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A review by dmturner
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 by Neil Clarke
4.0
This mammoth volume assembles three score proper science fiction stories from the year 2015. Everything in it has the "what if this goes on?" variety of plot. Some of the stories are set in the near future, some farther off, and reading all of them gave this reader the feeling that I was in a hall of mirrors with endless reflections going off in all directions, providing different perspectives on some of the same ideas.
One takeaway of the field represented here was that many of the stories were cluttered with invented vocabulary and names as a substitute for vividness, and focused too much on world-building or on the technical details of the various sciences they drew from. But that could be my reaction because I am drawn to lucidity and simplicity in stories. I particularly enjoyed Nancy Kress's "Cocoons," "Martin Shoemaker's "Today I Am Paul," and Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures, Please" for those reasons, and also because they seemed more story-like than some of the others, with characters I cared more about. I confess that I grew up reading SF in a time when it shared more clarity and story structure with modern YA, so I sometimes get impatient.
There were a lot of common themes in the stories; space travel, culture, politics, war, diplomacy. Many of the stories focus on the provisional nature of identity in a universe populated by avatars, machine consciousnesses, and altered humans. The last story posited consciousness in a murmuration of starlings. Some stories had travel portals to get around the vast distances of space, while others used generation ships, stasis, or stored data to get humans or their successors from one place to another.
The brief biographies of authors prefacing each story were an intimidating roster of publications. Having pulled away from hard science fiction after my first few decades (I moved into reading more fantasy), I was unfamiliar with many of the names. This is a good introduction to the present-day field, and I recommend it.
One takeaway of the field represented here was that many of the stories were cluttered with invented vocabulary and names as a substitute for vividness, and focused too much on world-building or on the technical details of the various sciences they drew from. But that could be my reaction because I am drawn to lucidity and simplicity in stories. I particularly enjoyed Nancy Kress's "Cocoons," "Martin Shoemaker's "Today I Am Paul," and Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures, Please" for those reasons, and also because they seemed more story-like than some of the others, with characters I cared more about. I confess that I grew up reading SF in a time when it shared more clarity and story structure with modern YA, so I sometimes get impatient.
There were a lot of common themes in the stories; space travel, culture, politics, war, diplomacy. Many of the stories focus on the provisional nature of identity in a universe populated by avatars, machine consciousnesses, and altered humans. The last story posited consciousness in a murmuration of starlings. Some stories had travel portals to get around the vast distances of space, while others used generation ships, stasis, or stored data to get humans or their successors from one place to another.
The brief biographies of authors prefacing each story were an intimidating roster of publications. Having pulled away from hard science fiction after my first few decades (I moved into reading more fantasy), I was unfamiliar with many of the names. This is a good introduction to the present-day field, and I recommend it.