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

INTRODUCTION Jonathan Strahan

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.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction changed editors early in the year, with publisher Gordon van Gelder stepping down and handing the editorial reins over to Charles Coleman Finlay. It’s hard to know exactly how much of the work published in 2015 was in inventory, but F&SF did seem to feature a wider variety of writers towards year’s end than it had of late. I was particularly impressed by Carter Scholz’s powerful hard SF novella “Gypsy” (reprinted from his collection Gypsy Plus...), Tamsyn Muir’s Lovecraftian “The Deepwater Bride”, and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Winter Wraith”. It’ll be interesting to see how the magazine continues to evolve during the year ahead. F&SF was once described to me as The New Yorker of the genre, and I’d love to see it restored to that position.

Lightspeed, under the editorship of John Joseph Adams and others, was easily in the top rank, and had its best year yet publishing some great stories by Chaz Brenchley, Sam J. Miller, Nike Sulway, Caroline M. Yoachim, Amal El-Mohtar, and producing several special issues of interest. There were a lot of other magazines out there, and a lot of them published worthwhile work. Andy Cox’s Interzone had a good year, featuring a great story by Alastair Reynolds alongside strong work from many of its regulars. Analog continued to publish strong hard SF with an old school twist as it has for many years now. There are literally too many other magazines to talk about, but I should mention new magazine Uncanny, which had a strong first full year of publication, while Shimmer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Cosmos, and Strange Horizons (which published a fine Kelly Link story) were all worthwhile.

It’s hard for me to say a lot about original anthologies during 2015, if only because I edited one myself. Still, although this year was weaker than last for really outstanding original anthologies, there were some good ones that were worth your time. I thought Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell’s Stories for Chip was one of the three or four best anthologies of 2015, with great stories by Geoff Ryman, Nick Harkaway, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nisi Shawl. Also outstanding was Gardner Dozois and George RR Martin’s nostalgic Old Venus, which featured topnotch SF stories by Ian McDonald, Elizabeth Bear, and Garth Nix, and the Microsoft-published Future Visions, which had some of the year’s best stories by Ann Leckie, Greg Bear, and Seanan McGuire. There weren’t many straight fantasy anthologies published during 2015 that really stood out, though there were some great dark fantasy/ horror anthologies, most notably The Doll Collection from the ever reliable Ellen Datlow. Probably the closest to a fantasy anthology, though, was John Joseph Adams’ Operation Arcana, a military fantasy anthology with good work by Genevieve Valentine, Yoon Ha Lee and Carrie Vaughn. Also well worth noting are Nick Mamatas’ and Matsumi Washington’s Hanzai Japan, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer’s Sisters of the Revolution (my pick for best reprint anthology of the year), and Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton & Brenna Yovanoff’s really interesting writing workshop anthology, The Anatomy of Curiosity.

Given the amount of short fiction being published, it’s hardly surprising that it was another great year for short story collections. Easily the best, or at least my favourite, collection of the year was Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Beneath the Oil-Dark Sea, which features her tour de force novella “Black Helicopters”. There really wasn’t a better book published in 2015. That said, another even longer book really did give it a run for its money. Almost as good and maybe even more important, Leena Krohn’s enormous Collected Fiction was released by the VanderMeers’ Cheeky Frawg Press right at the end of the year and provides a staggering, voluminous insight into this important Finnish writer. Surely another award-nominee.

There were also some outstanding collections from a few better-known writers during the year. Get in Trouble by the playful, unpredictable, and always brilliant Kelly Link was a delight from start to finish. China Mieville’s Three Moments of an Explosion was his first book in a while, and brought together recent stories with a swag of new ones, which gave us the best look at his shorter work so far. I loved “The Dowager of Bees”, but a good handful of the stories here stand amongst the year’s best. Genre superstar Neil Gaiman likes to produce miscellanies rather than collections, books that gather stories, poems, and odd bits and pieces that he’s written over the preceding few years. His latest, Trigger Warning is very much in that tradition, but also manages to collect some of the best stories of his career along with excellent new novelette “Black Dog” (which appears here). Garth Nix, whose short fiction is underappreciated, delivered his first collection for adults, To Hold the Bridge. Led off by a strong ‘Old Kingdom’ novella, To Hold the Bridge features a truly impressive array of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and deserves to be considered amongst the best of 2015.

These, of course, were not the only collections worth your attention. Eleanor Arnason’s Hidden Folk, C.S.E. Cooney’s Bone Swans (which features two terrific new novellas), Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love With Hominids, and Deborah Kalin’s powerful Cherry Crow Children were all excellent and belong on your bookshelf. I’d also recommend The Best of Gregory Benford and James Morrow’s Reality by Other Means. Both are major career retrospectives that deserve your attention.

With all of this fiction to choose from it’s always difficult to whittle down the multitude of stories to the 200,000 odd words that go into this book. In some cases, a magazine or anthology may seem underrepresented because author had better stories elsewhere (this was true of both Kelly Robson and Sam Miller this year); in some cases stories were unavailable (a growing trend alas, and why the Greg Egan and China Mieville stories, for example are not here); and of course some were overlooked in the flood. Still, there’s a balance here of science fiction and fantasy, perhaps liberally defined, and some of the best stories I could find in 365 days of solid reading. And looking back at the range and diversity of what I read in 2015, not all of which is mentioned here, it’s hard not to feel that the genre is in fine fettle, and that any side issues that filled social media and news sites were really nothing of consequence. So, was it a good year? It always is, and I’m already reading for 2016 and it’s looking to be a heck of a ride.