John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

As usual, in my effort to find the top stories of the year, I scour the field to try to read and consider everything that’s published.

Though the bulk of my reading typically comes from periodicals, I always also read dozens of anthologies and single-author collections. Here’s just a sampling of the anthologies that published fine work that didn’t quite manage to make it into the table of contents or Notable Stories list but are worthwhile just the same: Dead Letters, edited by Conrad Williams; Children of Lovecraft, edited by Ellen Datlow; Scary Out There, edited by Jonathan Maberry; In the Shadow of Frankenstein, edited by Stephen Jones; The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood; The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran; A Tyranny of Petticoats, edited by Jessica Spotswood; Cyber World, edited by Jason Heller; Decision Points, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt; Clockwork Phoenix 5, edited by Mike Allen; Hidden Youth, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke; Upside Down, edited by Jaym Gates and Monica Valentinelli; and several others (including the horror anthology What the #@&% Is That?, edited by Douglas Cohen and yours truly).

In addition to this, the anthologies Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan; 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and John McFetridge; and Summer Days and Summer Nights, edited by Stephanie Perkins, contain stories represented in the table of contents, and stories on the Notable Stories list appeared in anthologies such as The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe; An Alphabet of Embers, edited by Rose Lemberg; Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan; Unfettered II, edited by Shawn Speakman; Humanity 2.0, edited by Alex Shvartsman; Genius Loci, edited by Jaym Gates; Astro Noise, edited by Laura Poitras; Strangers Among Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law; and You, Human, edited by Michael Bailey.

There were fewer eligible single-author collections with original material to consider, but new collections were published by Alexander Weinstein (Children of the New World), Caroline M. Yoachim (Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories), Patricia A. McKillip (Dreams of Distant Shores), Amber Sparks (The Unfinished World), Jeffrey Ford (A Natural History of Hell), Carlos Hernandez (The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria), Laird Barron (Swift to Chase), Livia Llewellyn (Furnace), and Tina Connolly (On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories). Three collections contain stories included on the Notable Stories list: The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu; A Collapse of Horses, by Brian Evenson; and The Bed Moved, by Rebecca Schiff. Also of interest, but ineligible because it is made up entirely of reprints, was the debut collection from Carrie Vaughn, Amaryllis and Other Stories.

As always, I surveyed more than a hundred different periodicals over the course of the year, paying equal attention to major genre publications like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction and to new markets like Persistent Visions and Liminal Stories. I also do my best to find any genre fiction lurking in the pages of mainstream/literary publications such as The New Yorker, Tin House, and Granta.

The notable stories on this year’s list are drawn from forty-four different publications—twenty-nine periodicals, twelve anthologies, and three single-author collections—from forty-three different editors (counting editorial teams as a unit). The selections themselves are drawn from fourteen different sources—eleven periodicals and three anthologies—from thirteen different editors or editorial teams.

This year marks the first appearance of several periodicals on our table of contents, including Conjunctions, Fireside Magazine, Beloit Fiction Journal, BuzzFeed READER, and The Sun. Periodicals appearing on the Notable Stories list for the first time this year include Big Echo, Faerie Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, GigaNotoSaurus, People Holding…, The Sun, VQR Online, and ZYZZYVA.

Four of the authors whose work is included in this volume—A. Merc Rustad, Catherynne M. Valente, Dale Bailey, and Nick Wolven—have previously appeared in BASFF; thus the remaining fifteen authors (fifteen rather than sixteen because Bailey appears twice) are represented for the first time.

Debbie Urbanski, Brian Evenson, and Ken Liu tied with the most stories in my top eighty this year (three each), and several authors had two each: A. Merc Rustad, Alyssa Wong, Carmen Maria Machado, Caroline M. Yoachim, Dale Bailey, Dominica Phetteplace, N. K. Jemisin, Naomi Novik, Nick Wolven, P. Djeli Clark, Rich Larson, and Sofia Samatar.

I mentioned above that the BASFF 2017 stories “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” and “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Additionally, “The City Born Great,” by N. K. Jemisin, is a Hugo Award finalist. Notable stories that have received award recognition include “Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea,” by Sarah Pinsker (Nebula finalist); “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay,” by Alyssa Wong (Nebula and Hugo finalist); “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” by Amal El-Mohtar (Nebula and Hugo finalist); “Things with Beards,” by Sam J. Miller (Nebula finalist); “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers,” by Alyssa Wong (Nebula and Hugo finalist); and “The Jupiter Drop,” by Josh Malerman (Stoker finalist).

As I’ve noted in past forewords, I don’t log every single story I read throughout the year—I only dutifully log stories that I feel are in the running—so I don’t have an exact count of how many stories I reviewed or considered. As in past years, I estimate that it was several thousand stories, perhaps as many as five thousand, altogether.

Naturally, many of the stories I read were perfectly good and enjoyable but didn’t stand out enough for me to consider them among the best of the year. I did, however, end up with about a hundred additional stories that were at one point or another under serious consideration, including stories from publications not represented in this anthology, such as Amazing Stories, The Book Smugglers, Bracken Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, Daily Science Fiction, The Dark, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Flash Fiction Online, Futuristica, Galaxy’s Edge, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Lackington’s, Lenny Letter, Liminal Stories, The Lovecraft ezine, Nature Futures, Persistent Visions, and Slate, as well as the anthologies and collections named above.

This foreword mentions only a few of the great publications considered for this anthology; see the table of contents and the Notable Stories list to get a more complete overview of the top publications currently available in the field.

Given how many stories I have to consider every year, it’s probably obvious that I can do this only with a considerable amount of help. So I’d just like to take a moment to thank and acknowledge my team of first readers, who helped me evaluate various publications that I might not have had time to consider otherwise: Alex Puncekar, Robyn Lupo, Devin Marcus, Sandra Odell, Karen Bovenmyer, and Christie Yant. Thanks also to Tim Mudie at Mariner Books, who keeps everything running smoothly behind the scenes at Best American HQ.

If you’ve made it this far in the foreword, then maybe you’ve been introduced to some new publications to look for in the future or been reminded of a few that have fallen off your radar over the years and deserve a second look. Which brings me to one last point I’d like to take the opportunity to drive home.

We’re undoubtedly living in a golden age of genre—but not just in literature: also in TV and film. There’s more genre entertainment being produced today than any reasonable person would have any hope of keeping up with. That’s how it’s been with short stories and books for many years; it’s one of the reasons volumes like this one are useful and necessary. But now this is increasingly applicable to television and film as well. Though it’s probably still possible to keep track of all the genre movies coming out (though any one person is unlikely to do so, because of the quantity and the still wildly varying levels of quality), television is becoming more like publishing in the sense that even if you’re a deeply devoted genre fan, you’d basically have to be committed to watching television full-time in order to catch all the genre TV shows being produced. Overall that is a good thing—at least it is if, like me, you love television—even if it makes it harder to have that shared experience anytime you run into a fellow fan; and of course all that film and television (and video game!) entertainment leaves the deeply devoted genre fan with less time to spend on short stories than ever before.