Monday, August 25, 2008

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two, 2008

Edited by Jonathan Strahan

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
A man travels to the past through a magical gate.

"The Last and Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French" by Peter S. Beagle
A man can't remember how to speak English and can only speak French.

"Trunk and Disorderly" by Charles Stross
A man has to rescue his robot girlfriend from a diabolical plot.

"Glory" by Greg Egan
Two visitors come to a planet searching for the lost theorems of a vanished race only to become embroiled in a power struggle between two rival nations.

"Dead Horse Point" by Daryl Gregory
A woman helps another woman deal with her mental condition.

"The Dreaming Wind" by Jeffrey Ford
Every year a village has to cope with a strange, crazy wind until one year when the wind fails to blow.

"The Coat of Stars" by Holly Black
A costume designer uses his talents to rescue his lover from the faeries.

"The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka
A story of creation versus evolution.

"Wizard's Six" by Alex Irvine
A man has to stop an apprentice wizard from becoming a wizard.

"The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham
A money changer runs afoul of an powerful and bored Lord.

"By Fools Like Me" by Nancy Kress
A woman and her granddaughter get in trouble for reading books.

"Kiosk" by Bruce Sterling
An entrepreneur opens a little store with merchandise supplied by his magical duplication machine.

"Singing of Mount Abora" by Theodora Goss
A woman does what it takes to get her man, even though her man is a dragon.

"The Witch's Headstone" by Neil Gaiman
A boy helps a young, dead witch get a headstone for her unmarked grave.

"Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter
The universe is being destroyed and nothing will stop it.

"Jesus Christ, Reanimator" by Ken MacLeod
Jesus Christ returns but it is no big deal.

"Sorrel's Heart" by Susan Palwick
Mutants on the run, hiding from murderous nonmutants.

"Urdumheim" by Michael Swanwick
Demons try to destroy the first people.

"Holiday" by M. Rickert
A man is visited by the ghosts of dead children.

"The Valley of Gardens" by Tony Daniel
In the far future, humanity strikes a blow against an implacable enemy bent on destroying the universe.

"Winter's Wife" by Elizabeth Hand
Mr. Winter gets himself a strange bride from Iceland.

"The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small" by Chris Roberson
An old man is questioned about his knowledge of Mexico, a story of an alternate history.

"Orm the Beautiful" by Elizabeth Bear
A dragon sacrifices himself to save the remains of his ancestors.

"The Constable of Abal" by Kelly Link
An odd woman and her daughter can see and capture ghosts.

The nice thing about a collection like this is that there will probably be at least a few stories that will please the reader. The bad thing is that you have to wade through the unappealing ones to get to the goodies. The same is true of this collection. All the stories are interesting, but some I just liked a lot better than the others and some just didn't click with me at all. Though I usually don't care for short stories, reading a collection like this introduces the reader to new authors, which makes it worth while.

For reviews of the individual stories, see Best SF.

New Words
Bimaristan: Bimaristan is a Persian word meaning hospital. "She was taken to the bimaristan, but the physicians could not save her, and she died soon after." ("The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate")
Ablative: Materials that provide fire resistance by gradually eroding to the flame front at a known or predictable rate. "She took in my appearance, from scorched ablative boots to champagne hairstyle." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Hypergolic: A term related to spontaneous ignition upon contact. "For one thing, in a fit of misplaced bonhomie I'd offered Edgestar Wolfblack a lift, and old Edgy wasn't the best company for a post-drop pre-prandial, on account of his preferred tipples being corrosive or hypergolic, or both." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Clade: A group of animals or other organisms derived from a common ancestor species. "'Blackdeath? Is no posthuman of that nomenclature in my clade,' Edgy complained." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Plangently: Plangent means having a loud, mournful sound. "It's hard to remain stressed out while reclining on a bed of silks in a pleasure palace on Mars, with nubile young squishies to drop pre-fermented grapes into your mouth, your very own mouth-boy to keep the hookah smoldering, and a clankie band plangently plucking its various organs in the far corner of the room." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Amanuensis: One employed to take dictation, or copy manuscripts; A clerk, secretary or stenographer. "He said it so emphatically that even my buggy-but-priceless family heirloom amanuensis recognized it for an infoburst and misfiled it somewhere." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Katanas: A type of Japanese sword. "His Excellency Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger sibling of the Emir of Mars, rose from his seat upon the throne; naked eunuch bodyguards, their skins oiled and gleaming, raised their katanas in salute to either side." ("Trunk and Disorderly")
Ontological: Ontology is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. "During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction -- mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes -- that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction." (from the introduction to "Glory" by the editor)
Fullerene: A form of carbon having a large molecule consisting of an empty cage of sixty or more carbon atoms; buckyballs. "The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shockwave's momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave." ("Glory")
Lemmas: A lemma is a theorem proven only for use in the proof of more important theorems. "Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his own opinion on the theorem the tablet stated; the Niah themselves had had a clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish between everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems." ("Glory")
Amphioxus: The lancelet, a small translucent lancet-shaped burrowing marine animal; primitive forerunner of the vertebrates. "He studied fruit flies, and amphioxus; and while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Michael Poore." ("The Prophet of Flores")
Graupel: Pellets of snow. "Then he climbed, with pain and resignation, up the shiny black stairsteps into this eerie, oversized, grandiose rock-solid black fort, this black-paneled royal closet whose ornate, computer-calligraphic roof would make meteors bounce off it like graupel hail." ("Kiosk")

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