This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the editor in exchange for an honest review. Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction was released on October 22, 2024.

I made a comment on social media about how intrigued I was by the table of contents of the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, and editor Stephen Kotowych kindly offered a review copy. Then it sat on my digital shelves for an embarrassingly long time before I actually started reading. I love the idea of Year’s Best anthologies, but in practice, they tend to be long, and a cover-to-cover read feels like an undertaking. But if there’s a plus side to such a long gap before reading, it’s that the stories I’d already read felt pretty new again. 

As it says in the title, this anthology seeks to collect the year’s best Canadian sci-fi and fantasy from the year 2023, ultimately 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,” 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. To round out the highlights, 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. 

Recommended if you like: Year’s Best anthologies.

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Five Short Stories.

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.