I live for these collections. Especially towards end of year time. A great way to get familar with both, new, and older authors. Dive in.

Strahan's introduction is boring. He's trying to sound unbiased, like someone who could choose the very best science fiction and fantasy in an absolute sense, but ends up seeming pompous and dull. The most important things that happened in science fiction last year, he says, are that the United States elected a "controversial" leader (this comes off as praise-by-insufficient-hostility, which I'm guessing he didn't intend) and lots of people bought novellas. Some of the novellas were "bestsellers" and some were "critically acclaimed", but Strahan refuses to assign both descriptions to the same story.

Strahan's choice of stories, on the other hand, is pretty good. I'm reading this the way I usually read big fat anthologies, skipping ahead whenever something doesn't grab me immediately, but I'm definitely reading more than I'm skipping. I particularly enjoyed Tobias Buckell's "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance", Vina Jie-Min Prasad's "A Series of Steaks" (hilarious use of 3D printing!), and Yoon Ha Lee's "The Chameleon's Gloves" (Lawful Good Kel general! who is not actually the protagonist, but that's fine, I have priorities). Kathleen Kayembe's "The Fairy Tree" is an extremely effective changeling story. R. S. Benedict, "My English Name", is what happens if you start with a horror premise and write it as a love story about being an expat in China; I recommend it strongly.