Report on the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 Collection
Every year I read The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (BASFF) collection to see what’s going with (relatively) mainstream SFF. What I enjoy most about BASFF is the cycling guest editor. Every year the survey comes in at a fresh angle, the beam of our attention guided by a new hand. For the 2025 collection that hand belonged to the esteemed Nnedi Okorafor and she held the BASFF saucer steady while we waved our tractor beam around, looking for hot new speculative literature.
Every year the BASFF guest editor will write, at length or briefly, on the themes or lack thereof evident in the stories they’ve selected. The nice thing about editors is their work is done by the time the book hits your hands. They’re the architect but they don’t know, will never know, what happens to you inside their building. Which is in this case an anthology.
In Okorafor’s BASFF building, I got chased around by a number of scary monsters, thanks to a strong contingent of horror stories. Russell Nichols and Tananarive Due gazed back at the terrifying history of Black victimization in 20th century America with their stories “What Happened to the Crooners” and “When a Stranger Knocks”. These two tales walk a fine line between classic pulp horror tropes and sharp examination of historical atrocity, arriving in a place appropriately haunting.
Other writers focused on the perennial SFF themes of difference and exclusion, exploring the perspectives of such unfathomably strange beings as robots, mutants, aliens, and PhD students. A standout among these is Carlie St. George’s “The Weight of Your Own Ashes”, about the challenges of dating while multi-bodied. St. George artfully takes a premise which could easily become too cute or too confusing and instead makes it quietly wrenching and heartening.
Multiple writers in the 2025 BASFF highlighted experiences of old age or neurological difference. Kij Johnson’s “Country Birds” brought its protagonist beautifully out of life via a gentle twining metaphor. In “The Wonders of the World” by ‘Pemi Aguda and “Look at the Moon” by Dominique Dickey, characters process their disparate mental health struggles through powerful, perhaps fated, encounters with the sublimely mysterious. The fantastical elements here are so lightly drawn as to be debatable, verging into softly magical literary fiction, though one particular moment in “Look at the Moon” goes very hard violence-wise.
There was a certain overall lack of crazy shit in this year’s BASFF. BASFF is not a stronghold of crazy shit, to be sure. Weird and freaky material doesn’t usually climb high enough to register on this most refined-as-far-as-SFF-goes radar. Usually there’s at least one legitimately freaky story, though. Sometimes it’s so freaky I don’t like it, but I’m still glad it’s there for the person who does. I did appreciate the heaps of corpses and the unknowing cannibalism in S.L. Huang’s “The River Judge”, which was satisfyingly grody and amoral in a folk tale-ish fashion.
If one could complain, which one shouldn’t, one might say that this year’s BASFF stories were almost too mild and reflective on the whole. Many bittersweet tears shed over the unavoidable pains of life, much resolution to keep up the vaguely good fight. That isn’t a constructive critique in my part, though, merely a matter of taste. There were no bad stories. There were some stories by best-selling mainstream authors which I found, as my first introductions to their work, fairly underwhelming. Again, not constructive, just a taste question. I know in my heart it’s good for things to be “inoffensive”.
And yet…
Three stories from BASFF 2025 struck me as true homerun hits. “The Sort” by Thomas Ha stood out among all the other tales of difference and exclusion, telling a surreal tourism tale about a genetically-engineered father and son duo whose alterity signifies multiple forms of real life marginalization without needing to collapse down into any single one of them. They experience the horribly contingent vacillations of social acceptance in a way that’s weird and painful and familiar to everyone. Thus far in my reading Thomas Ha does not miss when it comes to shorts.
“Yarns” by Susan Palwick was one of the few unabashedly science-fiction wacky stories in BASFF 2025, and it was the only story that made me tear up in real life. Silliness and sentiment so often walk hand-in-hand. Palwick describes a simultaneously totally un-credible and completely familiar future world where many people are completely alienated from the sensory pleasures of life, all the humane aspects of being, and consequently have become murderous, criminal Twitch streamers who may be their own kind of shadow government/hereditary mafia-style crime family. Then Palwick reveals more and more, all of it founded on the power of having a nice caring old lady in your life. It works! I tell you, it works. Big sadness and big sweetness, all tangled up in one crazy yarn ball.
The best story in the collection comes from Adam-Troy Castro, as the best stories in collections often do. Castro is sprinkling catnip for committed science fiction fans by titling this tale “The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics”, but it’s not merely a pastiche or a response to Asimov. It’s a response to everything, and in the course of three wildly constructed sentences, one of them epic in length, Castro tells you an entire life which will be immediately, utterly familiar to you from all of history and from your own experiences. This is the kind of story which reminds you that there are still powerful things left to say with literature. What terrible stewards we humans have been, of the world and of each other! We mustn’t let ourselves create thinking machines, because we would hurt them so terribly.
If only someone could explain this to the Silicon dickheads who run society due to their immense qualifications in the field of idiocy. Lucky for you, you’re not a Silicon dickhead, so you get the chance to have Adam-Troy Castro explain it in a way that feels like sticking your finger in the electrical socket. If that’s not an endorsement, then I don’t know what is. Forget the BASFF collection entirely--the link to Castro story is right there; hop to it!
