Элинор Арнасон: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Many authors are now reissuing their old backtitles as ebooks, either through a publisher or all by themselves, so many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all here. Before you conclude that something from an author’s backlist is unavailable, though, check with the Kindle and Nook stores, and with other online vendors.

It was a weaker year in 2017 for short-story collections than 2016 had been, although there was still some good stuff.

The year’s best collections included: Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories (Fairwood), by Naomi Kritzer; Lost Among the Stars (WordFire), by Paul Di Filippo; Telling the Map: Stories (Small Beer), by Christopher Rowe; Wicked Wonders (Tachyon), by Ellen Klages; Norse Mythology (Norton), by Neil Gaiman; Dear Sweet Filthy World (Subterranean), by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Down and Out in Purgatory (Baen), by Tim Powers; Up the Rainbow: The Complete Short Fiction of Susan Casper (Fantastic Books); Concentration (PS Publishing), by Jack Dann; and Six Months , Three Days, Five Others (Tor.com Publishing), by Charlie Jane Anders.

Also good were: Totalitopia (PM Press), by John Crowley; Fire (PM Press), by Elizabeth Hand; The Overneath (Tachyon), by Peter S. Beagle; The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stories (Subterranean), by William Browning Spencer; Emerald Circus (Tachyon), by Jane Yolen; The Refrigerator Monologues (Saga), by Catherynne M. Valente; and Tender: Stories (Small Beer), by Sofia Samatar.

Career-spanning retrospective collections this year included: The Man with the Speckled Eyes (Centipede), by R. A. Lafferty; Tanith By Choice (NewCon Publishing), by Tanith Lee; The Best of Bova, Volume III (Baen), by Ben Bova; The Thing in the Stone and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; Dusty Zebra and Other Stories (Open Road), by Clifford D. Simak; The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales (Dover), by Margaret St. Clair; The Horror on the Links : The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume One (Night Shade), edited by Seabury Quinn; The Devil’s Rosary: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume Two (Night Shade), edited by George A. Vanderburgh; The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” and Other Nautical Adventures (Night Shade), by William Hope Hodgson; The Ghost Pirates (Dover), by William Hope Hodgson; The Best of Richard Matheson (Penguin Classics), edited by Victor LaValle; The Last Heiroglyph: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 5 (Night Shade); Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Baen), by Poul Anderson; First-Person Singularities: Stories (Three Rooms), by Robert Silverberg, and The Hainish Novels and Stories (Library of America), by Ursula K. Le Guin. ( The Hainish Novels and Stories comes in two volumes, one an omnibus of Le Guin’s Hainish novels and the other a collection of her Hainish stories, but the story part alone is probably the strongest short-story collection of the year.)

As usual, small presses dominated the list of short-story collections, with trade collections having become rare.

A wide variety of “electronic collections,” often called “fiction bundles,” too many to individually list here, are also available for downloading online at many sites. The Science Fiction Book Club continues to issue new collections as well.

Also as usual, the most reliable buys in the reprint anthology market are the various best of the year anthologies, the number of which continues to fluctuate. David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF series was lost with the tragic death of its editor in 2016. There was no edition this year of The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera (Baen), edited by David Afsharirad, but a new volume has been announced for June 2018. There also didn’t seem to be a volume this year of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran, and this series may have died. There was a new best series launched this year, Best of British Science Fiction 2016 (NewCon Press), edited by Donna Scott, but since it covers 2016 rather than 2017, we can’t count it here. Continuing best series include: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), this volume edited by Charles Yu, with the overall series editor being John Joseph Adams; Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Four (Undertow), edited by Helen Marshall, series editor Michael Kelly; The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two (Night Shade Books), edited by Neil Clarke The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Gardner Dozois, now up to its thirty-fifth annual collection; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2017 Edition (Prime Books), edited by Rich Horton; The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Nine (Night Shade Books), edited by Ellen Datlow; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2017 (Prime Books), edited by Paula Guran; and Best New Horror, Number 27 (Drugstore Indian), edited by Stephen Jones.

That means that this year’s science fiction was covered by two dedicated best of the year anthologies, my own and the Clarke, plus four separate half anthologies, the science fiction halves of the Strahan, Horton, and Yu books, which in theory adds up to one and a half additional anthologies (in practice, of course, the contents of those books probably won’t divide that neatly, with exactly half with their coverage going to each genre, and there’ll likely to be more of one thing than another). There is no dedicated fantasy anthology anymore, fantasy only being covered by the fantasy halves of the Strahan, Horton, and Yu books. Horror is now being covered by two dedicated volumes, the Datlow and the Jones, and the “horror” half of Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror . It’s hard to tell where The Year’s Best Weird Fiction fits in, “weird fiction” being a term that could fit anything, depending on the whim of the editor; it’s possible that it may have some fantasy in it, but I suspect that it will lean toward horror instead. The annual Nebula Awards anthology, which covers science fiction as well as fantasy of various sorts, functions as a defacto “best of the year” anthology, although it’s not usually counted among them; this year’s edition was Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 (Pyr), edited by Julie E. Czerneda. More specialized best of the year anthologies are Wilde Stories 2017 (Lethe Press), edited by Steve Berman, and Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Bogi Takács.

There was no really prominent single title in the stand-alone reprint anthology market this year. The best of the stand-alone reprint antholgies were probably Galactic Empires (Night Shade), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Best of Subterranean (Subterranean Press), edited by William Schafer. More reprint SF anthologies included Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade (Baen), edited by William Ledbetter, If This Goes Wrong… (Baen), edited by Hank Davis, Go Forth and Multiply: Twelve Tales of Repopulation (Surinam Turtle Press), edited by Gordon Van Gelder, and Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction (Bloomsbury), edited by Michael Sims. Other reprint anthologies, all fantasy, included Swords Against Darkness (Prime) and New York Fantastic : Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps (Night Shade), both edited by Paula Guran, The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight (Firkin Press), edited by Scott H. Andrews, and The New Voices of Fantasy (Tachyon), edited by Peter S. Beagle.