Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year #16

This is the last best-of-the-year collection we'll see from Carr, who died this spring at the age of 50, very much at the peak of his creative abilities. Fittingly, this collection is a particularly excellent one, and among the authors represented are several Carr discovered and worked with for his landmark original anthologies, the Universe series. Kim Stanley Robinson's ""Escape from Kathmandu'' is a knockout of a novelette about the discovery and befriending of an abominable snowman. Even better is Lucius Shepard's ``Aymara,'' a haunting tale of love, politics and despair, set in a U.S.-controlled Latin American country, and in which an ill-conceived experiment in time travel results in the end of the worldsort of. Both Shepard's and Robinson's characters are fully fleshed out and adult. Also excellent are stories by Harry Turtledove, Ian Watson, John Varley, Orson Scott Card and a hilarious bit of revisionist biography by Carter Scholz, ``Galileo Complains.'' (October 2)