2024 the best sf movies review

Price: $7.99
(as of Dec 18, 2024 00:34:17 UTC - Details)

Unique visions and astonishments—new stories by:

Tobias S. Buckell and Karl Schroeder
Cory Doctorow
Neil Gaiman
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Alastair Reynolds
Michael Swanwick

Last year's best short-form SF—selected by acclaimed, award-winning editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer—offers stunning new extrapolations on what awaits humankind beyond the next dawn. The art of the story is explored boldly and provocatively in this powerful new collection of Year's Best speculative fiction.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Voyager; Original edition (May 26, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061721743
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061721748
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1.02 x 6.75 inches
Reviewer: John M. Ford
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Excellent Stories, Helpful Introductions
Review: I read and enjoyed each of the 21 stories in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's collection from 2008 science fiction stories. The introductions were just the right mix of author bios and pointers to other works. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of web addresses for most authors so I could find out more about them immediately after enjoying one of their stories.My favorite six stories all had a strong character focus, using future settings and new technologies as background to the concerns of interesting people.Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Arkfall" is a planetary romance that follows the developing relationships between crewmembers of a living submarine as it drifts through unmapped territory under an alien ocean.Kathleen Ann Gooman's "Memory Dog" shows how the right dog can be a woman's best friend--and her best link to the past and future.Alastair Reynolds' "Fury" reminds us that our oldest, darkest debts are sometimes paid by those we hold close.Jeff VanderMeer's "Fixing Hannover" shows a castaway engineer's value to those who pull him from the sea--and those who come to take him home.Mary Rickert's "Traitor" and Sue Burke's "Spiders" are each enjoyable on their own, but more so as a contrasting pair. Taking a darker and lighter view, respectively, they illustrate how a child, awash in too much information from the world, can muster the wisdom to focus on what is important. We wonder what becomes of them.I offer my gratitude for the Kindle version that allowed me to read these stories unobtrusively during a series of boring monologues by the senior executives in my agency. Their collective misunderstanding of the smile on my face during their orations is certain to benefit my career. This collection is worth your time in similar or better circumstances.

Reviewer: Walt
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Decent collection of stories
Review: I dearly wish that Amazon would provide a table of contents for Kindle ebooks in their on line description in order that I could more easily rate and review the contents; going through and compiling it myself is too onerous. But I digress, as that isn't really germane to this rating/review (are you listening, Amazon?!?!?)I found many of these stories to be engaging and entertaining, although as with any short story collection, there were those that I considered "clunkers". Overall, it was worth the $6 for the four or five nights' worth of bedtime reading contained herein. As a short story collection, it wasn't a standout, but then they can't all be (and seldom does such come along). I vacillated between a three or four star rating and settled on four as it was better than average but not superb.

Reviewer: J P. Rich
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Reviews should be reviews of the book, not the pricing of some alternative form of the book
Review: Hartwell's and Cramer's latest annual anthology is yet another an example of their consistently excellent taste in science fiction. I personally agree with the immediately preceding choices for the best stories, though there's not one in the book that's short of being very good. At $7.99, this is an incredible value.If the other "reviewer" has a problem with the e-book pricing, he should take it elsewhere. That "review" should be removed by Amazon, since it significantly lowers the average stars for this book but has zero to do with the quality of the content.

Reviewer: mcmullet
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Many very good science fiction short stories
Review: This is a collection. Many very good science fiction short stories.

Reviewer: RaDadIndy
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: At heart, PC uniformity
Review: There are imaginative stories here. I particularly liked "Pump Six" and "The Scarecrow's Boy". But there's also too many clunkers, and they tend to clunk for the same reason.There are 21 stories total. Not a single one falls in the category of good fighting evil. There is not single soldier in the book carrying out an honorable duty. Instead, we get a rape victim who seeks closure ("Oblivion"); a heavy-handed story about Neanderthal clones becoming a persecuted minority ("N-Words"); and variations on the hackneyed theme of eco-disaster ("Mitigation," and others). The result is that even some nicely done stories ("Memory Dog") have a tired feel because they are surrounded by so much political correctness.Of 23 listed authors, 9 are female. I don't do this kind of counting up-front; only after the fact when I've been struck by the uniformity of world views. Sorry, I'm not buying that 40% of the best SF stories these days are by women. It's rather clear the editors went out of their way to promote gender balance, which is the sort of thing that tends to go hand-in-hand with selecting PC themes. These are the sort of editors who offer introductions with sentences like these: "she writes aesthetically ambitious, feminist intellectual science fiction and fantasy" (page 356) and "he has been a leading figure in the field in favor of transgressing genre boundaries for at least a decade" (page 436). If these sentences raise warning flags for you, I encourage you to find another anthology. If you see nothing strange about these sentences, you will likely enjoy the book and find my review tendentious.

Reviewer: Robert (Max) Maxwell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Five Stars
Review: Great Read!

Reviewer: Bryan Knowles
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Solid collection
Review: "Orange" is probably my favorite story in the lot, but it's a solid collection from front to back.

Reviewer: Winston Smith
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Helps you sort through the chaff
Review: Best of the year anthos help sort through the chaff that clutters bookstore shelves. This one, plus the Dozois and Horton collections, do a great service.

Reviewer: Doug Fowler
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Lovely piece of kit. Very detailed great for a model railway..

Reviewer: Eric Lawton
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I have bought this anthology as soon as the new one comes out each year, because the stories are consistently good, by some of my favourite authors. I liked all of them this year, except I couldn't really get into "Memory Dog" by Kathleen Ann Goonan. It seemed well written with an interesting premise but in the end the main character, who had become a dog, didn't quite make sense, and I stopped reading half way through. Otherwise, I read the whole thing cover to cover in one go.If you are a fan of hard science fiction, this is one of the two best annual anthologies (the other being The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (I haven't read the 26th yet - just came out)

Reviewer: C. Renzi
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This was my first kindle purchase of a book to read for fun. Bad news first. I was disappointed by the following:1. No index/navigation aid? Really? The only way to see what the stories are like is to shift your way through the whole damn book page by page or rely on shared bookmarks (which skip over sections and stories). This is very poor layout/thinking behind the kindle edition. it would not take a huge effort to fix this, and it should have been done, especially since the kindle edition at present costs more than the paperback.2. leaving aside the details of the kindle technical issues, the quality of the stories is a bit bleah one of the reviewers on the paperback I think hit the nail on the head when he said that at the risk of sounding misogynist, he thought the stories were a bit bleah because almost half the authors were women and as we know, most SF readers and writers are slightly OCD geeky engineer types, and we don't really want to read about all the mushy feelings and characterisations. We don't give a crap. Give us a stick man with a REALLY COOL hard science on the hyper-luminal drives of the spaceship and we're happy. Several of the stories are quite descriptive and character-filled. Let me put it this way. Same story could have been written in half the space and lost none of the good points. Unless you enjoy two pages of descriptive stuff to describe the changing of seasons and moods (a la Anne Rice) then this is tedious. I prefer Pete Dexter's way of describing change of season. "It was winter."3. Apart from that, the stories that were NOT over-long and over-descriptive and over-touchy-feely, were also nothing to write home about.The Good parts.There were at least TWO stories that are worth the price of the book on their own.One is really a great story, I do not want to spoil it for you but it has to do with what sounds like a really non-interesting topic for some, but is actually a brilliant, brilliant, multi layered tale of genial complexity, subtlety and hard science too. It deals with robotics, creation and the human mind and consciousness. I will say no more so as not to spoil it, but it's brilliant and I would have gladly paid 3 times the price of the entire book just for this one.Another quite good one is about Neanderthals being genetically re-engineered to appear in the near future and was quite good too.I have yet to read about 35% of the remainder of the book and about 30% of it will NEVER get read because the stories are so sucky, and I would guess another 20% I speed/skim-read.If it wasn't for the one brilliant story i would give this 2 stars at most and if you also took out the neanderthal story I would say one star, but I also have 35% of the book still to read, so it may...I say MAY hit 4 stars if there is another genial tale in it, but I doubt there is.

Reviewer: Mr. Alan Eames
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Sf. You like it or you don't. I do.

Reviewer: James Bowman
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great Stories from a Master Anthologist year on year