Year's Best SF 9
The Future Boldly Imagined From Breathtaking New Perspectives
The world as we will know it is far different from the future once predicted in simpler times. For this newest collection of the finest short form SF to appear in print over the preceding year, acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered remarkable works that reflect a new sensibility. Courageous and diverse stories from some of the finest authors in the field grace this amazing volume -- adventures and discoveries, parables and warnings, carrying those eager to fly to far ends of a vast, ever-shifting universe of alien worlds, strange cultures, and mind-bending technologies. Tomorrow has never been as spellbinding, terrifying, or transforming as it is here, today, in these extraordinary pages. Hang on!
New tales from:
Kage Baker • Gregory Benford • Terry BissonRick Moody • Michael Swanwick • John Varley and many more
FictionScience Fiction
RELEASED2004
PUBLISHERHarperCollins
LENGTH512
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
The Future Boldly Imagined From Breathtaking New Perspectives
The world as we will know it is far different from the future once predicted in simpler times. For this newest collection of the finest short form SF to appear in print over the preceding year, acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered remarkable works that reflect a new sensibility. Courageous and diverse stories from some of the finest authors in the field grace this amazing volume -- adventures and discoveries, parables and warnings, carrying those eager to fly to far ends of a vast, ever-shifting universe of alien worlds, strange cultures, and mind-bending technologies. Tomorrow has never been as spellbinding, terrifying, or transforming as it is here, today, in these extraordinary pages. Hang on!
New tales from:
Kage Baker • Gregory Benford • Terry BissonRick Moody • Michael Swanwick • John Varley and many more
FictionScience Fiction
RELEASED2004
PUBLISHERHarperCollins
LENGTH512
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
