“Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016” is out now

The second edition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s fantastic “Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy” has been released, and for the second year in a row I am in it!

My story “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History,” originally published in Uncanny Magazine and subsequently nominated for a World Fantasy Award, is in there alongside magnificent work by Rachel Swirsky, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Sofia Samatar, Kij Johnson, Charlie Jane Anders, Seth Dickinson, and so many more. And while the series as a whole is edited by the unfailingly brilliant John Joseph Adams, the final choice on stories in this particular edition was made by my hero Karen Joy Fowler.

tl;dr BUY IT NOW 

Here is the “story note” about the origins of my contribution:

The seed of “The Heat of Us” was planted on the night Donna Summer died. I was walking home from work, feeling pretty blue – I think “Bad Girls” is probably the second-best album of all time – looking across at the sad lonely lights of the city coming on, all those people by themselves, all the separate sadness that a certain group of people would be feeling. And I remembered that the Stonewall Uprising happened on the night that Judy Garland died. And I thought “revolutions are born on nights like this.” But that seed didn’t break into blossom until I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop and I saw how exponentially my writing improved through being part of a community of writers and readers, how I could share their strengths and (hopefully) lend them mine. So this is a story about community – about how people are stronger together than separate, and how when we work together we can achieve things so incredible they’re indistinguishable from magic.