Book Review: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eight

I'm a little behind on my reading - I've been busy, OK! This is a collection of tales from 2014. Which means it isn't in the shadow of a damned pandemic, lunatic president, or any of the other modern horrors which have caused shockwaves to authors' psyches.

I love short stories. There's absolutely no commitment. I'm not going to be tricked into buying endless sequels of declining quality. There's no vast universe for me to get invested in. And if one's a bit disappointing, never mind; turn the page and start afresh. Short stories are like a one-night stand for the mind.

Anyway, Jonathan Strahan has plucked 28 stories out of the æther - some a short harbingers of the darkness yet to come - others are closer to novella-length dives into the strangeness beyond the stars.

A few are crap. Well, that's to be expected; you can't please everyone. Strahan acknowledges that the line between sci-fi/fantasy and other genres is a bit blurry. But I didn't expect to be reading a cowboy story straight off the bat. Oh well.

Some of the stories shine. What if Shakespeare wrote letters to Galileo (they were born the same year) and became a sci-fi author? What if H.G. Wells' War of The Worlds had a sequel where the humans took the fight to Mars? What if you had an ad-block for your soul?

And what if you needed to brush up on your Battle Yiddish in order to interrogate a cyborg?

Some of the stories are absolute poetry. Yoon Ha Lee in particular stunned me with his description of how "Perfume symphonies infused into exquisite fractal tapestries."

While Greg Egan's story was excellent, I can't help but feel I'd rather have read a story written by a young Afghani woman rather than about one.

There are a few other superstars in there - Ted Chiang is as outstanding as ever - but it's also a great showcase to discover brand new authors.

Weirdly, several stories concern the perils of uploading your brain to the cloud. I'm not sure what sparked off that concern, but read Valuable Humans in Transit for more of the same. Many of the stories concern the lies we tell ourselves. Even in the future there's no escape from our furious need to defend our ego.

A great clutch of stories.