Year's Best SF 4
The fourth volume in David G. Hartwell's ongoing Year's Best SF anthology series is something of a departure from his previous efforts. This time around, Hartwell has made a conscious decision to seek out great stories from unexpected places, a move that has paid off handsomely. For instance, several of the stories here are from the British SF magazineInterzone(one is a translation of a French piece that first appeared inGalaxies 4), and he has even taken a story from the pages ofPopular Science. As usual, however, all of his selections have two things in common: they are all unquestionably works of "science fiction" (which is to say, they do not cross over into other genres such as horror or fantasy), and they are all of excellent quality.Probably the crown jewel of this book is the most talked-about story of 1998, Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life." This is only Chiang's fourth story, but he has already earned an impressive number of awards for his work, including theNebula Awardand the J. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Michael Swanwick's piece "Radiant Doors"--which plays off C.M. Kornbluth's classic story "The Marching Morons"-- is also a standout, as is Alexander Jablokov's "Minority Report." In fact, most of these stories are impressive in one way or another, although--as with any collection--some succeed better than others. Overall, this is probably the most representative "Year's Best" collection to appear in recent memory, and it's a shame that Hartwell is limiting himself to just one volume per year.--Craig E. Engler