Year’s Best TOCs
Everybody's blogging these days: Kathryn Cramer has posted (a couple weeks ago, actually) the TOC for her and David Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy 3 in her newish blog. It looks like a good list of authors, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've read almost none of the stories, so it'll be good to get to read them. I liked last year's edition (YBF 2) quite a bit. The TOC for YBSF 8 is also there, and also looks potentially good, though I haven't liked Hartwell & Cramer's SF selections as much as their fantasy selections in the past. ('Sfunny, I've always thought of myself as a science fiction fan, but it's been true for quite a while now that (by and large) I like fantasy more. But there's still quite a lot of science fiction I like, and I've read more of the stories in YBSF 8 than in YBF 3, and I continue to be surprised when people read only SF and complain about fantasy or vice versa.)
I am, of course, thrilled that there are two SH stories in YBF 3 ("Travel Agency" and "Comrade Grandmother"). I'm also pleased to see that Hartwell & Cramer draw on a wide variety of sources (28 stories from 15 different publications for YBF 3; 23 stories from 10 different publications for YBSF 8) including, in both books, a couple of small presses and a couple of online magazines) (and yes, Ellen & Terri draw on even more and wider-ranging sources, but they've got a much bigger book); unlike, say, the corresponding Silverberg/Haber anthology, which contains 11 stories from 4 different publications, including 7 stories from F&SF (which comes across to me more like "Fantasy: The Best of F&SF" than anything else, but maybe that's just me). Thanks to Steven H. Silver for pointing out this contrast, over on the Tangent Online newsgroup.
(I should note that YBSF 8 contains 6 stories from F&SF; I certainly don't mean to suggest that F&SF isn't publishing good stuff. The difference is that in YBSF 8 those stories make up about 25% of the total number of stories, while in the Silverberg/Haber volume they're about 64% of the total.)
Babble babble. At some point, if someone hasn't beat me to it, I'll do an author-gender count for Broad Universe's stats page; rough count suggests that the percentages this year are much the same as in previous years. About 30% stories by women in H/C's YBF 3, for example, and about 9% stories by women in Silverberg/Haber (which is to say, the only female author represented is Le Guin).
