Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

Horton's elegiac anthology of 15 mostly hard SF stories illuminates a broad spectrum of grief over love thwarted through time, space, human frailty or alien intervention, from the gentle melancholy of Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," which posits tame Technicolored time-warped dinosaurs in Vermont, to newcomer Leah Bobet's "Bliss," an agonizing riff on near-future drug addiction. Several selections address current political-social issues, like Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine," which extrapolates today's technology to chilling, Big Brotherly results. The long closing story, Alastair Reynolds's "Understanding Space and Time," however, presents a ray of cosmic hope: the sole survivor of a plague that decimated humanity is rescued and healed by intergalactic entities and lives out millennia while seeking ultimate truths, returning to see mankind regenerated. This anthology reflects the concerns of the genre today—and the apparent inability of our society to do anything about them. Note that two of the same stories appear in a rival volume, Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Reviews, July 24). (Sept.)
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Horton's fine showcase ranges from Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," in which an "incident" leads to a herd of triceratops invading Vermont during the course of a summer, to Alastair Reynolds' "Understanding Space and Time," in which the last human in the universe undertakes a quest for enlightenment. Other impressive pieces include Robert Reed's "Finished," with its immortality treatment that fixes one in the mental state one is in when treated; James Patrick Kelly's "The Edge of Nowhere," about a genuine Nowhere and what happens there; and strong stories from such newer names as Susan Palwick ("The Fate of Mice," in which a superintelligent mouse's life changes forever) and Daniel Kaysen ("The Jenna Set," in which Palavatar, a telephone answering service, births a new theory of social relationships). The selection also constitutes an interesting overview of recent trends in the genre. Regina Schroeder
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