The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Starred review from July 27, 2020
Strahan (The Book of Dragons, editor) packs the first volume in Saga’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series with 28 diverse and brilliant stories. Climate change looms large in many of these pieces: the clientele of “The Bookstore at the End of America” by Charlie Jane Anders, the resource hunters in Peter Watts’s “Cyclopterus,” and the loyal science bots of Alec Nevala-Lee’s “At the Fall” all navigate near-future worlds ravaged by global warming. E. Lily Yu’s “Green Glass: A Love Story,” Rich Larson’s “Contagion’s Even at the House Noctambulous,” and “It’s 2059 and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning” by Ted Chiang, meanwhile, take scathing looks at all-too-possible dystopian worlds split between haves and have-nots. Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex” and Sofia Rhei’s “Secret Stories of Doors” both find dark humor in very different visions of the future. There are no misfires here, and the standouts include N.K. Jemisin’s twisty “Emergency Skin,” Suzanne Palmer’s bleakly elegiac “The Painter of Trees,” S.L. Huang’s haunting “As the Last I May Know,” and Tegan Moore’s fierce “The Work of Wolves.” Strahan’s thoughtful selections offer a sometimes chilling, always fascinating look at the best of the genre.

Starred review from July 1, 2020
Exploring critical issues impacting humankind--from climate change to racism to mass shootings--this timely and thematically profound anthology of the year's best short-form science fiction is filled with thought-provoking gems. Noteworthy stories from all over the globe are featured prominently in this collection, including Indian writer Indrapramit Das' dark "Kali_Na," which chronicles the unforeseen consequences of a megacorp developing an AI deity for the masses; Saleem Haddad's "Song of the Birds," about a 14-year-old girl living in Gaza City struggling to understand her brother's inexplicable suicide; and Chinese writer Han Song's metaphorical "Submarines," in which the poor are forced to live in homemade habitats underwater. Peter Watt's "Cyclopterus"--set in a near future ravaged by environmental collapse--is chillingly plausible, as is "Thoughts and Prayers" by Ken Liu, which chronicles a couple's ordeal after their daughter is killed at a music festival by a shooter and their lives are destroyed by online trolls. "The Bookstore at the End of America" by Charlie Jane Anders is both disturbing and inspiring. Molly and her daughter, Phoebe, run a bookstore located on the border of California and the United States, which are at war. When the fighting begins and customers from both sides find shelter inside, the owners begin a mandatory book club--with glorious results. In an anthology full of powerful stories, perhaps the most memorable is "Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin, about an explorer who returns to an Earth that his misogynist, racist, and elitist ancestors left generations earlier as it was dying--only to find not a barren, graveyard planet, as he expected, but one thriving and vastly advanced. In a sentence that exemplifies the tone of many of the anthology's selections, Jemisin writes: "Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." If this is the future of science fiction, the genre is in very good hands.

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