A review by bowienerd_82
The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction by

3.0

This didn't feel like a collection that should be named "The Best of the Best"; it was pretty mixed, and only had a couple of stories I thought were really awesome. Most of them were OK, but there were a couple that really were not good. Also, far too many of them were borderline sci-fi at best; I suppose you could call them speculative fiction, but really, do they then belong in a book subtitled "20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction"? Several of those stories actually wound up being my favorites, but still...

Among the stories I did really like: "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson, "The Undiscovered" by William Sanders , "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" by Eileen Gunn, "Even the Queen" by Connie Willis, "Tales from the Venia Woods" by Robert Silverberg, and "Daddy's World" by Walter Jon Williams. Also worth the read, though not quite as awesome: "Mortimer Gray's History of Death" by Brian Stableford, "Coming of Age in Karhide" by Ursula K. Le Guin, "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, and "The Winter Market" by William Gibson.

In the end, I still remain someone who prefers novels to short stories, but there were definitely some stories worth the read, and some authors I will now have to investigate further.