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Book review: Year's Best SF of 1985
Jan. 27th, 2006 02:26 pmToday's book review is The Year's Best Science Fiction Third Annual Collection (covering 1985) edited by Gardner Dozois.
When I first started reading SF, I actually read some of the magazines, but by 1985 I'd mostly gotten out of the habit and switched to novels, so I didn't read these stories at the time. I was looking for a book of shorter pieces, and this seemed like it would be interesting.
Obviously, being a single year anthology, these stories are rather variable. Not surprisingly considering Dozois's reputation, most of the stories are competently written and at least somewhat interesting, but I found the overall tone of the anthology to be surprisingly dark and depressing, and reading through the whole book got to be something of a chore. This is a book a completist probably wants to own -- 9 of the stories were Hugo nominees, and it's likely that some of them would be hard to find otherwise -- but I can't recommend reading it cover to cover.
6 out of 10.
When I first started reading SF, I actually read some of the magazines, but by 1985 I'd mostly gotten out of the habit and switched to novels, so I didn't read these stories at the time. I was looking for a book of shorter pieces, and this seemed like it would be interesting.
Obviously, being a single year anthology, these stories are rather variable. Not surprisingly considering Dozois's reputation, most of the stories are competently written and at least somewhat interesting, but I found the overall tone of the anthology to be surprisingly dark and depressing, and reading through the whole book got to be something of a chore. This is a book a completist probably wants to own -- 9 of the stories were Hugo nominees, and it's likely that some of them would be hard to find otherwise -- but I can't recommend reading it cover to cover.
6 out of 10.