Anthony’s Reviews > The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection > Status Update

Read Lucius Shepard’s fascinating, poetic, and wholly original novella “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter.”

Read 4 very strong, distinctive stories: Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Skin Deep,” an affecting exploration of colonists misunderstanding native peoples; D. Alexander Smith’s “Dying in Hull,” a touching portrait of a stubborn elderly woman surviving in a flooded town; Kathe Koja’s cyberpunk “Distances,” which featured wonderfully inventive writing; and Kim Newman’s wryly amusing “Famous Monsters”

Read Pat Cadigan’s enjoyably hallucinatory, sensual, and crisp “It Was the Heat.”

Read Stephen Kraus’ “Emissary.” Kraus took an intriguingly fresh approach to inventing the circumstances surrounding a man’s first contact with aliens, but his choice of having a character speak in a long monologue rankled.

Read John Kessel’s “Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner,” which I had read as a teenager, and remembered loving. It wasn’t quite as excellent as my memory held it to be, but it was a solidly effective character study and cautionary tale.

Read James Lawson’s “Sanctuary,” which was the rare cyberpunk story that features richly drawn characters whose emotional lives matter to the plot; and Michael Swanwick’s fascinating “The Dragon Line,” which showcases an unusually dark portrait of Merlin.

Read Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent, subtle, and quietly moving “Goacier.”

Read Brian Stableford’s intriguingly grotesque, but somewhat stilted “The Growth of the House of Usher”

Read George Alec Effinger’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” which may have felt a bit fresher in the late 80’s than it does now.

Read Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones,” a good-enough time travel story set in the Pleistocene Epoch.