The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online Page A

good ultra-small press anthologies from Hadley Rille Books, edited by Eric T. Reynolds, Visual Journeys and Ruins Extraterrestrial. Reynolds brought out another three anthologies this year, Return to Luna (Hadley Rille Books), Desolate Places (Hadley Rille Books – co-edited with Adam Nakama), and Barren Worlds (Hadley Rille Books – co-edited with Adam Nakama), but unfortunately they were much weaker, with some decent work but nothing particularly memorable. Return to Luna was marginally the strongest of the three.
    Noted without comment is Galactic Empires (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Gardner Dozois.
    The best fantasy anthology was probably Fast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Playful and a lot of fun, it’s an anthology of original pirate story/fantasy crosses, pirate/slipstream crosses, and even a few pirate/SF crosses. If some authors here give the impression that the whole of their research into pirates consisted of watching a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean , others clearly know their stuff, and, for the most part, even the stories that are the sketchiest on the pirate stuff make up for it with the colourful fantasy element. There’s first-rate work here by Garth Nix, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Kage Baker, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Naomi Novik, Howard Waldrop, Carrie Vaughn, and others. Also excellent is Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (Subterranean), edited by William Schafer. The stories here are fairly representative of the kind of stories usually to be found on the Subterranean website, although none of them actually appeared there, being published for the first time here instead: fantasy, dark fantasy sometimes shading into horror, a smattering of science fiction, all extremely well crafted. The best stories here are by William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, Patrick Rothfuss, Kage Baker, although there’s also good work by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Carey, and others. Also good was A Book of Wizards (Science Fiction Book Club), edited by Marvin Kaye, which featured novellas by Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Patricia A. McKillip, and others. There was also another instalment in a long-running fantasy anthology series, Swords and Sorceress XXIII (Norilana), edited by Elizabeth Waters.
    Pleasant but minor fantasy anthologies included Warrior Wisewoman (Norilana), edited by Roby James; Enchantment Place (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Fellowship Fantastic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes; Mystery Date (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Something Magic This Way Comes (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Sarah Hoyt; Witch High (DAW), edited by Denise Little; Catopolis (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack; My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon (St. Martin’s Griffin), edited by P. N. Elrod; Magic in the Mirrorstone: Tales of Fantasy (Mirrorstone), edited by Steve Berman; and Lace and Blade (Lada), a fantasy/romance cross edited by Deborah J. Ross.
    It’s worth mentioning here that some of the anthologies mentioned above as SF anthologies, such as Clockwork Phoenix, Dreaming Again , and the Whates anthologies, had substantial amounts of good fantasy in them as well, sometimes nearly half the contents.
    The line between fantasy and slipstream is often hard to draw rigorously, but anthologies that seemed to me more slipstream than fantasy
    (in spite of some of their titles) included: Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy (Five Senses Press), edited by Ekaterina Sedia; Subtle Edens (Elastic Press), edited by Allen Ashley; Alembical (Paper Golem), edited by Lawrence M. Shoen and Arthur Dorrance; Spicy Slipstream Stories (Lethe Press), edited by Nick Mamatas and Jay Lake; A Field Guide to Surreal Biology (Two Cranes Press), edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg; and Tesseracts Twelve (Edge), edited by Claude Lalumiere.
    Shared world anthologies, many of them superhero oriented, included Wild Cards :