The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, the granddaddy of sf year’s best anthologies, is out. Published by St. Martin’s, and edited, as always, by Gardner Dozois, this volume runs 662 pages. Dozois’s annual summation—an overview of the short science fiction field with specific examples and some coverage of book publishing, movies, and the people—runs a seemingly small 28 pages (I don’t have last year’s volume to compare it to), and the list of honorable mentions at the back is 10 pages long. But the bulk of the book, and its raison d’être, as always, is the stories. This year, there are 28 stories Dozois deemed worthy of inclusion.
The sources of those stories is an interesting reflection of the changes in publishing over the last few years: seven were originally published in on-line sources, two others in small press chapbooks, and two in small press anthologies. Even the “traditional” sources seem to be changing. Asimov’s Science Fiction (which Dozois edited until two years ago) is the single largest source, with seven stories making the book, but The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was the only other paper magazine to provide more than one story (there are two from F&SF). British magazine Interzone and Irish magazine Albedo 1 each put one story in the book. Of the five other stories published in anthologies, four came from two books that Dozois published through the Science Fiction Book Club. Jim Baen’s Universe, an online magazine, is the second most popular contributor, with three stories in the book originally appearing there.
It’s rare for Dozois to choose more than one story by one author, and this year, only one managed the double: Alastair Reynolds.
Of the 268 authors receiving honorable mentions, most did so for only one story. But Robert Reed led the pack with an astonishing 14 stories listed as honorable mentions. Far behind him was Terry Bisson with 8, and then several other authors had six.
The stories making the cut (in Dozois’s opinion; we’ll see how the other year’s bests shake out in the coming weeks), in alphabetical order by author, are:
“Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi
“Where the Golden Apples Grow” by Kage Baker
“Every Hole is Outlined” by John Barnes
“The Pacific Mystery” by Stephen Baxter
“The Ile of Dogges” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
“Bow Shock” by Gregory Benford
“The Town on Blighted Sea” by A.M. Dellamonica
“I, Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow
“Riding the Crocodile” by Greg Egan
“Okanoggan Falls” by Carolyn Ives Gilman
“Damascus” by Daryl Gregory
“The Big Ice” by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold
“I Hold My Father’s Paw” by David D. Levine
“The Highway Men” by Ken MacLeod
“Kin” by Bruce McAllister
“Dead Men Walking” by Paul J. McAuley
“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald
“Good Mountain” by Robert Reed
“Nightingale” by Alastair Reynolds
“Signal to Noise” by Alastair Reynolds
“The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Home Movies” by Mary Rosenblum
“Life on the Preservation” by Jack Skillingstead
“In the River” by Justin Stanchfield
“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick
“Far As You Can Go” by Greg Van Eekhout
“Incarnation Day” by Walter Jon Williams
“Julian: A Christmas Story” by Robert Charles Wilson
Comparing these stories to the major awards, we find the comparison to the Nebula ballot increasingly difficult, due to the “rolling eligibility” criteria for the Nebula (most of the stories on this year’s ballot were published in 2005), but the three that were published in 2006 all receieved honorable mentions in Dozois’s anthology.
Looking at the Hugo ballot, we find quite a bit of overlap: Robert Charles Wilson’s novella “Julian: A Christmas Story,” Paolo Bacigalupi’s novelette “Yellow Card Man,” Ian McDonald’s novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” Bruce McAllister’s short story “Kin,” and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s short story “The House Beyond Your Sky” all appeared on this year’s ballot (the winners will be announced at the end of this month). The other four novellas on the ballot earned honorable mentions, as did the three other novelettes, and the three other short stories. What does this mean? Probably that Dozois is very much in tune with the people who nominate for the Hugo Awards.