Well, look at that. My favorite Year’s Best anthology has arrived — and earlier than I expected.

This is the fifth volume of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Rich did a handful of volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best SF before combining them into one fat mega-volume starting in 2009. I much prefer these generously-sized tomes. They rest nicely in my lap, and pin me to my reading chair.

This year, Rich selects thirty-three short stories and novelettes from a wide range of magazines — Analog, Asimov’s SF, Interzone,, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Eclipse Online, Electric Velocipede, Tin House, and others — as well as anthologies, including The Future is Japanese, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and Robots: The New A.I.

His contributors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Linda Nagata, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, Robert Charles Wilson , Genevieve Valentine, Elizabeth Bear, Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Christopher Rowe, Naomi Kritzer, Michael Blumlein, Catherynne M. Valente, Lavie Tidhar, and many others.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

“Nahiku West” by Linda Nagata (Analog)
“A Murmuration of Starlings” by Joe Pitkin (Analog)
“The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing” by Sandra McDonald (Asimov’s SF)
“The Bernoulli War” by Gord Sellar (Asimov’s SF)
“In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF)
“The Castle That Jack Built” by Emily Gilman (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“The Governess and the Lobster” by Margaret Ronald, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Sunshine” by Nina Allan (Black Static) “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld)
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia (Clarkesworld)
“Prayer” by Robert Reed (Clarkesworld)
“Honey Bear” by Sofia Samatar (Clarkesworld)
“The Contrary Gardener” by Christopher Rowe (Eclipse Online)
“Heaven Under Earth” by Aliette de Bodard (Electric Velocipede)
“Scrap Dragon” by Naomi Kritzer (F&SF)
“Twenty-Two and you” by Michael Blumlein (F&SF)
“One Breath, One Stroke” by Catherynne M. Valente (The Future is Japanese)
“One Day in Time City” by David Ira Cleary (Interzone)
“The Philosophy of Ships” by Caroline Yoachim (Interzone)
“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed)
“The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring” by Genevieve Valentine (Lightspeed)
“Arbeitskraft” by Nick Mamatas (The Mammoth Book of Steampunk)
“Fireborn” by Robert Charles Wilson (Rip-Off)
“Under the Eaves” by Lavie Tidhar (Robots: The New A.I.)
“Four Kinds of Cargo” by Leonard Richardson (Strange Horizons)
“The Keats Variation” by K. M. Ferebee (Strange Horizons)
“Things Greater Than Love” by Kate Bachus (Strange Horizons)
“The Weight of History, The Lightness of the Future” by Jay Lake (Subterranean)
“Elementals” by Ursula K. Le Guin (Tin House)
“Two Houses” by Kelly Link (Tin House)
“Swift, Brutal Retaliation” by Meghan McCarron (Tor.com)
“Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz” by Marissa K. Lingen (Tor.com)
“The Magician’s Apprentice” by Tamsyn Muir (Weird Tales)

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition was published today, July 10, by Prime Books. it is 520 pages in trade paperback, priced at $19.95. There is no digital edition.

We covered last year’s volume here.

See all our recent New Treasures here, and Rich’s recent Retro-Reviews and other articles for Black Gate here.