Year's Best Science Fiction: 4th Annual Collection

Rating:
Summary: Dozois gives sf readers a lot for their money & time.
Review: Dozois's fourth massive 80s anthology of current sf culled 27 genre stories out of the hundreds published in 1986 to reprint here. Dozois always locates stories that represent the current trends of the field. Cyberpunk was at its greatest influence then, and those writers (e.g., William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams) are well represented. Two award winners he reprinted are Greg Bear's "Tangents" and Lucius Shepard's long, intense "R & R." The three I liked best are these: Tanith Lee's "Into Gold," a clever take on the Arthur legend set at the end of Rome's influence; Kim Stanley Robinson's "Down and Out in the Year 2000," an ironic study of street life in a decaying Washington, DC; and Connie Willis's "Chance," about a married woman's romance with a man who has died. All three stories were first published in ASIMOV'S, which has dominated much of the American sf short story scene in the last 20 years.