THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION

Twenty-four of 1995's best stories, selected by seven-time Hugo award-winning editor Dozois. Part of the contents will already be familiar to Kirkus regulars, since Ursula K. LeGuin's ``A Woman's Liberation'' appeared in her splendid Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995); while her ``Coming of Age in Karhide,'' along with Greg Egan's ``Wang's Carpets'' and Paul J. McAuley's ``Recording Angel,'' were featured in the wonderful New Legends (ed. Greg Bear, 1995). And Poul Anderson's ``Genesis,'' with Joe Haldeman's ``For White Hill,'' first saw daylight in the abstrusely imaginative Far Futures (ed. Gregory Benford, 1995). To mention some of the other, equally diverse and excellent, tales at random: Nancy Kress's ``Feigenbaum Number'' (chaos theory); Terry Bisson's nostalgia trip, ``There Are No Dead''; James Patrick Kelly's aliens and star-gateways, ``Think Like a Dinosaur''; Michael Swanwick's weird after-death existence, ``Radio Waves''; Pat Cadigan's virtual reality, ``Death in the Promised Land''; and David Marusek's information superhighway of the future, ``We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.'' Essential reading.