Some of the Best of Tor.com 2021

Description

A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2021.Includes stories by:
‘Pemi Aguda
G. V. Anderson
Elizabeth Bear
Kate Elliott
Aliza Greenblatt
Glen Hirshberg
Elsie Kathleen Jennings
Cheri Kamei
Jasmin Kirkbride
Matthew Kressel
Usman T. Malik
Sam J. Miller
Annalee Newitz
noc
Sarah Pinsker
Daniel Polansky
Peng Shepherd
Cooper Shrivastava
Lavie Tidhar
Catherynne M. Valente
Carrie Vaughn
E. Lily Yu
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications.
ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty 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.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as the Prix Imaginales. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Cheri Kamei is a basement goblin and a floral print disaster. She resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Cooper Shrivastava is a writer based in New York City. She holds an undergraduate degree in math and philosophy, and is always excited when she can bring these elements into her fiction. When not reading and writing, she can often be found indulging in her other strange hobby: recreating recipes from historical sources. Cooper was a member of the 2019 Clarion Writers Workshop and has been published in Clarkesworld, and Heavy Feather Review.
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.
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. She is the author of The White-Throated Transmigrant.
Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border.
She’s a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Transylvanian, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it. Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.
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. She is the author of the acclaimed Eternal Sky series, the Edda of Burdens series, and coauthor (with Sarah Monette) of the Iskryne series. Bear lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts.
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.
GLEN HIRSHBERG received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was a Literary Guild Featured Selection. His collection, The Two Sams, won three International Horror Guild Awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Hirshberg has won the Shirley Jackson Award and been a finalist for the World Fantasy and the Bram Stoker Awards.
Jasmin Kirkbride is a writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Open Pen and Fairlight Books, and she has published a handful of poems and peer-reviewed academic articles. She is currently working on a novel. By day, she is a PhD researcher and associate tutor at UEA, exploring hope and climate fiction. She has worked in publishing for several years and is a freelance editor and writing mentor alongside her studies. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and an MA in Ancient History from King’s College London.
Kate Elliott has been writing science fiction and fantasy for 30 years, after bursting onto the scene with Jaran. She is best known for her Crown of Stars epic fantasy series and the New York Times bestselling YA fantasy Court of Fives. Elliott’s particular focus is immersive world-building & centering women in epic stories of adventure, amidst transformative cultural change. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes & spoils her Schnauzer.
Kathleen Jennings lives in Brisbane, Australia. She was raised on a cattle property in Western Queensland. Since shedid most of her schooling by Distance Education/School of the Air (Royal Flying Doctor radio and all), she was able to get through a lot of books when she was meant to be doing her schoolwork. Her parents did not stop this.
Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Eleven Eleven Literary Journal, and in anthologies from Candlewick Press, FableCroft Publishing and Ticonderoga Publications, among others. She won a Ditmar Award for Best Short Story (“A Hedge of Yellow Roses”) and her stories have been included in Primes’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 and Ticonderoga’s The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2015. Flyaway is her debut novella. She is currently an MPhil candidate in creative writing at the University of Queensland, specialising in Australian Gothic Literature.
She is also an illustrator: her art has appeared on many books (including two for Tor.com), has been nominated three times for the World Fantasy Awards and has won a number of Ditmars.
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.
Matthew Kressel is the author of King of Shards and Queen of Static, and is a World Fantasy Award finalist and multiple Nebula Award finalist. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Interzone, the anthologies Cyber World, Naked City, After, and many other markets. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. By day he codes websites, and by night he recites Blade Runner in its entirety from memory. He lives in New York City.
Noc Gu, Buddhist practitioner, writer, and seeker. Born in 1989 and raised in a suburban town in Shanghai, China, they have been attracted by SF&F novels since a young age and started writing in college.
’Pemi Aguda has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Granta, American Short Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story among others. She is from Lagos, Nigeria.
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, and New York. Her first novel, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today Show and NPR On Point. She is also a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 fellow, and a recipient of a 2016 Elizabeth George Foundation’s emerging writers grant.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) was published by HarperCollins. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.
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.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His work is forthcoming in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Nightmare, and other venues. In December 2014, Usman led Pakistan’s first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge.

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