Gardner Dozois, ed.

St. Martin's, 1992

As Robert Silverberg did for Arbor House a decade earlier, Gardner Dozois produced three big anthologies in the 1990s for St. Martin's. (Actually this first Dozois volume was published in the UK by Legend (as The Legend Book of Science Fiction) a year before its US release, but it was St. Martin's in the US who followed up with two additional volumes in matching formats.) Dozois' introduction emphasizes that the book contains stories that most impacted him as a reader, rather than being any kind of historical overview or objective compilation. Thus his lower historical boundary is the mid-1950s, about the time he started reading SF himself.

He also notes that he omitted famous stories by Keyes, Clarke, Asimov, et al, for being already heavily anthologized -- and includes a long list of other stories he would have liked to have used.