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A review by rebeccacider
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 by John Joseph Adams, Karen Joy Fowler
4.0
3.5. I'm really glad there's now a Best American series for speculative fiction. A number of these stories are fabulous—beautifully crafted, psychologically complex, and just plain imaginative. (Meet Me in Iram, The Game of Smash and Recovery, and Tea Time were probably my top three picks.)
As I read on, my interest waned because I felt like the stories were too homogeneous. Many were contemporary or near future, and the prose styles and subject matters seemed to converge on some generic literary grimdark ideal. Readers looking for wonder and magic got almost no stories set in secondary worlds, which those looking for avant-garde fiction only got a few stories that experimented with form in a meaningful way.
Obviously I don't expect the variety of a longer anthology like Year's Best, but the Best American Comics I read a while back was much more diverse in terms of content.
I will say that, hurrah, this anthology was fairly diverse in terms of gender, race, and sexuality.
As I read on, my interest waned because I felt like the stories were too homogeneous. Many were contemporary or near future, and the prose styles and subject matters seemed to converge on some generic literary grimdark ideal. Readers looking for wonder and magic got almost no stories set in secondary worlds, which those looking for avant-garde fiction only got a few stories that experimented with form in a meaningful way.
Obviously I don't expect the variety of a longer anthology like Year's Best, but the Best American Comics I read a while back was much more diverse in terms of content.
I will say that, hurrah, this anthology was fairly diverse in terms of gender, race, and sexuality.