The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Read Online Free

matter.
    â€”“The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History”
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    So science fiction and fantasy readers, same as any other readers, wish to read an engaging and particularized voice. And certainly in the short form, at the very least, experimentation and lyricism are more common than not.
    The short form is quite often where a new voice first appears—in a debut story that immediately marks the writer as someone to watch. As part of helping to administer the Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week summer program at UC San Diego (a similar workshop takes place each summer in Seattle), I spend several weeks each winter reading submissions. I can attest to the incredible talent we find among these mostly unpublished writers, each and every year.
    An increasing number of these submissions are arriving from different cultures and different countries, drawing on different literary traditions and with different political experiences. The imagined future seems to finally be a more expansive place. And thank god for that. How lonely would all those white men have been, all by themselves in the great dark universe? (See
Star Wars: A New Hope.
Very lonely, indeed.)
    In order to assemble this particular collection of short fiction, the inestimable John Joseph Adams chose eighty stories, and from those I chose twenty. The venues in which these stories were initially published were wide-ranging. I will confess here that the difference between fantasy and science fiction, while clear enough to me in theory, is often unclear when I’m faced with a specific text. I was grateful not to be the one making those decisions.
    The decisions I did make, winnowing the eighty stories down to twenty, were hard enough. I’m still in mourning for several of the beautiful pieces I couldn’t include; I expect I always will be. I’m gratified that a number of those are on the ballots of various awards this year; they deserve this praise and attention. In every other way, the task was a pure pleasure. It has convinced me that the golden age of the science fiction/fantasy short story must be just about right exactly now.
    I read everything blind, so it was a wonderful surprise to later recognize the names of many authors I already know and love. Even better were the names I had never seen before but am sure I will be finding again and again now.
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There’s never been a world that isn’t a world at war.
    â€”“The Thirteen Mercies”
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    Science fiction stories (fantasy, too) are always primarily a comment on the current moment in the current world. Based on these eighty initial stories, I’m prepared to say that one of the things occupying our minds just now is war.
    The future of warfare was by far the most common theme, both in the stories I chose and in the ones I wished for but could not take. In this category, I include the so-called war on terror, though there was actually less focus on that and more on the old traditional carnage. Although the methods and motives for war may be new, the final outcomes remain, sadly, what they have ever been.
    Though in some of the stories, the more interesting part of a war was how to survive it. And having done that, how to put it into the past and leave it there.
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You don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost.
    â€”“Interesting Facts”
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    Science fiction and fantasy are well suited to thought experiments and philosophical questions regarding the Other. In this literature, humans can be assessed directly through comparison with nonhumans. I read a great many stories that did this.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were magical—wet gentlemen or jinn. Sometimes they had fairy-tale aspects.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were aliens. We may call them lions or handmaids or vampires, but they are nothing of the sort and have their own inexplicable extraterrestrial agendas.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were those other animals with whom we