A review by smartflutist661
Year's Best SF 9 by David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer

adventurous emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

3.75

Definitely mixed thoughts about the stories here. Some that I loved: "Amnesty", Octavia E. Butler, though I read it in Bloodchild and Other Stories; "Four Short Novels", Joe Haldeman; "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons", John Varley; "The Hydrogen Wall", Gregory Benford; "The Madwoman of Shuttlefield", Allen M. Steele. Plus "The Albertine Notes", Rick Moody, which was disconnected and poignant and brought back memories of my own, and was clearly grappling with 9/11, just a few years prior; "The Day We Went Through the Transition", Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero, similarly touching, though looking quite a few years further back; "The Great Game", Stephen Baxter, both extremely critical of the War on Terror and a great military sci-fi short on its own merit. I was a bit bored by a number of the stories in the beginning of this collection, with "Ej-Es" standing out a bit alongside the ones already mentioned; it picked up around "The Violet's Embryos", though, and I might have felt somewhat differently had I actually read the excellent "Amnesty" this time around. Only "Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers" stands out as being not that interesting from the later stories.