I’m pretty darn happy right at the moment. Just got news that Publishers Weekly have given The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1 a starred review (see below). Woot! That’s the third straight PW star for my year’s bests, which makes me feel pretty darn good. I believe it ships next week, which is pretty exciting. My sincerest thanks to everyone involved, especially the guys at Night Shade and all of the contributors.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year #1
Edited by Jonathan Strahan. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $19.95 paper (478p) ISBN 978-1-59780-068-6

Australian editor Strahan (Best Short Novels: 2007) gathers 24 stories from a wealth of standard and New Age publications for a provocative anthology that will satisfy readers looking for fresh, contemporary work that stretches both SF and fantasy boundaries. Walter Jon Williams’s bittersweet “Incarnation Day” and Cory Doctorow’s oddly touching “I, Row-Boat” extrapolate current bioengineering and robotics trends into far-flung times and places. Kelly Link’s elegiac “The Wizards of Perfil” and Peter S. Beagle’s perceptive take on siblinghood, “El Regalo,” skew family relationships into bizarre and endearing new shapes. Still others, especially Elizabeth Hand’s exquisite “The Saffron Gatherer” and Margo Lanagan’s terrifying “Under Hell, Over Heaven,” defy categorization, offering flashes of primal recognition of the peaks and valleys of human emotion. Except for a few forays into gory violence (possibly influenced by current video gaming), these stories all refract experience into kaleidoscopic new worlds-strange, dangerous and lovely. (Apr.)