The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

July 13, 2009
Strahan's third annual anthology provides a solid sampler of good fiction. Stories by well-known authors Holly Black, Stephen King and the late Joan Aiken, though strong, are outclassed by masterful and innovative genre tales written by relative newcomers, such as Kij Johnson's “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” Meghan McCarron's “The Magician's House” and Ken Scholes's “The Doom of Love in Small Spaces.” Also notable, Paolo Bacigalupi's “The Gambler,” John Kessel's “Pride and Prometheus” and Rachel Swirsky's “Marry the Sun” use traditional storytelling techniques to build powerful, exciting tales. Only Garth Nix's overlong “Beyond the Sea Gates of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe” and Margo Lanagan's predictable “Machine Maid” are substandard. Strahan's introduction gives a nice overview of the state of the genre.

February 21, 2011
Strahan's fifth anthology contains 29 wide-ranging tales. Neil Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is a deceptively simple folktale-styled story of the price one may pay for gold. "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey Landis untangles a complex knot of childish power. Sarah Rees Brennan's "The Spy Who Never Grew Up" gives a beloved childhood icon a sinister update; Diana Peterfreund's "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" turns unicorn lore on its head; and Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" puts a fantasy spin on the temporal culture shock of immortality. This year the fantasy tales outdo the SF in depth of storytelling and characterization, though all the inclusions are strong, with few ideas left by the wayside.

April 1, 2007
This is an excellent sampling of some of the most interesting contemporary voices in sf and fantasy, including Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Link, and Paul Di Filippo, tackling a pleasingly wide range of subject matter. Jeffrey Fords "Night Whiskey" concerns the strange customs of a small town and the terrible things that sometimes come out of the unknown. Christopher Rowes "Another Word for Map Is Faith" concerns a future in which the faithful of Christendom traverse the earth, "correcting" geography to conform to the errors on maps. The volume closer, Ian McDonalds "Djinns Wife," is a lovely fairy tale of the future about a dancer who marries an AI; as the narrator observes, even if it doesnt have a happy ending like a Bollywood movie, it has a happy enough ending. Editor Strahan has selected a lot of winning stories here, well worth revisiting, often more than once.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)

March 31, 2014
Strahan remains confident and competent following his series’ move to a new publisher. He makes a point of invoking the venerable tradition of “annual snapshot of the SF field,” name checking editorial luminaries like Judith Merril, David G. Hartwell, and Gardner Dozois. While there are one or two false notes, such as Val Nolan’s interminable “The Irish Astronaut,” most of the 28 stories reward reading. Of particular note are Yoon Ha Lee’s “Effigy Nights,” in which an occupied people turn to books to protect themselves from an occupying force; Eleanor Arnason’s “Kormack the Lucky,” whose protagonist struggles to win freedom in a world founded on slavery; K.J. Parker’s cheerfully amoral “The Sun and I”; and Ian McDonald’s comic “The Queen of Night’s Aria.” Small-press anthologies and independent zines are well represented in the table of contents; the Big Three print magazines are notable mainly by their absence—an indication of the evolving face of speculative fiction. Strahan’s work doesn’t quite achieve Merril’s literary range, but it compares favorably with Hartwell’s steadfast traditionalism and Dozois’s weighty tomes.

Starred review from February 26, 2007
Australian editor Strahan (Best Short Novels: 2007
) gathers 24 stories from a wealth of standard and New Age publications for a provocative anthology that will satisfy readers looking for fresh, contemporary work that stretches both SF and fantasy boundaries. Walter Jon Williams's bittersweet "Incarnation Day" and Cory Doctorow's oddly touching "I, Row-Boat" extrapolate current bioengineering and robotics trends into far-flung times and places. Kelly Link's elegiac "The Wizards of Perfil" and Peter S. Beagle's perceptive take on siblinghood, "El Regalo," skew family relationships into bizarre and endearing new shapes. Still others, especially Elizabeth Hand's exquisite "The Saffron Gatherer" and Margo Lanagan's terrifying "Under Hell, Over Heaven," defy categorization, offering flashes of primal recognition of the peaks and valleys of human emotion. Except for a few forays into gory violence (possibly influenced by current video gaming), these stories all refract experience into kaleidoscopic new worlds—strange, dangerous and lovely.

March 24, 2008
Australian anthologist Strahan’s second annual “best of” collection is too small to hold all the great speculative stories of 2007, but it provides an excellent sampler, focusing on the recent trend of interstitiality. Kelly Link’s “The Constable of Abal,” which revolves around an unscrupulous fortuneteller and her daughter’s search for home, is equal parts fantasy, coming-of-age tale and unconventional ghost story. Ken MacLeod’s “Jesus Christ, Reanimator,” about the inglorious Second Coming of a blogging messiah from outer space, wraps social commentary in sardonic science fiction. Holly Black’s poignant “The Coat of Stars” blends together elements of folklore and urban grit to create an unlikely and deeply moving story about love and loss. If these 24 stories are any indication, SF and fantasy are continuing their evolution—or “dissolution,” as Strahan calls it—just as they always have: through innovative writers re-examining conventions and redefining boundaries.

February 8, 2010
Strahan’s introduction calls 2008 “a good but not exceptional year for short fiction,” and in accurate reflection, all 29 stories collected here are good, but few are great. The standouts are memorable in a variety of ways: for sheer power of narrative voice, Pat Cadigan’s “Truth and Bone”; for human connections to inscrutable aliens, Damien Broderick’s “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide”; for humor amid life-and-death peril, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s “Mongoose.” Hard SF fans should seek out the imperiled far future Earth of Stephen Baxter’s “Formidable Caress,” while a sense of wonder and menace permeates Peter Watts’s “The Island.” A few stories don’t feel as strong as they might have been, but there are no real wrong turns.