The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Eight. (ed Jonathan Strahan, Solaris Books)
Now published by Solaris books, with lots of big names from a wide variety of sources.
Reviewing short SF since 2000
Now published by Solaris books, with lots of big names from a wide variety of sources.
A quite vivid and memorable setting to open (and close) the story – a drive-in movie theater, and heart-breaking but affirming ending.
Nothing particularly fresh to glean from a story that covers some very well-trodden ground.
Young Dafyd the Difficult is apprenticed to a wizard, and there is magicke, gryphons and gems.
Set in the Xuya sequence, young Quynh Ha finds herself given a task by the Dust Queen – a living legend whose Martian dust dances she has long admired.
Steam/lizard punk from Tidhar, who gives himself the opportunity to poke gentle fun at SF writers and SF fandom.
Egan opens the hard SF anthology with a story that illustrates the good and less good aspects of hard SF.
A short story looking at the potential to do things differently.
Some nice writing, but the story ends up like a (not very good) teen movie from the 1980s.
A short piece in which Jouty, through the translation by Edward Gauvin, looks at a clearing in a forest at Finges – a clearing evidently untouched by the hand (or the foot) of man, since time immemorial.
Almost three dozen stories, gleaned from sources far and wide, to keep you quiet for a long time!
The three short SFF winners, two runners-up, a Gene Wolfe story, and two stories masquerading as poetry.
A short and fairly straightforward story, with, as the title suggests, the moon facing an apocalyptic event.
A story that upon reading it, sticks in the memory as being longer than it actually was.
If you co-edit an anthology, you’ve got to make sure your story stands up alongside the rest, and fortunately Howey does so.
A light-hearted time travelling story.
A plant story that has a germ of an idea, but the plant was rushed out of the greenhouse a bit too early, without enough hardening off.
The BRING HER TO ME word of the Lord is BRING HER TO ME insistent, albeit capitalized…..
Further adventures of Professor Threefoot, whose ‘lengthy ruminations’ in the previous story did not engage me.
An unsettling story full of yearning for what you can’t have.
A fractionally lighter tone in this story in the apocalypse anthology, with an end-of-the-world party in a swanky hotel is in full swing
A close up, personal take on the apocalypse, with the setting a suburban housing estate where a teenage girl is looking after her terminally ill grandmother.
A bleak, virtually deserted Glasgow, with but one chink of light.