Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

THIS IS THE tenth volume of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series, which started back in 2007 at Night Shade and moved to Solaris in 2013. I’d like to thank Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen for getting behind the book at the beginning, and Ross Lockhart for all of his hard work on the series in the later days. I’d especially like to thank Jonathan Oliver and Ben Smith at Solaris for taking the risk on picking the series up, and for running with it in the way that they have. I will always be grateful to them for stepping in and for believing in the books and in me. Special thanks to my wonderful agent Howard Morhaim who for over a decade now has had my back and helped make good things happen. Finally, most special thanks of all to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. I always say that every moment spent working on these books is stolen from them, but it’s true, and I’m forever grateful to them for their love, support and generosity.

CONTENTS

Introduction , Jonathan Strahan

Black Dog ,

City of Ash ,

Jamaica Ginger , Nalo Hopkinson & Nisi Shawl

A Murmuration , Alastair Reynolds

Kaiju Maximus®: “So Various, So Beautiful, So New” , Kai Ashante Wilson

Water of Versailles ,

Capitalism in the 22nd Century, or, A.I.R. ,

Emergence ,

The Deepwater Bride ,

Dancy vs. the Pterosaur , Caitlín R. Kiernan

Calved , Sam J. Miller

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson , Elizabeth Bear

The Machine Starts ,

Blood, Ash, Braids ,

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers ,

The Lily and the Horn ,

The Empress in her Glory ,

The Winter Wraith ,

Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan ,

Little Sisters , Vonda N. McIntyre

Ghosts of Home , Sam J. Miller

The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club ,

Oral Argument ,

Drones ,

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, Usman T. Malik

The Game of Smash and Recovery ,

Another Word for World , Ann Leckie

WELCOME TO THE Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year . This is the tenth volume in this series, which aims to collect the best science fiction and fantasy stories published during the preceding year. A decade is a long time, and a lot has changed since we started out, but what has remained constant throughout the decade is that there is a lot of great science fiction and fantasy being published every year.

So, how was the year? Well, 2015 must have seemed like a pretty crazy year if you were outside the fishbowl that is science fiction and fantasy and looking in. A whole lot of insider tennis spilled over into mainstream media, which made it looked like SF was at war with itself. And it pretty much was. One group said or did one thing, another group said or did another. A whole lot of invective was sprayed, and it seemed like you had to take sides. It made it that much harder to be part of the science fiction community, and if (sadly) some people decided it just wasn’t worth the grief who could blame them?

While the battle between Old Skool EssEff and that NewStuff (or Insider Tennis Players and the Forces of Right or however you wanted to characterize it) was being fought in social media feeds and convention business meetings the world went on. New stories appeared. A lot of them. Authors debuted. Some terrific ones. And short fiction continued to be published in a neverending torrent, a gift of plenty so great that no one could hope to keep track of it, never mind read it all. Was it a good year, though, in amongst all of the Sturm und Drang ? Who knows? I read some pretty remarkable fiction, found new writers to fall in love with, and was encouraged by the appearance of more and more fiction across the globe. It was an exciting year to be a reader, and you can’t ask for much more than that.

I spent most of my 2015 time reading anthologies, collections, magazines, and scouring ebooks and websites for the best short fiction I could find. And, to cap off the year, I spent the end of the year working with a team of experts on compiling the Locus short fiction Recommended Reading List and selecting stories for this book, which means I spent a lot of time thinking about whether it was a good year or a bad year or whatever. And I heard a lot of opinions. “A lousy year for short science fiction,” said one colleague. “A worse year for fantasy anthologies,” said another. “A good year for horror,” said still another. Was it?

Well, first of all, 2015 was another year where no one read most or all or even a significant bit of all of the short fiction published. No one has useful statistics on the amount of short fiction being published, and I don’t know that I’d trust anyone who claimed that they did. I’d guesstimate that there were more than 10,000 new stories published, but that’s only an extrapolative guess. Given the torrent, though, where could you turn to find great short fiction?

The major magazines were a pretty safe bet, though no single magazine dominated this year. The Big Three – Tor.com , Asimov’s , and Clarkesworld – all had good years, with Tor.com probably having the best year of the lot. It published a story a week or so, ranging from literary science fiction to fantasy to horror. With a large group of editors acquiring fiction, the site doesn’t have a single editorial voice but that works to its advantage, I think. During the year it published extraordinary novellas by Kelly Robson (“Waters of Versailles”), Usman T. Malik (“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn”), as well as great shorter pieces by David Herter, Priya Sharma, Michael Swanwick, John Chu, Jeffrey Ford, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. I should also mention the Tor.com book program, for which I acquired stories during the year. It featured some very fine stories by Kai Ashante Wilson, Nnedi Okorafor, K.J. Parker, and others.

Asimov’s also had a strong year, possibly its best in a while. As has always been the case, it publishes a good range of SF and fantasy, and continues to develop new writers. As was the case for Tor.com , Asimov’s very best stories in 2015 were at novella length. Greg Egan’s “The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred” was the best hard science fiction novella of 2015, as Egan again powerfully used SF to examine important issues. It’s my top pick for the Hugo. Also outstanding was Aliette de Bodard’s “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls”, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Inhuman Garbage”, and Sam J. Miller’s “Calved”. Sam J. Miller and Kelly Robson had outstanding years publishing some great stories in several venues. Asimov’s also featured strong stories by Gregory Norman Bossert, Sarah Pinsker, Robert Reed, Indrapramit Das, and others.

Clarkesworld seemed to switch focus during 2015, moving away from being a general SF and fantasy magazine towards a much more SF-focused approach by year’s end. Although 2015 wasn’t its best year ever, it was a good one, and it featured very strong stories by Naomi Kritzer, Sam J. Miller, Catherynne M. Valente, Quifan Chen, Aliette de Bodard, Kelly Robson, and others.