Best of 2008 Picks -- Lou Anders

Well, the chocolate is easy.

I've recently discovered Terra Nostra organic Dark Chocolate's "Intense Dark" which is 73% cacao (and I have learned not to bother with anything that is less than 60%). Really, really good. Maybe not as good as Vosges's Mo's Bacon Bar, which has applewood smoked bacon in milk chocolate, but Mo's Bacon Bar is also too rich to eat every day. 

As to film, hands down The Dark Knight. That's the film I've been waiting for all my life. If it were up to me, I'd actually prefer they didn't make a third, though I know that's crazy when it's the 2nd highest grossing film of all time.

On the music front, the just-released-to-vinyl-only ep Black Pear Tree from the Mountain Goats & Kaki King is just tremendous. The Goats available as digital download for donation "Satanic Messiah" is great too. How can you not like a band that asks you to tip them $6.66 for the free download?

On the fiction front, Sean Williams's Cenotaxis (released in the beginning of 2008 from Monkeybrain) is fantastic. As a stand-alone novella (or short novel?), I could actually read it, and I thought it was just superb. A brilliant demonstration of how good SF can be at short length.

It's difficult to choose between children, but Paul Cornell's "Catherine Drewe" and Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler," both published in my own anthology Fast Forward 2, both seem to be garnering exactly the reaction I hoped they would. John Meaney's "Via Vortex" in my anthology Sideways in Crime is about the most chilling use of quantum entanglement as applied to teleportation one could imagine. Elsewhere, Kage Baker's "Speed, Speed, the Cable," from Nick Gever's Extraordinary Engines is a wonderful steampunk/secret history in her Company world.

From my own list at Pyr, obviously I'm biased, but I believe Theodore Judson's The Martian General's Daughter and David Louis Edelman's MultiReal demonstrate admirably everything that SF can be at its best. But what a great year 2008 was overall!