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Gardner Dozois edited his monumental Year’s Best Science Fiction series for 35 years. The series started in 1984 and ended in 2018 when Dozois died. In Robert Silverberg’s brilliant “Foreword” to The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction (2005), Silverberg presents Dozois’s strategy to be the anthology of record for Science Fiction. Every event, every compelling story, every innovation to the genre was meticulously recorded by Dozois for Posterity. That’s what makes this SF series so iconic and important.
This 655 page volume includes the best SF stories from 1984 to 2004. Not only did Dozois select the stories for this anthology, he provides introductions to each story to explain why the writer and this particular story made it into this Big Fat Book.
If you have a Science Fiction fan on your Holiday Gift List, The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction would make a wonderful present. Or, maybe Santa could bring this great book to you! How many of these stories are you familiar with? Any favorites? GRADE: A
Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS — vii
FOREWORD by Robert Silverberg — xi
PREFACE by Gardner Dozis — xvii
- Blood music / Greg Bear — 1
- A cabin on the coast / Gene Wolfe — 19
- Salvador / Lucius Shepard — 28
- Trinity / Nancy Kress — 42
- Flying saucer rock and roll / Howard Waldrop — 78
- Dinner in Audoghast / Bruce Sterling — 93
- Roadside rescue / Pat Cadigan — 103
- Snow / John Crowley — 109
- The winter market / William Gibson — 121
- The pure product / John Kessel — 137
- Stable strategies for middle management / Eileen Gunn — 152
- Kirinyaga / Mike Resnick — 162
- Tales from the Venia Woods / Robert Silverberg — 177
- Bears discover fire / Terry Bisson — 191
- Even the queen / Connie Willis — 199
- Guest of honor / Robert Reed — 213
- None so blind / Joe Haldeman — 238
- Mortimer Gray’s History of death / Brian Stableford — 246
- The Lincoln Train / Maureen F. McHugh — 293
- Wang’s carpets / Greg Egan — 303
- Coming of age in Karhide / Ursula K. Le Guin — 328
- The dead / Michael Swanwick — 342
- Recording angel / Ian McDonald — 352
- A dry, quiet war / Tony Daniel — 363
- The undiscovered / William Sanders — 380
- Second skin / Paul J. McAuley — 400
- Story of your life / Ted Chiang — 418
- People came from earth / Stephen Baxter — 454
- The wedding album / David Marusek — 464
- 10¹⁶ to 1 / James Patrick Kelly — 502
- Daddy’s world / Walter Jon Williams — 520
- The real world / Steven Utley — 541
- Have not have / Geoff Ryman — 561
- Lobsters / Charles Stross — 577
- Breathmoss / Ian R. MacLeod — 597
- Lambing season / Molly Gloss — 647
One of my life’s ambitions is to read all the volumes in the series, as well as the five volumes of its predecessor, the Ace BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF THE YEAR #6-10 (which he had edited before launching his better-known Big Fat Book series). By the time I read all of these, I will be about 135 years old…And that’s Step One in my plan to live forever while being immersed in great reading!
Jerry, I too have dreams of reading all of Gardner Dozois’s YEAR’S BEST volumes including those skinny prequels to the Big Fat Volumes. Maybe next year…
Though the prequel series was Dozois taking over for Lester Del Rey, who started the slim-volume series with E. P. Dutton, whose packaging of them was even more perfunctory than what Doubleday would cough up in the ’70s. The Ace reprints ran to garish covers, but at least showed some evidence of professional book packaging.
Then again, Ballantine/Del Rey’s packaging of Terry Carr’s annual can best be described as nonchalant, as well.
Todd, I read the Terry Carr YEAR’S BEST anthologies as they were published. I hope to reread them some day.
I read those, less religiously, but I read THE YEAR’S FINEST FANTASY/FANTASY ANNUAL series for as long as it ran (Carr migrated from Berkley to Pocket Books along with editor David Hartwell), despite the relative unevenness of Carr’s selections compared to, say, Gerald Page and K. E. Wagner’s selections for YEAR’S BEST HORROR…Carr would pick up what I thought of as terrible Stephen King shorts (i.e. “The Cat from Hell”) and smug little efforts such as T. C. Boyle’s “Descent of Man” while Page, then Wagner, would usually score the actually good King short stories (i. e. “The Children of the Corn”–I gather the film adaptation is atrocious, but the story is fine), and better work. But most of the Carr fantasy annual justified the lapses in judgment, and it averaged better than Lin Carter’s annual until Arthur Saha was able to take that on over completely, and his version was almost as good as the Carr. And Datlow and Windling’s fine bugcrushers started about then.
Todd, I’m with you on Terry Carr’s “lapses” in choosing quality Fantasy short stories for his anthologies.
I collected all of these anthologies, without reading most of them, so there’s only a handful of stories in this Best book that I’ve read, and those I think are…okay. But there is one that I love, and that’s Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — the basis for the film The Arrival. Also, Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman is good on its own, but it’s the first chapter of his novel Air, which is one of my favorite novels.
Jeff, the Ted Chiang story is great as is Geoff Ryman’s. I was impressed by Greg Bear’s “Blood Music” when I first read it–it pretty much predicted nanotechnology before it became a thing–and Robert Reed’s “Guest of Honor.”
I’m always wondering how those who had a story in the initial volumes but not in the Bestest Best fell about that…but, then again, I was pretty chuffed that my first pro story made it to the Recommended But Not Included long-list in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s annual. And got me a nice letter from Karl Edward Wagner, which I have no idea where it might be.
Todd, I would treasure a letter from Karl Edward Wagner!
I know most of the authors of course but don’t remember the stories.
But I remember Karl Edward Wagner – met him at the Eastercon in Brighton (England) 1984.
Many authors were there, of course most of them British but also was at a party with Betsy Wollheim who had taken over DAW books then.
Fond memories!
Wolf, I once spoke with Betsy Wollheim on the phone back in the 1970s when I was trying to get some DAW Books for reviews. She agreed to send me some books, but she warned, “You better make sure you send us the published reviews or we’ll shut you off!”