Ellen Datlow’s career as the doyen of “year’s best” editors began with
The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection in 1988 (with co-editor Terri Windling), and the series was renamed The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror with the third annual collection. After 21 volumes, the series ended, but Datlow continued with 2009’s
The Best Horror of the Year Volume One. We’ve now arrived at the 12th entry. If you combine the two series, only the late Gardner Dozois and his The Year’s Best Science Fiction series has (with 35 volumes) a longer history. Datlow unfailingly presents notable scary tales and – since her choices come from an immense variety of sources – even avid readers are unlikely to have encountered them all. This year is no different; she offers 22 stories and novelettes and one novella first published in 2019. Datlow also includes an annual “summation” of the year in horror and a list of “honorable mentions.”
Aliette de Bodard,
Seven of Infinities (Subterranean 10/20) A scholar investigates murder in a house designed by an architect fond of puzzles in this engaging far-future SF mystery novella set in the Xuya universe. “It’s a tightly written jewel of a story, intense and full of feeling, and I recommend it highly.” [Liz Bourke]
Scott Edelman,
Things that Never Happened (Cemetery Dance 9/20) Edelman’s latest collection offers 13 eerie and engrossing horror stories, with comments on each by the noted author/editor.
Paula Guran,
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Volume One (Pyr 10/20) Guran’s year’s best anthology series continues with its first volume from Pyr, after ten previously from Prime, with 25 stories from 2019. The impressive line-up of authors includes Pat Cadigan, Theodora Goss, Ellen Klages, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Sam J. Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, and Rivers Solomon.
It’s always seemed to me that John Joseph Adams’s
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its sixth volume, has served a somewhat different if equally important purpose than the more traditional year’s best volumes which have been a staple of SF publishing for more than 70 years. While those volumes have historically been SF’s way of presenting itself
to itself (always with the hopes of drawing a broader readership among those who simply want to check in on SF from time to time), Adams’s annual volumes are part of the “Best American” series of focused anthologies which began with