Black Gate

It’s that time of year again. I’ve been reporting here on the annual crop of Year’s Best SF and Fantasy anthologies as they’ve arrived over the summer — including Rich Horton’s sixth (published in June), the eighth volume from Jonathan Strahan (May), and David Hartwell’s eighteenth volume (December 2013).

And now at last the great granddaddy of them all arrives: Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection. Arguably the most essential of the lot, it is certainly the most comprehensive and the most irreplaceable. Gardner, the Hugo Award-winning editor of Asimov’s SF for two decades, has been compiling and editing this volume every year without fail since 1984, and his richly detailed annual summation is required reading for anyone who expects to really understand science fiction.

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world in the year’s best short stories.

This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley and John Barnes. And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection was published by St. Martin’s Press on July 15. It is 750 pages, priced at $40 in hardcover, $22.99 in trade paperback, and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jim Burns.

In his first novel, acclaimed short story writer Josh Weil draws on tales of Slavic folklore to tell the story of two brothers in a near-future dystopian Russia. Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton, said “The Great Glass Sea is our world made uncanny; the Russian countryside of folktale and literature turned darkly luminous, menacing, and brittle.” Sounds promising to me.

Twins Yarik and Dima have been inseparable since childhood. Living on their uncle’s farm after the death of their father, the boys once spent their days helping farmers in fields, their nights spellbound by their uncle’s tales. Years later, they labor together at the Oranzheria, a sea of glass erected over acres of cropland and lit by space mirrors that ensnare the denizens of Petroplavilsk in perpetual daylight. Now the twins have only work in common — stalwart Yarik married with children, oppressed by the burden of responsibility; dreamer Dima living alone with his mother, wistfully planning the brothers’ return to their uncle’s land.

But an encounter with the Oranzerhia’s billionaire owner changes their lives forever and soon both men find themselves poster boys for opposing ideologies that threaten to destroy not only the lives of those they love but the love that has bonded them since birth.

Josh Weil is the author of the the novella collection The New Valley, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Esquire, Agni and One Story. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

The Great Glass Sea was published by Grove Press on July 1, 2014. It is 474 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition.