Best of the Best Volume 2

Dozois, Gardner, editor. Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (vt The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels). New York City: St. Martin's, 2007. For variant title and UK publication, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of April 2023, here.[1] For contents, see ISBDb, as of April 2023, here.[[2] Reviewed by Jason W. Ellis, SFRA Review #278 (Oct.-Dec. 2006): 12-14., our source here and whom we quote; as of 30 April 2023, listed, but not available to Erlich (an SFRA member) here.[3]

Anthology includes:

Alastair Reynolds's Turquoise Days (Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon P, 2002).[4] Ellis says this novella "is about communing with the 'Pattern Juggler biomass,' a worldwide biological entity on another world that is made up of many individual, cooperating cells. Pattern Jugglers form a distributed computing system that can encode alien (read: human and other non-Pettern Juggler) thoughts as well as entire minds. Reynolds never makes it clear, but the Pattern Jugglers appear to be a biological and synthetic amalgamation. The author's ideas are similar to those in Greg Bear's Blood Music, but he pushes them out to the stars."

Ian McDonald's "Tendeléo's Story" (Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing, 2000).[5] About "alien nanotechnological substances called Chaga consuming and transforming the land in Africa as well as other places around the globe." Note "the author's choice to have a female protagonist interface with the Chaga," which Ellis compares with Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz (1994), bibliographic information given here.[6] 

Michael Swanwick's "Griffin's Egg" (1991), which is set "on a moon base inhabited by workers embedded with 'trance chips' that facilitates communication directly to the brain. War on Earth carries over to the moon base when an operative releases a nano-biotech weapon that creates havoc within the minds of the infected" (13). Note implant motif and cf. and contrast such works as Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (1959).[7]

RDE, finishing, 26Ap23