The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

The best science fiction and fantasy stories of 2021, selected by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Veronica Roth.
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
"Veronica Roth burst onto the publishing scene in 2011 with her first novel, Divergent, which she famously wrote during her senior year at Northwestern University. That book went on to become a number-one New York Times best seller and a franchise-starting worldwide blockbuster. Divergent spawned two novel sequels—Insurgent and Allegiant along with a story collection called Four. Collectively, the books have sold somewhere north of forty million copies worldwide and were adapted into three major motion pictures.
After the Divergent series concluded, Veronica returned with a new young adult duology Carve the Mark and The Fates Divide— and then followed that up with a short story collection called The End and Other Beginnings. In 2020, Roth pivoted, making her adult debut with the novel Chosen Ones, which I was fortunate enough to acquire for my imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It received high praise from previous BASFF series editors Diana Gabaldon and Charles Yu, not to mention the likes of Charlie Jane Anders, Blake Crouch, and Amber Benson and also received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and, despite coming out right when the pandemic started locking everything down, hit the New York Times best- seller list. Veronica’s second adult novel is due out in 2022."