One of the best (hehe) "Best of" anthos I've read, I'll be thinking about a lot of these stories for a loooong time

I only jumped aboard with volume 4, but I've quickly become a devoted fan of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series. I think Clarke provides a good sampling of what the genre is up to, and his tastes broadly align with my own. Clarke edits Clarkesworld Magazine, and I find that I often particularly like stories that have been "double selected" by him: when a Clarkesworld story turns up in Best SF of the Year, it's almost always excellent. (Plus, there's no fantasy in it!)

This collects the best fiction of 2020, but due to pandemic knock-on effects, ended up coming out in 2021. (Similarly, the 2021 volume will see release in 2023, but my understanding is they hope to catch up this year by doing two volumes.) Like volume 5, I read this slowly. I often find that if I read a number of stories from an anthology in quick succession, they blur together and don't leave much of an impression: I think I end up approaching the start of a new story like the start of a new chapter in a novel, and not slowing down to acclimate myself to the new narrative. So I rotated this volume's thirty-plus stories between my other reading, averaging two or three stories per month. I started it in January 2022, and I finished up the last story almost exactly a year later in January 2023!

I found this a strong volume on the whole, slightly stronger than I remember volume 5 being. You can't write up a whole volume like this story by story, so I'll talk about four stories I really enjoyed in a lot of detail, then go over some others I liked, then finally discuss some weak ones. (I will link to ones freely available on the Internet)

• "An Important Failure" by Rebecca Campbell. This is about a kid who's an apprentice violin maker in the near future, when the trees are burning away and dying off, and he hears a beautiful violin performance that makes him want to present the performer with the perfect violin. But making such a thing is a series of difficulties, especially if the world's going to pot. After a somewhat confusing start (I often read my BSFY stories over lunch after teaching, which usually means I am not in a very focused mindset), it quickly grabbed me. I often hate writing about music, but like Sarah Pinsker, Rebecca Campbell has the gift of making the beauty of the sound come alive in prose. Genuinely moving without being maudlin, and the way it keeps coming back to various "failures" is the kind of thing that resonates with me at thirty-six years old. Things are going to hell and the world wasn't meant to be like this, but there's some beauty to find in all of it anyway.
• "AirBody" by Sameem Siddiqui. This is set in a future where people can temporarily "rent" the bodies of other people in different locations; like, you might live in San Francisco, but rent someone's body in New York so you can go to a meeting in person without traveling. The main character is a young Pakistani man in the D.C. area who rents his body to an "aunty" back home. It's very cute, has some great worldbuilding, and good jokes—a satisfying tale of missed opportunities.
• "Your Boyfriend Experience" by James Patrick Kelly. This is a kind of disturbing story about a couple where one partner is very interested in food, but the other, a developer, has never been able to share his interest. The developer is working on a project to make a male robot companion for gay men, and he tests it out on his partner. Pretty emotionally intense, very strong. I was left somewhat uncertain by the ending, in the best possible way.
• "Exile's End" by Carolyn Ives Gilman. This is told from the perspective of an museum curator on a human colony planet—her museum's pride and joy is a native artwork depicting a native woman who plays a key role in her planet's founding myth, someone who bridged the gap between human and colonizer. (Like a more significant Pocahantas.) Those natives are all dead now, so the artifacts in her museum are all that's left... until someone turns up, claiming that there's a small population of them still alive on a distant colony world, and they want their stuff back. It's a striking story, beautifully told, about what art is: how it derives its meaning from what we attach to it, not what it actually looks like, and how different people and different cultures can attach different meanings to the same physical artifact, and thus see it in completely different ways. There's no easy answers here and no sanctimony, just a strong tale of the conflict of cultures.

There were a number of other ones I really enjoyed:

• "The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi. A Neuralink-esque device records all thoughts in the brain (among other things). Some of these memories get packaged and sold; the main character is an old woman dying of cancer who keeps experiencing memories of death to try to come to terms with her own impending death. Good worldbuilding, a little saccharine, but enjoyable.
• "Invisible People" by Nancy Kress. I find that I don't always get on with Kress's writing (and she once complained about me on her blog!), but this I thought was a really interesting story, about parents who discover that their daughter was genetically modified, but in a really interesting way.
• "This World is Made for Monsters" by M. Rickert. I'd never encountered M. Rickert's writing before, I think, but after this I'd like to seek out more. This is a beautifully told story about a spaceship landing in a small town and the way its residents react. Soon there's an annual festival but no aliens, yet the traces of their presence linger on.
• "Salvage" by Andy Dudak. So much going on in this very well told story! Aliens discover that observing the universe harms the universe, so they imprison humans in their own minds, each one not even knowing this has happened, as they're all caught up in their own simulations continuing on from where reality left off. The protagonist (who was on a relativistic ship at the time this happened, and thus protected) "salvages" these people, uploading their consciousnesses into computers. But she has her own secrets, and is soon caught up in issues surrounding the salvage of a notorious dictator. Great stuff.
• "Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air" by Matthew Kressel. Interesting story about people trying to commune with powerful alien intelligences that may or may not be gods. Dark and disturbing.

Of course there are some that didn't work for me, but I could imagine working for others; beyond that, there are the rare ones that I don't get why they were picked at all. Thankfully there were just three of those in this volume... but two were by probably the two most famous authors in the book! "Uma" by Ken Liu, like a number of Ken Liu's stories, felt more like exposition about future technology than an actual story, and James S.A. Corey's "Elsewhere" just didn't have much going on it: neat tech idea, but the story didn't have the depth to make it work. "Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik had a neat idea again, but it was implemented in a way that made absolutely no sense to me and destroyed the storyworld's credibility.

On the whole, this is a strong volume, and shows that short sf is in good health. As always I would rate much of what I read here above the Hugo finalists for the relevant year (e.g., had "An Important Failure" been on the novelette ballot for 2021, I would have ranked it above everything except "Helicopter Story"). I look forward to volume 7, and to eventually going back and reading volume 1-3.