The Best Science Fiction of the Year - 2025

For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it’s the story of a young woman navigating a complex relationship with her AI “mother,” an investigator looking into the mysterious collision between two starships in an effort to avoid planetary conflict, a caretaker working to rescue, rehabilitate, and protect abandoned wooly mammoths, or a sapient starship having to make a difficult choice between the living and the frozen, science fiction inspires our imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. At the very heart of the genre is short fiction, the secret lab that has introduced many of the new ideas, techniques, and voices prominent across all other media.

In The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 2025, Hugo and Locus Award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a comprehensive year-in-review of 2025’s short fiction markets and selects thirty of its best stories from the wealth of magazines, anthologies, podcasts, and collections that make up the field. In these pages you’ll find works by both the new and established authors who are setting the pace for science fiction today and into tomorrow. Start your journey here.

Includes:

• “Strays” by Scott William Carter
• “Elegy for Zephyr One” by Gene Doucette
• “Barnacle” by Kate Elliott
• “Lincoln and the Harvester C-100” by R.S.A. Garcia
• “In My Country” by Thomas Ha
• “The Last of Operation Shroud” by Alexander Jablokov
• “Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures and Attraction Is When I Do It for You” by Claire Jia-Wen
• “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim
• “Freediver” by Isabel J. Kim
• “Reality Check” by Nancy Kress
• “Threat Assessment” by Matthew Kressel and Mercurio D. Rivera
• “Emergence” by Rich Larson
• “And Every Galatea Shaped Anew” by Marissa Lingen
• “Faith” by Kate Maruyama
• “Blue Speck” by E. L. Mellor
• “The Tin Man’s Ghost” by Ray Nayler
• “The Apology Tour” by Nnedi Okorafor
• “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H. H. Pak
• “The Chronolithographer’s Assistant” by Suzanne Palmer
• “Coda” by Arula Ratnakar
• “New Niches” by Jackie Roberti
• “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro
• “The Flaming Embusen” by Tade Thompson
• “An Echo’s Timelapse” by Tlotlo Tsamaase
• “Woolly” by Carrie Vaughn
• “The Twenty-One Second God” by Peter Watts
• “Data Ghost” by Martha Wells
• “Termina” by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
• “Whalesong” by Daniel H. Wilson
• “The Garden of Collective Memory” by Neon Yang