The Year's Best Science Fiction Series

This is first post in a series reviewing the stories published in the Gardner Dozois-edited series of anthologies called the Year's Best Science Fiction. Beginning in 1984, Dozois--then editor of Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine as well as countless themed anthologies--began publishing these weighty surveys of short fiction. At a time when the SF novel market began favoring bloated trilogies, movie & TV tie-ins and military space opera, Dozois (following in the footsteps of the groundbreaking IASFM editor Sheila Murphy) was keeping the flame of tight, focused storytelling alive in the genre. He either discovered or fostered the careers of many writers who went on to fame: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick, Connie Willis, Orson Scott Card, etc.

I probably would have given up on SF as kid stuff, had I not begun reading IASFM and these anthologies at a crucial point in my teen years. Writers like John Kessel and Lucius Shepard were not just great genre practitioners, but literary stylists--certainly the equal of the mundane authors in that other anthology series Best American Short Stories.

Dozois snagged the lion's share of great stories of IASFM, but these anthologies allowed him to also present tales that had been sold to competing magazines like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog & Omni, as well as from smaller publications.

The introductions to each volume are overviews of the entire SF field--including novels, movies & TV. These can be slightly depressing as it always seems that SF magazines are folding and publishing houses cutting back.

When the first volume came out, in 1984, SF was already entering a sort of renaissance, with energetic new writers publishing their most intense work, usually in short form. Many of these writers appear in the very first volume:
Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, John Kessel, Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside them are writers whose careers began a decade or more earlier--James Tiptree Jr., Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe--as well as a few grandmasters from the golden and silver ages--Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg.

It will be interesting to revisit the stories in these anthologies, and to read the many, many of them I never got around to. Also, I look forward to following the series into the 1990s and 2000s when I was not following SF very closely.

Next up: The first story in the first anthology-- "Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling.