The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

preface

The first volume of this series, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection, was published way back in 1984, a time so distant and so different that it might as well be another world, and one that would probably seem as alien as any fictional Mars to many of today’s young readers. As I type these words, it’s 2017, with The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection about to come out. Although I already edited The Best of the Best in 2005 and The Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels in 2007, it seemed time for another such collection—so here it is, covering the years from 2003 to 2017, and from The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection to The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection.

Over the entire span of the series, from 1984 to 2017, we’ve reprinted more than six hundred stories, from authors from all around the world, reprinted from magazines, anthologies, electronic magazines, novella chapbooks, and podcasts. I hope that you’ve enjoyed and will enjoy some of them. If you do, the credit goes to the authors who wrote them, and the editors who were shrewd enough to buy them in the first place. They did the real work. All I’ve done, over the years, is to offer you a chance to read the stories that I myself enjoyed.