Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

Among the Notable Stories, three were finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards: Brooke Bolander’s “The Only Harmless Great Thing” (Nebula Award winner, and also a finalist for the Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Awards); “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,” by Alix E. Harrow; and “The Court Magician,” by Sarah Pinsker. The following Notable Stories were also Locus finalists: “Okay, Glory,” by Elizabeth Bear; “Queen Lily,” by Theodora Goss; “Firelight,” by Ursula K. Le Guin; and “The Starship and the Temple Cat,” by Yoon Ha Lee. “And Yet,” by A. T. Greenblatt , and “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births,” by José Pablo Iriarte, were named Nebula finalists. Joe Hill’s “You Are Released” was a finalist for the Stoker.

(Note: The final results of these awards won’t be known until after this text is locked for production but will be known by the time the book is published.)

The lone anthology to have a story represented in the table of contents this year was Kaiju Rising 2: Reign of Monsters, edited by N. X. Sharps and Alana Abbott; several other anthologies, however, did have stories in the top eighty, such as A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, edited by Elsie Chapman and Ellen Oh; Flight or Fright, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent; Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller; Particulates, edited by Nalo Hopkinson; and The Devil and the Deep, edited by Ellen Datlow. The anthology with the most stories in the top eighty — four — was Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush; Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, edited by Gary Whitta, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey, had three; and Infinity’s End, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Welcome to Dystopia, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, had two each.

Here’s a sampling of the anthologies that published fine work that didn’t quite manage to make it into the top eighty but are worthwhile just the same: The Book of Magic, edited by Gardner Dozois; Future Fiction, edited by Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso; Hath No Fury, edited by Melanie R. Meadors and J. M. Martin; The Cackle of Cthulhu, edited by Alex Shvartsman; A Year Without Winter, edited by Dehlia Hannah, Brenda Cooper, Joey Eschrich, and Cynthia Selin; By the Light of Camelot, edited by J. R. Campbell and Shannon Allen; Toil and Trouble, edited by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe; Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath, edited by Kevin J. Anderson; Fresh Ink, edited by Lamar Giles; Phantoms, edited by Marie O’Regan; Lost Films, edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle; Shades Within Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law; Underwater Ballroom Society, edited by Tiffany Trent and Stephanie Burgis; Sword and Sonnet, edited by Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler; and Sunspot Jungle Vol. 1, edited by Bill Campbell.

Additionally, the Amazon Original Stories program released several interesting SF/F works in 2018 in two “collections,” Warmer and Dark Corners; they aren’t quite anthologies per se (nor are they collections in typical publishing parlance), since the stories are downloaded individually, but otherwise that’s what they feel like. I think of them as deconstructed anthologies, so I’m including them in this section.

I don’t keep close tabs on all-reprint anthologies since by definition nothing in them is eligible for BASFF, but among those worthy of note released in 2018 include: The Future Is Female!, edited by Lisa Yaszek, and The Final Frontier, edited by Neil Clarke.

The two standout collections this year were Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (three stories in the top eighty, one selection), and How Long ’til Black Future Month?, by N. K. Jemisin (two stories in the top eighty, one selection), which are also the only two collections to produce BASFF selections this year. Other collections that had stories in the top eighty were Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, by Kelly Barnhill; Guardian Angels and Other Monsters, by Daniel H. Wilson; and We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories, by C. Robert Cargill. Fine work was to be found in several other collections (some of which contained only reprints and thus had no eligible material), including The Promise of Space, by James Patrick Kelly; All the Names They Used for God: Stories, by Anjali Sachdeva; The End of All Our Exploring, by F. Brett Cox; The Dissolution of Small Worlds, by Kurt Fawver; The Merry Spinster, by Mallory Ortberg; The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales, by Michael Bishop; Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction, by Rich Larson; Night Beast, by Ruth Joffre; Godfall and Other Stories, by Sandra M. Odell; Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, by Vandana Singh; Acres of Perhaps, by Will Ludwigsen; Half Gods, by Akil Kumarasamy; An Agent of Utopia, by Andy Duncan; The Ones Who Are Waving, by Glen Hirshberg; Alien Virus Love Disaster, by Abbey Mei Otis; All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma; The Future Is Blue, by Catherynne M. Valente; How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, by Jane Yolen; The Dinosaur Tourist, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; and Starlings, by Jo Walton.

I surveyed more than a hundred different periodicals over the course of the year and paid equal attention to genre publications both large and small. Likewise I do my best to find any genre fiction lurking in the pages of mainstream and/or literary publications.

Outside of the two magazines I edit— Lightspeed and Nightmare —which are inevitably well represented in the top eighty, since one does tend to like one’s own taste in fiction, periodicals that were well represented include Apex (two); Clarkesworld (three); Eyedolon * (two); Fireside (three); FIYAH (two); Strange Horizons (three); Terraform (two), Tor.com (four); and Uncanny (three). The following periodicals each had one story in the top eighty: Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Future Tense, McSweeney’s, MIT Technology Review, The Paris Review, Stonecoast Review, The Dark, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Margins, and Vastarien. *

Some periodicals that published interesting material that didn’t make it into the top eighty include Augur, * Cincinnati Review, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Future Science Fiction Digest, * Playboy, PodCastle, Shimmer, Reason.com, The Sun, Tin House, and Wired.

It’s always nice to see new publications cropping up year to year, and so to celebrate that I’ve denoted with an asterisk above those publications that debuted in 2018. But the circle of life is, well, a circle, and inevitably all good things come to an end. This year is no exception: several periodicals have either gone extinct or embarked on an indefinite hiatus. These include Cicada (founded 1998), Dark Discoveries (founded 2004), Liminal Stories (founded 2016), Mythic Delirium (founded 1998), and Shimmer (founded 2005). Book Smugglers Publishing isn’t closing but announced in November that it will be largely scaling back its fiction endeavors. Two major magazines lasted through 2018 but have announced they will cease publication in 2019 after fourteen-year runs: Intergalactic Medicine Show and Apex Magazine.