Science Fiction: The Year's Best (2006 Edition)

By Joe Haldeman and Alastair Reynolds

Horton's elegiac anthology of 15 mostly hard SF stories illuminates a broad spectrum of grief over love thwarted through time, space, human frailty or alien intervention, from the gentle melancholy of Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," which posits tame Technicolored time-warped dinosaurs in Vermont, to newcomer Leah Bobet's "Bliss," an agonizing riff on near-future drug addiction. Several selections address current political-social issues, like Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine," which extrapolates today's technology to chilling, Big Brotherly results. The long closing story, Alastair Reynolds's "Understanding Space and Time," however, presents a ray of cosmic hope: the sole survivor of a plague that decimated humanity is rescued and healed by intergalactic entities and lives out millennia while seeking ultimate truths, returning to see mankind regenerated. This anthology reflects the concerns of the genre today—and the apparent inability of our society to do anything about them. -- Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jan 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781434442727

Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart. Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series. Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope. 

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Reviews for Science Fiction

[kd9_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The problem with collections like this is the probability that I will have read most of the best short fiction in this book already. What distinguishes a fine collection is the more rare stories. If they are equally good, then the collection can be a revelation. Unfortunately in this case, this collection depends on "modern literature" for its unknown stories and all of them are thin, weak, or incoherent. "A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story" by Douglas Lain is atmospheric without any grounding to reality or surrealism. It is neither clever nor memorable. " 'You' by Anonymous" by Stephen Leigh is clever, but only a wisp of a real story. Most of the rest of collection are well known and well awarded stories by Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, and Howard Waldrop.

[ckmtl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't particularly care for either Purdom's economics-based story, or Lain's take on the "New Yorker Coffee Cup Story", but most of these stories were pretty good.I've made a mental note to check out what else Alastair Reynolds' has written, based on his entry 'Understanding Space and Time'.