one story, I think, was the best of the year, by SF’s greatest-ever writer of novellas: Gene Wolfe. This is The Ziggurat, a tremendously exciting and quite chilling novella, with a classically, profoundly unreliable narrator. It can be read entirely differently depending on how much you believe what the narrator says—I think enough clues are there to suggest he’s entirely out there—but the story certainly doesn’t demand any particular reading.
