The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition

American science fiction magazines are struggling to survive, but Horton easily fills this hefty anthology with stories from original anthologies and online publications. Rather than focusing on a narrow subset of fantastic stories, he attempts to illuminate the entire field: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Mongoose" is Lovecraft-flavored interplanetary adventure; Alex Irvine's "Dragon's Teeth" is secondary-world fantasy; and Robert Charles Wilson's "This Peaceable Land" might be termed cautionary alternate history. Most of the stories demonstrate laudable technical expertise, and several, like Kelly Link's "Secret Identities," are genuinely memorable; only R. Garcia y Robertson's "Wife Stealing Time," with its cartoonish Native Americans transplanted to Mars, seems really out of place. Fans of year-end round-ups need not worry about excessive overlap; only eight of Horton's 30 selections appear in Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's competing anthologies. (Aug.)