In the forward Dozois says that the trouble with putting together a "best of the best" book is that so many of the stories have been anthologized so many times, and you don't want to give the readers a lot of retreads. So his answer to this was to take some of the lesser-known and maybe not best stories and mix them in. The problem with doing this of course is that you end up with an anthology that isn't quite the best of the best. And that's what we have here. There are some great stories, but

Overall review: This is a solid collection with some very good stories in it. Most times in the past when I've read short story collections, it's a book with all stories from the same author in it, which is nice in its own way, but this sort of thing seems like a great way to get a sampling of stories from across the Sci-Fi spectrum. I'll be checking out more in the Gardner Dozois "Best of" series in the future.Detailed reviews below, but I think the biggest standouts from this collection (not i...

Top-notch collection, particularly for readers who haven't regularly been following Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction series (and who therefore wouldn't have already read these stories). At 650+ pages there is something for every SF fan's liking here, and Dozois has done an excellent job in choosing great stories without significantly overlapping with too many other Best-Of collections. I could have done with a few less novellas, but otherwise well worth your time and money. Recommended.

Well, it's been quite a journey; it took me almost half a year -with considerable intervals of course- to finish this anthology that traveled me in a vast expanse of time and space. Not all of its stories were strictly science fiction, but quite a few of them were fine examples of speculative fiction. In any case, a lot of them were brilliant, sometimes closer to literary than to genre fiction, and even the duller or more difficult among them had something interesting to ponder on. If you like S...

This is a collection of 36 stories ranging from 1981 to 2002 and purporting to represent the best shorts in science fiction in those years. A blurb on the back by GRR Martin says that "if a science fiction fan from 1984 chanced to stumble into a time warp and pop up in the here and now, and wanted to know what had been happening in his favorite genre in the last twenty years, all you'd need to do was hand him a copy of Gardner Dozois's Best of the Best." In a way, I'm that fan. I read a lot of s...

This is a selection of Gardner Dozois' favorite stories from the first twenty years (1983 to 2002) of The Year's Best Science Fiction. Those annual anthologies had themselves already skimmed the cream off of each year's crop of stories, so ideally, this should be filled with nothing but masterpieces of the form. But, of course, there's no accounting for taste. Dozois admits up front that he has selected many of his own personal favorites, rather than choosing exclusively award winners, and his i...

Reviews of some of the stories:Blood Music, by Greg Bear--Medically Adaptable Biochips are injected into the bloodstream of their creator.Salvador, by Lucius Shepherd--the ugly truth of our troops in a 3rd world country, stoned out of their minds on drugs and armed with state-of-the-art weapons.Trinity, by Nancy Kress--an experiment to bring God to sense his humans. 5 🌟 for this one.Snow, by John Crowley--Living your life, you will have countless hours of the dull, ordinary stuff of life. The co...

Modern science fiction writers try to do too much all at once. By modern I mean anything after 1990. Before then, they came up with a nice idea and wrote a story round their single idea set either in the present or on a planet that only had three things different from Earth or in the future which only had three things different in it than 1975. These days, that’s all way too simple. If you’re writing about another planet it has to have a complex thoroughly worked-out ecology based on methane and...

This didn't feel like a collection that should be named "The Best of the Best"; it was pretty mixed, and only had a couple of stories I thought were really awesome. Most of them were OK, but there were a couple that really were not good. Also, far too many of them were borderline sci-fi at best; I suppose you could call them speculative fiction, but really, do they then belong in a book subtitled "20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction"? Several of those stories actually wound up being my f...

Summary: Dozois published annual anthologies with the best published SF short works from several magazines ever since 1985. From 20 of these anthologies covering the years 1983-2002, he chose those 36 stories which impressed him as a reader the most. Obviously these are not absolutely the best stories of those years, because he didn't grab everyone in his anthologies. This is the first volume of three, where the second publishes novellas which were excluded from this first volume, and the third

Is it "The Best of the Best"? Unanswerable as that question is, there is probably no one better qualified to make his case than Gardner Dozois. And to be fair, he is not claiming to be collecting the best science fiction ever, just the stories that have been previously collected in his annual year's best anthology now well past it's second decade of existence. And what stories! Starting off with Blood Music from Greg Bear raises the possibility of peaking too soon but the collection maintains it...

I admit: I read only 14 stories out of 26, but please understand me: I just couldn't take it any more! For me, Dozois' yearly Best of SF were always a so-so mix: some good, many bad. But in this Best of Best he overdid himself: it's actually Worst of the Best! From 20 years! The first problem: almost none is actually scifi, but, you know, "edgy", "slippy" and so on. Second and bigger problem: they are exactly the kind of artsy texts going for the ravishing, highly polished form and completely fo...

2 stars Metaphorosis ReviewsSummaryGardner Dozois' favorite stories from 20 years of his Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies.ReviewSubtitled 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, the volume gives you a feeling for just how long Dozois had been doing this. And then realize there’s also a later Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction. Impressive.I’ve read several of Dozois’ Year’s Best over the years, most recently this one. I’ve never really cared for them mu...

If you haven't tried any of the anthologies from The Year's Best Science Fiction series, you really should, and this might be a great place to start. For years now, this series has been my traditional birthday gift to-me-from-me-with-love as it's publication in July coincides conveniently with the day. I have discovered numerous new authors through its stories.The series has been going since 1984 and roughly half of them have won awards. As they should, Gardner Dozois does a magnificent job of e...

Tier 1246 • Mortimer Gray's History of Death • (1995) • novella by Brian Stableford (aka Mortimer Gray's "History of Death")418 • Story of Your Life • (1998) • novella by Ted ChiangTier 21 • Blood Music • (1983) • novelette by Greg Bear19 • A Cabin on the Coast • (1984) • short story by Gene Wolfe213 • Guest of Honor • (1993) • novelette by Robert Reed363 • A Dry, Quiet War • (1996) • novelette by Tony Daniel380 • The Undiscovered • (1997) • novelette by William Sanders520 • Daddy's World • (199...

Wow this was full of great stories. Some didn't reach my five star rating... it would be hard to get that rating for a compilation of stories. The best part is the author background and introduction. These stories have such a varied POV and getting the setting laid out before jumping into the fast pace of a short story was helpful. Beware reading this will increase the list of books to read a lot

An outstanding compendium of the crème de la crème SF stories from Hugo and Nebula award winning authors, with some delightful ones at present crossing the frontier of "fiction" to the real world - Nanotechnology implants at the cellular level; BMI (Brain Machine Interface) with Elon Musk's Neuralink; linking the brain's Theta waves of inner focus & meditation across individuals; advances in AI with Bio-Engineering leading towards Kurzweil's approaching singularity.

I never did this before, but I want to try to review each story as I read them (also because I'm not sure if I'm going to read the entire book all at once)Blood Music by Greg BearI definitely read this one before, it must have been in one of the Year's Best Science Fiction that I've read in the past. Incredibly unsettling. I love the idea, but something about the writing didn't quite work for me. Everything happened incredibly fast, and still felt kind of slow at times.Cabin On The Coast by Gene...

"History of Death" is a long story, but well worth the read, and is easily one of the most interesting pieces of fiction I have ever read. I highly recommend others to read this story. The story details Mortimer Gray's journey of writing about death, and the fascination people have with it, once people become essentially immortal. The story's author works on a number of volumes in the History, which takes 174 years to complete. Battling several close calls with death himself, Mortimer Gray is an...

An outstanding collection. Here's an annotated TOC. My favorites are starred or rated, but they're all worth reading. I can't believe what an amazing lineup this is. Astounding! Fantastic! Absolutely not to be missed, if you have any interest in short SF. And a great primer, if you've always wanted to try some. Start with the best, right here.** 10 to the 16th to 1 • (1999) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly • A Cabin on the Coast • (1984) • short story by Gene Wolfe**** A Dry, Quiet War • (1996...