Gardner Dozois (editor) The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Ann

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

Gardner Dozois (editor)

St Martins, Jul 2007, $35.00

ISBN 9780312363345

As always this is a fascinating anthology as much for those stories selected as the best in 2006 as for the essays starting with the Summation, which though Mr. Dozois opens with a "relatively uneventful year" he quickly affirms otherwise as the publishing world had radical changes. The stories come from a wide variety of sources that prove how vast the options in the field have become. Some tales by famous authors were originally electronic such as "I, Row-Boat by Docterow was an on line entry in Flurb I and "The Ile of Dogges" by Bear and Monette was on Aeon Seven. Others were typically included in magazines such as "Tin Marsh" by Swanwick and "The Djinn's Wife' by McDonald both in Asimov's Sconce Fiction, and "Damascus" by Gregory and" Okanoggin Falls" by Gilman in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Finally, a few were part of what seem like somewhat a dinosaur at least in this anthology: printed books such as "Nightingale" by Reynolds (see Galactic North). The twenty-eight short stories are solid tales with fan favorites and newcomers included. Each entry is well written and fun to read as the collection covers the gamut of the genre. However, it is Mr. Dozois' fabulous "Summation" that brings together the year in which source diversity keeps expanding making it impossible even for an insomniac lunatic book reviewer to even have heard of some of the tales; don't even try to ponder how Mr. Dozois finds some of them; though all are worthy of inclusion.

Harriet Klausner