New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Neil Clarke
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Neil Clarke has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor for each of the last five years (not including 2015, when the Puppies took over the ballot and nominated pretty much exclusively their Puppy-aligned pals), and has won three Hugo Awards for his magazine Clarkesworld.
But recently he’s been gaining more recognition as a highly-regarded anthology editor, for books such as Galactic Empires, the cyborg anthology Upgraded, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1. Volume 2 of his Best Science Fiction of the Year arrived earlier this month, with stories by Ian R. MacLeod, Nina Allan, Lavie Tidhar, Sam J. Miller, Xia Jia, Aliette de Bodard, Alastair Reynolds, Sarah Pinsker, Margaret Ronald, Robert Reed, Suzanne Palmer, Ken Liu, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and many others. Its arrival kicked off the Best of the Year season — nearly a dozen more Best of volumes are scheduled to arrive over the next few months.
[Click the images for bigger versions.]
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two collects the best short SF of the year from over a dozen different sources, including magazines lke Asimov’s SF, Clarkesworld. Lightspeed, Analog, Tor.com. Interzone, and F&SF, and anthologies such as Now We Are Ten, Invisible Planets, Bridging Infinity, Drowned Worlds, and Cyber World: Tales of Humanity’s Tomorrow.
Here’s the complete Table of Contents for The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two.
“The Visitor from Taured” by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s, September 2016)
“Extraction Request” by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, January 2016)
“A Good Home” by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed, June 2016)
“Prodigal” by Gord Sellar (Analog, December 2016)
“Ten Days” by Nina Allan (Now We Are Ten, edited by Ian Whates)
“Terminal” by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com, April 2016)
“Panic City” by Madeline Ashby (CyberWorld, edited by Jason Heller and Joshua Viola)
“Last Gods” by Sam J. Miller (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan)
“HigherWorks” by Gregory Norman Bossert (Asimov’s, December 2016)
“A Strange Loop” by T.R. Napper (Interzone, January/February 2016)
“Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse” by Xia Jia (Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu)
“Pearl” by Aliette de Bodard (The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
“The Metal Demimonde” by Nick Wolven (Analog, June 2016)
“The Iron Tactician” by Alastair Reynolds (Newcon Press)
“The Mighty Slinger” by Tobias S. Buckell and Karen Lord (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan)
“They All Have One Breath” by Karl Bunker (Asimov’s, December 2016)
“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, February 2016)
“And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices” by Margaret Ronald (Clarkesworld, June 2016)
“The Three Lives of Sonata James” by Lettie Prell (Tor.com, October 2016)
“The Charge and the Storm” by An Owomoyela (Asimov’s, February 2016)
“Parables of Infinity” by Robert Reed (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan)
“Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man” by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s, July 2016)
“You Make Pattaya” by Rich Larson (Interzone, November/December 2016)
“Number Nine Moon” by Alex Irvine (F&SF, January/February 2016)
“Things with Beards” by Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld, June 2016)
“Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit — Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts” by Ken Liu (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan)
“Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, April 2016)
Here’s last year’s volume, with stories by Alastair Reynolds, Ann Leckie, Brenda Cooper, Caroline M. Yoachim, Carrie Vaughn, Carter Scholz, David Brin, Geoff Ryman, Hao Jingfang, Ken Liu, Nancy Kress, Naomi Kritzer, Paul McAuley, Sam J. Miller,y Seanan McGuire, Yoon Ha Lee, and many others.
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The next Year’s Best volume on the horizon is the eleventh volume of Jonathan Strahan’s long-running series, arriving next week from Solaris.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eleven edited by Jonathan Strahan
And for my fellow Neil Clarke fans…. here’s our coverage of his recent releases:
Galactic Empires
The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1, edited by Neil Clarke
See the Table of Contents for The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One, edited by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace
Clarkesworld: Year Seven edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace
Clarkesworld: Year Eight, edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace
Neil Clarke on The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews
If Neil Clarke Didn’t Have a Day Job, He’d Win All the Awards
Plus our regular monthly coverage of his magazine Clarkesworld, of course.
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two was published by Night Shade Books on April 4, 2017. It is 624 pages, priced at $17.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Markus Vogt. See more details at Neil’s website.
See all our recent New Treasures here.
Almost as interesting as the TOC is Neil’s list of Honorable Mentions. It’s relatively short (last year’s was forty-something entries), so it’s very satisfying to be on that list.
I haven’t seen this year’s Honorable Mentions list, but last year’s included a story by Clifford D. Simak—yet another late publication of a story originally meant for THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS.
That is interesting! Glad to see a Simak story make the list after all these decades. I suspect he would have been very proud!
A few more stories from LDV were liberated this year, including “Love Song” by Gordon R. Dickson, in The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, just released this month by Baen. So yeah, it’s worth keeping an eye on Neil’s TOC and his list of Honorable Mentions every year, just to see how the old masters measure up.