Around this time of year all the book publishers start talking about what you should be reading over the next couple of months. “Great Beach Books”, “Perfect Summer Reading”. No one gets very specific about the criteria though. Should the books be light and easy to read? Linked to big news stories or the latest fads? Or maybe just the newest books that everyone else is reading? For me, summer reads should be easy to finish in bite-sized pieces, something you can pick up and read for about twenty pages at a time. A short-story collection then makes for the perfect summer reading. (Of course I think short-story collections are perfect for the other three seasons too, but let’s pretend we’re just talking about summer here.)
David G. Hartwell has published dozens of anthologies since the late 1970’s; his Worlds Best SF series has now been going on for eighteen years. In the current installment, he’s chucked the mass market paperback format and gone straight to the trade paperback for the collection of the best short science-fiction in 2012. It was a very good year for sci-fi, and Hartwell keeps up with his usual trend of putting together a collection that’s impossible to categorize, and which has pretty much something for everyone.
I’ve loved Hartwell’s collections since my parents sent my sister and me a care-package with one of his very first solo anthologies, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, from 1988. This was where I first read stories by John Varely, Larry Niven, and Gene Wolfe, plus quite a few authors I’ve never heard of before or since. Year’s Best SF – 18 has that same mix of famous and obscure (or at least outside my familiar selections), with representatives from several different continents. In the twenty-eight stories there are a lot that a liked, a few that didn’t appeal to me, and a couple that left me completely lost.
The book starts off with the crowd-pleaser, Old Paint, by Megan Lindholm, who actually had me a little teary-eyed in places. Highly-computerized modern conveniences showing a shocking amount of loyalty to a human owner; I’ve been a sucker for this sort of thing since reading I Robot.
Elsewhere in the book you have stories like Paul Cornell’s The Ghosts of Christmas, and Waves by Ken Liu. Both of these hurt my brain in a very skillful way, one telling the story about the evolution of civilization, and the other a (kind of) time-travel story along one lifetime.
A few, like Two Sisters in Exile By Aliette de Bodard (alien civilization with living ships) and Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter (one I’ve read before, and enjoyed even more while rediscovering it) are part of larger books or series, and they made me want to read more.
And then you have authors like Robert Reed, Catherine H. Shaffer, and Eleanor Arnason, who are all amazingly talented artists, and who’s stories consistently do nothing for me. It’s purely a matter of taste, and I can’t even explain why. Eleanor Arnason’s story is part of a whole world she’s created of cat people; I should love these. And yet Holmes Sherlock is the second one of her Hwarhath stories I’ve read, and they’ve both felt just a little flat.
If you want a little more comedy, Perfect Day is C.S Friedman’s slice-of-life story about just how frantically convenient all these modern conveniences are going to make things. Lewis Shiner’s story Application is the shortest in the book; it’s hilarious and surprisingly dark. And Tonny Ballantyne wrote a snarky and satisfyingly mean-spirited piece: If Only… , a daydream about the consequences of rejecting things for stupid reasons.
I’m sorry, Sacha, but you’ve crossed the threshold. I’m afraid to say, you’re not allowed science any more.
The collection includes stories about cyberpunk scammers, a planet with an eternal dark side (and the creatures that live there), a murder mystery on an artificial world, and Yoon H Lee’s literary description of a space battle in an ideological war over calendars. If I had to pick favorites, Dormanna was achingly lovely, probably my favorite Gene Wolfe Story in years. And Michael Swanwick wrote an off-kilter love-story among scientists, The Woman Who Shook The World Tree, with a unique view on reality and one of most oddly uplifting happy/not happy endings I’ve ever read.
I didn’t always understand the point of a few of these (Bruce Sterling, what are you going on about?), but they were obviously really good stories. Even the ones I didn’t like were just proof that just about every sci-fi fan will find something to like in this collection, and not just people who share my (hard to describe) tastes.