The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor—a leading writer in the field—then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. Science fiction and fantasy enjoys a long literary tradition, stretching from Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne to Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William Gibson. In The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy award-winning editor John Joseph Adams delivers a diverse and vibrant collection of stories published in the prior year. Featuring writers with deep science fiction and fantasy backgrounds, along with those who are infusing traditional fiction with speculative elements, these stories uphold a long-standing tradition within both genres—looking at the world and asking, What if…?
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016
edited by Karen Joy Fowler & John Joseph Adams
BASFF #2
The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor—a leading writer in the field—then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. From quiet, elegiac, contemporary tales to far-future, deep-space sagas, the stories chosen by guest editor Karen Joy Fowler and series editor John Joseph Adams for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 demonstrate the vast spectrum of what science fiction and fantasy aims to accomplish, 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.
