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A review by barometz
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois
1.0
I received a copy of this one as a gift from a couple of friends who swear by the Year's Best series, and had ended up with an extra copy of the 2003 edition (which, importantly, was a year that neither of them had yet read). I'd like to preface what I'm about to say with the fact that I sincerely believe them when they tell me that Year's Best is not usually like this.
I got through this volume with a mix of guilt about not finishing a gift book, hope that maybe the next story would be better than the last (because it is an anthology after all), and sheer spite.
Terry Bisson's "Dear Abbey" may be the only one in the lot that made me truly feel something. That feeling was "unmoored in the face of the smallness of one person's existence" that was not quite tempered enough by the humor inherent in our wacky professor and his unlikely Texas drawl, but I do always insist that science fiction sometimes exists to make you feel a little bad, so I say well done.
There were a smattering of stories that I thought were alright; Howard Waldrop's "Calling Your Name", Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "June Sixteenth at Anna's", Nancy Kress's "Ej-Es", M. Shayne Bell's "Anomalous Structures of My Dreams", Kage Baker's "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst", William Shunn's "Strong Medicine", Robert Reed's "Night of Time", Dominic Green's "Send Me a Mentagram", and Nick DiChario's "Dragonhead" all get passing grades from me--none of them are particularly outstanding, but they're all solidly okay.
There were several that were downright unreadable. Charles Stross's "Rogue Farm" could have had some kind of emotional impact if I understood what the so-called farms roaming around the countryside even were. I spent most of Michael Swanwick's "King Dragon" trying to figure out which parts were metaphors and which parts were literal fantasy elements like fae folk. I have almost no idea what happened in Terry Dowling's "Flashmen", John C. Wright's "Awake in the Night", or James Van Pelt's "The Long Way Home" despite reading every word of them. A handful were also just painstakingly boring: John Kessel's "It's All True", Steven Popkes's "The Ice", Walter Jon Williams's "The Green Leopard Plague", Judith Moffett's "The Bear's Baby", and Geoffrey A. Landis's "The Eyes of America" all managed to center on characters that their author could not make me care about (and in the case of "The Ice" went on for what seemed forever while not really feeling like sci-fi). Harry Turtledove's "Joe Steele" holds the distinction of being the only story I actually skipped, because I was exhausted with its gimmick of narrating in one-to-five-word sentence fragments within the first page and a half.
There were some that, while coherent, were uncomfortable in other ways. There are a handful in particular that tipped into weird sexual stuff that either felt gratuitous or like wish-fulfillment: William Barton's "Off on a Starship", Jack Skillingstead's "Dead Worlds" (you have no personality and ran over this woman's dog, and she still had sex with you? More than once?? Yeah, right, buddy.), Paul Melko's "Singletons in Love" (might have been an interesting story if we weren't focused on the attraction aspect, honestly), and Geoff Ryman's "Birth Days" (not because it was queer, because so am I, but you gotta warn people about M-preg in your stories). Plus, particular kudos to Paul Di Filippo's "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon" for going back to the weird sex stuff after I thought we were out of those particular woods. John Varley's "The Bellman" was deeply uncomfortable for me as someone who doesn't deal well with pregnancy in fiction, but I suspect that the imagery and overall theme of (wildly unbelievable) future cannibalism would have been gross regardless. Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Fluted Girl" had implications that the main character and her sister were enslaved and groomed from a young age for entertainment that could border on sexual, and I absolutely needed a shower after that one; gross to me that this one made the cut at all.
Overall, the okay stories were just not enough to balance out the absolute train wreck going on with the bad ones. There was also a lot--and I mean a lot--of alternate history stuff, both political and celebrity-related, that was just not interesting to me, but I can see this whole thing potentially landing better if that was your jam. I spent a lot of the first half wondering about Gardner Dozois as a person (did his spouse leave him? is this man okay?) and the second half wondering about myself (is there something I'm not getting here? do I just not like short stories as a format? am I too gay for "mainstream" science fiction?), and I also tried to remember what the world was like in 2003 when we were not so far removed from the 9/11 attacks and the times before them. I wish I had an explanation for what exactly happened here, because I don't think I found one.
If this is what did make the cut, I shudder to think what horrors lurk in the honorable mentions.
I got through this volume with a mix of guilt about not finishing a gift book, hope that maybe the next story would be better than the last (because it is an anthology after all), and sheer spite.
Terry Bisson's "Dear Abbey" may be the only one in the lot that made me truly feel something. That feeling was "unmoored in the face of the smallness of one person's existence" that was not quite tempered enough by the humor inherent in our wacky professor and his unlikely Texas drawl, but I do always insist that science fiction sometimes exists to make you feel a little bad, so I say well done.
There were a smattering of stories that I thought were alright; Howard Waldrop's "Calling Your Name", Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "June Sixteenth at Anna's", Nancy Kress's "Ej-Es", M. Shayne Bell's "Anomalous Structures of My Dreams", Kage Baker's "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst", William Shunn's "Strong Medicine", Robert Reed's "Night of Time", Dominic Green's "Send Me a Mentagram", and Nick DiChario's "Dragonhead" all get passing grades from me--none of them are particularly outstanding, but they're all solidly okay.
There were several that were downright unreadable. Charles Stross's "Rogue Farm" could have had some kind of emotional impact if I understood what the so-called farms roaming around the countryside even were. I spent most of Michael Swanwick's "King Dragon" trying to figure out which parts were metaphors and which parts were literal fantasy elements like fae folk. I have almost no idea what happened in Terry Dowling's "Flashmen", John C. Wright's "Awake in the Night", or James Van Pelt's "The Long Way Home" despite reading every word of them. A handful were also just painstakingly boring: John Kessel's "It's All True", Steven Popkes's "The Ice", Walter Jon Williams's "The Green Leopard Plague", Judith Moffett's "The Bear's Baby", and Geoffrey A. Landis's "The Eyes of America" all managed to center on characters that their author could not make me care about (and in the case of "The Ice" went on for what seemed forever while not really feeling like sci-fi). Harry Turtledove's "Joe Steele" holds the distinction of being the only story I actually skipped, because I was exhausted with its gimmick of narrating in one-to-five-word sentence fragments within the first page and a half.
There were some that, while coherent, were uncomfortable in other ways. There are a handful in particular that tipped into weird sexual stuff that either felt gratuitous or like wish-fulfillment: William Barton's "Off on a Starship", Jack Skillingstead's "Dead Worlds" (you have no personality and ran over this woman's dog, and she still had sex with you? More than once?? Yeah, right, buddy.), Paul Melko's "Singletons in Love" (might have been an interesting story if we weren't focused on the attraction aspect, honestly), and Geoff Ryman's "Birth Days" (not because it was queer, because so am I, but you gotta warn people about M-preg in your stories). Plus, particular kudos to Paul Di Filippo's "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon" for going back to the weird sex stuff after I thought we were out of those particular woods. John Varley's "The Bellman" was deeply uncomfortable for me as someone who doesn't deal well with pregnancy in fiction, but I suspect that the imagery and overall theme of (wildly unbelievable) future cannibalism would have been gross regardless. Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Fluted Girl" had implications that the main character and her sister were enslaved and groomed from a young age for entertainment that could border on sexual, and I absolutely needed a shower after that one; gross to me that this one made the cut at all.
Overall, the okay stories were just not enough to balance out the absolute train wreck going on with the bad ones. There was also a lot--and I mean a lot--of alternate history stuff, both political and celebrity-related, that was just not interesting to me, but I can see this whole thing potentially landing better if that was your jam. I spent a lot of the first half wondering about Gardner Dozois as a person (did his spouse leave him? is this man okay?) and the second half wondering about myself (is there something I'm not getting here? do I just not like short stories as a format? am I too gay for "mainstream" science fiction?), and I also tried to remember what the world was like in 2003 when we were not so far removed from the 9/11 attacks and the times before them. I wish I had an explanation for what exactly happened here, because I don't think I found one.
If this is what did make the cut, I shudder to think what horrors lurk in the honorable mentions.