I had pretty much given up contemporary science fiction as a
lost cause, but over the past few years I’ve discovered there’s still plenty of
stuff out there I like to read. I just didn’t know where to look for it. If
you’re in the same boat, a good starting place is THE YEAR’S BEST MILITARY
& ADVENTURE SF 2015, a fine collection edited by David Afsharirad and
published by Baen. The authors are a mixture of veteran writers such as David
Drake, David Brin, David Weber (honest, there are people involved in this book
who aren’t named David), Hank Davis
(well, that’s still close), and Brad R. Torgersen (completely David-free), as
well as newer writers like Eric Leif Davin, Claudine Griggs, and Seth
Dickinson. Then there’s Brendan DuBois, hardly a new writer but fairly new to
SF, and Joe R. Lansdale, who, of course, is a genre unto his own self.
Those two contribute my favorite two stories in the book. DuBois’s “The Siege
of Denver” is an absolute knockout, a fine piece of MilSF that ties in with his
novel DARK VICTORY (which I have and hope to be reading soon). Lansdale’s “The
Wizard of the Trees” is pure fun, an Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired adventure on
Venus the way long-time readers like me wish it was.
Not all the stories quite worked for me, which is not surprising. I never
expect to like all the stories in an anthology, but you might enjoy some of the
ones that weren’t to my taste. The others from this volume I particularly liked
are “Save What You Can”, the first Hammer’s Slammers story by David Drake in
quite a while; Brad R. Torgersen’s “Gyre”, part of a multi-author series called
The Sargasso Containment that’s been running in the magazine Galaxy’s Edge; “Helping Hand” by
Claudine Griggs and “Twilight on Olympus”, two problem stories in the classic SF
tradition that end very differently; and David Brin’s “The Tumbledowns of
Cleopatra Abyss”, a hard SF tale set on a far future Venus, or rather, at the
bottom of one of Venus’s oceans.
David Afsharirad has assembled a very good collection here, and I hope he
continues putting together these annual volumes for a while. I’ll certainly be
a regular reader if he does. Recommended.
