3.5. I'm really glad there's now a Best American series for speculative fiction. A number of these stories are fabulous—beautifully crafted, psychologically complex, and just plain imaginative. (Meet Me in Iram, The Game of Smash and Recovery, and Tea Time were probably my top three picks.)

As I read on, my interest waned because I felt like the stories were too homogeneous. Many were contemporary or near future, and the prose styles and subject matters seemed to converge on some generic literary grimdark ideal. Readers looking for wonder and magic got almost no stories set in secondary worlds, which those looking for avant-garde fiction only got a few stories that experimented with form in a meaningful way.

Obviously I don't expect the variety of a longer anthology like Year's Best, but the Best American Comics I read a while back was much more diverse in terms of content.

I will say that, hurrah, this anthology was fairly diverse in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. ( )

I love "The Best American...." annual series of books. Whether it is the short story collection, the Science Fiction collection, the essays, travel stories or, most especially, The Best American Non-Required Reading" collection, each year's anthology is a joy to read.
As an anthology, of course there are stories I enjoyed more than others, but even the ones I disliked are of high quality, engaging and highly original.
Science-fiction is not my usual first (or second) choice of reading, but every once in a while, I binge on it and lately, that has been the case. This is a fine collection of stories, good enough to make me want to read sci-fi a lot more often ( )

Always hard to rate a book of short stories.

My favorites in this collection were probably: “The Game Of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link, “Planet Lion” by Catherynne M Valente, “Three Bodies At Mitanni” by Seth Dickinson, and “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” by Vandana Singh.

Shout out also to “Lightning Jack’s Last Ride” by Dale Bailey, which was an amazing pastiche, though not exactly the kind of story I usually like. ( )

I'd read a couple of volumes from this Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series (which started up in 2015), and I liked both of them so much that I'm now working on going back through the rest of the series. Very slowly, given my massive reading backlog, but at least I finally got to the 2016 collection.

The series overall tends very much towards the more "literary" end of the SF spectrum, but this installment, in particular, seems to feature a lot of works that are perhaps slightly experimental, or abstract, or even a little surreal, and certainly on stories that require thought and careful reading to be effective.

As is usual for anthologies, some of these pieces worked better for me than others. I don't think any of them quite knocked my socks off the way the most impressive of stories can, but the best of them are very good, and even the ones that missed the target a little for me did so in genuinely interesting ways. ( )

I got this for the Ted Chiang story, which was very good, but the best story IMO was:
Ambiguity Machines: An Examination by Vandana Singh
Very Borgesian, I loved it.
( )