David G Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (eds)' "Year’s Best SF 16" (anthology, 2011): Annotated table of contents & review

Kathryn Cramer posted the ToC earlier this week. The volume collects editors' choice of fiction originally published during 2010, & will likely "be out from HarperCollins in May" 2011.

Legend: ff = flash fiction; ss = short story.

Table of contents (21 stories, best first, unread last).

Links on author, publisher, or editor fetch more matching fiction. Where I'm aware of an online copy, download link is included. My rating for read stories appears in brackets.

1. Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Futures in the Memory Market" (B); download text/MP3; Clarkesworld, June 2010: A recording device like in Arthur Clarke's "Patent Pending" - record your entire experience, not just audio & video; sell it in units like DVDs, so anyone can play back the experience.
   
   This is the story of a young woman conned into a slavery-like contract with a corporation that trades in her experiences.
2. Jack McDevitt's "The Cassandra Project" (B); download; Lightspeed, June 2010: Discovery of an alien artifact on moon.
3. [ff] Gregory Benford's "Penumbra" (B); download; Nature, 9 June 2010: Apocalypse brought about by earth getting caught in "a gamma-ray burster" somewhere in or out of our galaxy. These are supposed to be astronomical phenomenon that transform a star into a black hole, & are supposed to be intense enough to kill everything on earth if occuring within the galaxy!
   Title, "Penumbra", means "twilight zone"; some of earth was behind moon's twilight zone, leading to many survivors.
   
4. Joe Haldeman's "Sleeping Dogs"; Elizabeth Anne Hull (ed)'s "Gateways" (anthology): Not read.
5. Kay Kenyon's "Castoff World"; download podcast; Jetse de Vries (ed)'s "Shine" (anthology): Not read.
6. Benjamin Crowell's "Petopia"; Asimov's, June 2010: Not read.
7. Vernor Vinge's "A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt From the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee"; Elizabeth Anne Hull (ed)'s "Gateways" (anthology): Not read.
8. Terry Bisson's "About It"; F&SF, September/October 2010: Not read.
9. Vandana Singh's "Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra"; download; Strange Horizons, 29 March 2010: Not read.
10. Damien Broderick's "Under the Moons of Venus"; download; Subterranean Online, Spring 2010: Not read.
11. Cat Sparks' "All the Love in the World"; Alisa Krasnostein (ed)'s "Sprawl" (anthology): Not read.
12. Alastair Reynolds' "At Budokan"; Jetse de Vries (ed)'s "Shine" (anthology): Not read.
13. David Langford's "Graffiti in the Library of Babel"; download; Nick Gevers & Marty Halpern "Is Anybody Out There?" (anthology): Not read.
14. Michael Swanwick's "Steadfast Castle"; F&SF, Sptember/October 2010: Not read.
15. Catherynne M Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord"; download; Lightspeed, August 2010: Not read.
16. Karl Schroeder's "To Hie from Far Cilenia"; John Scalzi (ed)'s "Metatropolis" (anthology): Not read.
17. Brenda Cooper's "The Hebras And The Demons And The Damned"; Analog, December 2010: Not read.
18. Robert Reed's "The Good Hand"; Asimov's, January 2010: Not read.
19. Stephen Popkes' "Jackie’s Boy"; Asimov's, April/May 2010: Not read.
20. Sean McMullen's "Eight Miles"; Analog, September 2010: Not read.
21. [novella] Paul Park's "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV)"; download; F&SF, January/February 2010: Not read.

Related.

1. Previous volumes in this series.
2. Competing "best of 2010" anthologies: Dozois', Horton's, Strahan's.
3. Fiction originally published during 2010.
4. My "best of 2010" list (links others' lists at bottom).
5. "Best of" lists; "good" fiction; "good" online fiction. 
6. Works of  David G Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer.
7. Short fiction anthologies, collections, magazines (only old pulps); all short fiction.

Note: I normally update list posts like this when I read one of the stories, find a new online link, etc. This post was last updated on 6 March 2011.