Many different stories packed into one cover.Amazon's questions such as "How is the author's writing" would not apply.Overall I liked it and plan to read more titles like it.

Buy it every year. Never disappointing.

Compare this with the same title, the first few editions from the early 1980s, and you'll notice a big change in short scifi fiction: it's getting longer. Authors are putting more words into their short stories, padding them out more. The way we read material is changing, we are no longer limited to available space in a monthly or quarterly magazine. But the story ideas are staying much the same, especially those that Dozois chooses for his anthologies -- soft sci-fi, bittersweet scifi, slushy emotional scifi, and stuff that you'd be hard pressed to consider as being scifi at all. The standard of writing remains high, even if the writers often have nothing to write about, and you'll find a fair few of that kind of story in this vast selection, wordy puffballs of meaningless waffle (Jay Lake and Robert Reed especially so). Some grand ideas too, but sadly not enough of those. and a lot of the writers could pass as clones of each other, using the same or very similar writing techniques. Dip in here and there at random, paying no heed to the author's name, and see for yourself. But that aside, an engaging read that will keep you off my lawn for weeks.

This collection devoted to what Gardner Dozois considered as best SF published in 2013 is slightly better than the one from 2012, because even if there were more very bad stories (no less than seven), on another hand fifteen are really worth reading (four being very good).Having now read twenty nine Gardner Dozois yearly collections (from third to thirty first) I couldn't help but notice a steady but regular decline in quality of SF writing, from the 80s to the modern times. OK, granted, this is just one of yearly anthologies amongst many, and yes, it reflects the very personal, subjective taste of the editor, but still, there is a clear trend towards a lesser quality. The main reasons of that, at least in my personal opinion and for my subjective taste, are the following:- a tendency to run after the developments in the world, rather than trying to anticipate them. Global warming hysteria, fear of nanotechnologies and GMOs and consequences of recent progress in informatics are the best examples of it. Few writers even try to think about something really new - and it seems that even fewer have intellectual capacity of doing it...- nihilism, pessimism and fear-mongering seem to be the leading motive in recent SF, as there is hardly any joy and exaltation linked usually with new discoveries and opening of new horizons. To the contrary, everything and anything seems to be a threat.- lack of humour. In this anthology there are at the best two stories, out of thirty two, which contain some humour and wit. The rest is mostly gloom and doom taken DEADLY seriously...- left winged politics. That is probably due to Gardner Dozois personal choice, but at least in his anthologies anything conservative, religious and especially military is mostly the source of all evil in the world. Christianity seems to be particularly hated - but almost everybody panders to islam.- poorly developed characters, with whom we cannot really connect.- poor endings - or no endings at all. It seems that nowadays there are few writers able to find a good closure or a punch line.For all that reasons, reading those huge collections was frequently much less fun than expected - and I distinctly remember that when I discovered SF with classic short stories from the 50s and 60s, well, this was a much more enjoyable experience...Returning now to this collection, out of the 32 stories, this year, for my personal taste, only four could be considered as VERY GOOD: "Technarion", "The promise of space", "The Queen of the Night's Aria" and "Hard Stars".On another hand there were also seven stinkers: "The Discovered Country", "Martian blood", "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince", "Fleet", "The Irish astronaut", "Only human" and "Quicken"Other stories ranged from GOOD (11) to READABLE (10).This collection includes also, as usual, an overview of what happened in SF (largely understood) in 2013 and that section is invariably always very precious. At the end there is also the very useful section of "honourable mentions" - stories which couldn't be selected for this collection because of lack of space (and this is already a HUGE book!), but which were also of good quality.Below, more of my impressions, with some SPOILERS:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Discovered Country" by Ian R. MacLeod - the world is dying and so is humanity; obscenely wealthy people download into virtual reality to become immortal - invited by the owner, a musician arrives to one of their "residences"...; this story was simply boring on the first ten pages and became a totally idiotic nonsense on the next twelve. AVOID!"The Book Seller" by Lavie Tidhar - surprise, surprise! I usually don't like things written by this author and I certainly never cared much for the stories about "Central Station", situated in the very strange, in fact freakishly weird, futuristic Israel. This one however completely broke through my defences, by its heart-warming, passionate message of love for books - and also by the tribute it pays to one of the most important pioneering SF stories ever (1933 "Shambleau" by Catherine L. Moore). A GOOD, solid, honest "Central Station" story - even if it still is very, very weird..."Pathways" by Nancy Kress - in a near future, in an area of United States particularly ravaged by extreme poverty, a young girl who suffers from a rare incurable disease undergoes an experimental treatment. This dark, depressing and pretty scary SF story mixed with some social criticism reminded me a little of "Winter's bone" movie (which I LOVED by the way). A GOOD, honest, solid thing."A Heap of Broken Images" by Sunny Moraine - years ago, on a distant exoplanet, human colonists committed a genocide, or maybe rather a xenocide (thanks, Orson Scott Card) against indigenous intelligent alien population; now, a young alien female works as a guide for human tourists who come to visit the sites of this atrocity. The initial idea is interesting and the story is quite READABLE."Rock of Ages" by Jay Lake - this is the story of a strange adventurer, half-punk anarchist, half-radical environmentalist, a kind of green Snake Plissken aged 130 (but well preserved), who tries to prevent a great disaster; this 50+ pages novella is a little bit too long for its own good - also, it seems to be attached to earlier novels by the same writer (the "Green" cycle) and if you didn't read them (I didn't) you may have trouble to fully understand what the heck is going on... I didn't like the radical environmentalist ideology of this story and I struggled through it a lot, but I managed to finish it, so I rate it READABLE - but barely..."Rosary and Goldenstar" by Geoff Ryman - in XVI century, in a slightly alternate history, two Danes come to visit England and meet people who, like them, are fascinated by astronomy; a young struggling actor, a certain Shakespeare, also participates in the meeting; this is a well written and quite amusing short story - it's just a pity that the ending is weak. Also I was... well... surprised, that in a meeting of XVI century astronomers Copernicus is never mentioned, even once, unlike Galileo and Tycho Brache... Still, it is a GOOD, interesting thing."Gray Wings" by Karl Bunker - in a distant future a very rich girl participates in a race of flyers (people who grew wings for this occasion) across Africa; in the opening lines circumstances force her to crash land in a very poor Nigerian village... A well written, GOOD, interesting story."The Best We Can" by Carrie Vaughn - an extremely pessimistic, even depressing, atypical and for my personal taste incredibly STUPID description of First Contact; it is a READABLE story, but in my opinion also a totally ludicrous thing..."Transitional Forms" by Paul McAuley - genetically modified organisms created to cleanse a heavily polluted industrial area mutated and escaped all control; the whole area became a "hot zone" and its borders are patrolled; this is the story of one of guards who keep the "hot zone" off limits. A rather banal, although READABLE story."Precious Mental" by Robert Reed - and yet another Great Ship 50+ pages novella... This time an immortal man who used to be one of the captains of the Great Ship is recruited (well, in a way of speaking...) for a salvage mission far, far away... I noticed that every time Great Ship stories actually leave the Great Ship they get better - and the further the Great Ship stories go from the Great Ship, the better they get...))) This one is a GOOD, solid, honest thing - if only the ending wasn't so lame, it could be a masterpiece..."Martian Blood" by Allen M. Steele - first story ever by this usually very good author that I absolutely HATED! In an alternate reality, on a Mars quite different from what it really is, human immigrants are slowly but surely colonizing the planet - and the less advanced natives are not happy with it... One day, a Mars-born human guide is hired by an Earth scientist for a risky quest... The story begins very well, but then turns into nonsense and crashes in an abysmally IDIOTIC and morally REPUGNANT ending (which includes a very cruel and totally useless murder)... I was DISGUSTED by it - AVOID!"Zero For Conduct" by Greg Egan - definitely NOT one of my favourite authors, but here he delivers - BIG TIME. The story takes place in contemporary Iran and the main hero is a very, very gifted teenage girl, working very hard to get her high-school diploma. One day she makes a stunning discovery - but as she belongs to a very vulnerable segment of society (she is an Afghan refugee, belonging to Tajik nation) she is concerned that it will be stolen from her... A GOOD, well written, dramatic and profound story."The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard - another story in the distant future/alternate reality cycle about a high tech future world dominated by rivalry between Chinese and Azteca empires. This time a Vietnamese woman goes to space to try to salvage a derelict sapient spaceship... READABLE but, as most of the stories in this cycle, freakishly WEIRD..."A Map of Mercury" by Alastair Reynolds - a human messenger tries to contact an artistic community of cyborgs "living" on Mercury; he carries an important message and needs a simple "yes" or "no" answer. It is a READABLE story, but CREEPY and with some really unpleasant moments."One" by Nancy Kress - a boxing story, in fact a kind of variation on "Rocky" by, who would ever believe that, Nancy Kress, of all people... Well, she had also to throw in some LGBT stuff, probably to lessen the shock...))) A not so good boxer undergoes brain surgery - and results are, well, surprising, to say the least... A GOOD, solid, well written novella - it could have been a masterpiece, if the ending was just a little bit better."Murder on the Aldrin Express" by Martin L. Shoemaker - obviously inspired by Agatha Christie's classic, this futuristic whodunit takes place onboard an Earth-bound space ship, bringing home the remains of a tragically ended Martian expedition. This is a GOOD, solid, honest story, with just the solution of the whole thing being a little bit disappointing."Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince" by Jake Kerr - a collection of articles from various sources about Julian Prince, a Nobel-prize winning writer, who lived and wrote after the impact of an asteroid devastated North America. Even if it is a short thing, I found it boring - and also stupid, depressing and unpleasant. AVOID."The Plague" by Ken Liu - A short story about the meeting of two people after a catastrophic event linked to nanotechnologies - one is a "regular" human, the other descendant of victims of the nanotechnology linked plague. Unpleasant and shocking but original in its conclusion, this is a READABLE story."Fleet" by Sandra McDonald - the story of a transsexual person living on a post-apocalyptic Guam - and that is more or less everything I could understand from this thing. I don't usually care a lot for LGBT stories and this one I found particularly messy, weird and the obscene language certainly didn't help... AVOID!"The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin" by Michael Swanwick - humans colonized an alien world and its indigenous inhabitants are now extinct. But are they REALLY extinct? A very strange story, with a lot of LGBT elements, but certainly creative - it is a great pity that author had to add one last line which makes the whole story almost impossible to understand... A READABLE thing."Bad Day on Boscobel" by Alexander Jablokov - somewhere in outer limits of Solar System, inside a very much transformed asteroid exists a human colony, subsisting thanks to gigantic genetically modified trees. A single mother, raising a rebellious teenage daughter, struggles to keep her job and try to control the more and more problematic brat... The story is very boring and characters not very interesting either - but the description of this strange world makes it READABLE."The Irish Astronaut" by Val Nolan - an American man comes to Ireland to bury the remains of an American-Irish astronaut. A good story lies buried somewhere in this very boring narrative, which ultimately goes absolutely nowhere... AVOID."The Other Gun" by Neal Asher - this story is situated in Polity/prador universe; a very dangerous man and his faithful female troodon sidekick/pet/friend search for a lost weapon of enormous power for a mysterious entity known as the Client - but their quest takes them in an unexpected direction. This is a GOOD, solid, honest space-opera, with just the ending maybe a little bit weaker."Only Human" by Lavie Tidhar - another short story related to Central Station universe, but this time dominated by LGBT themes - it happens on Titan and main characters are a lesbian couple... I found the intrigue freakishly weird and the story impossibly boring. AVOID!"Entangled" by Ian R. MacLeod - This story about a radical youthful rebellion which went very, very bad and about the very Christian virtues of sacrifice, forgiveness, charity, love and mercy (even if there is no Christians in this story) is a really surprising, clever and interesting thing. It could be a masterpiece, if only author didn't decide to surf on the global warming hysteria and surrender to the "upcoming collapse of capitalism" fad... Still, it is a GOOD, solid, shocking and moving story."Earth 1" by Stephen Baxter - in a distant future our descendants start a quest to find the birth world of humanity - it will be a long quest... There was potential for a masterpiece here, but the story was a little damaged by unlikeable characters and very stupid ending. Still, it is a GOOD, solid story."Technarion" by Sean McMullen - this very original, in fact quite brilliant story happens somewhere around 1850 in England and I will say nothing more about the plot, because you deserve to discover it by yourself; let's just say that it will delight all people who hate computers...))) I don't fully agree with the ideology of it, but it is nevertheless a VERY GOOD, surprising and deeply shocking thing."Finders" by Melissa Scott - in some kind of alternate reality universe three people go to an abandoned space station to salvage precious resources - of course they will find more than they bargained for... It is a quite banal and rather tedious treasure hunt, with pale characters and a very predictable ending. READABLE, but barely."The Queen of Night's Aria" by Ian McDonald - this story occurs on Mars but in an alternate reality universe; here the Red Planet not only harbours life but even an alien civilization - more than one in fact... Human soldiers are engaged in a merciless war against indigenous Uliri on Mars and an opera singer comes from Earth to entertain the troops - it will be one helluva tour...))) This is a rather rare thing in modern SF: extremely well written, with interesting characters, fast pace of action, great originality, tons of wit and humour, twists on every page, very well chosen title and finally a terrific punch line! A VERY GOOD STORY - the BEST IN THIS COLLECTION! TO READ ABSOLUTELY!"Hard Stars" by Brendan DuBois - in a near future technologically outmatched USA face a massive drone attack by China, Iran and North Korea, which makes it almost impossible to use any advanced technological device; some federal agents try to carry a mission when avoiding drone attacks... This is more a techno-thriller than SF, but it is a well written story, with a very powerful message - democracies cannot afford losing technological and military edge, because authoritarian regimes will never miss a chance to destroy them... A VERY GOOD, quite scary story."The Promise of Space" by James Patrick Kelly - short but powerful story about the dangers and hardships of space exploration and Mars colonization; nothing more will be said, as you deserve to discover the details by yourself... It's actually pretty depressing, but, albeit a little reluctantly, I must admit that this is a VERY GOOD story."Quicken" by Damien Broderick - a new technology makes it possible to "rekindle" (resurrect) the dead - but those who come back are not very well received by the rest of the society... That was a great idea, but to my great regret this long-winded 59 pages novella is a total disaster. It becomes quickly boring, then turns into weird and on most pages delivers an incredibly insulting rant against Christianity and Christians, who are more or less compared to Nazis... And all that only in the first part of the story - in the second one we go in a kind of freaky absurdity which one usually associates with high-fever delusions... It is also occasionally obscene and in some other moments GROSS. Bottom line, this is a HORRIBLY BAD THING, the WORST STORY IN THE COLLECTION. AVOID!-------------------------------CONCLUSION: an average collection, slightly better than the one from 2012 - but reading it was not always easy or pleasant.

Once again Gardener Dozois has edited an excellent anthology, I have bought at least the last 10 annual editions and this one is up there wirh the rest of them. Of course it is nearly impossible that a reader would agree with every choice of story Dozois has made and as usual there are one or 2 that I would have left out and one or 2 I have read in magazines that I feel should have been included but overall the quality is high. Personally I would not much object if the summation of events of the year in Sci Fi were left out but I do usually get this read in the end if only to see who has died and which magazines have prospered and which have died. It is a shame there is no Kindle release at the same time as the paperback release because surely SciFi fans will also be technophiles and would buy it that way.

Half of the book's worth is the summation of the year offered by Dozois. Whatever the book costs is a small price to pay for a full year's SF experience in a novelette sized write-up. You read that in one sitting or several, you get to live the whole year in the SF arena as a spectator. Of course, not all the stories would be to your taste or liking, but, think about it, he has arranged in front of you these few stories out of the hundreds published round the year, and saves you the godawful trouble of reading all those to extract your personal pleasure.Well, if you are reading only SF and nothing else, these volumes are godsend; and if you're bipolar, meaning you know what, then you can't give it a miss. If you are a strict unipolar type of person, thriving on the so-called mainstream literature (whzzat? say again?) then open your eyes and look around. Dozois towers over all others, and you can't miss him. Start with him.

Great stories, often by authors you have never heard of. They cover a wide array of SciFi story types, something for everyone. Currently collecting them all and as I read each one I always pick up three or four new authors. Haven’t found a story yet that I regret reading. Funny thing is that I have never been a fan of short stories.