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The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 Edition Paperback – June 5, 2011
- This third volume of the year's best science fiction and fantasy features thirty stories by some of the genre's greatest authors, including Carol Emshwiller, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Paul Park, RJ Parker, Robert Reed, Rachel Swirsky, Peter Watts, Gene Wolfe, and many others. Selecting the best fiction from Asimov's, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Tor.com, and other top venues, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy is your guide to magical realms and worlds beyond tomorrow.
- Print length544 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrime Books
- Publication dateJune 5, 2011
- Dimensions6 x 2 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101607012561
- ISBN-13978-1607012566
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Product details
- Publisher : Prime Books; 2011th edition (June 5, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 544 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1607012561
- ISBN-13 : 978-1607012566
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 2 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,785,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #911 in Science Fiction Short Stories
- #3,344 in Fantasy Anthologies
- #3,808 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She is the author of THE HONEY MONTH, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She's the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy. Up next: Never Say You Can’t Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times; and a short story collection called Even Greater Mistakes.
Her novel The City in the Middle of the Night came out in 2019—it won the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, and was named one of the year's best books by the Guardian, Den of Geek, Polygon and Autostraddle, among others, and was optioned for television by Sony and Mom de Guerre Productions. Her 2016 novel, All the Birds in the Sky, was #5 on Time Magazine's list of the year's 10 best novels, and won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford awards. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White First Novel Award.
Charlie Jane was a founding editor of io9.com, a blog about science fiction and futurism, and went on to become its editor in chief. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, ZYZZYVA, and numerous anthologies and "best of the year" collections. Her novelette "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award, and her short story "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Charlie Jane also won the Emperor Norton Award, for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."
Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" has been viewed more than two million times.
She hosts the long-running monthly reading series Writers With Drinks, in which she makes up fictional bios for the authors (and nobody's sued yet.) Charlie Jane also organizes the Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, which brings a mob of people to local bookstores to buy tons of books, and eat chocolate along the way. And during the covid-19 crisis, she also helped to organize a series of online fundraisers for local bookstores, at welovebookstores.org. She also helps to organize and co-host the monthly Trans Nerd Meet Up.
Back in the day, Charlie Jane created the satirical website GodHatesFigs.com, which received many "best of the web" awards. She was also part of the editorial staff of Anything That Moves, the influential bisexual magazine, and helped out with many other queer publishing projects including Black Sheets/Black Books. And she also organized tons of events such as the notorious Ballerina Pie Fight—plus an event in a hair salon where people got their hair cut while reading stories about haircuts to an audience.
With Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane co-hosts a podcast about the meaning of science fiction called Our Opinions Are Correct. The podcast has been going strong for two years, and won a Hugo Award for Best Fancast. Anders and Newitz also collaborated on io9, plus an anthology called She's Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff, and a magazine called other magazine.
Charlie Jane hugs trees, and keeps a British penny in her left shoe at all times.

Alexandra Duncan is the author of the award-winning YA sci-fi novel SALVAGE (2014), its companion SOUND (2015), and the eco-thriller BLIGHT (2017). Her short stories have been published in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. She lives with her husband and three monstrous, furry cats in North Carolina. You can visit her online at www.alexandra-duncan.com.

C.S.E. Cooney (http://csecooney.com/) lives and writes in the borough of Queens, whose borders are water. She is an audiobook narrator, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium 2015).
Her work includes the novella Desdemona and the Deep (Tor.com 2019), three albums: Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir, and a poetry collection: How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes. The latter features her 2011 Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.”
Her short fiction can be found in Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the Sword and Sonnet anthology, edited by Aidan Doyle, Rachael K Jones, E. Catherine Tobler, Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 5, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018), Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 12, Lightspeed Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Strange Horizons, Apex, Uncanny Magazine, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, GigaNotoSaurus, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and elsewhere.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and she graduated from Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy and Sturgeon Awards. She’s twice won the Nebula Award: for her 2010 novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and her 2014 short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.”
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If you're like me, you read annual "best of" collections because you want to get a sense of what is going on in your favorite genre(s) - Who are the hot new writers? What new styles are developing? In what direction is the genre heading? - but you don't have the time or patience to go scouting all of the print and online `zines and anthologies on your own. It's a good thing that somebody invented editors like Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton to do all of the hard work for us.
The unfortunate downside of allowing somebody else to do your literary scouting is that that person's preferences, passions, and predilections are not yours; some level of disappointment is inevitable. I am sorry to report that I found Rich Horton's "The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011" less satisfying than the 2009 and 2010 editions. There were fewer pieces in the 2011 edition that I found startling or delightful, fewer pieces that were truly excellent, and more pieces that were difficult or impossible to read.
The most playful stories in the collection are "The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model," by Charlie Jane Anders (the io9-dot-com editor), in which humanity's alien creators turn out to be a lot less competent, caring, or respectable than most of us would like to think; and "A Letter from the Emperor," by Steve Rasnic Tem, a poignant 1950s-adjacent sci-fi tale about a man who travels between the outposts of a far-flung stellar empire carrying stale and unreliable news to long-neglected Imperial subjects. (For students of the classics, this is reminiscent of Cogswell's "The Spectre General.")
Possibly the coolest, funniest, and most profane story is "The Other Graces" by Alice Sola Kim. High school senior Grace Cho receives an invitation to join a social network called "The Other Graces," comprised solely of Grace Chos from "alternate timelines of a high fidelity to yours." The Other Graces help this Grace ace her SATs and get into her dream college. But are the Other Graces any more real than the invisible "Information Center" that dominates Grace's schizophrenic father's life? Full of wry observations about family, school, class, racism, and language, the story isn't clearly sci-fi, fantasy, or anything else.
Notably, Kim is one of at least three Asian American authors (counting Charles Yu and Yoon Ha Lee) contributing to this volume, and one of at least 11 women (out of 25 authors whose bios don't conceal their gender). Compared to what we saw during the "Golden Age" of sci-fi, this is a very diverse bunch.
INDIVIDUAL STORIES (IN THE ORDER THE APPEAR IN THE BOOK)
1. Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain, by Yoon Ha Lee: Poetic sci-fi about a very special weapon (think of Banks' "lazy gun") made by a very special designer (something we also see in Neal Asher's "Polity" novels); her weapon erases an entire lineage from the timeline; a creature seeks help to remove the maker of these incredibly powerful weapons from the past. [4/5](Lightspeed, 7pp.)
2. Amor Vincet Omnia, by KJ Parker : Young man from vaguely Catholic order of magician-priests is sent to discover whether
another man has stumbled upon an elusive and deadly secret. [4/5](Subterranean, 21pp.)
3. The Green Book, by Amal El-Mohtar : Unorthodox in structure, story about a woman's spirit locked inside a journal and the men who "correspond" with her [3/5](Apex Magazine, 7pp., Nebula Nominee)
4. The Other Graces, by Alice Sola Kim : Korean American Grace Cho is haunted by versions of herself from parallel universes ... or maybe she's just crazy like her dad. Nice bits on casual racism; includes Korean writing, which is an unusual touch. [4/5] (Asimov's, 15pp.)
5. The Sultan of the Clouds, by Geoffrey A. Landis: Old school sci-fi with contemporary touches about struggles within a high-tech dynasty that has colonized Venus and rules from magnificent floating cities. I thought it was a bore, but a lot of people apparently disagree. [3/5]( Asimov's , 42pp., Nebula Nominee; Hugo Nominee)
6. The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories, by Christie Yant : A fairy tale of sorts about lost loves and mistaken assumptions in the vein of "Gift of the Maji." Also tries to be a piece of meta-fiction. [3/5] (The Way of the Wizard, 12pp.)
7. A Letter from the Emperor, by Steve Rasnic Tem: Sentimental, old-style SF about a man who travels between the outposts of a far-flung stellar empire carrying stale and unreliable news [4/5] (Asimov's, 12pp., )
8. Holdfast, by Matthew Johnson : Slice-of-daily-life fantasy about a rural family. Full of charms, hexes, and dragons battling in the sky. In a humorous twist, the importance of dragons lies in the content of their excrement. [5/5] (Fantasy Magazine, 12pp.)
9. Standard Loneliness Package, by Charles Yu : Poetic sci-fi about a man who works for an Indian customer service center where he experiences negative emotions for the firm's clients; low on realism. [4/5](Lightspeed, 16pp.)
10. The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, by Rachel Swirsky : Nebula-winning novella about a proud and deadly sorceress from a matriarchal culture and her endless afterlife as an enslaved spirit; touches on cultural change over time, the nature of death and magic, and the beginning and end of the cosmos; tries to pack in too much and gets tiresome about 2/3 of the way through. [5/5] (Subterranean, 42pp., Nebula Winner; Hugo Nominee, WF nominee)
11. Arvies, by Adam-Troy Castro : Discomfiting story about a world in which unborn fetuses control adult human bodies as if they were R.V.s ("arvies"). [4/5] (Lightspeed, 12pp., Nebula Nominee)
12. Merrythoughts, by Bill Kte'pi : Story of non-human family trying to find their place within a world where superheroes battle supervillains. [3/5](Strange Horizons, 10pp.)
13. The Red Bride, by Samantha Henderson: Very short story concerning a revolt by aliens enslaved by humans. [4/5] (Strange Horizons , 4pp., )
14. Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, by Paul Park : Historical, semi-auto-biographical construction that I could not get myself to read; NOT a big Paul Park fan [2/5](F & SF, 55pp., Nebula Nominee)
15. Bloodsport, by Gene Wolfe : Idiosyncratic swords and sorcery fantasy in world where warfare emulates chess, sort of. [4/5] (Swords & Dark Magic, 12pp.)
16. No Time Like the Present, by Carol Emshwiller : Told from a teenage girl's point of view; story about people from a/the future buying up all the real estate in a depressed town. [4/5] (Lightspeed, 11pp.)
17. Braiding the Ghosts, by C.S.E. Cooney : Definitely one of my favorites. Grandma is an evil necromancer teaching young Nin how to enslave the dead. The story focuses on intergenerational conflict. Nin isn't so sure she wants to know. Unusual. [5/5](Clockwork Phoenix, 23pp.)
18. The Thing About Cassandra, by Neil Gaiman: Stuart invented his long-ago sweetheart Cassandra to fool his friends and family, but now she wants to talk. Along the same lines as "Ruby Sparks" ... or is it? [4/5]( Songs of Love and Death, 13pp.)
19. The Interior of Mr. Bumblethorn's Coat, by Willow Fagan : Poetic fantasy; couldn't read it [2/5](Fantasy Magazine, 11pp.)
20. The Things, by Peter Watts : Retelling of John W. Campbell's classic "Who Goes There?" (filmed as "The Thing") from the point of view of the monster. Workmanlike, but not exciting. [4/5](Clarkesworld, 15pp., Hugo Nominee)
21. Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory, by Paul M. Berger: Elegant story about an elven warrior and his human bride. Long ago, the elves swarmed in from another universe and conquered the world; is there hope for a human revolt? [4/5] ( Fantasy Magazine, 11pp.)
22. Amor Fugit, by Alexandra Duncan: Young woman and overprotective parents who may or may not be mythological figures. What happens when she meets a young man? [4/5] (F&SF, 18pp.)
23. Dead Man's Run, by Robert Reed : Kim Stanley Robinson-style story about near-future running partners, a murder, and an artificial intelligence based on a dead friend. [4/5](F & SF, 60pp.)
24. The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model, by Charlie Jane Anders: What if our alien progenitors had the most cynical and mundane reasons conceivable for seeding our world with life? Written by one of the founders of the io9 web site. [4/5](Tor.com, 10pp.)
25. The Word of Azrael, by Matthew David Surridge : Swordsman meets the Angel of Death and lives, but goes on a decades-long quest to find him again. [4/5](Black Gate, 24pp.)
26. Under the Moons of Venus, by Damien Broderick: Somehow, Venus has been transformed overnight into a paradise and virtually everybody has been transported there; this is the story of those left behind ... or maybe they're just nuts. [3/5] (Subterranean, 17pp., )
27. Abandonware, by An Omowoyela : Did sister discover psychohistory, turn it into a piece of software, and leave it on a ZIP disk before she died? [3/5](Fantasy Magazine, 11pp.)
28. The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon, by Elizabeth Hand : Tedious story of a present-day effort to reproduce a film documenting the 1901 flight of a monstrous human-powered airplane [3/5](Stories, 43pp., Hugo Nominee, WF Award (Novella))
BOTTOM LINE
I consistently find Horton's sci-fi and fantasy volumes to be more friendly and more entertaining than Gardner Dozois' sci-fi-only collections. This one is not an exception. I was disappointed in some of Horton's choices, but this is, on the whole, another solid collection. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys short sci-fi & fantasy.
I had a few problems with this work, all relatively small but enough to cost it a star. First, I read other "Best of" anthologies, and some of the stories in this one, I've run across before. I don't like buying the same stories over and over again; this is a waste of my money and reading time. Second, one of the drawbacks in an anthology is the very variety I was extolling above. You need an author introduction to each piece, and a story introduction, so you can tell what the story is about and its style, so you can find one you want to read that day. Other anthologies do this, and you can accordingly go through and read the intros to each piece to get a feel for what is where. With this collection there are no intros (there are author bios in the back, not with their stories, which I found annoying), and I found the best approach was simply to flip to page one and start reading straight through. The pleasure in this approach is never knowing what you'll get and enjoying each piece as it comes. The annoyance is having to read each story to know what it's about, so you can't pick pieces to suit your mood for that day. You just have to take your chances. Since it's not much work to provide a couple of sentences summarizing each piece, I would rather the editor do that and let me choose what to read when I want to read it. Finally, the quality of the pieces in this collection vary a good bit. Some, like "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window," are very crisp and sharp and strong, and some, like "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance," blather on for 60 pages and make no sense whatsoever.
Overall, though, this is a rich collection that will take you to many worlds and give you a nice overview of current trends in fantasy and science fiction. Annoyances aside, this work should give you many hours of enjoyment and possibly introduce you to some new authors whose longer works you can then go out and find, for your reading enjoyment. Have fun!






