The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Read Free Page A

speed.
    Likewise, I want to acknowledge the contributions of the many editors in the science fiction/fantasy field who have edited best-of-the-year volumes over the years, including Gardner Dozois, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, David G. Hartwell, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton (to name but a few of the prominent ones of my era as a reader). I consider their work the textbooks of my education as an editor. But if their works were my textbooks, then Gordon Van Gelder, former editor and current publisher of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, was my professor.
    And last but not least, thanks so much to Joe Hill for taking the helm for the good ship
BASFF
’s inaugural voyage. His comments about and criticisms of all the stories I presented him with were always astute and incisive, and he was both an amiable and a stalwart collaborator. Also, as you will no doubt agree once you read Joe’s introduction, he wrote as wonderful a love letter to science fiction/fantasy as I’ve ever seen. If you read it and are not moved by it, and are not made super-excited to read this anthology afterward, I daresay this might not be the book for you.
    Â 
    I consider the mantle of series editor to be a tremendous responsibility, and the SF/F genre is vitally important to me, so this is a job I take very, very seriously.
    Being series editor of the first Best American title to focus on science fiction and fantasy puts me into several different roles. I’ll be an ambassador of the genre to the outside world, the genre’s proselytizer in chief, who will be called upon to spread the gospel of SF/F far and wide.
    But first and foremost I am a curator, with the mission to survey the field and ask, “What is the best American science fiction and fantasy?”
    In my effort to find the top eighty stories of the year, I read more than a hundred periodicals, from longtime genre mainstays such as
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, to leading digital magazines such as
Clarkesworld
and my own
Lightspeed
, to top literary publications such as
The New Yorker
and
Granta
, as well as sixty or more anthologies and single-author collections. I scoured the field for publications both big and small and paid equal consideration to stories in venerable major magazines such as
Analog
and stories in new niche zines like
Scigentasy
(the latter of which I’m pleased to say ended up with a story in this volume).
    By my calculations, my long list of eighty was drawn from forty different publications—twenty-four periodicals, fifteen anthologies, and one stand-alone ebook—from thirty-six different editors (counting editorial teams as a unit, but also distinct from any solo work done by one of the editors). The final table of contents draws from fourteen different sources: nine periodicals and five anthologies (from fourteen different editors/editorial teams).
    About halfway through the year I stopped logging every single story I read, as it got to be too onerous to do so; instead I started logging only things that I
liked.
I myself edited or coedited five anthologies and twenty-two magazine issues in 2014, which included approximately 185 original, eligible stories altogether. Including those, I have spreadsheets showing that I and/or my first-reader team evaluated approximately 2,600 stories, but how many stories in total I actually ended up considering is something of a mystery; if I were to venture a guess, I’d say it might be as many as twice that. Those numbers, I think—combined with how difficult it was to narrow down my selections to the top eighty stories—speak to both the extreme vitality of the field and the need for volumes like this one.
    Science fiction and fantasy has been an indispensable addition to our cultural heritage, one that has given us great masters such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Shirley Jackson, as well as the tools to