Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection" (2003): anthology with 25 stories

Note: 2008 edition (Vol 25) annotated ToC - in case you mistakenly landed at this page.
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Contents.
In brackets, following story title, are my ratings.

1. "Breathmoss" (C) by Ian R MacLeod. I had read it a long time back. A rather long, contrived, & unremarkable tale on some planet with mostly women, very few men. An a young puberty age girl learning the ways of the world. She eventually meets her own old self from future, I think.
   
2. "The Most Famous Little Girl in the World" by Nancy Kress.
   
3. "The Passenger" (B) by Paul McAuley. I remember having read it a long time back. Some space farers "rescue" a little girl from an apparently abandoned ship with all dead, & she turns out to be something else (an alien or something, I don't quite recall).
   
4. "The Political Officer" (B) by Charles Coleman Finley. Read it long back. Some kind of intrigue aboard a spaceship.
   
5. "Lambing Season" by Molly Gloss.
   
6. "Coelacanths" by Robert Reed.
   
7. "Presence" by Maureen F McHugh.
   
8. "Halo" by Charles Stress.
   
9. "In Paradise" by Bruce Sterling.
   
10. "The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars" by Ian McDonald.
    
11. "Stories for Men" by John Kessel.
    
12. "To Become a Warrior" by Chris Beckett.
    
13. "The Clear Blue Seas of Luna" by Gregory Benford.
    
14. "VAO" (A) by Geoff Ryman. I read this recently, & might write a proper review a few days down. A harassed computer programmer writes a zombie terrorist creation virus. Well written in a rather light vein. Set in an old age home, with much sympathetic talk about caring for the old.
    
15. "Winters are Hard" by Steven Popkes.
    
16. "At the Money" by Richard Wadholm.
    
17. "Agent Provocateur" by Alexander Irvine.
    
18. "Singleton" by Greg Egan.
    
19. "Slow Life" by Michael Swanwick.
    
20. "A Flock of Birds" by James Van Pelt.
    
21. "The Potter of Bones" by Eleanor Arnason.
    
22. "The Whisper of Disks" (B) by John Meaney. Story of a prodigious girl that grows to be a very old woman, invents many things - among them moving via other dimensions to other stars, & gets rich by companies she founds. A second parallel thread of her ancestors runs in 18th or 19th century England, & has palace intrigue I could not quite relate to; may be those familiar with recent history of England will be able to be happy with this tangent thread.
    
23. "The Hotel at Harlan's Landing" (A) by Kage Baker. A women talks of good old days in early 19th century in a small town on Pacific coast of US, & her memories of town's modernization. Great prose, but not much sf.
    
24. "The Millennium Party" (C) by Walter Jon Williams. The really short story is of a happy world where you live very long, meet your spouse once a year for dinner & don't give full attention even then, & can change your brains to shut off irrelevant memories! Reminded me of Issac Asimov's Solarians.
    
25. "Turquoise Days" (B) by Alastair Reynolds. A rather complex & long cocktail of Asimov's "Nemesis", Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth", & Yann Martel's "Life of Pi".
    

Fact sheet.
Editor: Gardner Dozois
First published: 2003
Publication history & other information.
See also: Gardner Dozois's "Year's Best" & "Best of Best" anthology series.