The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume Four. (ed Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2010)
An excellent collection, with that part of the volume covering fantasy stories not leaving me too far adrift
Reviewing short SF since 2000
An excellent collection, with that part of the volume covering fantasy stories not leaving me too far adrift
An example of good semi-prozine standard, but not, for my money, one for a Year’s Best.
An interesting setting, part feudal-fantasy, part SF.
Excellent hard SF from McAuley, in a narrative that gradually reveals more as it progresses
A short piece written as part of a festschrift to Ursula K. Le Guin, which touches on one of the themes in her writing.
Exquisite love story set over a summer of love, and an autumn of loss.
Alien technology arrives on Earth, enabling duplication of whatever what is desired.
Seems that Mad Amos graced the pages of F&SF during the 1980s and 1990s, and here the ‘mountainous mountain man’ returns, dealing with an awkward customer who has cut off the water supply to a town in the remote Wild West.
Well written, lyrical and elegaic in its own right.
Claustrophobic tension in an enclosed domed station, whose inhabitants are kept chemically happy by an AI doctor in human form.
Politics and backstory to flesh out the action in a story that lives up to its predecessor.
A gentle, amusing story warning of the problems of proper prophylactic planning.
Stories by Tim Lees, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, Patrick Samphire, Nina Allan, but none of them outstanding.
Captures the feeling of constraint and repression and danger, and the streets of central London, but ‘Children of Men’ it ain’t.
Understated throughout, and classy.
Short in the reading, likely to be long in the memory.
An entertaining, light piece with a nod to Golden Age SF.
Bowes’ series of autobiographical (up to a point!) stories in F&SF have been a treat for some time now.
Little is explained, but to compensate, the short relationship between the two protagonists is a vivid physical one.
A very lengthy look at running, but with an sfnal element.
as delicious as a warm gingerbread cookie…
A very subtle and sharp look at a near-future where pretty much everything has gone to wrack and ruin.
A love story featuring a ghost, urban space design and sculpture.
An imaginative piece.
A nicely balanced issue.
A fourth story in the ‘S’hudonni’ sequence – the first dating back to 1988 – withthe narrative style and the flashbacks supporting the story to good effect.
Nerdy high school science geeks are the masters of creation, and the jocks are under their thrall.
Just how gullible are the conspiracy theorists?
More interpersonal and interspecies dynamics than you get in most sf novels
Nicely observed, but short, and not clear to me as to what Strahan saw in it to pick it for the volume.
The second best story featuring a Tesla-powered Frankenstein monster at Chicago’s World’s Fair that I have read in the past couple of months.
A fairly bleak tale with a couple of stylistic issues that don’t help the story.
A story which asked too much of this reader in terms of suspending disbelief.
An interesting and affecting look at bereavement, through the lens of hyperspace.
A fairly routine story, below par from an author such as Lee.
A conversation by moonlight and by firelight, as a highwayman listens to a man previously of the cloth, who has spent seven years in the land of the Faery, in the arms of Titania.
The Gods of the Aztecs have fallen, replaced by an altogether more earthbound regime of metal and cogs.
Wry humour from Resnick.
Another effective short from Johnson, a story that gently takes off and gives a glimpse of a future, with a delicate touch.
A good political and psychological take on the alien incursion meme. Complements quite nicely the SF film ‘Monsters’ which I saw and enjoyed this weekend (and which I can recommend)
This entry into the ‘Diving’ canon is a doozy
Excellent issue with Dale Bailey, Ken Liu, Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario, and Terry Bisson being the picks for me.
Suburban Halloween shivers, as two young children have to face up to the death of their grandma, with an evil (or at least emotionally cold) step-mother and her strange brother to content with.
Surprisingly affecting short.
An excellent story from a writer new to me.
A good collection of stories, Evans and Hawkins starting and closing the fiction strongly.
One of the strongest stories in IZ over recent issues, and one I can see being atop the Readers’ Poll for 2010.
Interzone continues to publish stories by new writers and writers from across the globe, and this is from a Filipinan now living in the Netherlands.
Originally broadcast on BCC Radio 4, the story is in the form of a dictated report, someone addressing his concerns with the behaviour of an AI, now lost to his research agency.