The subtitle to this collection is “20 years of the best short science fiction novels,” referring to the fact that this follow-up to Volume 1 is concerned with that peculiarity of the science fiction genre, the novella.

Those who regularly embark on National Novel Writing Month are aiming for a minimum of 50,000 words in order to achieve their goal. Now, 50,000 words is pretty short for a novel, and I’d have thought 80,000 would be more of a standard length, and in the science fiction genre we’re used to mammoth books of 150,000 words and longer.

It’s only in the SF genre that I’ve seen mention of novellas (and their smaller siblings, novelettes), which can be thought of as either very long short stories or very short novels: 30,000 words, maybe a little more.

At their best, novellas acheive a wonderful feat: they somehow manage to flesh out the characters and settings of a short story to make them more substantial, but without leaving that sense that things have been padded out to meet some requirement of the publishers. I remember reading Tim Powers’ first two novels and appreciating the tight, concise writing in those 50,000 worders. A novella keeps things tight whilst allowing the writer longer to fully explore the new world s/he has created.

These novellas are lifted from the first 20 years of Gardner Dozois’ ever-excellent annual ‘Best of’ collections. I’ve been buying these regularly for a good while now (I review the 24th collection below), but there was still enough within these pages that I hadn’t seen before, because they date from those collections I hadn’t read. Gratifyingly, I only remembered one story with any clarity (mainly because I re-read it relatively recently), and I enjoyed re-reading even the most recent of these (from the 20th collection) without feeling I was going through the motions. In fact, though I must have read Alastair Reynolds’ “Turquoise Days” less than five years ago, I didn’t remember any of it.

This is partly a function of my reading such a devil of a lot of short SF, and also of having had a lot on my plate in the past couple of years.

Anyway, as always with Dozois, this impeccable collection is pure gold. Starting with Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, every single novella is excellent, entertaining, thought provoking, and sometimes moving. Probably my favourite here is “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, which turns an anecdote about Hemingway’s lost manuscripts (stolen from a train in Paris at the very beginning of his writing career) into a meditation upon alternate universes and time travel. This, like some of the others here, was later extended into novel length for publication, but it’s a near-certainty that the shorter version is better.

“Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress is another wondrous novella later lengthened, but included here in its original form. It takes post Human Genome project ideas about “designer children” to one of the possible conclusions. What if you could design a human being who had no need of sleep?

Other well-known writers included are Walter John Williams, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Frederick Pohl, Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald and Ian R. MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” is one of the few I’d read before. It’s a characteristically elegiac story of a lonely old man persisting in a lonely pursuit of an unfashionable scientific cause.

I’d especially recommend this collection to anyone who finds short fiction problematic but would be interested in discovering new writers. As a sampler of the best in contemporary science fiction this is hard to beat, and it makes a fine stop-gap between Dozois annual collections.

Highly recommended.