As always, reviews for individual stories:Terminal (Lavie Tidhar)Poetic but does require more suspension of disbelief that I am able to give a story at the moment.Touring with the Alien (Carolyn Ives Gilman)And idea story and I don' t think I've seen any particular variant of this idea before. Neat.Patience Lake (Matthew Claxton)This one was really strong: bleak, deep, with a hinted rich world behind it. And very much a magnifying glass for today. When I read the summary, I did not think I would...

I usually read this every year but this time the book took me over 5 months to finish, not so much because of content... still I'm not all that thrilled with these any more... I'm thinking I'll give these a rest. Dozois deserves a Hugo just for doing this for 30 years... but those days are long gone!

It's hard to rate an anthology since there are some standout stories, and some stinkers that you just can't get into, but overall I enjoyed most of the stories. I gravitated towards some authors I am familiar with and the longest story in the book "The Iron Tactician", I saved till the end to end on a high note. I think in the future I'll look up the book to see who the authors are before deciding if I want to go ahead and read it. They are thick books so there is some commitment involved if you...

A perfectly fun collection of stories, with a great mix of all the sci fi from hard (too few) to social commentary to humour to the burgeoning cli-fi genre.It's nice to see authors expand their narrators, though the prevalence of white men writing from the perspective of women of colour is a bit odd. But there's a lot of good here and it reads much easier than any collection this size has any right to.

A mixture of stories ranging from 3* to 5* with the majority being in the lower end of that range. I wonder how much Gardner Dozois 'preferences' for certain kinds of stories has changed over the years when assembling this anthology. Versus how much has the 'quality' of great writing varied in the current year.

After a fairly disappointing 33rd annual edition, Dozois' collection of 2016's best science fiction is a return to form, in which the majority of stories are not heavy-handed moral parables for our times. Granted, not all of them are to my taste, and one of them was damn near incomprehensible to me, but all in all, I enjoyed the majority of stories within.I do note that Dozois has deemed it unnecessary to make any mention of the continuing Hugo Award controversies at all, which is commentary eno...

Particular favorites were "These Shadows Laugh" by Geoff Ryman, "Redking" by Craig DeLancey, "Fifty Shades of Grays" by Steven Barnes, "Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee" by Alastair Reynolds, "Cold Comfort" by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty, "Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy" by Charlie Jane Anders, and "The Iron Tactician" by Alastair Reynolds.

So the Year's Best Science Fiction series has just turned 34. Happy birthday! Hopefully Mr. Gardner Dozois will continue to regale us with this series for many years to come.A trend appears to have formed in the past 5 or so years, with short fiction getting shorter and shorter. Gardner Dozois himself noticed in the introduction to this year's edition, that fewer and fewer novellas come out, and the novelettes are getting fewer and fewer words.Looking up at a statistic, from 25 titles per TYBSF

This was a good year for sci-fi, apparently.There were maybe four or five stories that felt weak to me, but most were above my expectations. I would sometimes finish a story and then wait till next day before starting another one just to savor the previous one a little longer. They are not only diverse and complex, lots of them are really well written.I read complaints in the reviews about dominating global warming theme. I would not say it was dominating, there are just five of those stories (a...

Stories are fine with one caveat. Enough with the global warming trope; it's cliched, it's tired, and it's oh so contemporary.

Front to back filled with a fantastic array of Science Fiction stories. Space Opera, Hard Sci Fi, weird stuff, contemplative fiction where the SF elements are very subtle, and all the feelings. Took me ages to read this complete volume, and I'll likely return to it in the future, picking a story or two at random to read.

The standouts, for me:• Elves of Antarctica, by Paul J. McAuley, 5 stars!• Flight from the Ages • novelette by Derek Künsken. 4.5 stars• Firstborn, Lastborn • short story by Melissa Scott. 4+ stars• Checkerboard Planet • novelette by Eleanor Arnason. 4 stars• The Visitor from Taured • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod. Soft 4 stars• Fifty Shades of Grays • novelette by Steven Barnes. Soft 4 stars.— and lots more 3.5 and 3 star stories. Good anthology, as always. Overall, 3.5 stars, rounded up.TOC: htt...

Phew ... It's hard to review a voluminous collection like this, more than 650 pages of SF novellas and short stories. Most are by well known authors, and I'm recognizing multiple names from past volumes in this series. And really, if you want to stay informed about the state of the genre, this is the collection to read. It's big, it's juicy, and whatever your taste in sci fi, there's wont to be something you'll enjoy in here. I've read some comments complaining about the stories dealing with cli...

This is an exceptional sampling of many different sub-genres and authors of science fiction curated by probably the greatest science fiction editor alive at that time, Gardner Dozois. (He passed away suddenly in 2018.) There are so many online and print vehicles for science fiction short stories and short fiction (novellas and novelettes) that pulling the best from all of those sources is an incredible task. There are stories from old, established writers like Alistair Reynolds and Gregory Benfo...

One of the better anthologies I have read.Favorite Stories in no particular order:Jonas and the fox by Rich LarsonElves of Antarctica by Paul McAuleyThe Further Adventures of Mr. Costello by David GerroldFifty Shades of Grays by Steven BarnesMy Generations Shall Praise by Samantha HendersonThey Have All One Breath by Karl BunkerThose Brighter Stars by Mercurio D. RiveraThings With Beards by Sam J. Miller

This is a dense book, full of good stories. I suspect all his anthologies are as thorough. What I like about this editor's collections is he gives you a brief bio on the author and a mini abstract of the story's topics at the beginning of each selection.I am not going to lie, I did not read every single story. Some just didn't interest me as much as others. But those I read I enjoyed and it gave me some new SciFi authors to look for on the bookshelves and read their longer fiction.

Every year, editor Gardner Dozois publishes a collection of the best short science fiction published in the previous year; in 2017 we are now up to the 34th such volume. This is a very large book indeed, running to some 650+ pages and containing Dozois’s choices for the very best of the field. In addition, he provides a summation of changes in the publishing world as it pertains to science fiction, information about the best-reviewed sf books, films and television shows, how anthologies and maga...

I have been reading this anthology since I bought the very first annual collection, many, many years ago. I have to say that this is the worst edition, by far. And these collections have slowly gotten worse over the past few years - to the point where I will be switching to a different anthology, that edited by Neil Clarke. I have been impressed with his anthologies so far. I rate each and every story in these anthologies and then I average the rating of all the stories. This collection rated a

Read these collections when they become availableI am a SciFi geek of course and grab one when ever they come out. Not all of the stories are world class, but all are crafted by true SciFy professionals. Two of my favorites are included here: One from Greg Benford and one from Alister Reynolds. These two alone are worth the time and investment to appreciate this collection...

Noteworthy stories.- Touring with the alien- Redking- Fifty shades of grays- Sixteen questions for Kamala Chatterjee- Cold comfort- Dispatches from the cradle: The hermiet - 48 hours in the sea of Massachusetts- Those brighter starsOtherwise meh. Too much fiction, not enough science... And too few genuinely new ideas (at least to me). Some short stories I would like to read would be about/on;- an exploration of a world where we have cheap fusion energy,- the addictive nature of the internet and