I spend far too long thinking about, writing about, or working towards publishing books of the year’s best stories to not be interested in what other people think is excellent. I’m always particularly interested in what my colleagues at Locus think, so I was interested to see Rich Horton’s annual ‘Virtual Best of the Year‘ post on his newsgroup.
He offers multiple lists, but the one below is for the short Terry Carr length volume that most closely resembles the length of the books I do for ibooks:
Giliad, Gregory Feeley
The Voluntary State, Christopher Rowe
The Third Party, David Moles
The Faery Handbag, Kelly Link
The People of Sand and Slag, Paolo Bacigalupi
PeriAndry’s Quest, Stephen Baxter
Quarry, Peter Beagle
Biographical Notes to A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with
Air-Planes by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Benjamin Rosenbaum
The Gladiator’s War: A Dialogue, Lois Tilton
Metal More Attractive, Ysabeau S. Wilce
Opal Ball, Robert Reed
Ten Sigmas, Paul Melko
State Change, Ken Liu
Dibs, Brian Plante
Family Bed, Kit Reed
A Keeper, Alan De Niro
All of Us Can Almost …, Carol Emshwiller
Being With Jimmy, Aaron Schutz
I think Rich estimates the above book would fill about 150,000 wds, which compares to the 110,000 we have for the ibooks anthologies. I was pleased to see that we overlapped on seven selections, and that he mentioned the Rosenbaum story from All-Star Zeppelin Stories, which I didn’t see until too late. Still, a good list.
One thing I would comment, briefly on, is Rich’s comment that “I caveat it by noting that I haven’t had to deal with issues like acquisition that might have caused other anthologists to not have their ideal TOC”. I was surprised at how much impact this has on the books I’ve worked on. I’ve edited or co-edited seven ‘year’s best’ anthologies so far, and I’ve lost at least one story in every book to permissions problems. This year, with the fantasy book, we lost two at the last minute, and there were two other stories we really wanted we couldn’t get at all. It’s all part of the business and to be expected, but is unfortunate. It does, though, make lists like Rich’s all the more interesting.