- Mass Market Paperback: 484 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; 1- edition (24 Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0061059021
- ISBN-13: 978-0061059025
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 10.7 x 2.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,178,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Travel to the Farthest Reaches of the Imagination
Acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell is back with his fourth annual high-powered collection of the year's most inventive, entertaining, and awe-inspiring science fiction. In short, the best.
Here are stories from today's top name authors, plus exciting newcomers, all eager to land you on exotic planets, introduce you to strange new life forms, and show you scenes more amazing than anything you've imagined.So sit back and blast off for an amazing trip with
Stephen Baxter
Gregory Benford
David Brin
Nancy Kress
Bruce Sterling
Michael Swanwick
and many more...
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
I slid out of the rental car's AC, and the heat of the mid-western night wrapped itself around my face like a wet iguana. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
I slid out of the rental car's AC, and the heat of the mid-western night wrapped itself around my face like a wet iguana. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I'd rate this one "good" though not "excellent". Several fine stories, a lot of OK ones, a couple of clunkers.
High points:
"Maneki Neko", by Bruce Sterling. I enjoy Sterling's novels, but sometimes I wish he'd just write short stories... he's that good. This one, about a world where informal Net networks are starting to dominate our behavior, is excellent.
"Story of Your Life", by Ted Chiang. One of the best stories I've ever read about communicating with aliens, combined with a heartbreakingly poignant tale of human loss.
"Rules of Engagement", by Michael Flynn. I'm not a big military SF fan, but this was a good little combat story with an unusual point, set in what's obviously a well-worked out future.
"That Thing Over There", by Dominic Green. Definitely the best treatment of the yeti/Abominable Snowman legend that I've ever read. And it makes it very clear just what was so abominable about them...
"The Radiant Doors", by Michael Swanwick. A deeply creepy story about time-travelling refugees from an unspeakable future. Swanwick does an excellent job of depicting horror by glimpses.
(Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent story is marred by a stupid ending; as in much of his work, Swanwick sacrifices logic for effect. Still, worth reading for its unpleasant answer to the "leisure question" -- what will we do when the machines are doing all the work for us?
"A Dance to Strange Musics", by Gregory Benford. Typical Benford, with utterly forgettable characters and large blocks of explication (will Benford ever learn how to tell us stuff without making it really obvious that he's Telling Us Stuff?). But I still enjoyed this, perhaps because it managed to compress most of the content on one of Benford's rather flabby novels into a mere 35 pages or so. I disagree with the story's main idea -- I don't think that humanity would be awed and moved by meeting a superior intelligence that doesn't actually *do* much of anything -- but it's still a good read, with some really novel worldbuilding.
Low points:
"The Year of the Mouse", by Norman Spinrad. Someday, someone will manage to explain to me why Spinrad is supposed to be a major voice in our field. Anyhow, you can skip this story, a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy about Disney taking on
"The Allies", by Michael Geston. Overlong and clunky ecological morality tale. Geston has been writing SF since the 1960s, but this reads like a novice effort. Avoid.
"The Twelfth Album", by Stephen Baxter. An Alternate History (AH) story about the Beatles. Of interest only to hardcore Beatles fans.
"Near Enough to Home", by Michael Skeet. Another AH story, about Canada. Not that bad, but not remotely worth including in the "year's best" IMO. It's hard to write a really interesting AH story, to be sure...
"Life in the Extreme", by David Brin. Very minor piece about the earliest days of Uplift. Not bad, but disappointing -- if it wasn't Brin, one doubts whether this would have been in here. Another answer to the leisure question.
Final point: Hartwell doesn't seem to have arranged these stories in any order, at all. I mean, the first story is Alexander Jablokov's rather lackluster "Market Report". I would have put a shorter, more kick-butt story up front ("Rules of Engagement", say, or Sterling's "Maneki Neko") in order to draw the reader in and get some momentum going.
Still, a decent anthology with some very good stuff; worth a look.
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
A couple of really fine stories, for me the best being 'Story of Your Life', and the rest are mostly good but the standard of proof reading in the Kindle edition is execrable, to the extent that it seriously detracts from the enjoyment. Presumably this has been OCRed from a printed edition. After a few pages I took to highlighting the ones I spotted (and I doubt I found them all) with the intention of making some sort of count, but there are too many to count. Some are so glaring that they make a nonsense of the story, for example in 'A dance to strange music' we learn that the brain has 1,015 pathways and that the brain can carry roughly 1,010 bits of information per second and so on and so on. (These should of course be 10^15 and 10^10). These are just a couple of the more glaring errors which seriously disrupt this otherwise interesting story. Many of the errors would have been picked up by a run through a decent spelling checker. There are dozens more throughout the book disrupting other stories which leads me to mark this book down to 3 stars. It is really sloppy, not to mention cynical, to allow such poor production values in a book for which the publishers charge £4.49 and which being the age it is must have covered its production costs many times over. I should perhaps say that I am not a professional proofreader, just an ordinary SF enthusiast.
Format:Kindle Edition
Traveling back through time, I have reached the fourth volume of David Hartwell's annual review of science fiction. It contains 20 stories, each with an introduction to the story's author and the author's other works. Unlike the fifth volume and all those after, the introductions in this book do not preview their story. The previews do add something to the reader's enjoyment.
My five favorite stories are described below. Several deal with subtleties of language rather than with technology or any other more traditional science fiction theme.
Mary Soom Lee's "The Day Before They Came" is about an alien invasion of Earth. It is told though description of the ordinary lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things. And making ordinary plans.
In Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" a mother pieces together the narratives of her life and of her daughter's life. It's a little hard to follow without some translation.
Michael Flynn's "Rules of Engagement" shows the value of a fair fight. Even when the sides aren't clear.
Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Unraveling the Thread" retells a story painstakingly woven into the threads of an ancient carpet. There is a question of authorship.
David Brin's "Life in the Extreme" maroons a wealthy hobbyist in the middle of the ocean with only dolphins for company. It seems like he will never get away from them.
The book is recommended to all SF fans. It was a pretty good year.
My five favorite stories are described below. Several deal with subtleties of language rather than with technology or any other more traditional science fiction theme.
Mary Soom Lee's "The Day Before They Came" is about an alien invasion of Earth. It is told though description of the ordinary lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things. And making ordinary plans.
In Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" a mother pieces together the narratives of her life and of her daughter's life. It's a little hard to follow without some translation.
Michael Flynn's "Rules of Engagement" shows the value of a fair fight. Even when the sides aren't clear.
Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Unraveling the Thread" retells a story painstakingly woven into the threads of an ancient carpet. There is a question of authorship.
David Brin's "Life in the Extreme" maroons a wealthy hobbyist in the middle of the ocean with only dolphins for company. It seems like he will never get away from them.
The book is recommended to all SF fans. It was a pretty good year.
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