Year's Best SF6

By: J.A. Hitchcock
Date: Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Since I travel quite a bit, collections of short stories such as this book make for great reading, especially since each story is different instead of being stuck with one book and one story for a six hour flight, I have many to choose from. On this particular trip I had pneumonia, so in between sleeping (a lot), I read this book and found it to be a blessing, because most of the stories were short enough so that I could stay awake long enough to read them. Faint praise perhaps...

There are 27 short stories in the book, by authors well-known and not so well-known. There's Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian W. Aldiss, Stephen Baxter, and one of my favorites, Ted Chiang. The others I don't remember reading before, so it was a delight to get such a mix of authors and types of stories. The tales ranged from time-travel to parallel world, alternate histories, and good old sci-fi.

Some highlights:
"The Millennium Express" by Robert Silverberg: Here we have the clones of Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Vjong Cleversmith wreaking havoc in the year 2999. They're blowing up the Sistine Chapel and other sites of historic interest, and with obvious glee. Strettin Vulpius saw the quartet doing their dirty work and began following them around the world while they blew up or destroyed one place after another, causing panic in a now otherwise peaceful world. But Vulpius never imagined they'd take him under their wings as well. This was a true delight of a story and captured me from beginning to end.

"The Birthday of the World" by Ursula K. Le Guin: This story brings us to a kind of parallel world. When children are born, the brother and sister are wed to each other at the right age, becoming "God" and running that world (incest is best here). But when the current God has visions of destruction and death, their world is turned upside down, until the new Gods appear out of the sky. Le Guin never fails to satisfy and this was no exception.

"Oracle" by Greg Egan: This is time travel at its best, with a twist. Robert, the main character, is being kept in a small cage at the beginning, but he is then rescued by someone in the future...from a parallel universe! This puts Robert on the track of trying to change his future and the world's while dealing with skeptics and those who wish to destroy him all along the way.

Although I love Ted Chiang, his novella, "Seventy Two Letters," was hard to get into at the beginning. I couldn't quite grasp what was going on, but once I did, it moved along pretty well. In the final analysis, all of the stories were entertaining, except for the few "news articles." I don't care for it when writers pen fake futuristic news articles, and these were my least favorite parts of the book. Thank goodness there were very few of them.


Over all, YEAR'S BEST SF6 is a must for any sci-fi fan. I hope the next edition is just as good and better - no fake news articles, please!

YEAR'S BEST SF6

Grade: B+

Author(s): Various, edited by David G. Hartwell

Publisher: EOS

Price: $7.50