A review by antrapp1026
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection by Ian McDonald, Greg Egan, Rachel Swirsky, Lauren Beukes, Vandana Singh, Lavie Tidhar, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Timons Esaias, Mary Ann Mohanraj, Pavel Amnuel, Karl Bunker, Michael Swanwick, Chaz Brenchley, D.J. Cockburn, Jérôme Cigut, Karl Schroeder, Adam Roberts, Robert Reed, Jay Lake, Susan Palwick, Gareth L. Powell, Aliette de Bodard, Alastair Reynolds, Gardner Dozois, Jessica Barber, Peter Watts, Paul Graham Raven, Ken Liu, James Patrick Kelly, Allen M. Steele, Ellen Klages, Paolo Bacigalupi, Rich Larson

4.0

By completing this, the second annual collection, I am happily continuing my goal of reading all 35 volumes of the late, great Gardner Dozois’ award-winning Year’s Best anthology. There were a few more clunkers in this year’s collection than the first year’s, but I won’t mention those; instead, I’ll talk about the several outstanding stories: “Salvador” by Lucius Shepard, a harrowing, hallucinatory tale of a soldier losing himself in war; “Bloodchild,” Octavia E. Butler’s classic, Hugo- and Neblua-winning novelette about the lengths we will go to survive impossibly complicated circumstances; “Blued Moon,” Connie Willis’s perfectly pitched, deeply sweet screwball comedy; John Varley’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella “Press Enter,” a surprisingly subtle, unusually character-driven AI thriller; the inventive, funny, and moving time travel caper “Twilight Time” by Lewis Shiner; and the most affecting story, the tense, impeccably envisioned, beautifully humane WWII alternate-history tale “The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson.

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Read “Friend” by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel; “Foreign Skins” by Tanith Lee; “Company in the Wings” by R.A. Lafferty, and “A Cabin on the Coast” by Gene Wolfe on 9/13/2018 and “The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson on 9/14/2018