Year's Best Sf 4 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction))

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Product Description

Travel to the Farthest Reaches of the Imagination

Acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell is back with his fourth annual high-powered collection of the year's most inventive, entertaining, and awe-inspiring science fiction. In short, the best.

Here are stories from today's top name authors, plus exciting newcomers, all eager to land you on exotic planets, introduce you to strange new life forms, and show you scenes more amazing than anything you've imagined.

So sit back and blast off for an amazing trip with
Stephen Baxter
Gregory Benford
David Brin
Nancy Kress
Bruce Sterling
Michael Swanwick
and many more...

Amazon.com Review

The fourth volume in David G. Hartwell's ongoing Year's Best SF anthology series is something of a departure from his previous efforts. This time around, Hartwell has made a conscious decision to seek out great stories from unexpected places, a move that has paid off handsomely. For instance, several of the stories here are from the British SF magazine Interzone (one is a translation of a French piece that first appeared in Galaxies 4), and he has even taken a story from the pages of Popular Science. As usual, however, all of his selections have two things in common: they are all unquestionably works of "science fiction" (which is to say, they do not cross over into other genres such as horror or fantasy), and they are all of excellent quality.

Probably the crown jewel of this book is the most talked-about story of 1998, Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life." This is only Chiang's fourth story, but he has already earned an impressive number of awards for his work, including the Nebula Award and the J. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Michael Swanwick's piece "Radiant Doors"--which plays off C.M. Kornbluth's classic story "The Marching Morons"-- is also a standout, as is Alexander Jablokov's "Minority Report." In fact, most of these stories are impressive in one way or another, although--as with any collection--some succeed better than others. Overall, this is probably the most representative "Year's Best" collection to appear in recent memory, and it's a shame that Hartwell is limiting himself to just one volume per year. --Craig E. Engler