Review of The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction ed. by Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois is well known for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies.  Roughly five-hundred stories having accumulated in the series as of 2005, at that time St. Martin’s Griffin asked Dozois to up the ante: to choose the best of the best.  Producing two volumes, the first being The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, the second The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels.  (For the record, like the yearly anthologies, the best-of-the-best anthologies were also ice aged: The Mammoth Book of The Best of The Best New SF and The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels, respectively.)

Dozois consciously trying to avoid stories that had been re-printed innumerable times in other anthologies while maintaining a consistently high level of quality, the anthology he compiled covers all the names of the field one would expect, while not always the stories. What Dozois continues to do is spread interest within the sub-genres and micro-genres science fiction has to offer, resulting in a solid collection of short stories, from the genre’s mainstream to a handful somewhat beyond (but not too far).  (See the bottom of this review for a complete list of the thirty-nine stories Dozois selected.)  The following review covers some but not all of the stories, thirty-nine indeed mammoth.

Review of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9 ed. by Jonathan Strahan

Numbers sometimes speak louder than words, so rather than open my review of editor Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9 (2015, Solaris) with some trite intro, here is the statistical breakdown:

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their second appearance in Strahan’s ‘best of’ series: 75% (highest of all volumes to date)

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their third appearance: 64%

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their fourth appearance: 39%

Percentage of stories by authors making at least their fifth appearance: 18%

Percentage of stories by authors making their seventh appearance: 4% (one story, in fact: Kelly Link has appeared in seven of the nine volumes)*

I don’t mind repeat inclusions.  It’s perfectly plausible that a given writer has written several high quality stories over the past decade.  The question in my mind, however, is: does such a list truly represent the current state of short speculative fiction?  Has the editor really gone out to pound the pavement, gotten to know the back genre corners and haunts of underground authors who are writing quality fiction but not yet in the spotlight, and compiled a list of the best of 2014 regardless of author?  Or has he just gone with old faithful?  I know Strahan is working within limitations most readers may not be aware of—legal clauses, reprint restrictions, author rights, sales expectations, etc.  Nevertheless, given such a high volume of repeat inclusions, I lean toward the idea these are favorite authors, and therefore not wholly representative of 2014 in short speculative fiction.