Of all the Year’s Best S.F. collection’s by Gardner Dozois, this one might be my favorite so far. There weren’t any stories that just blew me away, but there were only a couple I hated and I quite liked quite a bit. Best stories: "Bears Discover Fire", "Tower of Babylon", and "Learning to Be Me".

(detailed review of the stories on my blog) ( )

Book publishing numbers up again, according to Dozois. He points out one interesting statistic - 57% of new SF books were part of a series or something like that, as opposed to original.

This volume too is up from the last one, making it to 3.70, so with the usual long summary and recommended reading list bonus points, a solid 4.5 on its now.

Three standout stories, too.

Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Mr. Boy - James Patrick Kelly
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Shobies' Story - Ursula K. Le Guin
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Caress - Greg Egan
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : A Braver Thing - Charles Sheffield
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : We See Things Differently - Bruce Sterling
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : And the Angels Sing - Kate Wilhelm
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Past Magic - Ian R. MacLeod
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Bears Discover Fire - Terry Bisson
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The All-Consuming - Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Personal Silence - Molly Gloss
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Invaders - John Kessel
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Cairene Purse - Michael Moorcock
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk - Dafydd ab Hugh
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Tower of Babylon - Ted Chiang
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Death Artist - Alexander Jablokov
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The First Since Ancient Persia - John Brunner
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Inertia - Nancy Kress
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Learning to Be Me - Greg Egan
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Cibola - Connie Willis
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Walking the Moons - Jonathan Lethem
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Rainmaker Cometh - Ian McDonald
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Hot Sky - Robert Silverberg
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : White City - Lewis Shiner
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates - Pat Murphy
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Hemingway Hoax - Joe W. Haldeman

Not wanting to grow up attitude certainly isn't helped by mum's mechanical approach to parenting.

3.5 out of 5

Look, it's full of stars.

3 out of 5

An enhanced policeman gets entangled in a billionaire's bizarre Dr Moreau creations as art and save the child schemes.

4 out of 5

Black bagged mate's Nobel notebook space travel cribbing award speech shocker.

4 out of 5

Downtrodden rock tour coke killer.

4 out of 5

Alien escapee local journalism.

4 out of 5

Nailing the ex for cloning.

3.5 out of 5

Hibernatin's a big ol' waste of time.

4 out of 5

Deadly deviant dishes means fungus faced diner's chef leavetaking.

4 out of 5

Boat builder death story.

3.5 out of 5

Alien Flash of conquistador history waffle.

3 out of 5

Sister's alien lovechild leaving lethality.

4 out of 5

Plague Dogs leveler love.

4.5 out of 5

Built like a brick lighthouse tunnelway to heaven.

3.5 out of 5

Please kill the real me, I deserve it.

3.5 out of 5

No Xerxes, no Spartans, no kids.

4 out of 5

Quarantine lack of collapse restraint.

4.5 out of 5

A man learns to come to terms with the Jewel or Ndoli device - which is also mentioned in Border Guards, and has a bit of a different reaction with a glitch to others.

3 out of 5

Sunshine city time.

3.5 out of 5

Virtually stuck here, by Jove.

3 out of 5

Seven year drought breaker stranger sighting.

3 out of 5

Berg SOS mutiny seeya.

4 out of 5

Big night light.

4 out of 5

Radiation rooted robomum.

3 out of 5

Multiple serial murder mayhem over Ernie's multiversal missing manuscript mania.

4.5 out of 5

4.5 out of 5

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/06... ( )

Another interesting collection, if perhaps not as strong as the first one I read in this series. Most of these stories fall in the "strong, but not particularly ambitious" category.

My favorites were "The Hemmingway Hoax," a tour de force about literary hoaxes, time travel and the multiverse; "Bears Discover Fire," a gentle, funny story in which bears discover fire; "And the Angels Sing," a first contact story; and "Past Magic" a story about trying to live in the past, and how technology might help us do so. A couple of the stories, "The Cairene Purse," a story about a man who visits Egypt in search of his missing archeologist sister; and "The First Since Ancient Persia," which tells of a woman who stumbles across a secret lab in the boondocks of Argentina, had promising beginnings but disappointing conclusions.

The biggest disappointments were "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" (despite an intriguing premise), and "White City," a short short that really didn't work for me. As always, Dozois' observations on the state of the field add an interesting prologue to the collection. ( )