Charles Yu

John Joseph Adams

A collection of the best American science fiction and fantasy stories from 2016

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Daryl Houston

I have a bit of a snobbery problem when it comes to books, and I've tended to turn my nose up at genre fiction. This year in particular, I've been trying to have more of an open mind about it and have read a fair bit of science fiction on my own alongside fantasy for the family read-aloud. I'm a sucker for "Best American" anthologies (I picked up two others when I bought this one recently) and this seemed like a good one to expose myself to a broader range of the genre without a huge investment in a long book or series. It also seemed like a good opportunity to see what current fiction in these genres was like (most of what I've read is 20 years old or older).

Turns out, fiction in these genres is very mixed. I dog-eared the following stories as really enjoyable or worthwhile:

- Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home
- When They Came to Us
- Openness
- The Future is Blue

I also thought "The Venus Effect" was fairly important but annoyingly written (it's metafiction, which I like in general, but I didn't like the way the author wrote it). I enjoyed a little bit "The Story of Kao Yu" but didn't think it really belonged in this anthology.

Most of the rest of the stories were meh at best for me. A couple of them were downright bad. I screened entries for a local genre fiction contest a few years ago, and there were a few pretty solid entries and a lot of really terrible ones. Some of the stories in this collection I would not have passed along to the round of final judging even in a local contest, much less considered fit for a collection of 20 of the best stories in the two genres. This makes me feel like maybe the current state of science fiction and fantasy is pretty grim, though it's possible that the series editor and judge just have tastes or literary sensibilities very very different from mine (though I think that my snobbery lets me value quality writing even if I don't love the category of the writing).

The thing about it is that good writing transcends genre. The stories I dog-eared are all reasonably good stories that I'd be pleased to have read in any context (one appeared in The Sun, which is a literary magazine and not a science fiction magazine). The ones I didn't mention by title above seem to have been chosen specifically because of their genre and not because they represent good writing or storytelling, and this sort of pigeonholing and acceptance regardless of quality is, I suppose, what makes me feel iffy about genre fiction in general to begin with.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

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