Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016: A Tor.com Original

Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016: A Tor.com Original

Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016: A Tor.com Original

Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016: A Tor.com Original

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Overview

A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2016.

Includes stories by:
Charlie Jane Anders
Nina Allan
Tara Isabella Burton
Monica Byrne
Rebecca Campbell
P. Djèlí Clark
Indrapramit Das
Alix E. Harrow
N. K. Jemisin
Margaret Killjoy
Cixin Liu
Melissa Marr
David Nickle
Laurie Penny
Daniel Polansky
Lettie Prell
Delia Sherman
Angela Slatter
Caighlan Smith
Lavie Tidhar
Rajnar Vajra
Genevieve Valentine
Carrie Vaughn
Alyssa Wong

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780765391957
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication date: 01/17/2017
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 820
Sales rank: 110,962
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

Before writing fiction full-time, Charlie Jane Anders was for many years an editor of the extraordinarily popular science fiction and fantasy site io9.com. Her debut novel, the mainstream ChoirBoy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story "Six Months, Three Days" won the 2013 Hugo Award and was optioned for television. Her debut science fiction and fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky appeared in 2016 to praise from, among others, Michael Chabon, Lev Grossman, and Karen Joy Fowler. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney's, Lightspeed,and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.

Nina Allan has been the recipient of the British Science Fiction Award, the Liverpool John Moores Novella Award, and the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues including Best Horror of the Year #6,The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2014 and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by women. Her debut novel The Race was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. She lives and works in North Devon, England.

Tara Isabella Burton's fiction has appeared in Shimmer,PANK, Daily Science Fiction and more. Her nonfiction, essays, and travel writing can be found at National Geographic, National Geographic Traveller, Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, and more. In 2012 she received The Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing.

Monica Byrne is a writer, playwright, and traveler based in Durham, NC. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road, won the Tiptree Award in 2015.

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions Online, and Interzone. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013.

P. Djèlí Clark is a writer of speculative fiction. Born in Queens, New York, he has lived alternatively in Staten Island, Brooklyn,Texas and the Caribbean. His stories have appeared in online publications such as Daily Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has also contributed short stories to anthologies such as the Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology and Griots: Sisters of the Spear, co-edited by Milton Davis and the pioneering Charles Saunders. Professionally, Clark is a doctoral candidate in history who focuses on issues of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. He currently resides in Washington D.C., and ruminates on issues of diversity in speculative fiction at his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.

Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer from Kolkata, India. His debut novel The Devourers (Penguin BooksIndia) was nominated for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in India, and released in North America from Ballantine Del Rey. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.He is a 2012 Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of the ClarionWest Writers Workshop.

Alix E. Harrow is a part-time history adjunct and full-time reader, with stories published in Shimmer and Strange Horizons. In her spare time she writes, gardens, herds pets, and works on her gloriously dilapidated house. She lives in Berea, Kentucky with her husband and son.

N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has won the Hugo Award and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards;shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree. She has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as multiple Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards.

Margaret Killjoy is an author and editor who travels with no fixed home. Margaret’s recent books include A Country of Ghosts,a utopian novel published by Combustion Books in 2014.

Cixin Liu is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant. His novels include The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest,and Death's End.

As a result of teaching university for over a decade prior to writing, Melissa Marr has an ongoing weakness for writing short stories and editing anthologies. However, she is best known for her folklore, myth, or fairy tale based novels, including the internationally bestselling Wicked Lovely series, the award-winning Graveminder, and recently, The Blackwell Pages (the latter co-authored with Kelley Armstrong). Melissa's 2016 release, Seven Black Diamonds, is the first of two books in a new YA faery series.

David Nickle is the author of the novels The'Geisters, Rasputin's Bastards, and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles,and Monstrous Affections. He is co-editor with Madeline Ashby of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics.

Laurie Penny is a contributing editor and columnist for the New Statesman and a frequent writer on social justice, pop culture, gender issues, and digital politics for the Guardian, the New Inquiry, Salon, the Nation, Vice, the New York Times, and many other publications. Her blog Penny Red was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010. In 2012, Britain’s Tatler magazine described as one of the top “100 people who matter.” She is the author of the nonfiction book Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2014). Tor.com Publishing published her novella Everything Belongs to the Future in2016.

Author of the critically-acclaimed Low Town series and The Builders, Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore in 1984. He was living in Brooklyn when he wrote this, but by the time you read it he might be somewhere else.

Lettie Prell’s short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Analog Science Fiction&Fact, Best of Apex Magazine anthology, Paranormal Underground, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, StarShipSofa podcast, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the novel Dragon Ring.

Delia Sherman writes stories and novels for younger readers and adults. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, as well as the collection Young Woman in a Garden. She has written several novels for adults: Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and (with Ellen Kushner) The Fall of the Kings. Novels for younger readers are Changeling, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen and Norton Award-winning The Freedom Maze. The Evil Wizard Smallbone is published by Candlewick Press. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching, editing, knitting,and cooking. Though the road is one of her favorite places to be, home base is rambling apartment in New York City with spouse Ellen Kushner and far too many pieces of paper.

Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, five Aurealis Awards, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. She's the author of, among others, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdoughand Other Stories, and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings,as well as the novellas Ripper (Horrorology), and Of Sorrow and Such, one of the new Tor.com novella series. Forthcoming from Jo Fletcher Books is the novel Vigil (2016) and its sequel Corpselight (2017).

Caighlan Smith writes all kinds of fantasy and is the author of the Surreality series. Her first published novel Hallow Hour was written when she was seventeen. An award-winning writer, Caighlan is studying English, Classics and Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland.She has written a dozen novels. The ‘C’ in her name is hard and the ‘gh’ is silent.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award winning Osama and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy,several novellas, two collections and a comics mini-series, Adler.He currently lives in London.

Rajnar Vajra is an American Science Fiction and Fantasy writer with a wide range of interests and education stretching from astrophysics to Zen. He has been a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter in a professional original rock band; a sound designer and recording engineer; a high school music teacher; a guitar instructor in the Performing Arts Division at the University of Massachusetts; a crafts person designing and creating jewelry; and involved in doctorate-level biochemistry research. He has been a Hugo finalist and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Visions of Tomorrow and Into The New Millennium, also magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and especially Analog where his writing has been frequently featured, including a full novel serialization. Currently, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and divides his time between writing, performing, composing, and recording music, and providing private lessons for guitar, keyboard, bass, and voice students.

Genevieve Valentine is the author of the novel Persona and its sequel Icon. Her short fiction has appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org,The AV Club, The Atlantic, and the New York Times.

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She also wrote the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel which was named to the ALA's 2012 Amelia Bloomer list of the best books for young readers with strong feminist content), and the novels Discord's Apple and After the Golden Age. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She's a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and in 2011, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for best short story. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.

Alyssa Wong is a Nebula-winning, Shirley Jackson-,Campbell-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy&Science Fiction, Strange Horizons,Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid.


Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Nina Allan has been the recipient of the British Science Fiction Award, the Liverpool John Moores Novella Award, and the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2014 and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her debut novel The Race was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. She lives and works in North Devon, England.
Tara Isabella Burton's fiction has appeared in Shimmer, PANK, Daily Science Fiction and more. Her nonfiction, essays, and travel writing can be found at National Geographic, National Geographic Traveller, Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, and more. In 2012 she received The Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing. She has recently completed her first novel.
Monica Byrne is a writer, playwright, and traveler based in Durham, NC. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road, won the Tiptree Award in 2015.
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, a British Fantasy Award and four British Science Fiction Association Awards, and was a double Hugo finalist for 2019 (Best Series and Best Novella). Her books include the Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war: The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and The House of Sundering Flames. She has also published a short story collection, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
Born in New York and raised mostly in Houston, P. DJÈLÍ CLARK spent the formative years of his life in the homeland of his parents, Trinidad and Tobago. He is the author of the novel A Master of Djinn and the novellas Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums, and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. He has won the Nebula, Locus, and Alex Awards and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards. His stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com, Daily Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Apex, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies, including Griots, Hidden Youth, and Clockwork Cairo. He is also a founding member of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction and an infrequent reviewer at Strange Horizons.
Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer from Kolkata, India. His debut novel The Devourers (Penguin Books India) was nominated for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in India, and released in North America from Ballantine Del Rey. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is a 2012 Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
A former academic and adjunct, Alix E. Harrow is a Hugo-award winning writer living in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction. Find her on Twitter!

N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has won the Hugo Award for best novel (The Fifth Season); been shortlisted for the Crawford, Gemmell Morningstar, and Tiptree Awards; and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She also won a Locus Award for Best First Novel (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) as well as multiple Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards.

Jemisin's short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss&Apex; and podcast markets and print anthologies. Her first six novels, a novella, and a short story collection are available from Orbit Books.

Jemisin is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she is a counseling psychologist and educator (specializing in career counseling and student development), a sometime hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger.

N. K.'s stories include The City Born Great and The Fifth Season.


MARGARET KILLJOY is an author and anarchist with
a long history of itinerancy who currently calls Appalachia home. When she’s not writing, she can be found organizing to end hierarchy, crafting, or complaining about being old despite not being old at all. She is the author of several novels and the Danielle Cain series for Tor.com Publishing.


CIXIN LIU is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant. His novels include The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End.
Melissa Marr writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into 28 languages and been bestsellers in the US (NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal) as well as overseas. Remedial Magic is the first of two books in a witchy lesbian fantasy-romance series. You can find her in a kayak or on a trail with her wife if she's not writing.
David Nickle is the author of the novels The 'Geisters, Rasputin's Bastards, and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and Monstrous Affections. He is co-editor with Madeline Ashby of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics.
Laurie Penny is an author, journalist and screenwriter from London. They are a culture writer for Wired magazine and have written for the Guardian, New Statesman, New York Times, Longreads, Time Magazine and many more. They are a graduate of the Nieman Foundation Fellows' programme at Harvard University and the Clarion West Writer's Workshop. Sexual Revolution is their ninth book.
DANIEL POLANSKY was born in 1984 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of the Low Town series, the Hugo nominated The Builders, and A City Dreaming. He currently resides on a hill in eastern Los Angeles.
Delia Sherman is a highly acclaimed fantasy writer. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Award winner), and Changeling. She lives in Boston and New York.
Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), among others. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow.
Caighlan Smith writes all kinds of fantasy and is the author of the Surreality series. Her first published novel Hallow Hour was written when she was seventeen. An award-winning writer, Caighlan is studying English, Classics and Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has written a dozen novels. The ‘C’ in her name is hard and the ‘gh’ is silent.

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, The Violent Century, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to many other works and several other awards. He is also the author of the Locus Award nominated Unholy Land and debut children's novel Candy.

Lavie works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut's by Locus.


Rajnar Vajra is an American Science Fiction and Fantasy writer with a wide range of interests and education stretching from astrophysics to Zen. He has been a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter in a professional original rock band; a sound designer and recording engineer; a high school music teacher; a guitar instructor in the Performing Arts Division at the University of Massachusetts; a craftsperson designing and creating jewelry; and involved in doctorate-level biochemistry research. He has been a Hugo finalist and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Visions of Tomorrow and Into The New Millennium, also magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and especially Analog where his writing has been frequently featured, including a full novel serialization.
Currently, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and divides his time between writing, performing, composing, and recording music, and providing private lessons for guitar, keyboard, bass, and voice students.


Gevevieve Valentine's first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies.
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville series of novels about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and the post-apocalyptic murder mysteries Bannerless and The Wild Dead. She's written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.
Alyssa Wong is a Nebula-winning, Shirley Jackson-,Campbell-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy&Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid.

Table of Contents

Clover by Charlie Jane Anders
The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan
Lullaby for a Lost World by Aliette de Bodard
The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton
Traumphysik by Monica Byrne
The High Lonesome Frontier by Rebecca Campbell
A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark
Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das
The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage by Alix E. Harrow
Everything That Isn't Winter by Margaret Killjoy
The City Born Great by N. K. Jemisin
Your Orisons May Be Recorded by Laurie Penny
The Three Lives of Sonata James by Lettie Prell
The Weight of Memories by Cixin Liu
The Maiden Thief by Melissa Marr
The Caretakers by David Nickle
meat+drink by Daniel Polansky
The Great Detective by Delia Sherman
Finnegan's Field by Angela Slatter
The Weather by Caighlan Smith
Terminal by Lavie Tidhar
Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra
La Beauté sans Vertu by Genevieve Valentine
That Game We Played During the War by Carrie Vaughn
A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong

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