At times, I'm just plain envious of an author's imagination and creativity. This is one of those times. Susan Back to the top. Others were annual round-ups of the field's best, classic gatherings by Bleiler and Dikty, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, and more recently by Gardner Dozois and David Hartwell. Now, like those sorely-missed early connoisseurs, they are almost all dead.
Readers prefer new novels, often trilogies or share-crops from media megaliths like Star Trek .
Yet SF was for a long time a literature that found its best work in the short story and medium-length novella. Remaining authors are Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Ben Bova, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Holdstock, Ursula K. Le Guin, Katherine Maclean, Ian McDonald, Robert Silverberg, Allen Steele, Lisa Tuttle, John Varley and Ian Watson. In bibliographical space, nobody can hear you scream Impossible expectations are aroused by such a collection. No, because the best are already too widely known. Foster's wry tale is a kind of pale imitation Cordwainer Smith, perhaps an explicit homage.