The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2016

By Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams

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 The Best 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544555211

Karen Joy Fowler

Well known in the mainstream for her New York Times bestseller, The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler is a well-respected and considerable force in SF and Fantasy as well. She is a two-time winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and cofounder of the Tiptree Award, given for works dealing with the politics of sex and gender.

Reviews for The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2016

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd read a couple of volumes from this Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series (which started up in 2015), and I liked both of them so much that I'm now working on going back through the rest of the series. Very slowly, given my massive reading backlog, but at least I finally got to the 2016 collection.The series overall tends very much towards the more "literary" end of the SF spectrum, but this installment, in particular, seems to feature a lot of works that are perhaps slightly experimental, or abstract, or even a little surreal, and certainly on stories that require thought and careful reading to be effective. As is usual for anthologies, some of these pieces worked better for me than others. I don't think any of them quite knocked my socks off the way the most impressive of stories can, but the best of them are very good, and even the ones that missed the target a little for me did so in genuinely interesting ways.

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love "The Best American...." annual series of books. Whether it is the short story collection, the Science Fiction collection, the essays, travel stories or, most especially, The Best American Non-Required Reading" collection, each year's anthology is a joy to read.
As an anthology, of course there are stories I enjoyed more than others, but even the ones I disliked are of high quality, engaging and highly original.
Science-fiction is not my usual first (or second) choice of reading, but every once in a while, I binge on it and lately, that has been the case. This is a fine collection of stories, good enough to make me want to read sci-fi a lot more often