The Best Science Fiction Short Stories I Read in 2023 ... and where you can read them.
Okay. Before we begin, let’s define what I’m talking about.
In 2023, I read 22 groups of stories: anthologies, single-author collections, and slates of award finalists. This amounted to hundreds of stories.
This list includes some of my favorites:
Read by me in 2023. Not necessarily published in 2023
Only stories that were new to me. I reread many all-time classics this year, but want to really shine the light on stories that are less likely to be well known.
With each short story, I’ll write a non-spoiler summary and link to where you could buy that book. (I’ll make a small commission, if you do, at not additional cost to you.)
Hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did. I was shocked by how many of my favorite stories came from author whose name I had never heard prior to 2023. The stories are listed in the chronological order that I read them this year.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2021 Edition. edited by Rich Horton
You Have the Prettiest Mask • (2020) • short fiction by Sarah Langan.
Great YA coming-of-age story set in a world where a global pandemic has made mask-wearing mandatory and controversial, just not the pandemic you like. This pandemic kills men horribly, but women of child bearing age are silent carriers. So society has decided to mask women in public: leading to Bloody Thirteen parties where teenaged girls are masked publicly. This novella stars one preteen girl whose family is hiding her from this reality in elite private schools. The story spends a lot of time in the friendship drama, but does it well, showing how build world events affect children’s daily lives.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
City of Laughter (2013) by Sequoia Nagamatsu
A failed stand up comic takes a job at an amusement park designed to give suffering children one last fun day … and then euthanize them on a rollercoaster. While trying to find a way to hold himself together on this job, he starts a romantic relationship with a woman whose son is receiving painful experimental treatment. This is so beautiful, so painful, so intelligent. It is worth the price of the book for this one story.
Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Virtual Cafe (2009) by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Akira is part of a new underclass; those who couldn’t finish their education during the Plague Years and now are really employable. He gets a sketchy job handing out flyers for what is probably a cult, while cultivating a friendship with a single mom in virtual reality. The complex, struggling characters show incredible depth here.
The Best of Nancy Kress. by Nancy Kress. 2015
Trinity • (1984) • by Nancy Kress
A difficult, disturbing, and riveting masterpiece. Seena tries to save her sister Devrie who is slowly killing herself by starvation as part of a scientific/religious cult/experiment that is using twins to try to prove the existence of God. The experiment works with two mind together, so Seena hunts down her cloned twin. The characters are realistic and well detailed with intense emotions. This novella moves propulsively, violating taboos , and ends with an explosion of a denouement, both challenging and fulfilling.
Asimov’s Science Fiction - 37th Annual Reader's Award Finalists. Novellas, Novelettes, and Short Stories
Snowflake – Nick Wolven (January/February 2022)
A brutal and intense story about emotional destruction and costs paid to try to ‘get things together’ enough to do your job. Coco is woman who has ‘risen above’ a lifetime of poverty and abuse to become a rockstar. But the drugs and her friends aren’t enough to keep to her together anymore. The novella follows Coco’s best friend after the star felt apart on tour. The drugs haven’t be cutting it anymore and maybe an experimental technological implant will be better. But that implant may come with a cost to her humanity.
Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café – M. Bennardo (November/December 2022)
A man is entirely separated from his body and lives in multiple immersive VR worlds. He discovers a strangely boring simulation that is nothing but a train, platform, and café. Boring, yes, but also with a realism that is captivatingly unlike all else.
Dreams from Beyond: Anthology of Czech Speculative Fiction. edited by Julie Nováková. 2016
Axes on Viola • novelette by Jaroslav Mostecký? (trans. of Sekyry na Viole 1996).
A thrilling sci-fi adventure with a great classic sense of wonder as its core. Two planets are connected by enormous trees that are rooted in both soils and hold them together with extreme tension. The story opens with men fleeing a powerful pulse wave created because a minor rupture in the taut connection. It ends up as a cat and mouse adventure within the intricate and immerse inner world of these trees.
The 2023 Hugo Award Finalists: Novelettes
“Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness”, by S.L. Huang (Clarkesworld, December 2022)
A sobering and terrifying look at the realistic near future of A.I. (or Large-Language Models, like ChatGPT). The ‘story’ (a woman is accused of making an A.I. that bullies some people to commit suicide) is written in the form of article that combines real-life situations (with hyperlinks) and intense near future thought experiments. This is an important story that is likely to outpaced by real-world events … or be terrifyingly prescient. Probably the rawest version of my “Science Fiction as Though Experiment” theory of Science Fiction.
THE 2023 HUGO AWARD FINALISTS: NOVELLA
Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)
The Landlords are literal Ogres, but “You” are destined to rise up and become a hero. What starts as a simplistic fairy tale allegory, slowly gets smart and becomes purely science fiction. Then it finishes with a complex and challenging ending that you don’t see coming. This is way better than you think it is, but it takes spoilers to tell you why.
The Fragrance of Orchids and Other Stories. by Sally McBride. 2023
Speaking Sea • (1999) • by Sally McBride.
A failing marriage. A cool walk along the edges of the Pacific. A strange gel is in the water and it may be rewriting the world. Conjures the same strange emotions that I get from a Steve Utley story.
Robots Through the Ages. edited by Robert Silverberg and Brian Thomas Schmidt. 2023
For a Breath I Tarry • (1966) • novelette by Roger Zelazny.
Both clever and poetic, this is another in the long line of computers wanting to be human. Mostly consistenting of a bargain cut between two supercomputers who control the northern and southern hemispheres of an icy wasteland earth. Great use of robotic minds.
Memories of Tomorrow. Short Fiction by Mayi Pelot. 1985 Translated by Arrate Hildago. 2022
Miren • 1985 • short story by Mayi Pelot.
A brilliant and very short story of a woman making her way through a science fictional world of technological wonder to a destiny of her own choosing.
Choppy Water • 1985 • short story by Mayi Pelot.
A rich and immersive fictional world where people slide down water channels instead of roads. A story of a fugitive and a local girl who fall in love through their resistance of oppressive powers. Loose analogy to the struggles of the Basque people. Full of really cool ideas and poetically written. Shades of the story “Hothouse” and the film “Avatar.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction on Earth. edited by Allan Kaster. 2023
“The Cottage in Omena” by Charles Andrew Oberndorf copyright © 2022
A chilling masterpiece of a novella. A woman returns to a cabin on a Michigan lake. She hasn’t been there since “The Incident” and she is obviously carrying some intense emotion damage. Slowly, the situation will be revealed through flashbacks that raise the hair on a back of the neck. There is an enormous amount of near future sci-fi invention happening here, but it is in the service of great characters and well paced creepy writing.
