neil clarke best science fiction of the year

We follow a young trainee Wayfinder – one of a select group of humans who traverse the surface of the planet, linking communities of humans who have mostly gone subterranean.

Nayler’s setting is very redolent of the planets in Harry Harrison’s ‘Deathworld’ series (of which I have very fond memories of reading in the 70s) with the flora and fauna of the alien planet all too capable of killing humans. The first story in this volume was near future, on Earth, and robotic/AI, and I had been disappointed with Jonathan Strahan’s take on the Year’s Best being very heavily weighted in favour of stories of that ilk. Nayler goes far-future and off planet, which pleased me. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2020 It’s a clever conceit, and Buckell handles it well without getting too mawkish, as the adoptive father learns about himself through this process. This involves an unboxing at home of a full-size but intellectually and socially undeveloped personality and raising it pretty much as one would do with an infant. Near future, and a veteran who has two artificial limbs and is generally down on his luck, decides to take on the role of ‘parenting’ a humanoid robot. Of course it’s publication date is 2022, rather than 2021 as it should have been, so just to clear, Volume 5 published in 2020 and Volume 6 published in 2022 does not mean that there is a year whose stories have been missed out, simply that the volume for stories published in 2020 did not appear in 2021 but in 2022.įirst published in Future Tense Fiction, – and still onlineĪ nice start to the volume. And that’s all I have to say about that!ģ0th April 2022 and I realised that I had not in fact got this volume pre-ordered, and so it finally got handed over by the Amazon delivery man today.

I did a similar quick and dirty check with Jonathan Strahan’s volume and which scored 17 out of 26 on the bell/gong, and 4or5/26 on the 5-year thing. I’d guess that 11 of the 32 have had stories in Year’s Best volumes more than 5 years ago. Due out in deadtree format just before Christmas Day – that’s one of *my* christmas presents sorted out then! (Nov 5th Update : publication date now mid-Feb 2022!) Strahan has published the ToC online, and I’ll put this here for the moment.Ģ1 out of 32 author names ‘ring a bell/sound a gong’ with me. The sixth volume in what is now the longest-running current Year’s Best SF anthology.

Neil clarke best science fiction of the year