The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

July 13, 2009
Strahan's third annual anthology provides a solid sampler of good fiction. Stories by well-known authors Holly Black, Stephen King and the late Joan Aiken, though strong, are outclassed by masterful and innovative genre tales written by relative newcomers, such as Kij Johnson's “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” Meghan McCarron's “The Magician's House” and Ken Scholes's “The Doom of Love in Small Spaces.” Also notable, Paolo Bacigalupi's “The Gambler,” John Kessel's “Pride and Prometheus” and Rachel Swirsky's “Marry the Sun” use traditional storytelling techniques to build powerful, exciting tales. Only Garth Nix's overlong “Beyond the Sea Gates of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe” and Margo Lanagan's predictable “Machine Maid” are substandard. Strahan's introduction gives a nice overview of the state of the genre.

February 21, 2011
Strahan's fifth anthology contains 29 wide-ranging tales. Neil Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is a deceptively simple folktale-styled story of the price one may pay for gold. "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey Landis untangles a complex knot of childish power. Sarah Rees Brennan's "The Spy Who Never Grew Up" gives a beloved childhood icon a sinister update; Diana Peterfreund's "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" turns unicorn lore on its head; and Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" puts a fantasy spin on the temporal culture shock of immortality. This year the fantasy tales outdo the SF in depth of storytelling and characterization, though all the inclusions are strong, with few ideas left by the wayside.

April 1, 2007
This is an excellent sampling of some of the most interesting contemporary voices in sf and fantasy, including Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Link, and Paul Di Filippo, tackling a pleasingly wide range of subject matter. Jeffrey Fords "Night Whiskey" concerns the strange customs of a small town and the terrible things that sometimes come out of the unknown. Christopher Rowes "Another Word for Map Is Faith" concerns a future in which the faithful of Christendom traverse the earth, "correcting" geography to conform to the errors on maps. The volume closer, Ian McDonalds "Djinns Wife," is a lovely fairy tale of the future about a dancer who marries an AI; as the narrator observes, even if it doesnt have a happy ending like a Bollywood movie, it has a happy enough ending. Editor Strahan has selected a lot of winning stories here, well worth revisiting, often more than once.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)