by Paula Guran
C. S. E. Cooney (csecooney.com/@csecooney) is the author of Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium, 2015). Her novella The Two Paupers, the second installment of her Dark Breakers series, appears in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2016 (Prime). She is an audiobook narrator for Tantor Media, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and the Rhysling Award-winning author of the poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction can be found in Black Gate, Strange Horizons, Apex, GigaNotoSaurus, Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 5, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and elsewhere.
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga also published a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and has been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. He resides in two worlds.
Nnedi Okorafor’s books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu Kabu (a Publishers Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner). Her latest works include her novel The Book of Phoenix, her novella Binti, winner of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novella, and her children’s book Chicken in the Kitchen. Okorafor is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, New York (SUNY). Learn more at Nnedi.com.
Having worked in journalism, numismatics, and the law, K. J. Parker now writes for a precarious living. K. J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt. As Parker, he has published fifteen novels and seventeen works of shorter fiction, some of which is collected in Academic Exercises (2014, Subterranean Press). He has more than three dozen novels as Tom Holt.
Rachel Pollack was born in Brooklyn, New York, and holds an honors degree in English from New York University, a Masters in English from Claremont Graduate School, and has taught English at New York State University. Considered one of the World’s foremost authorities on the modern interpretation of the Tarot, she’s published twelve books on the subject including 78 Degrees of Wisdom (Thorsons, 1998), considered a modern classic and the Bible of Tarot reading. As a fiction writer, Pollack has been bestowed many honors and awards, among them the famed Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction (for novel Unquenchable Fire) and the World Fantasy Award (for novel Godmother Night). “Johnny Rev” is her third novella featuring Jack Shade.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in every genre she reads, which happens to be most of them. She writes paranormal romances as Kristine Grayson, award-winning noir mysteries as Kris Nelscott, and a few other books under other names. As Kristine Kathryn Rusch, she writes whatever she pleases. Mostly, though, she’s known for her science fiction and fantasy. Nominated for every award in sf (and many in the other genres as well), she’s also won a lot of awards, including several readers choice awards from various magazines, a World Fantasy Award, and two Hugo awards (one for editing, and one for her short fiction). Her short work has been in over twenty year’s best collections, including three in 2016. Her novels have hit bestseller lists worldwide. Recently, she published the eight-volume Anniversary Day Saga, set in her Retrieval Artist universe, as well as the Interim Fates trilogy as Kristine Grayson. She’s series editor for Fiction River, with her husband Dean Wesley Smith, and she edits some of the volumes. In September, her retrospective anthology about women in science fiction, Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories, will be published by Baen Books. “Inhuman Garbage” is part of her Anniversary Day Saga.
Born in New York and educated on the East Coast, Carter Scholz set foot in Berkeley in the 1970s—and never looked back. The author of the novel Radiance and over three dozen works of shorter fiction, he is also a computer programmer and consultant. Scholz is a musician and composer of experimental music. He plays keyboards with the post-bop jazz quartet, The Inside Men, and has (among other things) also played Javanese gamelan.
Bao Shu is a Chinese science fiction and fantasy writer, after graduating from Peking University, he obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy from KU Leuven, Belgium. Working as a freelance writer in China, he has published four novels and over thirty novellas, novelettes, and short stories since 2010. His best-known works include Three Body X: Aeon of Contemplation (an authorized sequel to Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy), Ruins of Time (winner of the 2014 Chinese Nebula Award for Best Novel), and the novella included here, “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear.” He now lives in Xi’an.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Paula Guran is senior editor for Prime Books. In addition to the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas series and Dark Fantasy and Horror series, she has edited and continues to edit a growing number of other anthologies as well as more than fifty novels and single-author collections. She is the recipient of two Bram Stoker Award and an IHG Award, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award twice. Mother of four, mother-in-law of two, grandmother to three, she lives in Akron, Ohio.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jonathan Strahan and the rest of the Locus Recommendation Committee. Special thanks to Nana Amuah, an innocent bystander who was of great help this year.
“The Citadel of Weeping Pearls,” © 2015 Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2015).
“The Bone Swans of Amandale,” © 2015 C. S. E. Cooney (Bone Swans, Mythic Delirium Books).
“Binti” © 2015 Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, Tor.com).
“The Last Witness” © 2015 K. J. Parker (The Last Witness, Tor.com)
“Johnny Rev” © 2015 Rachel Pollack (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jul/Aug 2015).
“Inhuman Garbage” © 2015 Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s, Mar 2015)
Gypsy © 2015 Carter Scholz (Gypsy, PM Press / The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov/Dec 2015).
“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” © 2015 Usman T. Malik (The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, Tor.com).
“What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” © 2015 Bao Shu, translation Ken Liu (First English: © 2015 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2015).
Appendix: Some Notable Speculative Fiction Novellas 1843-1980
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
“Carmilla” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1871-72)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edward Abbott Abbott (1884)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1897) by H. G. Wells
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (1899)
The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) by Franz Kafka (1915)
The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft (1936)
“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell (as Don A. Stuart) (1938)
“Nightfall” (1941) and “A Sound of Thunder” by Isaac Asimov (1952)
Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
“Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke (1948)
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950)
The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert Heinlein (1951)
“A Case of Conscience” by James Bl
ish (1958)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
“Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock (1966)
“Empire Star” (1966) and “The Star Pit” (1967) by Samuel R. Delany
“Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer (1967)
“Weyr Search” (1967) and “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey (1967-68)
Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)
“Ill Met in Lankhmar” and “Ship of Shadows” by Fritz Leiber (1970)
“The Word for World Is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972)
“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” by Gene Wolfe (1972)
“The Deathbird” by Harlan Ellison (1973)
“A Song for Lya” by George R. R. Martin (1974)
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1974) and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) by James Tiptree, Jr.
“Home Is the Hangman” by Robert Zelazny (1975)
“Stardance” by Spider and Jeanne Robinson (1977)
“The Persistence of Vision” by John Varley (1978)
“Enemy Mine” by Barry B. Longyear (1979)
“The Unicorn Tapestry” by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980)
