The 30th edition of Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction has been published today. This is consistently the best of the year's-best anthologies in the field — absolutely indispensable. The series is celebrating the thirtieth milestone with an especially amazing installment. Editor Gardner Dozois explains:
It shows the continuing evolution of the field in the Twenty-First Century, as new types of people with new perspective and new approaches continue to come into it, people who might not have fit comfortably into John W. Campbell's largely white, male, middle-class, American stable of writers at ANALOG in the '30s and '40s. This volume contains work by Indian writers such as Indrapreamit Das and Vandana Singh, Israeli writers such as Lavie Tidhar, French writers such as Aliette de Bodard, Finnish writers like Hannu Rajaniemi, Australian writers such as Sean McMullen, Canadians such as Robert Charles Wilson, English writers such as Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, and Adam Roberts, and lots of women writers, such as, in addition to the ones already named, Pat Cadigan, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Carrie Vaughn, Linda Nagata, Megan Lindholm, Brit Mandelo, and Sarah Monette. In addition to new writers, short science fiction is now appearing widely outside of the traditional genre print magazines, and this anthology contains almost as many stories from online electronic sources as it does from print sources, including two stories (the Bear & Monette and the Robert Charles Wilson) that had only appeared before in audio form, as podcasts, and had never before been collected in print form.
And every year the older writers (some of them, anyway) continue to do really good work as well. I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher–and I've been watching the field for a long time.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection
