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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

ebook
5 of 5 copies available
5 of 5 copies available
From quiet, elegiac, contemporary tales to far-future, deep-space sagas, the stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Karen Joy Fowler for TheBest American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 demonstrate the vast spectrum of what science fiction and fantasy aims to illuminate, displaying the full gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears—of not just what we can accomplish or destroy as a person, but what we can accomplish or destroy as a people—and throwing us into strange new worlds that can only be explored when we shed the shackles of reality.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 includes Rachel Swirsky, Sofia Samatar, Charlie Jane Anders, Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kij Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Dexter Palmer and others
 
KAREN JOY FOWLER, guest editor, is the author of six novels and four short story collections, including We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and has won numerous Nebula and World Fantasy awards.
 
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, series editor, is the best-selling editor of more than two dozen anthologies, including Brave New Worlds and Wastelands. He is the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new science fiction/fantasy novel imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 14, 2015
      This first SF and fantasy volume of the venerable Best American annuals collects work published in 2014 by authors residing in the U.S. and Canada. Series editor John Joseph Adams and his team selected 80 stories (18 of which came from publications Adams edited) and anonymized them for Hill, who picked 20 to reprint; the rest received honorable mentions. The overall quality of the work is very high, with standouts including Nathan Ballingrud’s creepy-cute “Skullpocket,” about the fair a ghoul holds annually for his town’s children; Neil Gaiman’s “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back,” a charming return to his Neverwhere universe; and Karen Russell’s “The Bad Graft,” in which a woman picks up the spirit of a Joshua tree as a hitchhiker. T.C. Boyle’s “The Relive Box” is the lowest point, as its depiction of a man ensnared by a machine that can let him relive his best moments forever is the presentation of a scenario rather than a story, but Boyle’s technical skill holds the piece together. A certain similarity in tone creeps in after a while, but it’s fortunately broken up often enough for the book to keep the reader’s interest.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 5, 2016
      In this second book in the annual series, acclaimed series editor Adams and this year’s guest editor, Fowler, deliver a thoughtful array from a star-studded assemblage of writers. The 20 stories here were first published in American venues, but their subject matter travels far and wide in time, space, and human memory. Ghost stories “Meet Me in Iram” by Sofia Samatar and “Interesting Facts” by Adam Johnson explore the anguish of loss. Salman Rushdie’s “The Duniazát” and Rachel Swirsky’s “Tea Time” highlight fantastical lovers and obsession. Technology challenges humankind in “The Daydreamer by Proxy” by Dexter Palmer, Charlie Jane Anders’s provocative “Rat Catcher’s Yellow,” and the dystopian “Headshot” by Julian Mortimer Smith. Seth Dickinson’s “Three Bodies at Mitanni,” Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence,” and “Planet Lion” by Catherynne M. Valente explore how people identify—or fail to detect—intelligence. Equally memorable are Will Kaufman’s old-fashioned “Things You Can Buy for a Penny” and the fungoid body snatching of “The Mushroom Queen” by Liz Ziemska. The anthology doesn’t strike gold with every entry, but it will leave readers with plenty to think about.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from October 15, 2016
      The second in an annual series of intellectually demanding genre anthologies."Best" is, of course, an incredibly subjective term. This is clearly a very elite, highly curated set of stories; an obvious taste is at work. To select the stories for this volume, series editor John Joseph Adams chose 80 stories from hundreds. He then passed those 80 to guest editor Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, 2013, etc.), who picked 10 science fiction and 10 fantasy stories. She made her choices without knowing who the authors were, but it's unsurprising that some very familiar names from the literary end of the genre spectrum (Kelly Link, Catherynne Valente, Ted Chiang, and even Salman Rushdie, among others) appear here. There are no rip-roaring space operas or epics of castles and dragons; instead, this fairly cerebral collection includes many stories in the style of fable or myth. The tales include a sentient mushroom collective who takes the place of an unhappy woman, a virtual world of forgotten and sentient dating profiles sadly caught within an endless party, a well-dwelling "wet gentleman" who grants wishes with a nasty twist, a secret history of the Stonewall riots, a man coming to terms with the artificial eyes that replaced his cancer-riddled ones, and a trio of space travelers charged with determining which post-Earth colonial societies should be allowed to exist. A set of primal, classic-seeming tales from our past, present, and future.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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