Free The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois Page A

critical books about SF and fantasy, including Maps and Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeneys), by Michael Chabon; Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press), by Farah Mendlesohn; The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 2 (Aqueduct), by Eileen Gunn and L. Timmel Duchamp; and What Is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction? (Beccon), by Paul Kincaid. There were autobiographies by or biographies/critical studies of specific authors, including Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (HarperCollinsUK), by J. G. Ballad; H. Beam Piper: A Biography (McFarland), by John F. Carr; An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (Greenwood), by Andrew M. Butler; Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography (McFarland), by Jeffrey Marks; The Vorkosigan Companion (Baen), by Lillian Stewart Carl and Martin H. Greenberg (a guide to the work of Lois McMaster Bujold); Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (St. Martin’s Press), by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette; Basil Cooper: A Life in Books (PS Publishing), edited by Stephen Jones; The Richard Matheson Companion (Gauntlet Press), by Stanley Wiater and Matthew R. Bradley; and a posthumously published collection of articles on diverse subjects by Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect (Putnam).
    The year also saw the publication of two books of a kind that I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of: collections of articles previously published electronically online in blogs and in other Internet sources. They were Your Hate Mail Is Being Graded : Ten Years of Whatever (Subterranean Press), by John Scalzi, Whatever being the very popular blog that Scalzi won a best fanwriter Hugo for his work in this year, and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (Tachyon), by Cory Doctorow.
    It was another weak year in the art book field, after several fairly strong ones earlier in the decade. Once again your best buy was probably Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art. Also worthwhile were The Other Visions: Ralph McQuarrie (Titan Books), by Ralph McQuarrie; The Paintings of J. Allen St. John: Grand Master of Fantasy (Vanguard), by Stephen A. Korshak; As I See: The Fantastic World of Boris Artzybashoff (Titan Books), by Boris Artzybashoff; Virgil Finlay: Future/ Past (Underwood Books), by Virgil Finlay; A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Centipede Press), edited by Jerad Walter; Drawing Down the Moon : The Art of Charles Vess (Dark Horse Books), by Charles Vess; and Telling Stories : The Comic Art of Frank Frazetta (Underwood Books), edited by Edward Mason.
    There were a fair number of genre-related non-fiction books of interest this year. The most central of these was probably Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (Atlas), a collection of futurist articles, many by scientists or SF writers, edited by Damien Broderick. The edges of the possible in science, as we understand them today, is also explored in Physics of the Impossible (Doubleday), by physicist Michio Kaku, and in 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense (Doubleday), by Michael Brooks. Fans may also be interested in an examination of superhero science, Superheroes! (I. B. Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year), You Call This the Future? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning Life in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell.
    There were lots of