Another Year’s Best update
Assorted Year's Best TOCs and news and such:
Kathryn Cramer has posted the table of contents for Year's Best SF 11, edited by her and David Hartwell.
Sadly for us, there are no SH stories in this one.
Meanwhile, Ellen Datlow has posted the table of contents for the horror half of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. Also no SH stories there, but that's no surprise, as we rarely publish horror. I think the TOC for the fantasy half has not yet been released.
Rich Horton posted the tables of contents for his Year's Bests a couple weeks back, but I forgot to link to them. I'm pleased to see that Rich is reprinting two SH stories in his science fiction volume, and one in his fantasy volume. I'm also pleased to see the lovely cover mockups that Sean Wallace provided for the books (plus the one for Prime's corresponding horror volume, edited by John Betancourt and Sean Wallace). Clean and pleasant designs, nice art. These will be trade paperbacks, to be released in early summer.
And Brian Youmans has posted the table of contents for Best of the Rest 4, subtitled "The Best Unknown Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2005." In the last couple of volumes of this series, SH counted as an "unknown" publication, but this time the editor decided to count us as professional; seems reasonable to me. The book is more or less a best-of-the-semiprozines; I'm glad to see someone doing that.
Sadly, I gather that the Strahan and Haber Year's Bests, which were formerly coming out from Ibooks before that publisher went under, aren't likely to happen at this point.
One more thing, though this is more an awards thing than a Year's Best per se: the online literary magazine storySouth (featuring "the best fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that writers from the new south have to offer") has published the preliminary results of their Million Writers Award for online fiction; specifically, their notable stories of 2005 list. It's unclear to me how the list of notable stories is chosen, but I'm nonetheless pleased that seven SH stories are on the list--which, by storySouth's standard, make us the "best online publication" (a designation given to the publication with the largest number of notable-story selections). Go us! On April 1, they'll be releasing their list of the "top ten stories of the year," at which point they'll invite the public to vote on the best story from among those ten.
I'll update the SH awards page with all this info soon.