This 60th anniversary anthology of the best of F&SF features an extraordinary body of work. Honestly, it reads like a who's who of genre fiction: Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, etc. I had read some of the stories before, like Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Bradbury's tragic "All Summer in a Day." I think there were only three stories in the book that just didn't click for me at all, but far more were truly astonishing and fantastic.

Some of my new favorites:
"The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree Jr.
"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle (tearjerker at the end, ugh)
"The Dark" by Karen Joy Fowler
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
"Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin ( )

I read this for Ted Chiang's [b:The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate|223379|The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate|Ted Chiang|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266499760s/223379.jpg|216332] which turned out to be a very apt closing selection. Like any other anthology, the stories were hit & miss. I admit I skipped one or two. For example, I skipped Flowers for Algernon because I've read the novel-length version several times. But there were other wonderful finds and I'm very glad I read this. I do absolutely recommend that you read it, too. One thing - no selections from the 1980s? Does anyone have a guess why that may be so? Maybe the magazine was going through rough times? ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/11/review-of-very-best-of-fantasy-science.... ( )

I can't say I enjoyed this book but that was more a matter of taste than the quality of the book itself. It's an excellent collection of stories by top-tier SFF authors, but unfortunately I found most of them to be too strange and oddly depressing for my taste. There were a few stories I liked. My favorite was probably Solitude by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which Le Guin accomplished what she does probably better than any other writer I've read: create a culture so alien to our own that it should be incomprehensible, but then bring it to life in a way that helps the reader understand and admire it. ( )

Brilliant, varied collection of stories, with some haunting classics. It's rare that I read an anthology and love almost every story, but in this collection, there were only one or two that I wasn't gripped by. There is some amazing writing talent on show here, particularly when you think of the difficulty of conveying a complex fantasy world in only a few pages. ( )