The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 2025

Overview

For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether the story of a young woman navigating a complex relationship with her AI “mother,” an investigator looking into the mysterious collision between two starships, a caretaker working to rescue, rehabilitate, and protect abandoned wooly mammoths, or a sapient starship making 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 30 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.

Author Biography

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and over a dozen anthologies, including the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. He is a five-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form, four-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and three-time winner of the Locus Award for Best Editor. In 2019, Clarke received the SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.