A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2020.

Includes stories by:

Charlie Jane Anders

G. V. Anderson

Gregory Norman Bossert

Jeremy Packert Burke

Katharine Duckett

Brian Evenson

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Maria Dahvana Headley

Stephen Graham Jones

Justin C. Key

Naomi Kritzer

Rich Larson

Yoon Ha Lee

S. Qiouyi Lu

Usman T. Malik

Melissa Marr

Maureen McHugh

Tamsyn Muir

Sarah Pinsker

C. L. Polk

Matthew Pridham

M. Rickert

Zin E. Rocklyn

Rachel Swirsky

Lavie Tidhar

Carrie Vaughn

Fran Wilde

Claire Wrenwood

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About the Author

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy coming in April 2021, along with the forthcoming 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.

G. V. Anderson is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula Award. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, as well as anthologies such as The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. She resides in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.

Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started writing on a dare in 2009 at the age of 47. Since then his fiction has appeared in print and online, in audio, foreign translation, and Year’s Best anthologies, with stories in Conjunctions, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for legendary visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic.

Jeremy Packert Burke is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. They have had stories in the Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among other places.

Katharine Duckett’s fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Interzone, PseudoPod, and various anthologies. She served as the guest fiction editor for the Disabled People Destroy Fantasy issue of Uncanny. She hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first book. She currently resides in Brooklyn with her wife.



Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, including the story collections A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016), Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and the novel Immobility (Tor 2012), the latter two of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009). His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her novels include Halfway Human and the two-volume novel Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. Her short fiction appears in many Best of the Year collections and has been translated into seven languages. She lives in Washington, D.C., and works for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor of seven books in a variety of genres, including The Mere Wife (2018), a contemporary retelling of Beowulf. Magonia and Aerie (HarperCollins) are young adult adventure novels set in an imaginary sky kingdom, and she co-edited Unnatural Creatures, a monster story anthology, with Neil Gaiman. Her work has been nominated for The Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, The World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, The Shirley Jackson Award, and The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree), among others. Her nonfiction and cultural critique has been seen everywhere from The Daily Beast to the New York Times. In addition to her career as a writer, she's been a pirate negotiator, a corset maker, and a bartender at the Threesome Tollbooth, a bar built for exactly two guests and one cocktail expert, in a tiny Brooklyn closet. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, and several remote Italian island airbnbs.

Stephen Graham Jones was raised as pretty much the only Blackfeet in West Texas—except for his dad and grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, a couple kids, and too many old trucks. Between West Texas and now, he's published more than twenty books, including the novels The Fast Red Road, Ledfeather, and Mongrels, and the short story collections After the People Lights Have Gone Off, States of Grace, and The Ones that Got Away. Stephen teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert.

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer and psychiatrist. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres. He graduated from Clarion West in 2015 and earned his MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai two years later. As a psychiatry resident, he is currently trying to decide between a career in child, addiction, or work alleviating the social pains of the criminal justice system. As an author, he's currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. When Justin isn't writing, seeing patients, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he's chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons.

Naomi Kritzer has been making friends online since her teens, when she had to use a modem to dial up at 2400 baud. She is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana's Song duology and the Dead Rivers Trilogy. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Grande Prairie, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015.

Yoon Ha Lee's debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller. Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy catten, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

S. Qiouyi Lu writes, translates, and edits between two coasts of the Pacific. Aer fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Strange Horizons, and aer translations have appeared in Clarkesworld. Ae edit the flash fiction and poetry magazine Arsenika.

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer who divides his life between Orlando and Lahore. His short fiction has been reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the StorySouth Million Writers Award, and twice for the Nebula Award. He has won the Bram Stoker Award as well as the British Fantasy Award. In his woefully diminished spare time he runs distance.

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 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 YA faery series.

Maureen McHugh grew up in the Midwest and has lived in New York City, Austin, Texas, the People’s Republic of China, and Los Angeles, California. Her first novel, CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG, a dystopian story set in a China dominated future, was a New York Times Noteworthy Book and won the James Tiptree Award. Her collection of short stories, AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2011. She currently lives in Los Angles where she writes interactive narratives and teaches Interactive Storytelling at the University of Southern California.

Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Trilogy, which begins with Gideon the Ninth, continues with Harrow the Ninth, and concludes with Alecto the Ninth. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.

Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the

Locus, World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first collection, Sooner or Later

Everything Falls Into the Sea, and first novel, A Song For A New Day, were both published in 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels. She was born in New York and has lived all over the U.S. and Canada, but currently resides with her wife and dog in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines.

C. L. Polk (she/her/they/them) is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning novel Witchmark, the first novel of the Kingston Cycle. After leaving high school early, she has worked as a film extra, sold vegetables on the street, and identified exotic insect species for a vast collection of lepidoptera before settling down to write silver fork fantasy novels. Ms. Polk lives near the Bow River in Calgary, Alberta, in a tiny apartment with too many books and a yarn stash that could last a decade. She rides a green bicycle with a basket on the front.

Matthew Pridham was born in New Jersey and spent his childhood chasing trolls in Bergen, Norway. He has since mostly lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After working 13 years as a bookseller, he succumbed to the glittering allure of academia and earned degrees in philosophy, literature, and creative writing. His haunted house novella, “Renovations,” was printed in Weird Tales magazine issue 348, his film criticism has been published in WeirdFictionReview.com, and he’s written fiction and nonfiction for The Thought Erotic. He is currently not quite finishing his first novel.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She is the winner of the Locus Award, Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her third short story collection, You Have Never Been Here was published by Small Beer Press. She is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, which brings to mind The Confederacy of Dunces and Frankenstein in its exploration of flawed and tragic characters, will be published by Undertow Press in the summer of 2021.

Of Trinidadian descent and hailing from Jersey City, NJ, Zin E. Rocklyn's stories are older than her years, much like the name she's chosen to pen them under. Her work is currently featured in the anthologies Forever Vacancy, 2017 Bram Stoker-nominated Sycorax's Daughters of which her story "Summer Skin" was longlisted for Best of Horror 2017, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Nox Pareidolia and the independent zine Weird Luck Tales No. 7. Her non-fiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” was published in Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-Winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 issue. Her personal website is currently under construction, so stay tuned for all of her weirdness in HTML form. In the interim, you can follow her on Twitter.

Rachel Swirsky is a short story writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and in 2014 for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005.

Hugo and Nebula finalist K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD. His debut novel is Docile, and his short fiction and essays appear in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and more. Kellan has a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, which he totally uses at his day job as a paralegal.

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.

Carrie Vaughn is the New York Times Bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories. She's best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings. She's also a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels edited by George R.R. Martin. She has been nominated for various awards, including the Hugo and RT Reviewer Choice Awards.

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, three Hugo Awards, two Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, and her debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny, and Jonathan Strahan’s 2020 Year’s Best SFF.

Fran directs the Genre Fiction MFA concentration at Western Colorado University and writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tor.com.

Claire Wrenwood grew up in Indiana and New Zealand and now lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is a member of the Clarion class of 2019, and her work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine.


Title: Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 Edition : A Tor.com Original
Author(s): Charlie Jane Anders, G. V. Anderson, Gregory Norman Bossert, Jeremy Packert Burke, Katharine Duckett, Brian Evenson, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Maria Dahvana Headley, Stephen Graham Jones, Justin C. Key, Naomi Kritzer, Rich Larson, Yoon Ha Lee, S. Qiouyi Lu, Usman T. Malik, Melissa Marr, Maureen McHugh, Tamsyn Muir, Sarah Pinsker, C. L. Polk, Matthew Pridham, Zin E. Rocklyn, Rachel Swirsky, K.M. Szpara, Lavie Tidhar, Carrie Vaughn, Fran Wilde, Claire Wrenwood, M. Rickert
ISBN: 9781250817983
Copyright 2021
Release Date: January 05, 2021
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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