This is the third installment of David G. Hartwell's annual Year's Best collection, and he writes that it is "full of science fiction--every story in the book is clearly that and not something else."

Hartwell chose 22 stories this time around, a healthy increase from last year's collection. (This doesn't represent more pages, but rather in selecting stories of shorter length, Hartwell was able to fit more of them into the same space.) As usual, Hartwell does a masterful job of picking wonderful works from a variety of venues, and the names here include Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, and Gene Wolfe. This is the perfect collection for readers seeking stories that are quintessentially science fiction. Year's Best SF is rapidly becoming one of the most important annual anthologies in the science fiction field. --Craig Engler

Book Description
Enjoy today's most awesome and innovative science fiction, chosen by acclaimed editor David G. Hartwell from the best short fiction published over the last year. Like its two distinguished processors, Year's Best SF 3 is a cybercopia of astonishing stories from familiar favorites and rising stars, all calculated to blow your mind, scorch your, senses, erase your inhibitions, and reinitialize your intelligence. With stories from: Gregory Benford, Terry Bisson, Greg Egan, William Gibson, Nancy Kress, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe and more...

Download Description
"Enjoy today's most awesome and innovative science fiction, chosen by acclaimed editor David G. Hartwell from the best short fiction published over the last year. Like its two distinguished processors, Year's Best SF 3 is a cybercopia of astonishing stories from familiar favorites and rising stars, all calculated to blow your mind, scorch your, senses, erase your inhibitions, and reinitialize your intelligence. With stories from: Gregory Benford, Terry Bisson, Greg Egan, William Gibson, Nancy Kress, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe and 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.

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