David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF 12": Volume 12 of annual anthology series, 26 stories

Stories are ordered by quality, best first. Where I have read the story, my rating follows title, in brackets, followed by a very brief summary. Where I have posted a proper review of story, link on title takes you there.

A few of the stories are available online. Where I am aware of this, I provide a link either here or in my review article. Such entries are prefixed with a "*".

Stories collected were each published during the year 2006.

1. * Michael Flynn's "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth"(B): A Bermuda Triangle type story of a mysteriously lost ship, but mostly from human interest side of the bereaved families.
2. * Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (C), Jim Baen's Universe, Aug 2006: A pretty mundane doomsday story. World goes down suddenly to multiple simultaneous terrorist attacks without a hint of protest or resistance from governments!
3. Rudy Rucker's "Chu and the Nants" (C); Asimov's, June 2006: Based on first half of the story that is available online, it sounds like a jargon filled geeky utopia. Self-replicating nanobots called Nants are let loose on Mars - convert the whole planet into a sort of big AI. And they are programmed to display ads & kind of banish night from all over the world - how the hell is anyone able to see ads clearly on Martian disk from earth is beyond me. This half story indicates the big AI is learning to have it's own agenda, & will soon be out of control of humans. Second half will presumably describe its wonders.
4. * Eileen Gunn's "Speak, Geek" (C): A genetically tweaked dog that works as a genome coder accidentally discovers an interesting undocumented feature in upcoming product, "Man 2.1".
   
5. Nancy Kress's "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls", Asimov's
   
6. Terry Bisson's "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
7. * Heather Lindsley's "Just Do It!", F&SF Jul 2006, (not verified) online as MP3 audio.
   
8. Gardner R. Dozois's "Counterfactual", F&SF, June 2006.
9. Edd Vick's "Moon Does Run", Electric Velocipede.
   
10. Mary Rosenblum's "Home Movies", April/May 2006.
    
11. Ian Creasey's "Silence in Florence", Asimov's Sept 2006
12. * Kameron Hurley's "The Women of Our Occupation", Strange Horizons 31 July 2006, online.
    
13. Claude Lalumière's "This Is the Ice Age"
14. Joe Haldeman's "Expedition, with Recipes"
15. Liz Williams's "The Age of Ice", Asimov's
    
16. Gregory Benford's "Applied Mathematical Theology", Nature magazine.
    
17. Carol Emshwiller's "Quill"
18. Alastair Reynolds's "Tiger, Burning"
19. Paul J McAuley's "Dead Men Walking", Asimov's March 2006.
    
20. Daryl Gregory's "Damascus"
21. * Michael Swanwick's "Tin Marsh", Asimov's, online.
    
22. Ian R MacLeod's "Taking Good Care of Myself", Nature magazine.
    
23. Stephen Baxter's "The Lowland Expedition", Analog April 2006
24. Wil McCarthy's "Heisenberg Elementary", Asimov's Apr/May 2006.
    
25. Robert Reed's "Rwanda", Asimov's March 2006.
26. Charlie Rosenkrantz's "Preemption"

First published: 2007
See also: Entire anthology series.