This omnivorous selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and World Fantasy Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado is a display of the most boundary-pushing, genre-blurring, stylistically singular science fiction and fantasy stories published in the last year. By sending us to alternate universes and chronicling ordinary magic, introducing us to mythical beasts and talking animals, and engaging with a wide spectrum of emotion from tenderness to fear, each of these stories challenge the way we see our place in the cosmos.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 represents a wide range of the most accomplished voices working in science fiction and fantasy, in fiction, today -- each story dazzles with ambition, striking prose, and the promise of the other and the unencountered.

This anthology includes 120 authors—who contributed 230 works totaling

approximately 1.1 million words of fiction. These pieces all originally

appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the

SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next

generation of speculative storytelling.

All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New

Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for

that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.