Year’s Bests

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Just finally got around to updating the Strange Horizons Awards page with the info I know so far about the Year's Bests.

I got Gardner's Year's Best Science Fiction a couple weeks ago; usually the first thing I do when I pick up one of these volumes is go through the honorable mentions list looking for SH stories, but this time I somehow forgot.

So now I've done that, and it turns out Gardner listed 10 of our stories, up from 8 last year. We published 48 original stories last year (not counting reprints, and counting "Rushes" as one story), so that's more than 20% of our stories ending up as honorable mentions; not bad.

In Gardner's overview of the field (always one of the most interesting parts of the book), he says that we publish "good professional-level SF and fantasy (as well as the usual slipstream and soft horror)", and he specifically calls out "an excellent story by David Moles" (presumably "Fetch," which got an HM) and "good stuff" by half a dozen other specifically mentioned authors, all also on the HM list.

Also listed in Gardner's HM list are bunches of stories from Polyphony, and a few each from a variety of other small-press sources, including Trampoline and Mojo: Conjure Stories. SCI FICTION stories garnered well over 30 HMs, plus 3 reprints; between that and various recent awards and nominations, I think SCI FICTION is finally getting some serious attention from the field. Cool.

And a bunch of "our" authors got HMs for stories not published by us; I know it's silly for me to be pleased by that (except in the cases where they're also friends of mine, in which case it's perfectly reasonable), but I still am.

I gather that Ellen and Gavin & Kelly's Year's Best Fantasy & Horror gave us a fair number of HMs too (judging by the list Jason posted), but I haven't obtained that book yet so I don't have a complete list. I do know they're the only one of the Year's Bests that reprinted one of our stories this year.

2 Responses to “Year’s Bests”

  1. Jason Erik Lundberg

    “L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)” by Dean Francis Alfar got reprinted in the YBF&H antho. Honorable mentions go to Beth Bernobich for “Poison,” Bruce Boston for “Children of the Mutant Rain Forest,” Jae Brim for “The Ice Princess,” C. Scavella Burrell for “The Book of Things Which Must Not Be Remembered,” Rudi Dornemann for “Sunfast, Shadowplay, and Saintswalk,” Samantha Henderson for “Dead Letter,” Aynjel Kaye for “Circus of Regret,” Douglas Lain for “Shopping at the End of the World,” Bejamin Rosenbaum for “The Book of Jashar,” Heather Shaw for “Famishing,” Karina Summer-Smith for “Drowned Men Can’t Have Kids” and M. Thomas for “Beguiling Mona.”

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  2. Beth

    *Squee!*

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