The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (The Year’s Best Science Fiction, book 3) edited by Gardner Dozois

Comments

[theresawright]

An idealistic space scout discovers too late the dreadful reason for the disappearance of two of her colleagues.

Like ​“The Cold Equations,” this story falls apart if one introduces even rudimentary safety procedures.

More of an over-eager teen playing at being a space scout, which explains the carelessness on her part. But the complete lack of flight-safety protocols that let her sneak away with the family spaceship is very Cold Equations. Same with the design of the survey emergency beacon, which is basically a giant thermos that you need to open to read the message. Even Star Trek: TOS had automated beacons.

Some of the other stories are vaguely familiar. I know it's been a long time since I read this, but you'd think a collection of the Best would include more than one memorable story.

[ba_munronoe]

"I know it's been a long time since I read this, but you'd think a collection of the Best would include more than one memorable story."

Same here: I remember that cover, not so much the contents.

[(Anonymous)]

I found "Dogfight" memorable. Not for good reasons.

(Am I the only one who really wishes cyberpunk hadn't happened?)

[dewline]

Yeah, safety protocols don't survive libertarian/Darwinian authorial thinking very well, do they? Or they didn't back then.

[beamjockey]

Apropos of this, I just came across a review by Nick Allen of the new film Class Action Park. I am unlikely to watch this film anytime soon, but it seems germane. Allen writes:

“Class Action Park” is a sharp, funny, and bizarrely responsible documentary about an amusement park in Vernon, New Jersey that inexplicably hurt a lot of people. That recklessness was part of the fun—you could risk whiplash in a tube on the choppy waters of the Colorado River Ride, wade in a large wave pool that has a “death zone,” or commandeer the go-karts from Motor World and reach speeds of 50 miles per hour. The employees seemed more likely to join reckless behavior than stop it, and the rich guy behind it all was fulfilling his dream of creating a small world with no rules.

[jreynolds197]

That's the first of the YBSF that I bought.

Bluejay Books didn't survive long-term. I recall one of the books that they republished: L. Sprague de Camp's Rouge Queen. Yes, a typo on the cover. Oops!

[(Anonymous)]

Interestingly, I remember a number of these stories quite well, but I don't think I read the collection--I think I either read them in F&SF or one of the last Terry Carr Best of anthologies. (The Haldeman story I read in one of his collections)
The ones that stuck in mind were The Jaguar Hunter (because of a memorable mocking quote and the method of jaguar hunting, which was claimed to be real), the Haldeman (cautionary tale for cyborg safety and mental health reg writers), the Tiptree (Tiptree's stories should have come with warning labels to read only with caution if you have depression), and the real winner, "Side Effects", which I found frighteningly plausible (that may have been aided by a few bad experiences with the US healthcare system and some long term misdiagnosis issues.)

Riderius

[jbwoodford]

I generally like Swanwick's short fiction, and I enjoyed Gibson's short stories in the Eighties, but I'll probably never read "Dogfight" again. It was very well-written, and it's like "To Reign in Hell" (another one I'm unlikely to read again) in evoking the sense of watching a massive train wreck happen in slow motion.

[philrm]

This was also the first of the YBSF I bought; I have all of them except for the first two.

I remember nearly every story from this collection; this and the next ~ ten volumes - when Dozois was really at his peak as an editor (I didn't start reading Asimov's until a few years later) - really influenced my views of what SF could do.

If I recall correctly, this volume (which is sitting directly behind me on a bookshelf) introduced me to the work of Michael Swanwick, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, S.C. Sykes, Karen Joy Fowler, and Howard Waldrop.

I have a similar OSC story: I was really impressed by "The Fringe", and also by "America", which was in Volume 5, so I picked up a copy of The Folk of the Fringe when it appeared in paperback. I was so creeped out by Card's introduction, where he describes his complete inability to relate to or even socialize with people who aren't Mormons, that I put the book on a shelf and never read any of the other stories.

[dewline]

I feel just paranoid enough about that last person that I wonder if this wasn't one of his unspoken goals in writing such an intro. To anything.