The Sword and Laser discussion

Hi everyone!
Inspired by our pick of the month (Stories of Your Life and Others), can anyone recommend other collections of SF/F short stories?
The only other one I've ever read is a fantasy short story collection called Treasures of Fantasy, which I remember very fondly.

For a single author collection, I recommend Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee. There's a lot of good anthologies. Perhaps start with some of the Year's Bests and spiral out from there.

I just finished Edge of Infinity, which is a highly regarded SF collection from about 2 years ago. It's all stories about the colonization of the solar system, including a story set in James S.A. Corey's Expanse setting.

Back in the 90s there was the Legends collection, which featured short stories from some of the top epic fantasy authors of the time. It was so popular they published a Legends II and Legends 3.

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic, and I highly recommend it.

If you can track them down (looks like at least the first few volumes are available through Kindle), there's Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books, which were highly influential on later sword-and-sorcery and low-fantasy. With the exception of Lankhmar Book 5: The Swords of Lankhmar (which is a novel), the rest are collected short stories.

A pretty neat anthology I read a few years back was Space, Inc. It's basically a collection about some various jobs and vocations of a space opera setting.

I like the The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection anthologies that are published every year by Gardner Dozois.

You can also use the Bests to find the places those stories originally appeared. It's a good way to track down magazines or anthologies you'd probably like.

I'm also a fan of the BotY anthologies. There's a fun trilogy of anthologies edited by Al Sarrantonio: Redshift for SF; FlightsFlights for fantasy; and 999 for horror.

I haven't read them yet, but I'm looking forward to getting into The Apex Book of World SF and its sequels.

Edited to add links.

I recommend At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories by Kij Johnson.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume 1 edited by Robert Silverberg is the place to go for classic stories. A lot of them have been made into episodes of The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Outer Limits and stand alone movies that you'd know.
The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert Heinlein and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury are some single author collections that are favorites of mine.
Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, David Brin, Philip Jose Farmer, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley and Spider Robinson also have collections that I've enjoyed.

Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space is excellent. I also second Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

I just reread the OP and I think what you're asking for here is collections and anthologies. The difference being a collection is usually of a single author or co-authors, and an anthology is a group of stories by multiple authors.

For anthologies I would strongly recommend anything edited by Jonathan Strahan. His recent Engineering Infinity, Edge of Infinity and Reach for Infinity books are among the best SF anthologies I've ever read.

I've recently read Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories and The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius, both of which I recommend.

Neil Gaiman's collections in general are wonderful, but I *really* enjoy Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany. The stories are so delightfully strange and/or charming, the artwork is lovely, and the nonfiction is stuff you normally wouldn't ever read.

I got some for you:

Single Author collections:

I will second Larry Niven's Known Space stories. I'm not actually sure what format they're available in currently as they've been reprinted so often.

Impossible Things and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories by Connie Willis. She is super good. There's some overlap, of course, but Impossible Things has a couple excellent stories not in the Best Of volume.

With Friends Like These... and ...Who Needs Enemies? by Alan Dean Foster.

The John Varley Reader by John Varley is a collection by one of the best SF writers ever. It's pretty pricy so you might want to see if the library has it. If you can find used versions of his books, buy them. Amazon is currently selling a new copy of his classic short story collection Blue Champagne for $2,891.55. That's not a typo. People really like his stuff.

Anthologies:

Going Interstellar - one of the best anthologies I've read in recent years, all about interstellar travel. The last two stories kind of end the book with a whimper, but there are so many really good ales before that you can't go wrong.

Masked, edited by Lou Anders, who has never let me down. These are superhero stories and for the most part they are superb.

To name a few...

I second the Dangerous Visions and the Asimov above, and would add a few:

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury. Actually, any of his short story collections - the man is a brilliant storyteller.

The Harlan Ellison Hornbook and The Essential Ellison by Harlan Ellison. Again, any of his collections are well worth it.

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, Unicorn Variations, etc by Roger Zelazny.

This one's a bit off-genre, but I cannot recommend Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts strongly enough. He is a fantastic young writer, also happens to be Stephen King's son, but he really stands on his own. Along that vein, Stephen King's and Peter Straub's collections are also great reads.

One more: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Some of his best work was in the short form.

Neil Gaiman and Philip K. Dick have both been mentioned but deserve another endorcement. Le Guin has some excellent collections also. Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving both have had had their short stories collected. Kurt Vonnegut has some great short stories.

I have a soft spot for a group of short stories set in a framework. Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards & Fairies are both good collections. Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome is also excellent. Kai Lung's Golden Hours and the other books in the series are interesting. Asimov's I, Robot is a classic for good reasons.

A. Merritt's The Fox Woman and Other Stories has some very good stories. Lovecraft, Howard, and Clark Aston Smith all did their best work in the short story format. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore and any others who wrote for the pulp magazines did some fun stories. Lord Dunsany's short stories are brilliant.

The list could go on and on.

I'm a HUGE fan of short stories and have a constantly growing collection of anthologies and collected works by individual authors. I really recommend anthologies as a way of dipping in and finding complete gems of stories - and discovering authors that are new to you. The themed Mammoth collections are often good (if it's a theme that appeals to you - I've recently acquired The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF and The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction which I'm looking forward to diving into.

The Year's Vest SF collections edited by Gardner Dozois are always excellent, as are the Solaris collections. My particular vice is scouring second hand and charity shops for old collections, and I've found some doozies.


And don't forget the periodicals. F&SF, Analog, Interzone - a great way to test the state of the medium and find some superb stories.

I have been reading more short story collections in recent years. They a great way to find authors I might never try otherwise and when setting aside reading time become a challenge, it's easy to put them down for a long while without having to restart. I just finished Robot Uprisings.

Any of the many collections edited by Jeff VanderMeer and/or Ann VanderMeer. Their collections work extremely well for me. I particularly enjoyed their steampunk collections (one of which contains 72 Letters from this month's S&L book) and have The Time Traveler's Almanac and some of their weird tales in the queue. For aspiring authors, Jeff wrote Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction.

Fans of sci-fi humor should look for Unidentified Funny Objects and Unidentified Funny Objects 2.

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy for those who want gaslamp fantasy instead of steampunk (Sword instead of Laser).

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death are collections of stories about a machine that, for a few bucks and a drop of blood, will tell you how you will die (uselessly vague), exploring the impact on society.

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius has some fantastic stories, especially the first one.

For those interested in older stories, Steampunk: Extraordinary Tales of Victorian Futurism collects early sci-fi were not written by Verne and Wells. H.P. Lovecraft fans might enjoy The King In Yellow, which inspired him. High Adventure collects a variety of adventure stories.

Robert Cowley has a series of What If? books where historians explore alternate history.

You may also look into books released as serials, in both text and graphic formats, rather than complete volumes.

Last year, Tor released John Scalzi's The Human Division as a weekly serialized e-book before releasing it as a complete book.

If you love the Sword part of this discussion group/podcast, then you'll probably love: The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

If you like the Laser part of this discussion group/podcast: I just finished, and really enjoyed, Limbus, Inc. - it's a series of short stories linked by a meta story and they all center around one company.

Surprised no one mentioned the collection put together by Gardner Dezois and George R. R. Martin - Dangerous Women. That was high quality!!

Based on most of the recommendations above, I'd say these collections by Jeffrey Ford would be gereatly appreciated:

Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories
The Empire of Ice Cream
The Drowned Life
Crackpot Palace: Stories

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr. is really good. It's a career spanning "best of" collection. I've slowly been going through it, but so far it's had some of the strongest short stories I've read; The Screwfly Solution in particular is one of the most bone-chilling sci-fi stories I've read.

I've just begun cracking into Rogues. So far I've only read the Rothfuss, Martin, and Lynch stories, but all three were stellar. Rothfuss was full of beautiful prose and was a quirky little story, while Lynch's was hilarious and bawdy and had some of the weirdest magic I've seen in a while. His world felt Mieville-esque. And Martin was Martin – that read more as a history than a narrative, as many of his novella-length pieces do. But this anthology is definitely worth picking up just for the Rothfuss and Lynch, and I'm excited to read the rest of the stories within. There are also stories by Gaiman and Daniel Abraham that I'm particularly excited about.

This is excellent: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

io9 posted this article a few months back. There are quite a few on that list that interest me.

Essential Short Story Anthologies That Every Writer Should Read
http://io9.com/want-to-know-what-shor...

A good series of anthologies with an interesting twist is The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. The first book in the series, The End is Nigh, and the second book, The End is Now, have been released, with the third, The End Has Come, being published in 2015. The twist is that the short stories all deal with the particular time frame of an apocalyptic event: before (book 1), during (book 2), and after (book 3). Additionally, the short stories continue from one book to the next.

I want to second @2 Conservation of Shadows.

Also Kelly Link Magic for Beginners, for magical realist stories.

For multi-author anthology, I've had good luck with the Eclipse series (edited by Jonathan Strahan) so far.

Jeff Carlson has some good short story collections, and John Joseph Adams edits some good anthologies!

I just finished Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy and really enjoyed it. Got it via OverDrive from the library.

Tanya Huff has a couple of really good collections: What Ho, Magic!, Stealing Magic, etc.

Strange Brew is excellent.

And if you happen to like cats, the Catfantastic anthologies - I think there are 5 - are wonderful.

Yeah, a lot of anthologies are tired around a single theme or inspiration. One I enjoyed lately was Seeds of Change, where the authors tackled all kinds of issues facing our society and how we might deal with them. There should be more optimistic scifi! Where is the modern social equivalent of Star Trek? End rant.