The sixth volume of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, published by Nightshade Books, has just been released. It’s the first of the “year’s best” installments collecting work published in 2011 to come out, and the one I’ve been looking forward to the most. This year’s collection includes work by Kij Johnson, Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Caitlin Kiernan, and many fabulous others; several of the stories included here are now Nebula Award nominees.
Strahan’s Best of the Year books tend to be my favorite of the annual bunch (last year’s volume reviewed here), and this year’s installment was as high quality as I’ve come to expect. The book is big, nearly six hundred text-crammed pages long, and contains a comfortable mix of various different sorts of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, a little science-fantasy, some stories with a touch of horror, and even a bit of urban fantasy.
That variety, in stories and authors alike, is part of what makes Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6 stand strong as a retrospective of 2011, as well as part of what makes it so very readable — but now, I’m just repeating what I loved about the previous volumes. Suffice to say that it’s still true and still wonderfully satisfying.
[So, let’s get to the review]