I love the sci-fi short stories are still going strong.

Thankfully, there are still year-end anthologies collecting the best of the last year for me to try. Gives me the change to read someone new and find a new author to try.

This collection is a solid one, with enough great stories to make it worth your while.

This is one of the finest anthologies I've ever come across. I consider myself lucky if I find two or three stories in an anthology that I really like, but this one was full of exceptional works. The only clunker for me was the one by Charlie Jane Anders, but I've always been completely baffled by her popularity.

Best of the best:"It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids are Still Winning" by Ted Chiang

Received via NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley and Saga Press for this ARC.

I enjoyed this book for the most part. There were a few that weren’t my cup of tea and a couple of clunkers. I felt that each story was just the right length for its content. Worth reading, even if you’re not a sci-fi fan.

Pretty good anthology. A couple of the stories even made the Hugo ballot.

“Emergency Skin” and “A Catalog of Storms” are my favorites.

Thank you so much to net galley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book! really enjoyable and perfect for any sci fi lover!

This was an okay read. It is the same as with any anthology book where you will absolutely love a few, get bored with a few, and then there are other stories in-between. It is one of those books that is good to have on hand when you have only a little time to read or just are not in a mood for a long story. I would be willing to read more in this series.

I love anthologies, and especially those that focus on my favorite subjects: sci-fi and speculative fiction.

As with most anthologies there were some stores that I LOVED, some I liked, and some that I have already forgotten about. I would still recommend this to anyone who who loves the subject as well as loves short stories/novelettes.

I hope there will be more volumes in the future.

As always seems to happen with collections I liked some stories more than others but overall this was a great science fiction collection that I really enjoyed reading!

Excellent collection of diverse contemporary science fiction short stories. It's been years since I read a science fiction anthology and I'm so heartened by the inclusion of so many non-Western writers. Back in the day, when I devoured best of anthologies, the authors were overwhelmingly white men. We were allowed the occasional woman authors as a little treat.
The stories may tend towards the somber, but I imagine that's indicative of the current state of the world. I look forward to this series continuing,
I received a free copy of this book From Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Great science fiction stories from great science fiction writers. Go ahead and dip a toe in. If you liked Arrival, Ted Chiang's story that inspired it is in this book.

Great science fiction anthology. I highly recommend. The majority of the stories in this book were very well written, engrossing stories that make you think. I love a good long interesting book, but there is something special about anthologies. Perfect for when you need to read something meaty but only have a small amount of time. Like the perfect snack in your favorite flavor.

I enjoy anthologies so much, and I've also realized that anthologies are best enjoyed as a physical book so I bought my own copy and will review on my own terms.

A truly excellent collection of Science Fiction. Anthologies are not very popular at my library but we gave this one a shot and its been a hit.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 1 is a huge anthology of science fiction short (and not-s-short stories) that was refreshing in its breadth and speaks to a bright future for science fiction. With twenty-eight stories, it’s about twice the size of most anthologies. That is a mixed blessing in that I sometimes felt it was taking me too long to read. There’s Mount TBR piled so high and I am spending days and days on one book. However, I can’t think of a story that I wish I had not read.

There are a few stories that will haunt me, though. “Song of the Birds” by Saleem Haddad had me sobbing as I began to realize what the song revealed. It was one of the more heartbreaking stories I have read in years, in part because it projects a future where we don’t even try to solve our hard problems. Of course, it’s not the only story that predicts an entirely predictable grim future where today’s metropolises are underwater and scarcity is everywhere.

There are stories that seem like they are just the day after tomorrow. “Thoughts and Prayer” by Ken Liu was heartbreaking, but seemed very much of today, a family tragedy made worse by social media trolls and deep fakes. Others are farther afield, a couple going to the moon for their honeymoon and a woman leading an investigation of what went wrong at a failed interplanetary colony. One of the most affecting was the story of sentient machines taking measurements deep at sea and suddenly realizing they have been cut off…and one of them’s desperate and bold effort to find her way home. “Painter of Trees” by Suzanne Palmer is a simple story, but probably will stick with me the longest, about how colonization can lead to extinction even when you wish it would not.

I loved most of the stories in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and didn’t dislike any of them. It really is an outstanding collection of short stories and from a widely diverse group of authors. The only thing I disliked was the Introduction which seemed more like a State of the Union of Science Fiction address, with far too much detail on the ins and outs of publishing, books published, speeches given, writers passed, and awards given than an introduction to an anthology. I would much rather just get to the excellent stories.

I received an e-galley of The Year’s Best Science Fiction from the publisher through NetGalley

The Year’s Best Science Fiction at Gallery | Saga Books
Jonathan Strahan

This was really difficult for me to get into. I only got maybe 20% into it and just didn't pick it back up again. I normally really like Scifi. I may pick this up again another time and try again.

This collection, the start of a new series of Year's Best, has twenty-eight well-chosen stories from 2019 that will entertain anyone who loves short science fiction.

This 600+ page book is dedicated to Gardner Dozois, whose death in 2018 not only was an enormous tragedy to his friends and family but also to the whole science fiction community. Gardner had edited The Year's Best Science Fiction since 1984, ultimately producing thirty-five annual collections. Strahan's Year's Best Science Fiction does not continue Gardner's numbering and is published by Saga Press, not St. Martin's Press, but it does continue Gardner's tradition of summarizing the year in science fiction publishing including listing a great number of novels (despite the author's admitting to only having a limited amount of time to keep up with novel-length work).

Of course, Strahan, an experienced editor himself, does more than copy Gardner. Strahan has edited thirteen volumes of his previous The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year series as well as many other original and reprint anthologies. He has been a Hugo finalist ten times and serves as Reviews Editor for Locus. The twenty-eight stories here show the enormous breadth of his reading. Almost all the tales in Year's Best Science Fiction come from different sources; he only uses five twice and none more than that.

Some of my favorite stories in this issue include:

"The Bookstore at the End of America" by Charlie Jane Anders that features a bookstore with entrances from both the independent (and liberal) country of California and the conservative and religious nation of America, which causes problems when these two nations go to war against each other.
"It's 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning" by Ted Chiang; a fictional essay set in a world where the Gene Equality Project genetically enhanced the intelligence of 500 low-income children only to find that just a few achieved the same success as children of the rich despite having the same enhancements. This shows how the U.S. is not a society that rewards ability.

"As the Last I May Know" by S.L. Huang has a society where the key to the military's ultimate mass-killing weapon is implanted in a young girl so that the nation's ruler, before he can access the weapon, must kill the girl with his own hands. This ensures that the weapon would only be used as a last resort and that the ruler cannot simply order a mass slaughter without ever confronting a victim.

"A Catalog of Storms" shows a town where a few people gain the power to name storms and control them.

"Now Wait for This Week" by Alice Sola Kim is an interesting riff off the Groundhog's Day theme with time continuously resetting itself for a week. What makes this interesting is the voice since it is told from the point of view of the roommate of the rich girl caught in the time loop, not the looper herself.

"The Work of Wolves" by Tegan Moore is convincingly narrated by a dog whose intelligence has been greatly increased for search and rescue operations.

"Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin is about a servant of the descendants of the wealthy elite who fled Earth right before the environmental catastrophe they assume would destroy an overcrowded planet. But on a mission to Earth, the servant discovers the truth, much to the annoyance of the implanted intelligence programmed with the attitudes of the Founders that is narrating the story.

"At the Fall" by Alec Nevala-Lee is a survival story about an artificially created cephalopod designed to explore undersea vents but who has been abandoned, along with her sisters, by humanity.

"Secret Stories of Doors" by Sofia Rhei has the flavor of a combination of Kafka with Orwell as a worker who is secretly inserting fake stories into the World Encyclopaedia, is contacted by a secret society.

"This Is Not the Way Home" by Greg Egan has a couple win a lottery to honeymoon on the actual moon only to become stranded when Earth mysteriously ceases all communications.

It is interesting to note how the field of science fiction has become so broad, and the personal taste of editors can differ so much, that there is little overlap among the stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction and other "Best" anthologies also covering 2019. Five stories overlap with Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year and a different five overlap Diana Gabaldon's The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020.
Readers of science fiction short stories who are seeking a replacement for Gardner's Year's Best will find Strahan's volume a worthy successor. People who don't routinely read all the science fiction magazines, original anthologies, and other sources (even The New York Times) will find this volume a great way to catch up on the short science fiction world.

I love anthologies, an opinion most likely stemming from my English degree and the ever-present heft of enormous period anthologies being dragged between classrooms. I look forward to SFF short story anthologies every year and was thrilled to get a review copy of The Year's Best Science Fiction Volume 1 from Gallery Books. It’s a compendium of 2019’s best short stories and it served as a great refresher on how talented our current SFF authors truly are. The editor, Jonathan Strahan, has chosen some of my favorite stories from 2019, including Charlie Jane Anders’ ‘The Bookstore at the End of America,’ a fascinating tale about borders between a divided America that seems all the more relevant in the current political climate. The collection goes on to include stories from N. K. Jemisin, Elizabeth Bear, S. L. Huang, and Ken Liu, to name a few – all brilliant authors whose work I’ve long enjoyed. Over a dozen other authors combine with these personal favorites to provide a solid showcase of talent and worldbuilding. If you’re looking for compelling stories from a slew of talented writers and exciting voices, this is it.

Love this. Each short story inside this book was extremely well written and brought you fully into the story. As each story was finished you partly want to jump into the next story and at the same time want to delve into the story you just read and luxuriate inside it just a bit longer.

i enjoyed reading this years best science fiction it was a great anthology. i look forward to more anthologies.

Short story collections can be a great way to find new authors, but I didn't feel like there any hidden gems in these stories. The selection seemed repetitive in theme even though there's a lot of diversity in the authors, and most of these authors are well-known and ones I've already read. With a name like "the year's best", I was hoping to find more new to me because I'm no longer widely read in contemporary science fiction.