The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-fourth Annual Collection

Like a giant sequoia towering over a copse of maple trees, Hugo-winner Dozois’s annual shelf-bending collection of the year’s best SF continues to overshadow all other anthologies. Highlights include Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile,” about two immortals who yearn to do something “grand and audacious” before they consciously end their lives; Cory Doctorow’s “I, Row-Boat,” which chronicles a theological dispute between an artificially intelligent boat and a sentient coral reef; and Alastair Reynolds’s “Signal to Noise,” an unexpectedly intimate story about a scientist’s attempt to contact his recently deceased wife across quantum realities. This yearly anthology is required reading for every serious SF fan. (July )