Review - The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantary, Volumes 12 and 13

Over the last couple of years, I've been neglecting short fiction, which is odd considering that I was a frequent reader of science fiction magazines as a teen. (I used to dream about Analog and for a while I had an almost complete set of The Magzine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a 30-year run of Astounding.Analog). So after finishing Ray Nayler's excellent The Mountain in the Sea, I decided to dive back into anthologies for a while. I;m going to start publishing short reviews as I finish them. 

For many years, the best annual anthologies were those edited by Gardner Dozois. Sadly. he passed away in 2018. so his last anthology was the 35th edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction, covering 2017. Since then, Jonathan Strahan and Neal Clarke, among others have edited series of year's best anthologies. 

In this post, I'm going to briefly discuss Jonathan Strahan's anthologies, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volumes 12 and 13 covering the years 2017 and 2018.  These are hefty books: Volume 12 has 539 pages and 29 stories, Volume 13 has 30 stories and 494 pages. Both volumes include an introduction by Strahan and short biographies of each author.

For each book, I'm just going to list the stories that I bookmarked as being especially good with occasional annotations. I should note that I much prefer science fiction to fantasy, so I didn't read many of the fantasy stories (though I did start reading all of them). I bookmark the stories that I like and create a numerical score: stories I liked/number of stories in the book, expressed as a percentage.

Volume 12 (Likes: 29%)

• "Eminence", Karl Schroeder
• "The Chameleon's Gloves", Yoo Ha Lee
• "Crispin's Model", Max Gladstone: This one turned out to be horror, not my usual taste but quite good. 
• "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, Greg Egan": A dark look at an AI-dominated near future. 
• "An Evening with Sereryn", Rich Larson
• "Babylon", Dave Hutchinson
• "Bring Your Own Spoon," Saad Z. Hossain: A science fiction story with djinn.  
• "Belladona Nights", Alastair Reynolds: This was easily the best story in the book. A vision of humanity's far future that was elegaic, powerful, and terribly sad. 

Volume 13 (Likes: 23%)

• "Yard Dog", Tade Thompson. Jazz and fantasy, a nice mix. 
• "The Blue Fairy Manifesto", Annalee Newitz
• "Okay, Glory", Elizabeth Bear
• "Meat and Salt and Sparks", Rich Larson. I must track down his story collections; I like everything I've read by him.
• "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth", Daryl Gregory. I think this was my favourite story in the book.
• "Golgatha", Dave Hutchinson
• "Quality Time", Ken Liu. If you know any software developers or tech engineers, get them to read this.