Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Science Fiction Anthologies are like...

... a multi-course haute cuisine dinner, so you can try a little bit of everything, each with deliciously different flavors.

... a mix tape lovingly prepared by the editor with the best tunes he or she can find, you just need to figure out what the message is.

... all the colors of the rainbow, no let's just stop this.

Last week I got The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-third Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois. I have 1 through 22 and a Best of the Best. Each July (it used to be June, but it has drifted) I hunt the stores to find a copy of this anthology the instant it is available. I could use the internet these days but for this book purchase my habits are set. I don't want to imagine the horror of missing one of these after more than two decades of collecting and reading them.

I needed to piece together three pictures to get the full expanse of the two shelves which carry these. I will read any collection that Gardner Dozois puts together, he really has excellent taste and editorial acumen.

Over the years there have been some other anthologies which I have collected or kept up with. The Year's Best SF edited by David Hartwell and the now defunct Annual World's Best SF that was edited by Donald A. Wollheim.

Though I tend to see some of the stories when they are first published, I do enjoy having them gathered into these collections. Gardner Dozois in the introduction to his excellent series always exhorts his readers to subscribe to the various science fiction magazines, Asimov's, Interzone, Fantasy and Science Fiction, so I did. I haven't picked my favorite from the collections this year yet.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

[salivates over self]
I am so jealous. I am missing #1, #3 and #5. Whether or not I have read them, of course, is an entirely different matter.