Search Worlds Without End

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 exchanges 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, loss, and the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the after. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, as it claims its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity's never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.

Table of Contents:

FANTASY

• "Glass Bottle Dancer" by Celeste Rita Baker from Lightspeed Magazine Issue #119, April 2020
• "The Long Walk" by Kate Elliott from The Book of Dragons, edited by Jonathan Strahan
• "The Cleaners" by Ken Liu from Amazon Original Stories (Faraway Collection)
• "Tiger's Feast" by KT Bryski from Nightmare Magazine Issue #98, November 2020
• "Crawfather" by Mel Kassel from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2020
• "Two Truths and a Lie" by Sarah Pinsker from Tor.com, June 17, 2020
• "Let's Play Dead" by Senaa Ahmad from The Paris Review Issue #232, Spring 2020
• "And This is How to Stay Alive" by Shingai Njeri Kagunda from Fantasy Magazine Issue #61, November 2020
• "Our Language" by Yohanca Delgado from A Public Space Issue #29, Winter 2021
• "The Rat" by Yohanca Delgado from One Story Issue #270, October 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

• "One Time, a Reluctant Traveler" by A. T. Greenblatt from Clarkesworld Issue #166, July 2020
• "Skipping Stones in the Dark" by Amman Sabet from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2020
• "Brother Rifle" by Daryl Gregory from Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan
• "Schrodinger's Catastrophe" by Gene Doucette from Lightspeed Magazine Issues #126-127, November/December 2020
• "The Plague Doctors" by Karen Lord from Take Us to a Better Place: Stories, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• "Survival Guide" by Karin Lowachee from Burn the Ashes: The Dystopia Triptych, Vol. 2, edited by Christie Yant, John Joseph Adams, and Hugh Howey
• "The Pill" by Meg Elison from the collection Big Girl
• "The Beast Adjoins" by Ted Kosmatka from Asimov's Science Fiction, July-August 2020
• "How to Pay Reparations: a Documentary" by Tochi Onyebuchi from Slate's Future Tense, August 29, 2020
• "Beyond the Dragon's Gate" by Yoon Ha Lee from Tor.com, May 20 2020