The stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection were published 40 years ago, so I decided to read the collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. The biggest omission has to be Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds", but by and large I enjoyed it.
As interesting as the stories to me (since, by and large, I was already familiar with some of the work of nearly all the authors represented) was the forward to the edition, which begins with a short history leading up to the current state of the business of SFF publishing. The forward wanders on from here and into a variety of other topics, until Dozois starts in on the film industry.
The SF movies of 1983 were generally lackluster at best. Return of the Jedi brought the famous Star Wars saga to a disappointing end**. Jedi is ineptly directed, poorly paced and edited, filled with energyless wooden performances (Harrison Ford in particular stumbling through the film like one of the living dead), and marred by an impactless anticlimax which simply rehashes the big Death Star scene from Star Wars. At the end the Good Ghosts all go to a party and sing campfire songs with the teddy bears, and everyone looks relieved that it's over.
I'm not going to argue with most of this, except to note that RotJ had three separate threads in the climax. One is a bit of rehash of the raid on the Death Star from the first movie, and another sadly takes place on Endor instead of Kashyyyk, but the scenes in the throne room between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor did have an impact, and were a worthy conclusion to Luke's journey.
** LOL the joke was on all of us. Dozois lived to see the next end of the saga in 2005, but died before The Rise of Skywalker.
