Loaned to me by a friend whose opinion I trust. But this thing is huge! I skipped around in it. That's the upside of collections, I guess. It did remind me of the excitement I had as a teen-ager, waiting for the next edition of the SF magazines to come out. Enough so that I have subscribed to the e-book version of Analog. ( )

This collection could have been 5 stars, but typos and grammar errors knock off half a star. ( )

Five stars for the one story for which I picked this up. (Someday I might read all 40 collections but not while I have a dozen cartons of books TBR.) A little while ago I read [b:Younguncle Comes to Town|707988|Younguncle Comes to Town|Vandana Singh|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177484738s/707988.jpg|694262] by [a:Vandana Singh|377417|Vandana Singh|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg] and loved it, looked on her page, and found she had a story in this sf collection. Hmm.... Well, I'd never have guessed it's the same author, except that the little time-travel character-study - nature-of-faith-&-fate story was very good, interesting, enchanting, and well-written, too - just like the children's book. So - I'm off to become a fan of the author.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1368423.html

This came out in 2005, the year of the Glasgow Worldcon, and I guess that because I felt I had thoroughly chewed over that year's short fiction in the Hugo process I didn't urgently need to read this. That was wrong: Dozois has as ever pulled together an excellent set of stories, full of variety of approach and length. As noted below, I had read only the few stories which got shortlisted for the major awards, and one other which I had seen in its original anthology. Of the stories new to me, the standouts were Stephen Baxter's 'Mayflower II' - I often find his prose style annoying but this time it worked - and Walter Jon Williams' 'Investments', a hard sf story with softer edges. But they are all good, and I should get back into the habit of reading the 'Best of the Year' anthologies as soon as they come out.

The lack of overlap with the 2005 (and 2006 Nebula) award nominations is striking. Dozois includes three of the Hugo novelette nominees, and three novelettes and one novella which made it to the final Nebula ballots, but not a single winner in any category. ( )

More of the best.