Neil Clarke

It was a nice issue, with both nice and meh stories. There weren't any outstanding, 5 star ones, though.

"Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden - Humanity has invented teleportation, so now you can jump around the solar system. This is a story about both the impact of technology and very human emotional dead ends. 4 stars.

“Down the Waterfall” by Cécile Cristofari - Yet another take on time travel, roads not taken and moments you wished you had had. Very poetic, but it left me cold. 3.5 stars.

“Binomial Nomenclature and the Mother of Happiness” by Alexandra Munck - An engineer makes a machine that lets you see physical manifestations of emotions. I liked the world building and the characters. 4.2 stars.

“Stars Don’t Dream” by Chi Hui - Maybe it’s a dystopia, maybe it’s a utopia. Anyway, everyone is in the metaverse. Space exploration, what space exploration? But some people dream… Very nice hard sci-fi! 4 stars.

”Just Another Cat in a Box” by E.N. Auslender - Someone is trapped on post-apocalyptic planet, different versions of the protagonist awake one after another. It was pretty bleak and I did not like it. 2.5 stars.

“Rail Meat” by Marie Vibbert - Two con artists in a world it would be interesting to see more of. Very enjoyable! 4.3 stars.

“You Dream of the Hive” by C.M. Fields - what kind of existence do you want? The regular human one or… something else? Interesting! 3.9 stars.

”You Cannot Grow in Salted Earth” by Priya Chand - space exploration that had gone wrong. It felt more like a fragment than a story. 3 stars… (mais)

I have come to look forward to Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes, the only (I think) best-of anthology going to cover all of the sf genre and nothing but the sf genre. I like getting a sense of the best of the genre has to offer, especially from the not free-to-read magazines, which often get a lot less attention online, and the original anthologies, which rarely cross my radar. I pepper the stories from them in among my other reading; this year that meant it took me about six months to get through the thirty-one stories collected in this volume. If I had a complaint, it would simply be that the pandemic has put the series behind and it still hasn't caught up: volume 7 came out in 2023 but collects stories originally published in 2021.

As always, there's a lot to like here even when every story isn't exactly to my taste, and I appreciate the anthology introducing me to writers I haven't (as far as I remember, anyway) previously experienced. My favorite in this volume was the very first story, "Muallim" by Ray Nayler, which is about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done. But that doesn't mean it was all downhill from there or anything. Other highlights included:

• "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte. This was a 2022 Hugo finalist, so I had read it before, but it's a neat story about digital consciousness uploading and what some of the implications of that might be.
• "The Pizza Boy" by Meg Elison. A neat tale about a pizza delivery boy... in space! Where he works is a war zone, and the lengths he has to go to to gather ingredients are often illegal. Fun but serious at the same time, which is how I like my fiction.
• "I'm Waiting for You" by Kim Bo-young. Complicated story about a man taking a relativistic flight so that he can line up with one being taken by his fiancée, so they will keep their ages consistent at their wedding, only then his flight is delayed, so she has to adjust, so then he has to adjust, and it all gets quite convoluted and sad.
• "Hānai" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Aliens come to Hawaii to track down a woman who allegedly committed an enormous anthropological crime. Well observed character work and strong prose, neat exploration of a variety of cultural differences.
• "The Equations of the Dead" by An Owomoyela. A kid in a criminal organization is supposed to eliminate someone he's fallen in love with... and then ends up getting in way over his head, in a story involving mind uploads.
• "Complete Exhaustion of the Organism" by Rich Larson. I didn't totally know what was happening here but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Two people are on some kind of walk, trying to get away from some kind of weird society, but are followed by a child who comes back no matter how often they abandon it.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer. Like "Proof by Induction," this was a reread, but I find Palmer's Bot 9 stories incredibly charming and well written, so I was happy to reread it. A little robot is the only hope of a massive spaceship that finds itself out of control, its human crew incapacitated, in what is possible hostile territory.

Those are just a few that stick out to on skimming back over the table of contents, but there are a number of other worthwhile stories here. There were only a couple that I did not enjoy; there were several stories included from an anthology called Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, and these I found missed more than they hit, the kind of near-future futurism that dates too quickly because it's too timely; only three years later, I didn't feel like the authors had called it correctly. One of them was my least favorite story in the book, Ken Liu's "Jaunt," which was less a story and more like worldbuilding and background for a story. But I have previously established on this blog that Ken Liu works for me much less often than he seems to work for other people.

Some of this content you can get online, of course (I have linked to them above when so), but the benefit of the volume is to get all of it in one place. Hopefully this series catches up soon!… (mais)

A wonderful issue – mostly because of “Eight or Die” by Thoraiya Dyer. But other stories were good too :)

“Morag’s Boy” by Fiona Moore - I have read about Morag before, in “The Spoil Heap”, issue 198 of Clarkesworld. I wasn’t too impressed, and didn’t review it. This is the same dystopian universe, but the story is so much better. Morag adopts Cliff, and begins to understand that her post-apocalyptic world can be different. 4.9 stars.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Cyborg” by Samara Auman - crows are mourning their cyborg friend. This one is virtually plotless, it’s poetical and philosophical. Nice, but I was left wanting more. 3.8 stars.

“In Memories We Drown” by Kelsea Yu - some people are living in an underwater station after some kind of catastrophe. They find a strange plant. It’s a beautiful story. It felt too short and somewhat incomplete, though. 3.9 stars.

“Waffles are Only Goodbye for Now” by Ryan Cole - in a war zone, a little boy befriends a smart refrigerator. Awww. 4.0 stars.

“The World’s Wife” by Ng Yi-Sheng - there is a body that becomes a whole world… Fun! 4.0 stars.

“The Last Gamemaster in the World” by Angela Liu - Here is the grandest online game ever! Interesting, but it didn’t quite move me. 3.9 stars.

“Kill That Groundhog” by Fu Qiang - three people are trying to escape their Groundhog Day, in various ingenious ways. So much fun! Hilarious. 4.4 stars.

“Eight or Die”, Part II by Thotaiya Dyer - continued from issue 206 of Clarkesworld. We are still on a mission on an alien world. It’s weird, it’s quirky, it’s fun, it’s tragic, it’s magic, it’s humane. It’s very unlike “regular” sci-fi (whatever that is). The writing is great. The characters are great. Everything is great. I’m fangirling. Here are 5 stars.… (mais)