16) Year’s Best SF 11, ed. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
So, why is it that the Hugo and Nebula systems cannot produce shortlists of the quality of this selection? There was only one story out of 31 here that failed to really engage my interest (OK, some of them were very short) and two that I thought were really good and would not have come across otherwise. I liked very much R Garcia y Robertson’s “Oxygen Rising”, about future war, peacekeeping and sex, and Ken MacLeod’s “A Case of Consilience” struck me as one of the great sf and religion stories (OK, it references many of the others, but that if anything is a strength). Anyway, if the Dozois annual collection is even half as good as this, my money has been weell spent.
Last year was a pretty terrible year for films, I had similar issues choosing my favourite film full stop and came to the same conclusions. Is Inception perfect, no (my issues were with Leonardo Di Caprio rather than Ellen Page but seem to be pretty similar), but at least it’s original, not a sequel or an adaptation. Also, when I watched it in the cinema it had one of the greatest crowd responses I’ve ever been witness to.