The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2

Rating NR Genre short stories Author Jonathan Strahan (Editor) Publisher Night Shade Books

Nothing reminds me why I fell in love with science fiction more than a short story anthology.  More than a novel, short stories capture the variety of ideas the genre offers, which is what drew me to it in the first place.  Jonathan Strahan has put together an impressive collection in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2, though the genres in the title should be reversed - this is much more a fantasy collection than a science fiction collection.

The anthology starts with Ted Chiang's “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate,” which is worth the price of admission all by itself.  This Arabian Nights style tale shows us a magic circle that allows passage through time, backward and forward, and we listen in as the merchant gives his potential client examples of how it has been used in the past.  Each sub-story is complex and imaginative, and worthy of its own story.  Chiang pulls all the threads together masterfully, and the overall effect is sad and haunting.  Peter Beagle's “The Last and Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French” follows, a strange piece of magical realism in which a school librarian slowly begins turning French.  His language, his tastes, his hobbies, and his affections are slowly overwritten until even France itself is not French enough to satisfy him.  In “By Fools Like Me” by Nancy Kress, old woman who can barely remember the time before all the trees were gone is brought a strange package by her little granddaughter.  Inside, they find books, which are sin itself in a society that prays for rain and worships the icon of a tree.  The old woman's daughter-in-law is the head priestess, and will demand that the sins be turned over and sacrificed, but the old woman cannot do it.  Instead, she reads the books to her granddaughter in secret.  As an invalid in an agrarian, subsistence culture, she is risking her life by disobeying, but she accepts the risk for the stories and the dim memories they bring back to her.

The collection's best science fiction story is Stephen Baxter's “Last Contact,” a quiet little story about the end of the universe.  Baxter shows us the results of a reverse big bang, energy being ripped away from physical objects, recollecting, possibly to start the process anew, from the perspective of a woman and her mother sitting in the garden, drinking tea.  They know what's coming, they've seen the evidence, and now they wait to be ripped into oblivion together.  No space battles, no last ditch efforts to save humanity, no miracle cure for it all at the last second; just people acting like people in the face of annihilation.

Overall, this anthology is a wonderful escape, and although few of the stories in it point forward the way traditional science fiction might, they all captivate the way good speculative fiction does.  Dragons whose bones sing to the living, ghosts that scamper across dining room floors and into young girls' pockets, and people with hearts in the wrong places all remind us how it felt to pick up that first collection of short stories and be overpowered by storytelling.