Year's Best SF 9
Strange invaders. Alien planets. Genetic engineering. Artificial Intelligence. Time Travel. Space Adventure. These are just some of the themes science fiction is best known and loved for—and what you’ll get when you open the cover of Year’s Best SF 9. Every one of its 18 stories is pure science fiction, displaying some of the finest work being written today. They’re not like anything you’ve ever known…and they’re here to stay. Octavia Butler preps six job-seekers for employment with Earth’s alien invaders—a story about finding the strength to survive and transcend a horribly oppressive situation. I think we are the endangered species now. Geoff Ryman offers the diary of a gay protagonist at four stages of his life, in futures where homosexuality can be screened out of embryos, cured out of adults…and where he is the first pregnant man in history. Lieutenant, all I know is…they’re collecting butterflies. John Varley drops Earth a line—actually, many lines—of enigmatic, dimension-hopping entities who reveal the real purpose of life on Earth. It seems a small measure in return for the life of your world. Gregory Benford charges a Fourth Millennium librarian with a daunting task: to probe an alien AI for information that will save the solar system from an onslaught of interstellar plasma. But its price is wholly unexpected…. From transforming technologies and science gone wrong to strange cultures and alien creatures, the world of tomorrow has never been so exciting.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience FictionAnthologiesShort Stories
RELEASED2004
PUBLISHEREOS/HarperCollins
LENGTH500
LANGUAGEEN
An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. [Comment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian][1]: Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) > I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction. > Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. [Bloodchild and Other Stories][2] is a good place to begin discovering her work. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL35621W/Bloodchild_and_other_stories
Year's Best SF 9
by David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer
Strange invaders. Alien planets. Genetic engineering. Artificial Intelligence. Time Travel. Space Adventure. These are just some of the themes science fiction is best known and loved for—and what you’ll get when you open the cover of Year’s Best SF 9. Every one of its 18 stories is pure science fiction, displaying some of the finest work being written today. They’re not like anything you’ve ever known…and they’re here to stay. Octavia Butler preps six job-seekers for employment with Earth’s alien invaders—a story about finding the strength to survive and transcend a horribly oppressive situation. I think we are the endangered species now. Geoff Ryman offers the diary of a gay protagonist at four stages of his life, in futures where homosexuality can be screened out of embryos, cured out of adults…and where he is the first pregnant man in history. Lieutenant, all I know is…they’re collecting butterflies. John Varley drops Earth a line—actually, many lines—of enigmatic, dimension-hopping entities who reveal the real purpose of life on Earth. It seems a small measure in return for the life of your world. Gregory Benford charges a Fourth Millennium librarian with a daunting task: to probe an alien AI for information that will save the solar system from an onslaught of interstellar plasma. But its price is wholly unexpected…. From transforming technologies and science gone wrong to strange cultures and alien creatures, the world of tomorrow has never been so exciting.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience FictionAnthologiesShort Stories
RELEASED2004
PUBLISHEREOS/HarperCollins
LENGTH500
LANGUAGEEN
An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. [Comment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian][1]: Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) > I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction. > Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. [Bloodchild and Other Stories][2] is a good place to begin discovering her work. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL35621W/Bloodchild_and_other_stories
