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Title: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2009 Edition
Editor: Rich Horton
Genre: Speculative fiction anthology
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: Selected short stories from 2009 by some of the current masters, including Naomi Novik, Patrick Rothfuss, and Garth Nix.
Thoughts: I'll admit I'm not quite sure how to review an anthology like this. For a single-author short story collection, you can compare various works and draw conclusions about the author. For a themed anthology, you can discuss how well different authors played with the theme. This, however, consists entirely of previously published stories with no other common elements. The previously published bit does mean that the anthology suffers far less unevenness than other short story collections, at least.
I was amused to see some stories I actually recognized. I've read "We Love Deena" in Strange Horizons, for example. I'll admit, however, that I rather preferred other stories from that magazine from that year, so I'm not sure I always agree with the editor on "best".
There is a lot of very high quality fiction here, though. I'm sure Rothfuss fans were delighted by a Kvothe story, "The Road to Levinshr", to tide them over until the new novel came out. Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette feature a predatory space pirate ship and the engineer who loves her in "Boojum". "The Eyes of God" by Peter Watts examines the intersection between the Biblical injunction against even thinking about sin and modern security measures. "The Ray-Gun: a love story" explores how very alien the thinking of an alien artifact might be, and its effects on the people who encounter it. Elizabeth Bear makes a second appearance with "Shoggoths in Bloom", a poetic encounter between a black academic in the 1930s and some Lovecraftian creatures that probably has Lovecraft rolling in his grave.
Editor: Rich Horton
Genre: Speculative fiction anthology
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: Selected short stories from 2009 by some of the current masters, including Naomi Novik, Patrick Rothfuss, and Garth Nix.
Thoughts: I'll admit I'm not quite sure how to review an anthology like this. For a single-author short story collection, you can compare various works and draw conclusions about the author. For a themed anthology, you can discuss how well different authors played with the theme. This, however, consists entirely of previously published stories with no other common elements. The previously published bit does mean that the anthology suffers far less unevenness than other short story collections, at least.
I was amused to see some stories I actually recognized. I've read "We Love Deena" in Strange Horizons, for example. I'll admit, however, that I rather preferred other stories from that magazine from that year, so I'm not sure I always agree with the editor on "best".
There is a lot of very high quality fiction here, though. I'm sure Rothfuss fans were delighted by a Kvothe story, "The Road to Levinshr", to tide them over until the new novel came out. Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette feature a predatory space pirate ship and the engineer who loves her in "Boojum". "The Eyes of God" by Peter Watts examines the intersection between the Biblical injunction against even thinking about sin and modern security measures. "The Ray-Gun: a love story" explores how very alien the thinking of an alien artifact might be, and its effects on the people who encounter it. Elizabeth Bear makes a second appearance with "Shoggoths in Bloom", a poetic encounter between a black academic in the 1930s and some Lovecraftian creatures that probably has Lovecraft rolling in his grave.
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Date: 2011-04-06 05:18 pm (UTC)From:I'm reading the second Dresden book now, but I think it's been three years since I read the first and I'm really fuzzy on the details. Can you at least answer one question for me? How many books do I have to read before we get one about Dresden's back story with his teacher? (I honestly don't remember if this was explored in the first book or just hinted at, but I can't help feeling that if this were a TV show, the sweeps episode would be about that.)
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Date: 2011-04-06 05:53 pm (UTC)From: