The Years Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, et al.

Book Overview

Third in series, winner of the 1987 Locus Poll Award, Best Anthology. Contents include Introduction: Summation: 1985, essay by Gardner Dozois; The Jaguar Hunter, by Lucius Shepard (nominated, 1985... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312944861
• ISBN13: 9780312944865
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Bluejay Books
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Not Free SF Reader

The earliest of these that I have come across. In fact, it would seen you could just about get secondhand every volume of this series for the price of the first two, with bonus books if you were in the USA. Pretty much right on the standard, two, at a 3.77 average. Although some will be annoyed by the multiple instances of the dirty fantasy story low-blows thrown in, one of them even a World Fantasy short story award winner, apparently. Balanced by nothing disliked particularly, and a really cool Tiptree story. This one is a secondhand book, and the story Green Mars provided a surprised - having read that elsewhere I had never bothered to look at the one in here, but it appears that it just may be autographed at the beginning by Kim Stanley Robinson himself! Very cool find if it is. An interesting contrast is the length of the editor's summary, now roughly a novella, this one is only around 10 pages, or a short short story, and only a few pages of standard type story recommendations. Perhaps this is a factor of more stuff out there, as the summary mentions around 1300 sf-type books published per year, and it may be closing on double that now I think I read. Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : The Jaguar Hunter - Lucius Shepard Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Dogfight - Michael Swanwick and William Gibson Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Fermi and Frost - Frederik Pohl Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Green Days in Brunei - Bruce Sterling Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Snow - John Crowley Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : The Fringe - Orson Scott Card Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : The Lake Was Full Of Artificial Things - Karen Joy Fowler Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Sailing to Byzantium - Robert Silverberg Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Solstice - James Patrick Kelly Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Duke Pasquale's Ring - Avram Davidson Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : More Than The Sum Of His Parts - Joe Haldeman Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Out Of All Them Bright Stars - Nancy Kress Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Side Effects - Walter Jon Williams Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : The Only Neat Thing To Do - James Tiptree Jr. Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Dinner in Audoghast - Bruce Sterling Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Under Siege - George R R Martin Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Flying Saucer Rock & Roll - Howard Waldrop Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : A Spanish Lesson - Lucius Shepard Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Roadside Rescue - Pat Cadigan Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Paper Dragons - James P. Blaylock Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Magazine Section - R. A. Lafferty Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : The War at Home - Lewis Shiner Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Rockabye Baby - S. C. Sykes Year's Best Science Fiction 03 : Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson Man decides sexy werejaguar is better than bad American cop show. 4 out of 5 Gonna pay for the pilot enhancement. 3.5 ou

Dozois finds good sf stories for his readers.

Dozois's third Bluejay annual (1986, for 1985 work) follows the same format as his second. You can read no other sf-related book in a given year and still have a very good idea of what is happening in the current sf scene. Dozois believes that short fiction is the heart of the genre; it takes as much originality to execute an effective story as it does a genre novel, which generally spins out an equivalent concept at greater length. Moreover, the concentation of the short form forces writers into a concise presentation of their material. In an age of elephantine media-based novel series, that's a pleasure. This anthology picks up 24 stories, several of them long. I most liked Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things," a haunting meditation on Vietnam in which a woman interacts with a virtual version of a man she knew who died in the war. Another very good story included here, which won an award, is Frederik Pohl's "Fermi and Frost," a less satiric than usual portrait of surviving beyond armageddon. Additional stories I liked here include Robert Silverberg's long "Sailing to Byzantium," another award-winner in which Byzantium turns out not what it seems to be; Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars," which became the basis for his Mars trilogy; S. C. Sykes's "Rockabye Baby," a moving story about a severely injured man who enters an experimental program to regenerate his body; and Lucius Shepard's "A Spanish Lesson," a picaresque mood piece about an expatriate American in Europe who finally confronts his own shallowness. Two other award winners reprinted are Nancy Springer's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" and James Blaylock's "Paper Dragons." One of the tensions in genre fiction of this period was the conflict between the cyberpunkers and the rest of the writers. Robinson was accused of being a fuddy-duddy for not joining the punker bandwagon. I think he had the last laugh.