This collection illustrates starkly the travesty of the Hugo nominees for short fiction imposed by Canine shenanigans. There are more worthy tales in here than were nominated in the 3 short fiction categories which I read as preparation for voting. ( )

Strahan's 'best-of' anthologies are, in my opinion, the best of their type in the genre, and have been for a while now. The stories here range from good to excellent, and give a great overview of the range of material that been published in the past year, featuring both new and long-established authors.

Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
A very timely-feeling, if somewhat brief introduction.

*****Slipping, Lauren Beukes
Last year, Beukes' 'Broken Monsters' impressed me... and this story continues to impress. The technology here is beyond today's capabilities - but the behavior of the humans here is all too believable; the situation not just credible but likely.
With most countries banning 'enhanced' sports, the Games has found a home in Pakistan, where bionic athletes compete not solely for an audience, but for corporate and military observers. The hope? For the surgeon to showcase their wares, resulting in a payoff.
Why would anyone opt for these extreme and experimental surgical procedures? And what is the human cost? Beukes answers these questions with this horrific and emotionally wracking portrait of one young South African competitor.

*****Moriabe's Children, Paolo Bacigalupi
Previously read in 'Monstrous Affections,' re-read because it's more than worth a second read.
A dark and tragic fairytale of an evil stepfather, set on the shores and kraken-infested seas of a northern clime... This is a bit of a departure in style from Bacigalupi's previous work - but I love it just as much if not more, than anything else I've read by him. Powerful, timeless, and relevant.

****The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family, Usman T. Malik
This is an excellent, powerful story... but I'm not sure I'd call it science-fiction. Yes, there's a bizarre element, and a 'scientific' framework - but both feel largely symbolic.
The story is dedicated to the victims of a terrorist attack in Pakistan, and effectively discusses terrorism and the hopeless circle of hate and revenge that leads to such violence.

****The Lady and the Fox, Kelly Link
Kelly Link's version of a heartwarming Christmas story.
It's a classic-feeling tale of Faerie, but Link's contemporary and sometimes bizarrely-random details give the story a strange immediacy and verisimilitude. Tam Lin meets The Snow Queen, at the mansion of a wealthy celebrity family.

****Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind), Holly Black
Previously read in the 'Monstrous Affections' anthology.
'A young girl stows away on her uncle's spaceship. But with his latest smuggling commission, he bites off more than he can chew... Space pirates and violent aliens come together in a cute but also exciting tale that's also about growing up, learning to shake off others' preconceptions, and choosing ones own path in life.'

****The Long Haul from the Annals of Transportation, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009, Ken Liu
This alternate-history piece gives us a timeline where, due to trade tariffs, great airships become a popular way to transport cargo.
Written in the style of a magazine piece (imagine the 'Atlantic Monthly'), a journalist catches a ride with a husband-wife team who sail their own privately-owned cargo airship.
Although the technical and historical details are fascinating, the piece ends up becoming more about the practice of arranged mail-order brides, and the dynamics of such a relationship.

****Tough Times All Over, Joe Abercrombie
A hilarious and non-stop 'Thieves' World-style' fantasy that plays out like a relay race. A really violent, backstabbing, dangerous relay race. It plays with all kinds of fantasy tropes, tongue firmly in cheek - but also showcases Abercrombie's talent for economically drawing vivid and compelling characters who quickly come to life in the reader's imagination.

***The Insects of Love, Genevieve Valentine
An entomologist seeks her missing sister, who disappeared in the midst of a top-secret government mission. There seems to be some kind of time-slippage happening... or possibly alternate realities.
This is beautifully written, and I loved how it was developing... but it ended abruptly, and felt unsatisfying.

****Cold Wind, Nicola Griffith
Previously read on tor.com
'When I'm promised 'urban fantasy,' now THIS is what I want to be served!!
An unnamed observer enters a women's bar on a holiday evening. Conviviality is all around her, but she is watching and waiting... for who? or what? Gradually, small clues are dropped that this isn't going to be your usual bar pick-up or one-night-stand.
Rather, it's a tale of predators and prey...
Beautiful, vivid writing, as can always be expected from Nicola Griffith.'

***Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No.8), Caitlin R Kiernan
Incest twins on a psychopathic, serial-killing road trip.
If you liked 'Natural Born Killers,' you'll probably like this.

***Shadow Flock, Greg Egan
A drone-technology expert is blackmailed into using her skills to help a group of criminals pull off a financial heist. Felt much more like the opening of a novel than a short story.

****I Met a Man Who Wasn't There, K. J. Parker
I really have to get around to reading K.J. Parker's novels; I've loved every single short story from this author that I've read. For that matter, I should probably check out Tom Holt's work too, although from the blurbs it wouldn't seem to be nearly as suited to my tastes...
This one though... right up my alley.
A dark but wryly ironic tale... The curtain opens on an individual who is agreeing to pay a man a large sum to teach certain magical skills - including the ability to walk through walls and kill a man by looking at him. He's not at all sure that magic actually exists, however.

****Grand Jeté (The Great Leap), Rachel Swirsky
Well, this sure was better than that Dinosaur prose-poem. Sorry.
Sci-fi takes on the golem story and automatons harking back to Coppélia are far from uncommon in the genre, but this story puts a fresh spin on both. I wavered over thinking that the whole dying-child aspect was a little much - but I think it worked.
A Jewish father has already lost his wife; and now his daughter is dying of cancer. Distraught, he acquires restricted, experimental technology to create a duplicate of his daughter - a duplicate right down to her memories and brain function. Understandably, the daughter does not embrace her father's 'gift' with the enthusiasm he hoped.
The way the story progresses effectively explores themes of love, grief, and identity.

****Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying, Alice Sola Kim
Previously read in 'Monstrous Affections.'
'Hmm. No, the 'daughters' aren't what's terrifying here; at least not at first. A tight-knit group of girls, all Korean-American adoptees, decide to dabble in dark magic. At first, their late-night ritual doesn't seem to have any effect - but eventually, the fallout from that one night will tear them apart, in more ways than one. A scary story that works on more than one level, with complex insights into the feelings of adopted children - and teenage girls in general. Very, very good.'

****Shay Corsham Worsted, Garth Nix
Previously read in 'Fearful Symmetries.'
'Garth Nix is always excellent; and this tale is no exception. A retired secret service agent has been watching a certain house for thirty years. But when the threat that's been feared for all these decades erupts, the weapon has been forgotten, and bureaucracy gets in the way.'

**** Kheldyu, Karl Schroeder
There's a very James Bond-movie feel to this one. Gennady Malianov, arms inspector, has agreed to do a job for a wealthy scion that doesn't seem to involve arms at all. A carbon-sequestration plant needs to be started up, but the remote area is infected with a hazardous fungus.
The entertaining story plays out with plenty of action.

***Calligo Lane, Ellen Klages
"The secret of ori-kami is that a single sheet of paper can be folded in a nearly infinite variety of patterns, each resulting in a different transformation of the available space. Given any two points, it is possible to fold a line that connects them."
Franny, a woman of San Francisco, does magic using 'ori-kami.' Nice, but mood overshadows plot in this piece.

***The Devil in America, Kai Ashante Wilson
This piece effectively conjures the horrific evils of American slavery - horrors which even old African magic cannot mitigate, in this tale of a family up against the overwhelming odds of racism.
However, I felt that the fractured and meta-fictional elements of the story detracted from its power.

***Tawny Petticoats, Michael Swanwick
A humorous heist tale set in an alternate, paranormal New Orleans. A couple of con artists hire the third they need for their plan. The third is enthusiastically eager for the chance to pull off the 'black money scam' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_money_scam). But of course, not everything goes quite as expected.

****The Fifth Dragon, Ian McDonald
A beautiful take on the 'terraforming' theme. Two women are pioneers in the colonization of the moon. Each has their personal reasons to have left Earth, and each deals with the rigors of lunar survival in her own way. Although frequently apart, they become best friends. But, due to the low gravity, moon life comes with built-in restrictions: after a certain amount of time, a person cannot physically survive the return to Earth gravity. A decision to stay is irreversible. How will each woman choose?

*** The Truth About Owls, Amal El-Mohtar
Beautifully written, and exquisitely captures the complex feelings of a young immigrant from an unstable region. However, I disagreed with the final implication that there is something intrinsically 'healthier' in being interested in your 'own' heritage and folklore - I strongly feel that all of human heritage belongs to everyone equally.

***Four Days of Christmas, Tim Maughan
An odd little piece, inspired by a visit to the Chinese factory city from whence all our Christmas decorations come. We follow a specific future Christmas tchotchke on its journeys around the world, from factory floor to garbage dump.

****Covenant, Elizabeth Bear
One of the most original takes on the serial killer theme that I've seen. In the future, technology has come up with new ways to 'cure' psychopathy [methods that put those described in 'A Clockwork Orange' in the dust.] Here we meet one such rehabilitated criminal.

****Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, Theodora Goss
Well, this takes worldbuilding to a whole new level - literally. A small group of academics engage in a thought experiment; imagining a modern Cimmeria (it's not made clear whether this is a kingdom descended from ancient Crimea, the homeland of Howard's Conan, or Italo Calvino's country - it could be all, or something different.) When what they've imagined comes into being, of course they have to go study it in person.
I always love Goss' stories, and this is no exception. Recommended for fans of China Miéville's 'The City & the City.'

****Collateral, Peter Watts
A re-read. Previously read in 'Upgraded'; I liked it enough to read it again. 'Fans of 'Ender's Game' may very well like this one. A soldier with enhanced reaction times, wired in to her weapons systems, must face the ethical questions brought up when innocents are killed. Caught between the media, the military, her own training and her sense of right and wrong, things play out in an unexpected - but utterly logical - fashion.'

****The Scrivener, Eleanor Arnason
I'm so happy to see Eleanor Arnason in the spotlight and getting some long-deferred attention. This is a hilariously subversive fairytale. A father has three daughters; his dream is for one of them to become the successful author that he never was. Unfortunately, their dreams and talents lie elsewhere. A famous critic suggests that the girls go on a quest to find the Baba-Yaga-esque witch in the woods to consult with her - but what each young woman finds on her journey is not precisely what their father hoped.

*** Someday, James Patrick Kelly
Aims to be a commentary of cultural anthropology, but ends up like it's pushing boundaries just for the sake of pushing boundaries, rather than in service to the story.
A young woman named Daya, inhabitant of a small village, has come to an important day in her life - the day when she picks the fathers of her child.

*** Amicae Aeternum, Ellen Klages
Hmm, it's a little unfair for one author to get two stories in a best-of anthology!
This is a nice closer, though. It has a bit of a golden-age feel... maybe Ray Bradbury meets Heinlein... but the protagonist here is a bit of an anti-Heinlein-protagonist, in every way.
However, it's still got both the nostalgia of Bradbury and the bold ventures of Heinlein.
My one thing was, I didn't understand the girl's resignation to her fate. Her 'list' of things she's going to miss out on, after leaving earth with her parents on a generation ship, convinced me that she truly didn't want to go. So... why not run away with the best friend? That was what I expected; and what I would've done, if I were her... [though, I'm not - at her age, I would've been raring to go! Only as an adult do I identify more with her regrets.]

Many thanks to Rebellion/Solaris and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this highly-recommended volume. As always, my opinions are solely my own. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2015/04/review-of-best-science-fiction-and.html ( )