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Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two
“Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction belongs on every Canadian reader’s bookshelf.” - Amazing Stories
The Aurora Award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated series returns with a new volume!
Venture into extraordinary realms of imagination with the essential collection of the year’s best Canadian fantasy and science fiction.
Discover the magic woven by more than three dozen of Canada’s most celebrated authors and rising stars in fantasy and science fiction, including Cory Doctorow, Amal El-Mohtar, Nalo Hopkinson, Rich Larson, Premee Mohamed, and Kelly Robson, amongst others.
From alien worlds to magical realms, these stories explore the wonderous, the contemporary, the futuristic, and what it means to be human—all through the unique lens of Canadian speculative fiction.
Curated by award-winning author and anthologist Stephen Kotowych and selected from top markets like Asimov’s, Augur, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, On Spec, PodCastle, and Tor.com, prepare to be captivated, challenged, and utterly transported by the very best fantastical fiction written by Canadians today.
Featuring stories and poems that were winners and finalists for the Aurora Award, BSFA Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, Shirley Jackson Award, Prix Aurora-Boréal, Prix Solaris, World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award, and many more.
The Aurora Award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated series returns with a new volume!
Venture into extraordinary realms of imagination with the essential collection of the year’s best Canadian fantasy and science fiction.
Discover the magic woven by more than three dozen of Canada’s most celebrated authors and rising stars in fantasy and science fiction, including Cory Doctorow, Amal El-Mohtar, Nalo Hopkinson, Rich Larson, Premee Mohamed, and Kelly Robson, amongst others.
From alien worlds to magical realms, these stories explore the wonderous, the contemporary, the futuristic, and what it means to be human—all through the unique lens of Canadian speculative fiction.
Curated by award-winning author and anthologist Stephen Kotowych and selected from top markets like Asimov’s, Augur, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, On Spec, PodCastle, and Tor.com, prepare to be captivated, challenged, and utterly transported by the very best fantastical fiction written by Canadians today.
Featuring stories and poems that were winners and finalists for the Aurora Award, BSFA Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, Shirley Jackson Award, Prix Aurora-Boréal, Prix Solaris, World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award, and many more.
512 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 22, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 13, 2026
It took me a while to get through this, but not for lack of interest. FORTY-NINE stories and poems, and so many of them absolute marvels and introductions to new-to-me authors. Fabulous collection. Below are just the barest margin off the top that stood out and made me love them:
Horsewoman by A.M. Dellamonica
LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson
predictive text by Dominik Parisien
Svitla by A. D. Sui
The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Secondhand Music by Aleksandra Hill
I absolutely loved this story about music, self, boundaries, legacy, and hauntings.
The Long Way Home from Gaia BH1 by Manuela Amiouny
At Every Door a Ghost by Premee Mohamed
Tongue Mining by Jack Morton
Timely / current and very cool piece about language, data mining and selling, and colonization. 4 stars plus
Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont P.A. CORNELL
This is, I believe, another duplicate that Best Canadian and Best American SF & F have in common. Really liked this story, 4.25 (The other being the utterly fabulous John Hollowback and the Witch by Amal El-Mohtar)
Hemlock on Mars by Eric Choi
Science-heavy without sacrificing the humanity - great story! Got me in the feels 4.5
Lying Flat by Lynne Sargent
Loved this one. Poem, 4 stars
Lady Koi-Koi: A Book Report by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Out of the park, holy wow - absolutely loved this 4.75
In a Cabin, in a Wood by Kelly Robson
Another very strong story, poignant and beautiful. 4.5
The Spoil Heap by Fiona Moore
Absolutely loved this, would like to read more by Fiona Moore. 4.25
Well worth your time.
Horsewoman by A.M. Dellamonica
LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson
predictive text by Dominik Parisien
Svitla by A. D. Sui
The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Secondhand Music by Aleksandra Hill
I absolutely loved this story about music, self, boundaries, legacy, and hauntings.
The Long Way Home from Gaia BH1 by Manuela Amiouny
At Every Door a Ghost by Premee Mohamed
Tongue Mining by Jack Morton
Timely / current and very cool piece about language, data mining and selling, and colonization. 4 stars plus
Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont P.A. CORNELL
This is, I believe, another duplicate that Best Canadian and Best American SF & F have in common. Really liked this story, 4.25 (The other being the utterly fabulous John Hollowback and the Witch by Amal El-Mohtar)
Hemlock on Mars by Eric Choi
Science-heavy without sacrificing the humanity - great story! Got me in the feels 4.5
Lying Flat by Lynne Sargent
Loved this one. Poem, 4 stars
Lady Koi-Koi: A Book Report by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Out of the park, holy wow - absolutely loved this 4.75
In a Cabin, in a Wood by Kelly Robson
Another very strong story, poignant and beautiful. 4.5
The Spoil Heap by Fiona Moore
Absolutely loved this, would like to read more by Fiona Moore. 4.25
Well worth your time.
June 1, 2026
Many decent stories and some exceptional ones. Like with most anthologies, I found it most useful as a way to identify the authors I will want to read more.
October 9, 2026
As it says in the title, this anthology seeks to collect the year’s best Canadian sci-fi and fantasy from the year 2023, containing 49 works of short fiction and poetry. I am far from steeped in the Canadian genre scene, so I can’t comment too much on what was excluded, but I do read enough short fiction in general to compare these stories to other highlights of the year.
And one thing I knew going into the anthology is that the quality at the top was not going to be a problem. If I Should Fall Behind by Douglas Smith was one of the best stories I read all year, and it absolutely holds up, even on multiple rereads. The narrative voice catches the eye and generates easy immersion, and the story itself is poignant and heart-wrenching. One thing I often find missing in reprint anthologies is the story that’s worth the price of admission—with so much fiction being available elsewhere, why spend the money on this book in particular? But with “If I Should Fall Behind,” The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume Two passes that test with flying colors. The story was originally published behind a paywall, and it’s not especially easy to go picking through back issues of paywalled magazines. Fortunately, you can read it here, and it’s tremendous.
As an American reviewer, I don’t tend to have many country-specific awards at the front of my mind, but this anthology has every single English-language finalist for the 2024 Aurora Award for best Canadian SFF Short Fiction, and I’d take it in an absolute walk over the theoretically-worldwide Hugo shortlist for Short Story from the same year. For me, “If I Should Fall Behind” is the clear cream of the crop, but P.A. Cornell’s lovely time-travel romance Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont is also excellent, and Chandra Fisher’s melancholy Sink Your Sorrows into the Sea was easily my favorite of the new-to-me stories in the anthology. I don’t see Premee Mohamed’s At Every Door a Ghost and Justin Dill’s The Dust Bowl Café as hitting quite the level of the other three, but they’re both plenty engaging in their own right and are worthy inclusions in a shortlist with no real misses. Mohamed’s story of scientific research in an age of surveillance would’ve been among my new-to-me favorites if not for “Sink Your Sorrows into the Sea,” and Dill’s tale is clever and amusing, even if not especially groundbreaking.
But the hits aren’t limited to the ones that were recognized by the Auroras. LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson is a sobering look at “the good sort” of tourist that pulls absolutely zero punches and for my money is among the most underrated stories of 2023. Kelsey Hutton’s Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea is a magical anti-colonial story that hits hard even when the reader has a pretty good idea of what’s coming. And Aleksandra Hill’s Secondhand Music is a wonderful story of a musician given the smart prosthesis of someone highly accomplished in the field and slowly coming to realize the depths of the strings attached. And Manic Pixie Girl by A.C. Wise tells a story of a girl who keeps finding herself falling back into all her own vices that’s pretty compelling even before you get to the tie-in with more familiar tales.
And there’s…well, there are a lot of others. Like I said in the outset, I don’t actually read that many Year’s Best anthologies, and as I sift through my thoughts on this one, it occurs to me that I’d evaluate it differently as an anthology to read cover-to-cover than as a snapshot of the year in publishing. Considered as the former, its length works against it. I’m not convinced there are 49 Canadian stories and poems published in any given year that are truly dazzling—and that’s not an insult, 49 is just a really big number. Most of the works here make for enjoyable reads, but the anthology itself is a huge project, and the truly spectacular stories are surrounded by a lot of others that make for an entertaining few minutes and then immediately fade into the background.
But if you consider it as a reference book documenting the peak of Canadian short fiction in the year 2023, that length hits a bit differently. There’s still just as much value for having several absolutely tremendous stories—especially those few that are otherwise quite hard to find—but the overall length becomes more a feature than a bug. Perhaps Amal El-Mohtar, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kelly Robson, and other famous Canadian authors weren’t publishing the very best work of their careers in 2023, but they still deliver tales that are worth the read. And the impressive spread of publication outlets represented goes from a mixed blessing to an outright selling point if the reader approaches the anthology more as a survey than with completionist tendencies. Of course, I can still pick nits from either paradigm—the anthology does include almost all of the best Canadian short fiction I read from 2023, but it is missing Peter Watts’ excellent novelette “Defective.” But that truly is nitpicking in an anthology that has almost all of the very best, including several wonderful tales that were wildly underrated in genre culture writ large.
So how to evaluate the anthology on the whole? I read it cover-to-cover, and that experience was somewhat uneven but largely positive, with a handful of true gems highlighting the experience. My subjective experience may have been hampered a bit by having already read what I see as the best of the bunch, leaving the new-to-me tales a bit less impressive. But that’s not the fault of the anthology, and if you pick a story at random, your chances of landing on a gem are just as good as if you’d picked from some of the very best publications in the field. As a snapshot of the best of 2023 in Canadian fantasy and science fiction? It’s hard to find many complaints. I can point to one story I’d have pushed to add, but it contains a wide selection of SFF, including several that aren’t especially easy to find, and the best entries are truly stellar.
And one thing I knew going into the anthology is that the quality at the top was not going to be a problem. If I Should Fall Behind by Douglas Smith was one of the best stories I read all year, and it absolutely holds up, even on multiple rereads. The narrative voice catches the eye and generates easy immersion, and the story itself is poignant and heart-wrenching. One thing I often find missing in reprint anthologies is the story that’s worth the price of admission—with so much fiction being available elsewhere, why spend the money on this book in particular? But with “If I Should Fall Behind,” The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume Two passes that test with flying colors. The story was originally published behind a paywall, and it’s not especially easy to go picking through back issues of paywalled magazines. Fortunately, you can read it here, and it’s tremendous.
As an American reviewer, I don’t tend to have many country-specific awards at the front of my mind, but this anthology has every single English-language finalist for the 2024 Aurora Award for best Canadian SFF Short Fiction, and I’d take it in an absolute walk over the theoretically-worldwide Hugo shortlist for Short Story from the same year. For me, “If I Should Fall Behind” is the clear cream of the crop, but P.A. Cornell’s lovely time-travel romance Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont is also excellent, and Chandra Fisher’s melancholy Sink Your Sorrows into the Sea was easily my favorite of the new-to-me stories in the anthology. I don’t see Premee Mohamed’s At Every Door a Ghost and Justin Dill’s The Dust Bowl Café as hitting quite the level of the other three, but they’re both plenty engaging in their own right and are worthy inclusions in a shortlist with no real misses. Mohamed’s story of scientific research in an age of surveillance would’ve been among my new-to-me favorites if not for “Sink Your Sorrows into the Sea,” and Dill’s tale is clever and amusing, even if not especially groundbreaking.
But the hits aren’t limited to the ones that were recognized by the Auroras. LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson is a sobering look at “the good sort” of tourist that pulls absolutely zero punches and for my money is among the most underrated stories of 2023. Kelsey Hutton’s Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea is a magical anti-colonial story that hits hard even when the reader has a pretty good idea of what’s coming. And Aleksandra Hill’s Secondhand Music is a wonderful story of a musician given the smart prosthesis of someone highly accomplished in the field and slowly coming to realize the depths of the strings attached. And Manic Pixie Girl by A.C. Wise tells a story of a girl who keeps finding herself falling back into all her own vices that’s pretty compelling even before you get to the tie-in with more familiar tales.
And there’s…well, there are a lot of others. Like I said in the outset, I don’t actually read that many Year’s Best anthologies, and as I sift through my thoughts on this one, it occurs to me that I’d evaluate it differently as an anthology to read cover-to-cover than as a snapshot of the year in publishing. Considered as the former, its length works against it. I’m not convinced there are 49 Canadian stories and poems published in any given year that are truly dazzling—and that’s not an insult, 49 is just a really big number. Most of the works here make for enjoyable reads, but the anthology itself is a huge project, and the truly spectacular stories are surrounded by a lot of others that make for an entertaining few minutes and then immediately fade into the background.
But if you consider it as a reference book documenting the peak of Canadian short fiction in the year 2023, that length hits a bit differently. There’s still just as much value for having several absolutely tremendous stories—especially those few that are otherwise quite hard to find—but the overall length becomes more a feature than a bug. Perhaps Amal El-Mohtar, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kelly Robson, and other famous Canadian authors weren’t publishing the very best work of their careers in 2023, but they still deliver tales that are worth the read. And the impressive spread of publication outlets represented goes from a mixed blessing to an outright selling point if the reader approaches the anthology more as a survey than with completionist tendencies. Of course, I can still pick nits from either paradigm—the anthology does include almost all of the best Canadian short fiction I read from 2023, but it is missing Peter Watts’ excellent novelette “Defective.” But that truly is nitpicking in an anthology that has almost all of the very best, including several wonderful tales that were wildly underrated in genre culture writ large.
So how to evaluate the anthology on the whole? I read it cover-to-cover, and that experience was somewhat uneven but largely positive, with a handful of true gems highlighting the experience. My subjective experience may have been hampered a bit by having already read what I see as the best of the bunch, leaving the new-to-me tales a bit less impressive. But that’s not the fault of the anthology, and if you pick a story at random, your chances of landing on a gem are just as good as if you’d picked from some of the very best publications in the field. As a snapshot of the best of 2023 in Canadian fantasy and science fiction? It’s hard to find many complaints. I can point to one story I’d have pushed to add, but it contains a wide selection of SFF, including several that aren’t especially easy to find, and the best entries are truly stellar.
January 12, 2025
Ok this was “a romp”! It’s always extra fun to read big names in SF—names like Nalo Hopkinson, Amal El-Mohtar, Premee Mohammed, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and more. This multi-author anthology opens with a review of the year that was in Canadian publishing and SFF: *The Year in Review 2023* (the big story being the rise of generative “AI”). If you usually skip intros, don’t skip this one.
There are many really good stories (and poems) in this collection. Like Amal El-Mohtar’s *John Hollowback and the Witch*, an absorbing fairytale with a touch of horror (so, basically, Brothers Grimm); and so is the also excellent *The Lover* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. *The Girl Who Cried Diamonds* by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is about exploitation; I thought it was particularly clever/apt to use mineral extraction from a girl’s body to tell the story. I loved Derek Künsen’s super imaginative *Six Incidents of Evolution Using Time Travel* because of the “trantus worm” which is “a behavior-altering parasite that infects many intelligent species of the galaxy” and enables time travel (kind of)—reminiscent of Star Trek Discovery’s Stamets plotline (so now I must make time to watch it again).
The *Manic Pixie Girl* in A. C. Wise’s story is probably not one you want to get tangled up with. *The Distance Between Us* is an intriguing poem by Rati Mehrotra, about love and other great forces. Premee Mohammed’s *At Every Door a Ghost* is a thoughtul “What If?” about government surveillance and science in the wake of terrorism. Douglas Smith’s entry, *If I Should Fall Behind*, is a cool love story about the many-worlds theory. Kelsey Hutton gives us a welcome alt-version to the many Western-oriented stories about Victoria (a 19th c. queen) in *Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea* (bonus: magical dresses!!). Also loved Grace P. Fong’s Medusa-themed revenge tale, *The Toll of the Snake*, and Manuela Amiony’s time travel story, *The Long Way Home From Gaia BH1* (particularly because the central relationship is not your standard romantic one).
There’s looooads more. A story about a violinist with a haunted (?) prosthesis, by Aleksandra Hill. From Chandra Fisher: women who sink their sorrows into a particular part of the sea. I’m yet to decipher J.D. Dresner’s poem *For the Robots* (it’s in hexadecimal). There’s a very cool story about human-pseudo-octopus co-operation by Isabelle Piette and Margaret Sankey. A “holiday suit” forms a protective (maybe too protective) barrier against the world in a story by Rich Larson. There’s a cleverly circular story by Justin Dill. More out-of-time-ness, in a building this time, from P. A. Cornell. An excellent post-apocalyptic story featuring the best protagonist and a robot by Fiona Moore. On Mars, there’s a smart (and/or haunted) truck and reimagined imprisonment in Phoebe Barton’s *And Prison On My Back*. And that’s only about half the pieces in this fantastic collection, which closes with Nalo Hopkinson’s powerful *The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World*.
As you can see, more than worth your time and money. If you’re a SFF fan, this will be an excellent addition to your library.
So very many thanks to NetGalley and Ansible Press for DRC access.
There are many really good stories (and poems) in this collection. Like Amal El-Mohtar’s *John Hollowback and the Witch*, an absorbing fairytale with a touch of horror (so, basically, Brothers Grimm); and so is the also excellent *The Lover* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. *The Girl Who Cried Diamonds* by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is about exploitation; I thought it was particularly clever/apt to use mineral extraction from a girl’s body to tell the story. I loved Derek Künsen’s super imaginative *Six Incidents of Evolution Using Time Travel* because of the “trantus worm” which is “a behavior-altering parasite that infects many intelligent species of the galaxy” and enables time travel (kind of)—reminiscent of Star Trek Discovery’s Stamets plotline (so now I must make time to watch it again).
The *Manic Pixie Girl* in A. C. Wise’s story is probably not one you want to get tangled up with. *The Distance Between Us* is an intriguing poem by Rati Mehrotra, about love and other great forces. Premee Mohammed’s *At Every Door a Ghost* is a thoughtul “What If?” about government surveillance and science in the wake of terrorism. Douglas Smith’s entry, *If I Should Fall Behind*, is a cool love story about the many-worlds theory. Kelsey Hutton gives us a welcome alt-version to the many Western-oriented stories about Victoria (a 19th c. queen) in *Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea* (bonus: magical dresses!!). Also loved Grace P. Fong’s Medusa-themed revenge tale, *The Toll of the Snake*, and Manuela Amiony’s time travel story, *The Long Way Home From Gaia BH1* (particularly because the central relationship is not your standard romantic one).
There’s looooads more. A story about a violinist with a haunted (?) prosthesis, by Aleksandra Hill. From Chandra Fisher: women who sink their sorrows into a particular part of the sea. I’m yet to decipher J.D. Dresner’s poem *For the Robots* (it’s in hexadecimal). There’s a very cool story about human-pseudo-octopus co-operation by Isabelle Piette and Margaret Sankey. A “holiday suit” forms a protective (maybe too protective) barrier against the world in a story by Rich Larson. There’s a cleverly circular story by Justin Dill. More out-of-time-ness, in a building this time, from P. A. Cornell. An excellent post-apocalyptic story featuring the best protagonist and a robot by Fiona Moore. On Mars, there’s a smart (and/or haunted) truck and reimagined imprisonment in Phoebe Barton’s *And Prison On My Back*. And that’s only about half the pieces in this fantastic collection, which closes with Nalo Hopkinson’s powerful *The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World*.
As you can see, more than worth your time and money. If you’re a SFF fan, this will be an excellent addition to your library.
So very many thanks to NetGalley and Ansible Press for DRC access.
March 11, 2025
This was a fascinating reading to me. The idea is to be a sample of what's best in fantasy and Science Fiction in Canada, and as I am always looking for new voices, different styles and stories within those genres, I found many interesting fiction writing here.
It's 700-plus pages long and packed with good stuff that will be stuck in your head for a while. To me, J.D. Dresner’s 'For the Robots' and Kelsey Hutton's 'Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea' are good examples of literature that I did not know I liked until I read this collection.
I was happy to see some poetry in here as well, which is a genre I don't usually read much and like, but I really enjoyed them in this collection.
Thank you NetGalley and Ansible Press for a copy in exchange for an honest review. I had a lot of fun getting to know so many new authors.
It's 700-plus pages long and packed with good stuff that will be stuck in your head for a while. To me, J.D. Dresner’s 'For the Robots' and Kelsey Hutton's 'Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea' are good examples of literature that I did not know I liked until I read this collection.
I was happy to see some poetry in here as well, which is a genre I don't usually read much and like, but I really enjoyed them in this collection.
Thank you NetGalley and Ansible Press for a copy in exchange for an honest review. I had a lot of fun getting to know so many new authors.
September 30, 2025
Stephen Kotowych brings together varied short stories from many Canadian writers in the "Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two." There's a bit of everything in here from poems, to hard science fiction, historical fantasy, and more. I read the anthology gradually over a period of months, which is one of the advantages of such a varied collection.
A few favourite stories include:
“The Canadian Miracle” — Cory Doctorow
“Six Incidents of Evolution Using Time Travel” — Derek Künsken
“The Spoil Heap” — Fiona Moore
“Seeds for Titanium” — Brandon Crilly
A few favourite stories include:
“The Canadian Miracle” — Cory Doctorow
“Six Incidents of Evolution Using Time Travel” — Derek Künsken
“The Spoil Heap” — Fiona Moore
“Seeds for Titanium” — Brandon Crilly
May 24, 2026
Short Stories Collections are so hard to rate. There were some stories in here that I though were great and others I had to skim read just to get through them. I guess my major complaint is that the book tries to cater to too many interests. Some great authors in this book too.
December 14, 2024
Thank you to NetGalley and Ansible Press for an ARC of this book. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I usually love Anthologies, but sadly this one was a bit of a miss for me. There were a handful of stories that were really good, but also some that I deeply disliked. Getting a few stories in and then reading about the brutal r@pe and torture of a young innocent girl, really set the tone for the rest of the book for me. (The story was The Girl Who Cried Diamonds)
The length of the stories was excellent, and they generally took about 10-15 minutes to read. None of them felt like they dragged on too long, which was really nice.
I appreciate that there was a lot of poetry in this anthology! That is very rare to find in anthologies, and I loved all the poems. They were the highlight of the book, and what kept me reading to the end.
I wish I had loved this anthology more, but it just wasn't the book for me. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to read it, and I hope it will be a better choice for someone else.
I usually love Anthologies, but sadly this one was a bit of a miss for me. There were a handful of stories that were really good, but also some that I deeply disliked. Getting a few stories in and then reading about the brutal r@pe and torture of a young innocent girl, really set the tone for the rest of the book for me. (The story was The Girl Who Cried Diamonds)
The length of the stories was excellent, and they generally took about 10-15 minutes to read. None of them felt like they dragged on too long, which was really nice.
I appreciate that there was a lot of poetry in this anthology! That is very rare to find in anthologies, and I loved all the poems. They were the highlight of the book, and what kept me reading to the end.
I wish I had loved this anthology more, but it just wasn't the book for me. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to read it, and I hope it will be a better choice for someone else.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews