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