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This year's selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity's never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 12, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780358470076
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- File size: 3956 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from August 23, 2021
Roth (Chosen Ones) balances Earth- and space-based futures in this superior anthology of 20 sci-fi shorts. Several of the most powerful tales use current societal preoccupations to sketch alarming possible consequences. In “The Pill,” Meg Elison imagines that Big Pharma has developed a medication that can eliminate obesity and thoughtfully examines the dystopian effects of a society where choosing to remain overweight becomes a liability—and what happens to those whose lives aren’t really changed by the drug. Karin Lowachee’s “Survival Guide” explores what happens to students taught by an A.I. neural network that seems to improve comprehension but may be turning them into docile sheep in the process. And a devastating disease tests medical ethics in Karen Lord’s timely “The Plague Doctors.” The high point of the extraterrestrial entries, meanwhile, is Gene Doucette’s “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe,” in which a spaceship wanders into a section of the universe governed by different laws of physics. With these phenomenal selections, Roth nimbly demonstrates the genre’s continued potential for rich ideas. -
Starred review from October 1, 2021
The latest volume of this annual anthology reprints a wide array of genre fiction selected by regular series editor Adams and this year's guest editor, Roth. Roth's input seems to have focused on stories that deal with intense emotional experiences or questions of survival, with a few exceptions. Among the standout fantasy stories of the collection are Kate Elliot's ""The Long Walk,"" where one woman discovers the truth about the tithe of older, ""useless"" women sent to the dragons at the edge of the world; Ken Liu's ""The Cleaners,"" where memories are left as literal deposits on people's belongings and an entire industry exists to clean them; and Sarah Pinsker's horror-tinged ""Two Truths and a Lie,"" in which a woman discovers a sinister local-access television channel that possibly determined the fates of her and her classmates. There are also stand-out sf entries, like Gene Doucette's ""Schrodinger's Catastrophe,"" about a spaceship that enters a zone where the laws of physics are suspended. All in all, this anthology continues the series commitment to presenting a high-quality selection of the past year's fantasy and sf short fiction, and is highly recommended for both genre fans and general readers alike.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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