November Books 3) Science Fiction: The Best of 2003

3) Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, ed. Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber

Of the three annual sf anthologies published last year and the year before, the other two being edited by David Hartwell and Gardner Dozois, I found the one compiled by husband-and-wife team Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber the weakest. Now Silverberg has given up his editorial slot to Jonathan Strahan, but the format remains the same. It’s still not impressive (though I haven’t yet read this year’s Hartwell collection – see here for review of the Dozois, and especially to “Only Partly Here”, by Lucius Shepard, the first successful genre story I’ve read about 9/11 – must look out for that collection of his that has been raving about). There is also a surprisingly unprofessional level of misprints, a problem shared by the Silverberg/Haber volumes in this series. I don’t think I’ll bother with next year’s unless I hear that things have improved.