Year's Best SF

Usually I finish one of these Hartwell compilations and there's something I don't like, but I get the feeling they pulled out the stops to make the first edition pop.

Most of my comments specific to stories are in other posts, but here's a last few to pad out what was in the book:

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman - Probably one of the big standouts of this book to me. It's a sci-fi romance, something we don't get to see too often, and it's done well. I honestly wanted to see where things went, but I suppose he wraps it up simply enough.

In Saturn Time by William Barton - This scratched my "I loved Andy Weir's Martian (at least the movie version)" itch. Alternate history about what if we never forsook the space program and makes you feel nostalgic for something that never was.

Coming of Age in Karhide by Urusula K Le Guin - By far the thing that felt the most "modern" in here. Le Guin was really playing with concepts at the intersection of SF and feminist thinking before anyone else did it like her, and this one has some incredibly interesting writing in it. Also, plenty of sex, which is fine. She gives us the word "clitopenis" which I think we should adopt.

The Three Descents of Jeremey Baker by Roger Zelazny - This one is weird and wonderful in a very "golden age" sort of way. It's almost like they included an old story in a book of 90s scifi. It's very lighthearted despite the concepts within.

Evolution by Nancy Kress - I did not have "sci-fi compilation addresses the cultural impact of the novel coronavirus COVID-19" on my bingo card but...well, you get it. This one reads eerily prescient as terrorists arise in a world where antibiotics have drastically lost most of their efficacy.

The Day the Aliens Came by Robert Sheckley - Another light-hearted Golden Age romp. This one reads like if Robert Heinlein had a better sense of humor.

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski - Three cheers for very cool hard scifi! People explore stuff and make discoveries so that the author (who is an IRL microbiologist) can tell us cool concepts in microbiology. This might not do it for everyone, but it certainly did for me.

The Ziggurat by Gene Wolf - I'm early into my Gene Wolf-reading career. I've read the first book of his "New Sun" series, and this was decidedly more mundane - pretty much an alien abduction story. I loved it...until the end, where it gets pretty weird and seems to either lost track of the character, or suddenly be ok with them being kinda creepy and selfish almost out of nowhere. Everything up until the very end had me riveted though.

Anyways, one down, and 17 more to go :)