| Title | : | The Years Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | Published June 19, 2020 |
Contents:
* Soft Edges / Elizabeth Bear: a coastal restoration researcher can help the police solve a murder but is conflicted over the unjust nature of the criminal justice system.
* By the Warmth of Their Calculus / Tobias S. Buckell, the captain of a dustship musters her crew to escape from a trap set by Hunter-Killers in a game of cat and mouse amid the rings of a giant planet.
* A Mate Not a Meal / Sarina Dorie: an arachnipede becomes wary of potential mates after she sees a male eat her mother . . . but she's lonely.
* The Slipway / Greg Egan, astronomers are hard-pressed to explain what appears to be a new cluster of stars that's growing by the hour.
* This is Not the Way Home / Greg Egan; abandoned at a lunar base after losing radio contact with Earth, a newlywed traverses the moon in a buggy with her newborn toward a skyhook on the farside.
* Cloud-Born / Gregory Feeley: children born on a ship from Earth become anxious as they begin to transition to their new lives as colonists of Neptune.
* On the Shores of Ligeia / Carolyn Ives Gilman: an astrobiology postdoc is called at the last minute to remotely navigate a robot searching for hydrogen-based life on Titan.
* Ring Wave / Tom Jolly: an engineer in a life pod is desperate to join a colony in space after an asteroid destroys Earth.
* The Little Shepherdess / Gwyneth Jones: a deep-sea mining company's operation is threatened by a crustacean scientist.
* Sacrificial Iron / Ted Kosmatka, a decades long mission to another star is threatened when the two men keeping watch over a frozen crew turn on each other.
* The Menace from Farside / Ian McDonald: a teenager seeks to maintain her "Captain" status among her non-traditional lunar family by leading her siblings on a dangerous trek to Neil Armstrong's first footprint on the moon.
* The Ocean Between the Leaves / Ray Nayler: the mind of a dying gardener is transferred to another body for three days of closure in a state-run experiment.
* At the Fall / Alec Nevala-Lee: a robot strives to maintain its energy reserves as it crosses thousands of kilometers underwater to find its way home.
* Winter Wheat / Gord Sellar: a Canadian farmer and his son are at odds on how to cope with a powerful agribusiness promoting its genetically modified wheat.
* Cyclopterus / Peter Watts: a resentful submarine pilot is ordered to an undersea research facility to assist with the mining survey of a formerly protected seabed.
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The Years Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4 Reviews
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An above-average Year's Best anthology, the better of the two of these I've read so far. The book is available at no extra charge if you subscribe to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service (which you can try for a month at no charge).
Full ToC and story details:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?...
My favorites, in rough descending order:
• "The Little Shepherdess" • (2019) • short story by Gwyneth Jones. Wonderful feel-good story about a marine biologist studying critters who live on the abyssal plains near deep-sea polymetallic nodules. 4.5 stars, highly recommended. My full review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• "The Ocean Between the Leaves" • (2019) • novelette by Ray Nayler. A slice-of-life story in the Istanbul Protectorate by a newish writer who's becoming one of my favorites. 4.5 stars, highly recommended. Copy online at
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...
• "The Menace from Farside" • 2019 novella by Ian McDonald. A fine YA adventure and Heinlein homage in his popular Luna series. I have a full review at
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• "On the Shores of Ligeia" • (2019) • short story by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First-rate story about an ESA mission exploring Titan, from the POV of the human operator of the robot rover. Online at
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...
Other stories that I would recommend include "Soft Edges," a police procedural by Elizabeth Bear; "By the Warmth of Their Calculus" by Tobias S. Buckell; and "The Slipway," an astronomical puzzle-piece by Greg Egan. And there are more stories just a notch or two behind those. Overall rating for the anthology: 3.5 stars, rounded up. -
No table of contents
An anthology like this really needs a table of contents with hyperlinks to each story; it's slow going without it. -
The first story almost stopped me from reading any others, but I've read a couple of the others, so I kept going.
And the rest of the collection was satisfying. If you like hard SF, go for it. And if you ignore in the first one, it's pretty good, too.
What's wrong with the first one? I expect better of Mr. Egan.
Like I said, though, other than that, I enjoyed the whole collection. It's worth it. -
Available on Kindle Unlimited Aug 2021
Read:
-- On the Shores of Ligeia (2019) by Carolyn Ives Gilman - 3.5*
I didn't enjoy the beginning too much but trusting the author, I was rewarded. Planet exploration using a robot looking for items of interest and collecting samples. A scientist wore VR to explore the planet with the robot. The issues and discoveries experienced made for pleasant reading.
-- The Little Shepherdess (2019) by Gwyneth Jones - 2.5*
A woman scientist researching the sea life in an area of the ocean that will be mined for valuable materials makes a discovery.
-- Cyclopterus (2019) by Peter Watts - DNF
Story is being revealed as two people (one hired to drive the ship) discuss current affairs. As they are on on their way to the destination in the deep sea, a life-threatening situation arises. Something in the depth is happening. // I tapped out about there. Environmental politics, confusion until the situation is revealed are not my reading preferences. -
Excellent Choices
After working at an observatory, writing software for astronomers, I truly love Greg Egan's "Slipway". It took me some effort to visualize the geometry, but was a more rewarding story for all that.
Tom Jolly's "Ring Wave" is a new take on the aftermath of an Earth-killing asteroid.
"Winter Wheat", a story of one farmer's Quixotic resistance to rent-seeking conglomerates' genetic modifications.
More here that are truly great.
I first enjoyed some of these stories in science fiction magazines, but it's difficult for me to collect the digital back issues. -
I read several stories from this anthology. None were badly written, but none of the stories were memorable. I'm putting this aside for now.
