Posted at Heradas ReviewThis is an equal mix of F and SF stories, and John Joseph Adams truly understands the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is refreshing. The stories started out a little rough but quickly got into some AAA level stuff about a quarter of the way in, including a few new personal all-time favorite short stories in any genre.Standout stories: Interesting Facts, No Placeholder for You My Love, The Duniazát, Things You Can Buy for a Penny, and Three Bodies at

Looking back over this collection, of all twenty stories, the only ones that made me think “I am so glad I read this” are Lightning Jack’s Last Ride and Ambiguity Machines: An Examination. That is... not a good hit rate.From reading other reviews, it looks like a lot of other people share my opinion that this is a collection of a few great stories buried in a pile of some New-Yorker-ass nonsense. Listen, I have no beef with literary fiction, but most of the stories in here I didn’t find to be pa...

I love science fiction and l really enjoyed reading these short stories. Some of the authors were not well known to me, but I’m glad I got a taste of their work.

An allegorical short story about an exiled philosopher who has an affair with a Jinn named Dubia. In "The Duniazat," Salman Rushdie inserts magical realism into an old fairy tale to craft a piece about how we argue, how we treat one another, and the long-lasting repercussions of our actions that we may not predict. This story serves as just a fragment of Rushdie's newest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.Would recommend to those intrigued by its synopsis or fans of Rushdie's

As it turns out, this piece, published in the New Yorker, is actually an excerpt from the first chapter of Rushdie's novel, "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights." (My review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)Is it any coincidence that the 12th-century philosopher we meet here, whose (we are told) "bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth" is called Ibn Rushd, which bears a remarkable similarity to Rushdie? ;-) He is an histor...

Edit: Goodreads librarians strike again. The review below is for the short story "The Duniazát" by Salman Rushdie who can be read in The New Yorker. The librarians collated that story to this collection. I only read that story and did not even know this collection existed. "The Duniazát" by Salman Rushdie - read 2015It is a story about an old philosopher in medieval Spain that falls in disgrace because of his modern ideas of "cause and effect", "reason" and "logic". After all his books are burne...

After loving last year's debut of this new Best American imprint, I was a little disappointed by this year's. That's the natural consequence of changing volume editors, though, and not a sign of a real drop in quality: Joe Hill's taste last year just happened to be remarkably similar to mine (which is why I used to buy every song he recommended on his now-mostly-defunct blog) and Fowler's isn't, even when she's pulling stories from authors I really admire (Samatar, Link, Valente, and Kij Johnson...

I picked this up because I always want to read more good short SF, and because I have the highest possible opinion of Karen Fowler (who is a friend). I also really like the editors' process: John Joseph Adams, who reads more widely than you would think a human being could, picked 80 stories. Karen then read those stories author blind and picked 20 of the 80. So it's a testament to the taste of the field that many of our acknowledged finest short-story writers are represented here because they're...

4.6Anthologies are generally a mixed bag. Even the best collections tend to have enough poor stories that cancel out the best the collection has to offer. I think the highest rating I have ever given to an anthology is a 3.5 because of this unfortunate phenomenon. While not every in story Best American Sci-Fi and Fantasy 2016 is perfect, the best ones are perfect and the worst simply not to my taste. Maybe 2 stories of 20 get a B. That's a pretty good report card. I find this especially intere

A strong and varied collection of short stories, much more to my taste than last year's rather medicore volume in this series. Highlights for me were Catherynne M. Valente's 'Planet Lion' (a wonderfully weird mash-up of military space opera and psychedelic planetary exotica), Liz Ziemska's 'The Mushroom Queen' (mycology and a mid-life crisis in one haunting package), Maia Dahvana Headley's 'The Thirteen Mercies' (perhaps more horror than science fiction or straight fantasy but beautifully and ef...

Well, that's a lesson reminding me that despite my voracious appetite for SF & F, there is a whole swath if it that I don't care for, and this collection represetns that swath very well. The reviews here suggest that I am not alone in this. People used words like "literary" and "dreamy" and "surreal," and those are words that often make me put down a book. As I searched for this title, I saw that someone had just Liked a review I did of another short story collection, containing tributes to Jac...

A few stories that captured my attention:Catherynne M. Valente: Planet LionThe lions on a planet gain a collective sentience, fueled by memories from astronauts. Truly unique story, compelling.Kij Johnson: The Apartment Dweller's BestiaryA collection of tiny, funny stories about quite exotic pets like the lopi, the louet, the hooded quilliot. You tell the stories in the second person, and it tells more about your lonely life than about the pets that bring you a bit of joy mixed with sarcasm and

This is my second consecutive collection of sci-fi writing, and after the Best of Crank! it rather lags. Drawn from more 'mainstream' sources, it generally lacks the wild originality of the work in Crank! While some of the stories are transporting in their imagination, there are also many that barely graze the boundaries of realist fiction. This is also the most recent sample of science-fiction I've read, and -though sci-fi has always been a conduit for the existential angst of the times - it se...

"Tell me a story . . ."I really enjoyed Rushdie's New Yorker tale - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...We meet a philosopher who embraces “reason,” “logic,” and “science.” Because of his controversial theories, he has had his books burned and been ostracized. He meets a jinnia. She moves in and sets about producing great litters of children."If our children are fortunate, they will inherit only your ears, but, regrettably, as they are undeniably mine, they will probably think too much too s...

Not as wowed by this collection as I was last year's, but there are a handful of solid stories in this one.

I like The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, so when I heard the host--John Joseph Adams, the editor of this anthology--chatting with his co-editor about this book, I grabbed it on Amazon when it was on sale for $2. I am sorry that I did.I used to be a voracious reader of short stories, and as I read some of the stories in this anthology, I realized how much the short story form has changed in the decade or two that I've been away. Many of the stories in this anthology were, for all intents an...

"Relax. This is normal."—Dexter Palmer, "The Daydreamer by Proxy," p.106I'm not sure whether the effect was due to series editor John Joseph Adams or to this volume's specific editor, Karen Joy Fowler, but the flow from story to story in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 was exceptionally smooth.As to the stories themselves: I have transcribed the entire Table of Contents below. I won't try to rate the stories relative to each other—this really is a "best-of" volume, and there w...

All in all, quite a satisfying short story collection. I didn't appreciate all of the stories equally but each of them had a very interesting premise which definitely gave some food for thought. This is what I like about the series – by reading the collection you can get the patchwork picture of the genre. I guess I would never read some of the authors outside of this compilation but going though the book I still enjoyed the variety of topics and narrative methods. There was not a single story t...

A DNF for me at 26%. Out of 4 stories, I could only enjoy/finish 1. Sci-fi/fantasy is not my usual genre. But it’s not so foreign to me that I should have such difficulty with a Best Of anthology.I was looking forward to expanding my base of sci-fi writers. I’m disappointed.

There were a few gems in here, but the fantasy--the minute I see a retelling of Alice, I'm out of there--felt more like genre trying its damndest to be literary and subsequently veering into the worst aspects of magical realism minus any of the historical context that might anchor it. Sure, the sentences are pyrotechnic, but ultimately what you end up with is a little kid with scalpel sharp crayons and an extremely precious sensibility going "Tralalalala---!" So the good stuff:The Great Silence