A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2019.



Includes stories by:

Elizabeth Bear

Siobhan Carroll

John Chu

Greg Egan

Kathleen Ann Goonan

S. L. Huang

Carole Johnstone

KJ Kabza

Erinn L. Kemper

Mary Robinette Kowal

Rich Larson

M. Evan MacGriogir

Seanan McGuire

Lis Mitchell

Mimi Mondal

Annalee Newitz

Silvia Park

Laurie Penny

Brenda Peynado

Christopher Rowe

Rivers Solomon

Karin Tidbeck

JY Yang

E. Lily Yu

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About the Author

Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her novels include Karen Memory and The Eternal Sky Trilogy. Bear lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts.

Siobhan Carroll is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she specializes in British literature from 1750-1850 and in modern science fiction and fantasy. She first encountered Jeoffry in an anthology of eighteenth-century poetry and he has proven hard to forget. Readers can find other fiction by Siobhan in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ellen Datlow’s The Best of the Best Horror of the Year anthology, and indexed on her website.

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared in the Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, among other venues. His translations have been published in Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF and other venues. His story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Greg Egan published his first story in 1983, and followed it with a dozen novels, several short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His novel Dichronauts is the first in a new science fiction universe.

Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of several novels, including This Shared Dream. In War Times won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association's Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs (stories) was published in 2012. Her novella, "The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse," was published in Extrasolar, The Year's Best Science Fiction Volume 3, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a member of Advisory Board of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology as well as that of SpaceX and the Lifeboat Foundation, and is working on several novels, consulting, and other projects.

S. L. Huang has a math degree from MIT and is a weapons expert and professional stuntwoman who has worked in Hollywood on Battlestar Galactica and a number of other productions. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016. Her debut novel was Zero Sum Game, the first entry in the Cas Russell series.

Carole Johnstone is a British Fantasy Award winning writer from Lanarkshire, Scotland. She has been publishing short fiction for more than ten years and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best of the Best and Best Horror of the Year and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series in the US, and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy. She is a regular contributor to Interzone, the UK’s premiere science fiction magazine, has been published by Titan Books, Prime Books, and PS Publishing, and has written Sherlock Holmes stories for Constable & Robinson and Running Press.

"Signs of the Times", a short story about the end of days in Leith; her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done; and a novella, Cold Turkey, were all short-listed for British Fantasy Awards.

KJ Kabza's 80+ science fiction and fantasy short stories have appeared in 4 different languages in over 60 different magazines, anthologies, collections, and podcasts such as F&SF, Nature, Terraform, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. His first print collection, THE RAMSHEAD ALGORITHM AND OTHER STORIES, released in 2018 from Pink Narcissus Press.

Erinn L. Kemper is a Canadian who now lives on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where she wakes with the toucans and howler monkeys, writes in her hammock, walks her dog on the beach, and drinks ridiculous amounts of coffee, at least until happy hour. Erinn has sold stories to Cemetery Dance Magazine and Black Static and appears in various anthologies including Adam’s Ladder and Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders.

Mary Robinette Kowal was the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo winner for her story “For Want of a Nail.” Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies. She also writes the Glamourist History series, which began with Shades of Milk and Honey. A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she spent five years touring nationally with puppet theaters. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and many manual typewriters.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he’s sold over a hundred stories, the majority of them speculative fiction published in magazines like Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. His work also appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French and Italian.

His debut novel, Annex, was released with Orbit Books in July 2018. His debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, followed in October 2018 from Talos Press.

M. Evan MacGriogair is an author, screenwriter, actor, and curmudgeon (but glittery) who likes to sing. They are the author of Hearthfire (July 2018) as well as the Ayala Storme series and four other fantasy novels for adults. Multilingual and with a degree in history specialising in the Second World War, their interests lie with the human stories running through both linguistics and how we understand our pasts.

They make their home in Glasgow, Scotland, where they study and sing Gaelic, haunt the Highlands when possible, and drink far beyond their tea quota. You can bribe them with Harris Tweed, bubble tea, and sparkly things.

Seanan McGuire is the author of the Wayward Children series, the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.

Lis Mitchell has been reading speculative and fantasy fiction since she was three and half years old, and believed that Gollum lived in her toilet. She previously lived in Utah, Arizona, Northern and Southern California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Alberta. She finally fetched up in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, John, and firstborn child, Doombringer. When she isn't writing or reading, she photographs nature and sketches in museums. She is the author of "Blue Morphos in the Garden", A Tor.com Original.

Mimi Mondal is a Dalit woman who writes about politics and history, occasionally camouflaged as fiction. Her first anthology, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, was longlisted for the Locus Awards 2018. Mimi holds three masters’ degrees for no reason but pure joy. She lives in New York, and always enjoys the company of monsters.

Annalee Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture.

Currently they are an editor at large for Ars Technica, and previously they were the founding editor of io9, and the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. They have published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows.

They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and have a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Silvia Park grew up in South Korea. She is a George R.R. Martin scholarship recipient from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and an MFA candidate at NYU.

Laurie Penny is an award-winning author, journalist, screenwriter, essayist, public speaker and activist*. She has written several books, including Bitch Doctrine, Unspeakable Things, and Everything Belongs To The Future. She writes essays, columns, features and gonzo journalism about politics, social justice, pop culture, feminism, technology and mental health and she gets time, she also writes creepy political science fiction. She makes words for money, trouble and social change for lots and lots of places including The Guardian, Longreads, Time Magazine, Buzzfeed, The New York Times, Vice, Salon, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New Inquiry, Tor.com and Medium. When she’s not on the road, Laurie is based between London and Los Angeles.

Brenda Peynado's stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other prizes. Her work has previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She's currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches at the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

Christopher Rowe has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His stories have been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by The New York Times Book Review.

Some of his stories are collected in Telling the Map, a 2017 publication from Small Beer Press. With his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond, he writes the Supernormal Sleuthing Service series of middle-grade novels for HarperCollins. Rowe and Bond live in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky with three rowdy dogs and one cool cat.

Rivers Solomon graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently live in Cambridge, England, with their family. Solomon's debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, appeared in 2017. The Deep is in collaboration with Daveet Diggs and Clipping.

Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer and creative writing teacher, and writes fiction and interactive stories in Swedish and English. Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award 2013 and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel Amatka was published in 2017 by Vintage Books.

JY Yang is a Nebula finalist and the author of the Tensorate novellas from Tor.Com Publishing. Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. They live in Singapore and identify as queer and non-binary.

E. Lily Yu is a writer and narrative designer whose fiction has appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Boston Review, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Her first novel, On Fragile Waves, is forthcoming from Erewhon Books in Fall 2020.


Title: Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition : A Tor.com Original
Author(s): Elizabeth Bear, Siobhan Carroll, John Chu, Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, S. L. Huang, Carole Johnstone, KJ Kabza, Erinn L. Kemper, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rich Larson, M. Evan MacGriogair, Seanan McGuire, Lis Mitchell, Mimi Mondal, Annalee Newitz, Silvia Park, Laurie Penny, Brenda Peynado, Christopher Rowe, Rivers Solomon, Karin Tidbeck, Neon Yang, E. Lily Yu
ISBN: 9781250776785
Copyright 2020
Release Date: January 29, 2020
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Countries: United States, Canada | Learn more about available countries
Language: English
Format: mobi,ePub | Learn More about our supported formats
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