Status Updates From The Year's Best Science Fic...

Dying in Hull - Smith: An older woman scavenging the remains of her climate-flooded town.

Distances - Koja: People with computerjacks in their head have some issues.

Famous Monsters - Newman: A Martian reminisces on his career in Hollywood.

The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter - Shepard: A young woman is trapped inside a giant time-frozen dragon for years.

Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner - Kessel: Do you really want to win Bingo, though?

Emissary - Kraus: This started out so great but the narrator was just a bit too competent.

It Was the Heat - Cadigan: What happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans, maybe.

Skin Deep - Rusch: Alien farm worker under cover makes a realization and a decision.

The Growth of the House of Usher - Stableford: A dying man is really into his dead sister and bio-buildings.

Glacier - Robinson: A cooling world and a glacier outside Boston.

Sanctuary - Lawson: Cyberpunk mystery in the Southwest.

The Dragon Line - Swanwick: Arthurian characters in the present, dealing with family & pollution.

Our Neural Chernobyl - Sterling: A special virus causes issues globally. Beware the Raccoon Kingdom.

House of Bones - Silverberg: A time traveler is stuck 20k years in the past.

Schrödinger's Kitten - Effinger: A young woman has many futures ahead of her.

Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance? - Waldrop: Reread. This was a very enjoyable nostalgia trip to the late '60s with a fun ending.

The Girl Who Loved Animals - McAllister: She really did.

The Last of the Winnebagos - Willis: RVs are banned, the Humane Society are powerful cops, and all the dogs are gone.

Love in Vain - Shiner: Failing marriage, old connections, and a serial killer with powers.

The Hob - Moffett: The hobs of Northern England are apparently real and a bit out of this world.

The Last Article - Turtledove: Reread. Nazis win WWII, take over India. Gandhi attempts independence.

Stable Strategies for Middle Management - Gunn: Corporate management is a cutthroat arena..

In Memoriam - Kress: The role of memories and the end of life. Wiping yourself to start again, hmm.

Kirinyaga - Resnick: Reread. I feel like I can see what he meant with this story, but I still don't like it.

Surfacing - Williams: These people are not having a whale of a good time.

Home Front - Kelly: Growing up in an America at war.

The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady - Stableford: An alternate history where vampires use their powers and elite status to control humanity.

Peaches for Mad Molly - Gould: Housing is expensive, so why not live on the outside of 700+ story tall buildings? Really fun.

Read Lucius Shepard’s fascinating, poetic, and wholly original novella “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter.”

Read 4 very strong, distinctive stories: Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Skin Deep,” an affecting exploration of colonists misunderstanding native peoples; D. Alexander Smith’s “Dying in Hull,” a touching portrait of a stubborn elderly woman surviving in a flooded town; Kathe Koja’s cyberpunk “Distances,” which featured wonderfully inventive writing; and Kim Newman’s wryly amusing “Famous Monsters”

Read Pat Cadigan’s enjoyably hallucinatory, sensual, and crisp “It Was the Heat.”

Read Stephen Kraus’ “Emissary.” Kraus took an intriguingly fresh approach to inventing the circumstances surrounding a man’s first contact with aliens, but his choice of having a character speak in a long monologue rankled.

Read John Kessel’s “Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner,” which I had read as a teenager, and remembered loving. It wasn’t quite as excellent as my memory held it to be, but it was a solidly effective character study and cautionary tale.

Read James Lawson’s “Sanctuary,” which was the rare cyberpunk story that features richly drawn characters whose emotional lives matter to the plot; and Michael Swanwick’s fascinating “The Dragon Line,” which showcases an unusually dark portrait of Merlin.

Read Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent, subtle, and quietly moving “Goacier.”

Read Brian Stableford’s intriguingly grotesque, but somewhat stilted “The Growth of the House of Usher”

Read Howard Waldrop’s supremely enjoyable “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?”

Read George Alec Effinger’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” which may have felt a bit fresher in the late 80’s than it does now.

Read Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones,” a good-enough time travel story set in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Read the mildly entertaining “Our Neural Chernobyl” by Bruce Sterling

Read Judith Moffett’s sweet tale of creatures from English folklore, “The Hob.”

Read Lewis Shiner’s “Love in Vain,” a chilling portrait of the roles misogyny and sexual obsession play in the serial killings of women.

Read the deeply moving “The Last of the Winnebagoes” by Connie Willis. I’d read and loved this story as a teenager, and I’m amazed that I remembered some aspects of it all these years later.

Read Bruce McAllister’s “The Girl Who Loved Animals,” which featured both a strong premise and some aspects that felt a bit forced.

Read the excellent, Hugo-winning “Kirinyaga” by Mike Resnick

Read the brief, thought-provoking “In Memoriam” by Nancy Kress

Read Eileen Gunn’s incisive satire “Stable Strategies for Middle Management”

Read the chilling alternate history story “The Last Article” by Harry Turtledove

Read the delightfully inventive “Peaches for Mad Molly” by Steven Gould

Read Brian Stableford’s gothic, melodramatic, enjoyable “The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady”

Read “Home Front” by James Patrick Kelly. It was a refreshingly character-based tale of a high school kid living in a future America that’s in the midst of a disturbing war.