cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/491274
Here’s the cream of the crop: short stories, novelettes, novellas by science fiction writers already well known and awarded for their high-quality work in science fiction. These are writers like Poul Anderson, Joe Haldeman, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr, Vernor Vinge and Gene Wolfe.
Here also are writers who are newer to the field, but just as excellent, including high-powered talents such as Greg Bear, Jack Dann, Jack McDevitt, Pat Murphy, John Kessel, Rand B. Lee, Pat Cadigan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, and Dan Simmons. Altogether there are 250,000 words of great science fiction; twenty-five stories by twenty- four authors. These are the stories that will be nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards this year, the stories that years from now people will still be talking about.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction was a series of science fiction anthologies edited by American Gardner Dozois until his death in 2018. The series, which is unrelated to the similarly titled and themed Year’s Best SF, was published by St. Martin’s Griffin. The collections were produced annually for 35 years starting in 1984.
No Heinlein in 84’?
Your question intrigued me, so I had to go and take a look. It looks like Heinlein isn’t published in many anthologies, possibly because he was an editor of one himself (according to Wikipedia):
The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) was productive during a writing career that spanned the last 49 years of his life; the Robert A. Heinlein bibliography includes 32 novels, 59 short stories and 16 collections published during his life. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, at least two songs (‘Hijack’ by Jefferson Starship and ‘Cool Green Hills of Earth’ on the 1970 album Ready to Ride and as the b-side of a single by Southwind) and a board game derive more or less directly from his work. He wrote a screenplay for one of the films. Heinlein edited an anthology of other writers’ science fiction short stories.
He also fell out of favor in the 80s to large extent:
After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980 (The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein’s philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers and one critic, David Langford, has written about them very negatively. Heinlein’s four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.
I think that all of these factors combined to his exclusion in Dozio’s anthologies. By that time, Heinlein was already considered one of the three holy men of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi (Clarke and Asimov being the other two), so I’m not surprised he didn’t make it into these volumes, which were focused on the new talent of the time.
