Previously, this series suffered a bit when compared to the incomparable Gardner Dozois collections, but Neil Clarke has taken it upon himself to step into those shoes now that we have lost Mr. Dozois...and he has definitely stepped up his game. It's not just the inclusion of the "State of Science Fiction" Preface Section which was very well done and researched, he has stepped up the quality level of the stories included in the book. All of the stories are enjoyable, but some rise above the rest as really excellent. This particular edition is the best so far and makes me very hopeful for the future of this anthology series. One request, though, if the editor reads this. Would you please include in your "Year in Science Fiction" a critique of the year's offerings of TV and Movies? I always loved Gardner's take on that media, which is how the average Joe is usually exposed to Sci Fi. With that you would truly be the heir to the crown.

Enjoyed the seclection

I love all the different short & not so short stories. The variety is the nicest about this book. Also Neil Clark writes a little about each author, very cool.

Very good collection of stories to while away the hours. Not all my cup of tea but definitely worth the read.

This is a great collection (and great cover art as well). Most of the stories are original, well written, and I wish they had been novels. In fact, "Permafrost", probably the best story in the collection, is nearly a novella, and I wanted it to be longer. But some fell a little short, and for a compilation, I thought they could have found some better examples.

I've been reading sci-fi for forty years, and I've become a bit picky. There are some tropes in sci-fi that I will still fall for (the military sci-fi where the hardened soldier outwits both the evil aliens and the incompetent generals to find out we all, in fact, should get along), but in general, I need something new or interesting to get me to finish a five page story, much less a book.

I've watched sci-fi expand from sort of a white male power fantasy to a more diverse and interesting genre (Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" or Nnedi Okorafor's "Binti"). However, I've also seen where some of this diversity is reduced to stereotyped tropes and themes, and unfortunately there are a few stories in this collection that follow this trend, rather than actually developing unique and characters.

*Spoilers below*

For example, one story has a troubled lesbian protagonist, which is fine, even if it's kind of common now in sci-fi (I am reading two novels at the same time as this collection, every female in them is a lesbian, and half the men are gay as well), working in a moon station. They discover something interesting possibly alien, possibly mind-control, "2001"ish, and I was thinking "this is going to be pretty good". Then they start talking about the 1% (they actual said 1%) and how evil they were (a trope), then the protagonist turns out to be both not-liked-but-also-sympathized-with (a trope), and the boss is an a-whole (trope again). Then the characters start seeing dead relatives from a disaster that befell earth recently (hence the 'troubled', but they ALL are troubled, we now discover). Their reaction? Take off their helmets while outside the station. What? If I'm driving a car down the road and see my dead mother or brother, I don't jump out the window, I stop the car. I thought the story would develop into some sort of mind control, but no, it's something much simpler. And the worst part, it apparently killed a whole other team before (and also before the disaster, so not sure why it affected that previous team), except, somehow, the leader of the current team. Who said nothing. To anyone. And nothing was done to fix the issue, apparently because the 1% couldn't be bothered with the poor female/non-white males who make up the team (?). Even when the team told the supervisor they were working in the area of the anomaly, she took no action (even though it killed her previous team and almost killed her) and it was never clear why (the bottom dollar?).

So, I thought, is this a bad story, or are the tropes overshadowing the story and I'm just being cynical? So I did the Hawkeye Project approach. The Hawkeye project is from comics, and it shows how stupid and degrading female superheroes are depicted in art. Take a female superhero artwork, do the same artwork with Hawkeye, and if it looks ridiculous, it is. So I did that with this (and a couple other) stories: I changed all the characters into SWMs (straight white males), and the story(ies) completely fell apart.

This is kind of a long review for what is, after all, still four stars, but I find myself reading more short story complications at the end of the year because I don't have the energy to immerse into a full fledged novel, sometimes I can't read for weeks, and I forget the story. In doing so, I'm finding myself skipping stories, because they are falling into the same patterns for the characters. So I focus on 'end of the year' compilations, because they have 'the best of the best', but even these now are seeing the same trend of "establish a popular worldview, and cram some story in there as well". It's like the "Gor" novels in reverse.

In this time of increased diversity, where reviews always seem to say "a unique perspective with unique characters" in actuallity they seem to all be exactly the same, with the same development, the same 'bad guys' and no story. Yet, if some of the details had been made more universal (like, no one knew Rico was Filipino in Starhip Troopers until like the last two pages), and more focus was on the actual story, I think the diversity of the characters would come more naturally, and the stories would be better.

Great collection. If you used to collect the late Gardner Dozois’s sf volumes, do yourself a favor and check these out. Everything I loved from The Year’s Best Science Fiction is included, even the painstakingly researched summation. Of course, the stories are top notch and a great value for us busy sf aficionados.

I've read the first five shorts. I guess I'm an idiot (who's been reading sci fi for over 50 years) based on some of the other reviews, but I have really enjoyed those stories and am looking forward to the rest!

For those who were hoping that Neil Clarke's "Best Science Fiction" series would manage to fill the void left by Gardner Dozois' passing, this is a reminder of what we once had.

There are perhaps a tiny handful of enjoyable stories in this entire volume; The Work Of Wolves, and In The Stillness Between Stars stand out, but sadly, so many others are trite exercises in social consciousness, lacking in both subtlety and style. And endings. How is it possible to have some many stories with astonishingly weak endings?

It's difficult to believe that there weren't better examples of good speculative fiction to have chosen, because these are enough to make one give up on the genre.

I enjoyed most of the selection of stories in this anthology Of course, not everyone will be to every reader's taste but the overall quality was high and the proportion I was not grabbed by was low. I can recommend the Kindle edition in which I have not noticed any glaring errors. I used to buy the annual anthology edited by GD and I think that I will now buy this one each year. I was really quite disappointed when the publication got delayed by Covid.

A collection of short stories, some well known names, many not so. Rather dark stories, often merely weird, but not intriguing. I can't recommend it unless you're into the darker side of sci-fi.

The late Gardner Dozois' annual Year's Best Science Fiction collection was one of my essential purchases. Over the last few years a number of alternative year's best collections have started appearing - some including fantasy as well as sf -and as Neil Clarke's is one of the most well established, I thought I would see if if it could be a worthy substitute for Dozois' annual collection; not that anyone could replace Dozois, who is one of the all time great genre editors, and was a pretty good writer himself at one time.

Clarke's collection, while not quite as vast as the Dozois' annuals, still offers pretty good value for money. There are 28 stories collected, one a novella of over ninety pages. This is also the first sf anthology I've come across for a while where the majority of contributors are women. The quality of writing is very high overall, even in some of the stories that didn't quite work, and the aforesaid novella - Alastair Reynold's brilliant 'Permafrost' - is worth the price of admission on its own. The translated stories by Chinese writers are also excellent, particularly Cixin Liu's 'Moonlight', an ingenious time travelling take on the famous fable 'Appointment in Samara'. There are some issues with the book, however, that mean that I'm still considering whether this is an anthology series I will commit to buying regularly.

Almost all of the stories in this book deal with the collapse of our environment. While an undeniably crucial issue to the survival of our planet and species, this is supposed to be 'fiction', and the destruction of the environment is actually happening. As none of the stories offer much in the way of constructive, viable suggestions as to how to rectify things, or have anything particularly original to say about the subject, this can become wearing after a while - and then there's the politics.

At least one other reviewer has attacked this book because of the 'woke' politics of the stories. I have no problem with politically engaged genre fiction. SF, fantasy and horror are actually ideal for political comment and satire because they deal in exaggeration. The problem here is that the perspective and world view of all of these writers is virtually identical , and none of their political points are made with anything even remotely approaching subtlety. The cumulative impression of reading so many stories written from exactly the same political viewpoint consecutively is not one of an encounter with 'diversity', rather the complete opposite. In fact, it's more like stumbling across a cache of campaign literature from some student political society.

As a result, some of the bad stories in this book - and every anthology is bound to have one or two - are very bad indeed. Elizabeth Bear's pronoun apocalypse 'Deriving Life' is practically unreadable. Rebecca Wallace's 'Such Thoughts Are Unproductive' - which posits the possibility that, in the near future, the white, heteronormative, military-industrial patriarchy will start 'disappearing' people with opinions different from their own - is a particularly bizarre exercise in projection, bearing in mind that it is currently those who consider themselves to be 'progressives' who are most likely to try and make their political opponent's 'disappear' via cancellation and 'no-platforming'.

On the whole the quality of the writing, and the fact that the best stories in this book are excellent , mean that I couldn't in all fairness give it less than four stars. As well as the Reynolds, there are also first rate stories by Mercuria Rivera, Tegan Moore, and A. T. Greenblatt, and the good stories far outnumber the stinkers. However, I am still pondering whether this is going to be my new annual purchase.