Best of British Science Fiction 2021 edited by Donna Scott

(NewCon Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Dan Hartland

The British SF of the early 2020s begs an implicit question: two decades on from the ‘British Boom’, what has been its legacy? The Boom itself is long over, its last sputterings extinguished. We should not necessarily mourn it: in the space created by the sundering of the insistent poles of Anglo-American SFF, writers of ever greater diversity have wrested the limelight for themselves—and are transforming the genre, rather than merely remixing its increasingly stale twentieth-century verities.

Has the Boom cast any shadow, then, or has it proven less influential now than it appeared destined to be at the time? On the evidence of this edition of NewCon’s annual anthology, the Boom was in some ways an aberration, not a trend. The stories collected here find comfort in forms and styles, and sometimes even settings, that would in general not have been out of place even some decades prior to the 1990s.

Continue reading…

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.