The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

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There are a lot of Best of the Year volumes in our field, and frankly I recommend them all. One of the features of SF in 2018 is how much of it there is. There’s enough short fiction that the Hugo shortlist can very nearly ignore men, and still be mostly full of strong stories. (There are a couple of duds, but so it always was.) There’s enough that both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists can completely ignore the traditional print SF magazines (F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone, let’s say), and still be mostly full of strong stories. How then to resolve that issue? Read as many of the Best of the Year volumes as you can, I say! (And, hey, why not subscribe to one of the print magazines, if that’s possible? And try some original anthologies as well.)

The main distinction, of course, for each of these books is the editor’s individual tastes. (Or so Hannibal Lecter tells us…) We all read a lot of short SF, and have for a long time. And when I see the table of content pages of the other books they are stuffed with stories I almost took for this book (and a couple of overlaps)—so I know that my fellow editors have good taste! Thus part of the equation is: which editor’s taste aligns with yours? But, I’d suggest, if you can, read more—because reading stuff that you didn’t know you’d like is one of the truest joys of reading.

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