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I thought this had a lot of mediocre stories, with only a couple that were memorable and particularly interesting. I enjoyed the 22nd annual collection more.
I thought this had a lot of mediocre stories, with only a couple that were memorable and particularly interesting. I enjoyed the 22nd annual collection more.
Originally published at midureads.wordpress.com on January 17, 2018.
A Viking adventure with all the gore and blood that you could ask for. If only I could have been made to care for the characters…
Soldiers learning to maneuver robots in the war have to do as part of a hive mind. Pretty soon, real life cannot compare with the virtual one that they lead with the other members of the hive.
A retelling of the myth of Marcus Atilius Regulus, a Roman Consul. In the story, he is tortured by Carthaginians before his death. Everything in the story is actually setting up the reader for the way he dies.
An abused child grows up into a sociopath. You can guess what happens next!
It isn’t that bioengineered soldiers haven’t been done before. Here though the author makes it all about religion.
A black man joins the army in the eradication of Native Americans. The story remains localized and makes no claims about the big picture.
A coma patient becomes an avenging spirit with a special soft place in her heart for kids.
I have been wondering if I would like Gabaldon’s writing and I wonder no more. This story is based on a skirmish between the French and English soldiers on Canadian soil.
Nature and “people” come together in this story to save the land. I liked this one because plants featured in it.
POVs change as we see Carthage fall and a Roman general plays mind games with the Carthaginians he will be selling off to slavery.
Canine gladiators and sibling love made this story one of my faves!
An alien race tries to take over the planet and humans band together to stop that from happening. They also have help from the unlikeliest of sources.
Women have faced discrimination whenever they have dared to step into a profession. Flying planes during a war isn’t any different.
A mercenary is hired to rescue a princess who didn’t really need to be rescued. The princess was a pleasant surprise.
A utopian dream to unite the world while a war goes on outside. Didn’t take too long for it to unravel.
AIs rule the world. Humans don’t stand a chance against them yet they won’t give up fighting back or remembering how life used to be.
Sometimes, the enemy on the other side of the border is your friend. In this story, soldiers who trained together are forced to fight against each other when France daren’t go against Germany.
Soldiers have been manning an entry point into their empire for years now. No reinforcements have arrived for some time. The absence of enemies starts to make them think. Does the empire they have been defending even exist anymore?
A bully of an emperor keeps an architect alive just to torture him. The ending was a letdown.
A tale of Egg, the squire who isn’t a squire, and the knight he serves.
I’d say, you won’t be missing much if you didn’t read this anthology. But that’s just me…
Of all the books I remember reading when I was growing up, there are few that I remember as fondly as The Year's Best Science Fiction series edited by Gardner Dozios. For several summers, getting the annual volume (which is usually published in July) became an event, one that I especially appreciated if it was released before my family went on a vacation that involved many hours with me cramped in to the back seat of our car. Though I stopped buying the books around the time I left for college (little money) and sold the volumes I had (even less bookshelf space), my affection for the story-packed volumes never faded.
So when I saw a couple of the volumes on a shelf of my local library last weekend, I decided to check one of them out. Of the two I chose the twenty-sixth volume because it had in it a story ( Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "G-Men") about which I have seen references but had not been able to find until now. Reading the book has been an unadulteratedly positive experience, mixing the nostalgia I have for the series with the pleasure of discovering great stories for the first time. I've only read a third of the stories so far, but I've already enjoyed a few (particularly James Alan Gardner's "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story and James L. Cambias's "Balancing Accounts") which will long remain with me. Once I'm done with this one I plan on getting the other volumes that my library has, as they're perfect for the short bursts of reading time that I sometimes have when engaging with anything longer can be frustrating.
Unicorn Variations by Roger Zelazny
If an anthology starts as strong as this one did, then there’s no way I would not continue reading it! Consider the human species about to become extinct and our fate hinging on a chess match between a bartender, a unicorn, and a sasquatch.
Fire Watch by Connie Willis
I had already read this story & liked it. Keep a box of tissues handy when you read it!
Hardfought by Greg Bear
I am not ashamed to say that I abandoned this one halfway through into the story. It was too convoluted and complex for me to care about what was happening to the characters.
The Peacemaker by Gardner Dozois
Fanaticism can be found in all kinds of worlds and often results in innocents getting hurt and this story was no exception.
Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler
In a world gone silent due to a viral mutation, chaos and animalistic behavior is the rule of the day.
Press Enter by John Varley
Press Enter and find out things, if you dare!
I hugged her, and her breath came again, hot on my chest. I wondered how I'd lived so long without such a simple miracle as that.
Portraits of His Children by George R. R. Martin
I was surprised to read this story but not when it didn’t turn out to be anything special. The premise was good but the execution was too typical for me to enjoy it.
Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy
An ape raised as a human child by a scientist is left to fend for herself when her father dies.
Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans
A hamburger joint that serves customers from all dimensions.
Even in the realities where the Europeans never found America and it's the Chinese or somebody building the cities, there just isn't any reason to build anything near Sutton. And there's something that makes it an easy place to travel between worlds, too; I didn't follow the explanation. She said something about the Earth's magnetic field, but I didn't catch whether that was part of the explanation or just a comparison of some kind.
Ripples in the Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis
A time traveler who can’t return to his own time. Because. Consequences.
Once I tried to commit suicide by murdering my father, before he met my mother, twenty-three years
before I was born. It changed nothing, of course, and even when I did it, I knew it would change nothing.
But you have to try these things. How else could I know for sure?
Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas
A teenager has to deal with teasing and bullying at school because of developing earlier than her classmates and finds an unusual bloody silver lining that just might help her get through!
The Manamouki by Mike Resnick
A couple emigrates to a Kenya-esque world and tries their damnedest to fit in and yet…
Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson
Exactly what the title says and yet you will enjoy it, if you have fun reading weird things.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
Genetic developments allow parents to specify what their offspring should be like down to the last detail. When a couple is about to have a baby, the father chooses to have her be sleepless. Even a world so advanced in genetics isn’t ready for sleepless people taking over it.
Barnacle Bill the Spacer by Lucius Shepard
Barnacle Bill is a simple man whose job is to remove barnacles from the shuttle’s exterior walls. All he wants is to make himself useful, so he won’t be sent back to Earth, which would be a death sentence. Is it ever that easy?
The power of the Strange Magnificence, you see, lay in the subversive nihilism of their doctrine, which put forward the idea that it was man's duty to express all his urges, no matter how dark or violent, and that from the universal exorcism of these black secrets would ultimately derive a pure consensus, a vast averaging of all possible behaviors that would in turn reveal the true character of God and the manifest destiny of the race. Thus the leaders of the Magnificence saw nothing contrary in funding a group in York, say, devoted to the expulsion of Pakistanis from Britain by whatever means necessary while simultaneously supporting a Sufi cult.
Fiction or prescience?
Danny Goes to Mars by Pamela Sargent
Danny is the next presidential candidate who is advised to join an astronaut team to Mars to increase his chances of winning in the upcoming elections. The results didn’t quite meet his expectations but when do they ever!
The Nutcracker Coup by Janet Kagan
A human diplomat unwittingly incites a people (I use that term loosely because they are quadrupeds and had quills) to rebel against their ruler. Oh, and nutcrackers play a big role in the rebellion!
I think this anthology was a really good one even if did take me ages to finish it. I enjoyed reading, Unicorn Variations, The Manamouki, Barnacle Bill the Spacer, Danny Goes to Mars, & The Nutcracker Coup, the most. I purchased this book from Kitabain and am so glad that I did!
The first subdivision of the Dangerous Women anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois is a mix bag of both story quality and the interpretation of the phrase ‘dangerous women’. In seven stories across genres around the central theme of women who are dangerous, a reader is treated to see women in various ways only but is also forced to figure out if the women presented or alluded to are actually dangerous.
Of the seven stories featured in Dangerous Women 1 the three best at presenting both a very good story and dangerous women were Carrie Vaugh’s “Raisa Stepanova”, Megan Abbott’s “My Heart Is Either Broken”, and George R.R. Martin’s “The Princess and the Queen”. Just outside these three was Cecelia Holland’s “Nora’s Song” which had a very good story but was seen from the perspective of a little girl finding out how dangerous her mother is. These four stories were at the very beginning and the last three stories of the collection giving the anthology a strong start and finish.
However, the three stories in the middle suffered from a failure of either not being very good or not having a dangerous woman. Both Megan Lindholm’s “Neighbors” and Joe R. Lansdale’s “Wrestling Jesus” were very good stories, but the danger posed by the women either featured or more mentioned then seen was hard to detect. But the weakest story of the entire collection was Lawrence Block’s “I Know How to Pick’em” which went from having potential to falling flat by the end.
Overall Dangerous Women 1 is a mixed bag of very good stories with strong female characters, just very good stories with no danger attached to any female character, and just plain bad all around. The best that could be said is in the end the reader is the ultimate judge.
Individual Story Ratings
Raisa Stepanova by Carrie Vaughn (4/5)
I Know How to Pick’em by Lawrence Block (1/5)
Neighbors by Megan Lindholm (2.5/5)
Wrestling Jesus by Joe R. Lansdale (2/5)
My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott (4/5)
Nora’s Song by Cecelia Holland (3.5/5)
The Princess and the Queen by George R.R. Martin (4/5)
