The Best of the Year 2006
Rich Horton's First Year's Best from Wildside Press' Prime Books
Nov 24, 2008
Science Fiction The Best of the Year 2006 Edition (336pp, ISBN 9780809556496) is a relatively short collection of fifteen stories, edited by Rich Horton and published by Prime Books, a division of Wildside Press. It's one of four contenders for its title, and weighs in at less than half the length of the Gardner Dozois version. Nonetheless, there is little overlap, and it has some unexpected treats, as well as a fine cover by Les Edwards.
Nature Magazine
The stories range in length from the 850 words of Joe Haldeman's 'Heartwired' a look at future love from Nature Magazine, to two almost-novellas; Tom Purdom's 'Bank Run,' in which warring financiers make their conflict all too literal on a colony world, and Alastair Reynolds' 'Understanding Space and Time,' in which Elton John helps the last man alive come to terms with his fate on a future Mars. Sadly, both of these are amongst the weaker stories in the book. Purdom's is an exotic version of any other chase story, while Reynolds' story is so trademark of him that the experienced reader will see the plot twists before they happen.
Despite this being effectively the first small-press Year's Best, the usual magazines dominate the copyright page. Four stories from Asimovs include the Purdom and the Palwick (below) and Robert Reed's 'Finished' and James Patrick Kelly's 'The Edge of Nowhere,' both of which use artificial life-forms as their starting points, but which go in very unexpected directions.
Analog
Analog has three stories in the anthology; all three, 'The Policeman's Daughter' by Wil McCarthy, Mary Rosenblum's 'Search Engine,' and James van Pelt's 'The Inn at Mount Either' deal with what makes a person individual. The McCarthy is a droll PI story about duplicating people, while in the van Pelt a lost tourist must hunt his missing bride across thousands of alternate worlds, and the Rosenblum extrapolates how far people might go to get ahead in life.
Other highlights include Stephen Leigh's '"You", by Anonymous,' its barely a thousand paranoia-inducing words covering alien invasions and parasites, and Leah Bobet's 'Bliss,' a familiar story of drug addiction and a man trying to safeguard his sister which takes an entirely unexpected twist.
Michael Swanwick
The very best stories in the collection are Michael Swanwick's 'Triceratops Summer,' another of his trademark dinosaur stories, this time a beautifully bittersweet slice of life in a time-loop that will soon fade from existence; nonetheless the narrator decides to seize the day while all around his neighbours feud and fall in love.
Close contenders for the best-in-book story are Daniel Kaysen's 'The Jenna Set,' a laugh-out-loud conflation of Artificial Intelligence and call-centres, anchored by adorably geeky characters, while Susan Palwick's 'The Fate of Mice' looks at a neglected aspect of Daniel Keyes' classic Hugo and Nebula award-winning Flowers for Algernon, namely what happened to the titular mouse.
In all, while it's a modestly sized book, Horton's selection is off-beat and good enough that there's only one dud. The book is well worth tracking down.
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