In 1996, editor/critic David G. Hartwell began selecting his best-of-the-year stories in an anthology providing an interesting juxtaposition to Gardner Dozois's long-running Year's Best Science Fiction series.

Most of Hartwell's picks are by leading authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Reed, Gene Wolfe, Brian Aldiss, Stephen Baxter, Brian M. Stableford, and Sarah Zettel; several are by less-well-known writers.

Don't miss "Game of the Century," "Visit the Sins," "Kinds of Strangers," or "Huddle." Hugo nominees include "Ancient Engines" by Michael Swanwick, "Fossil Games" by Tom Purdom, "Border Guards" by Greg Egan, and "Macs" by Terry Bisson (which also won the Nebula short story award).

Small, light, and less costly than most anthologies, Hartwell's fifth collection is one of the series' strongest; almost every one of the 24 stories (plus one poem) makes an enjoyable read. --Bonnie Bouman



"An impressive roster of authors."


Book Description
Experience New RealmsAcclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell returns with this fifth annual collection of the year's most imaginative, entertaining, and mind-expanding science fiction.Here are works from some of today's most acclaimed authors, as well as visionary new talents, that will introduce you to new ideas, offer unusual perspectives, and take you to places beyond your wildest imaginings. Contributors to The Year's Best SF 5 include:Brian AldissStephen BaxterMichael Bishop Terry BissonGreg EganRobert ReedKim Stanley RobinsonHiroe SugaMichael SwanwickGene Wolfeand many more...


Download Description
Experience New RealmsAcclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell returns with this fifth annual collection of the year's most imaginative, entertaining, and mind-expanding science fiction.Here are works from some of today's most acclaimed authors, as well as visionary new talents, that will introduce you to new ideas, offer unusual perspectives, and take you to places beyond your wildest imaginings. Contributors to The Year's Best SF 5 include:Brian AldissStephen BaxterMichael Bishop Terry BissonGreg EganRobert ReedKim Stanley RobinsonHiroe SugaMichael SwanwickGene Wolfeand many more...


About the Author
David G. Hartwell is a Senior Editor at Tor/Forge Books. He is the proprietor of Dragon Press, publisher and bookseller, which publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, Northern Stars, The Ascent of Wonder (co-edited with Kathryn Cramer), and a number of Christmas anthologies. Recently he edited his sixth annual paperback volume of Year's Best SF and co-edited the new Year's Best Fantasy. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll and has been nominated for the Hugo Award twenty-four times to date.


Excerpted from Year's Best SF 5 by David G. Hartwell. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Chapter OneWhen we knew Granddad was going to die, we took him to see the Angel of the North.When he got there, he said: It's all different. There were none of these oaks all around it then, he said. Look at the size of diem! The last time I saw this, he says to me, I was no older than you are now, and it was brand new, and we couldn't make out if we liked it or not.We took him, the whole lot of us, on the tram from Blaydon. We made a day of it. All of Dad's exes and their exes and some of their kids and me Aunties and their exes and their kids. It wasn't that happy a group to tell you the truth. But Granddad loved seeing us all in one place.He was going a bit soft by then. He couldn't tell what the time was any more and his words came out wrong. The Mums made us sit on his lap. He kept calling me by my Dad's name. His breath smelt funny but I didn't mind, not too much. He told me about how things used to be in Blaydon.They used to have a gang in the Dene called Pedro's Gang. They drank something called Woodpecker and broke people's windows and they left empty tins of pop in the woods. If you were little you weren't allowed out cos everyone's Mum was so fearful and all. Granddad once saw twelve young lads go over and hit an old woman and take her things. One night his brother got drunk and put his fist through a window, and he went to the hospital, and he had to wait hours before they saw him and that was terrible. I thought it sounded exciting meself. But I didn't say so because Granddad wanted me to know how much better things are now.He says to me, like: the trouble was, Landlubber, we were just kids, but we all thought the future would be-terrible. We all thought the world was going to bum up, and that everyone would get poorer and poorer, and the crime worse.He told me that lots of people had no work. I don't really understand how anyone could have nothing to do. But then I've never got me head around what money used to be either.Or why they built that Angel. It's not even that big, and it was old and covered in rust. It didn't look like an Angel to me at all, the wings were so big and square. Granddad said, no, it looks like an airplane, that's what airplanes looked like back then. It's meant to go rusty, it's the Industrial Spirit of the North.I didn't know what he was on about. I asked Dad why the Angel was so important and he kept explaining it had a soul, but couldn't say how. The church choir showed UP and started singing hymns. Then it started to rain. It was a wonderful day out.I went back into the tram and asked me watch about the Angel.This is my watch, here, see? It's dead good isn't it, it's got all sorts on it. It takes photographs and all. Here, look this is the picture it took of Granddad by the Angel. It's the last picture I got of him. You can talk to people on it and it keeps thinking of fun things for you to do. IWhy no not explain to the interviewer why the Angel of the North isimportant?Duh. Usually, they're fun.Take the train to Newcastle and walk along the river until you see on the hill where people keep their homing pigeons. Muck out the cages for readies.It's useful when you're a bit short, it comes up with ideas to make some dosh.It's really clever. It takes all the stuff that goes on around here and stirs it around and comes up with something new. Here, listen:The laws of evolution have been applied to fun. New generations of ideas are generated and eliminated at such a speed that evolution works in real time. It's survival of the funnest and you decideThey evolve machines too. Have you seen our new little airplanes? They've run the designs through thousands of generations, and they got better and faster and smarter.The vicar bought the whole church choir airplanes they can wear. The wings are really good, they look just like bird's wings with pinions sticking out like this. Oh! I really want one of them. You can turn somersaults in them. People build them in their sheds for spare readies, I could get one now if I had the dosh.Every Sunday as long as it isn't raining, you can see the church choir take off in formation. Little old ladies in leotards and blue jeans and these big embroidered Mexican hats. They rev up and take off and start to sing the Muslim .call to prayer. They echo all over the show. Then they cut their engines and spiral up on the updraft. That's when they start up on Nearer My God to Thee.Every Sunday, Granddad and I used to walk up Shibbon Road to the Dene. It's so high up there that we could look down on top of them. He never got over it. Once he laughed so hard he fell down, and just lay there on the grass. We just lay on our backs and looked up at the choir, they just kept going up like they were kites.When the Travellers come to Blaydon, they join in. Their wagons are pulled by horses and have calliopes built into the front, so on Sundays, when the choir goes up, the calliopes start up, so you got organ music all over the show as well. Me Dad calls Blaydon a sound sandwich. He says it's all the hills.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Experience New Realms

Acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell returns with this fifth annual collection of the year's most imaginative, entertaining, and mind-expanding science fiction.

Here are works from some of today's most acclaimed authors, as well as visionary new talents, that will introduce you to new ideas, offer unusual perspectives, and take you to places beyond your wildest imaginings. Contributors to The Year's Best SF 5 include:Brian AldissStephen BaxterMichael Bishop Terry BissonGreg EganRobert ReedKim Stanley RobinsonHiroe SugaMichael SwanwickGene Wolfeand many more...

Author Biography: David Hartwell is currently a senior editor at Tor/Forge Books, as well as the editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Science Fiction. He has edited numerous anthologies, including The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1988) and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (1989) and has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Editor twenty times.

FROM THE CRITICS

VOYA - William J. White

The fourteen stories in this anthology include works by such luminaries as Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Joe Haldeman, Robert Silverberg, and Robert Sheckley as well as tales from popular "newcomers" like Stephen Baxter and Nancy Kress. All are thoughtful, well-constructed, and readable. My own favorites included Baxter's very hard SF tale of two space travelers marooned on Pluto after their wormhole "malfunctions;" Haldeman's story of a romance among artists competing in a contest sponsored by an Earth depopulated by an alien attack; and, of course, Gene Wolfe's strange and disturbing story Ziggurat, in which a divorced entrepreneur in an isolated cabin in the woods has a series of strange encounters with time travelers whose vehicle has broken down on a nearby lake. The stories represent a variety of subgenres within the field of science fiction. There is cyberpunk, as in William Browning Spencer's Downloading Midnight; time travel, from Wolfe and McKillip; an allohistorical "what if" story from William Barton that describes an alternate NASA space program; and, of course, hard science fiction from Baxter and Benford. Le Guin returns to the planet Winter, the setting of her classic novel, Left Hand of Darkness (Ace, 1969), in Coming of Age in Karhide. For the most part, this is mature and literate science fiction gathered from a variety of subgenres and publications that should appeal to most science fiction readers. VOYA Codes: 3Q 3P M J S (Readable without serious defects, Will appeal with pushing, Middle School-defined as grades 6 to 8, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

VOYA - Vicky Burkholder

Each year thousands of science fiction authors submit their stories to magazines, but only a small fraction of those will ever see publication. No matter what the size of that fraction is, editors of "Best of" anthologies have to sift through hundreds of stories from dozens of magazines to find those gems they deem the best. Dozois and Hartwell have done just that in these two volumes. Hartwell's third "best of" anthology contains twenty-two stories from such authors as Gregory Benford, Greg Egan, Robert Silverberg, Terry Bisson, and others. According to Hartwell, "It is the intention of this...series to focus entirely on science fiction"; fantasy, horror, and other genres are not covered here. This in no way limits the scope of the stories, however, which includes everything from biologic warfare from unexpected sources (The Mendelian Lamp Case by Paul Levinson) to time travel (The Nostalginauts by S. N. Dyer) to what happens when mankind's life span reaches immortality (The Pipes of Pan by Brian Stableford). Each story is prefaced by a short introduction that highlights the author, where the story was published, and the theme. One of the best introductions is found in The Petting Zoo, by Gene Wolfe, a story about a young boy who brings a dinosaur to life with unexpected consequences. Hartwell's introduction says it all: "...what might it mean if the dinosaurs came back as Barney?" Dozois presents a similar scenario with his fifteenth volume of best stories. His collection consists of twenty-eight stories, five of which are duplicated in Hartwell's book. One plus of Dozois's book is its listing of 275 honorable mentions at the end. Like Hartwell's collection, this book contains only science fiction stories and authors like Silverberg, Egan, Stableford, Ian McDonald, and James Patrick Kelly. Steamship Soldier on the Information Front by Nancy Kress takes "a critical look at the high pressure, high-tech, high-bit-rate lifestyle...a warning that no matter how fast you run, there's always something just a little bit faster coming up behind you." Like many science fiction stories, it is a commentary on today's society couched in futuristic terms. If your library has previous volumes of these series, these are must buys. If not, start with these and know that you have the best of the best in science fiction. If budgets are extremely tight and only one volume is possible, choose Dozois only because of his extensive honorable mention listing. Note: This review was written and published to address two titles: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection and Year's Best SF 3. VOYA Codes: 5Q 2P J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written, For the YA with a special interest in the subject, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

KLIATT