A review by bsparks2112
Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2016 Edition by Justin Landon, Ellen Datlow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Miriam Weinberg, Ann VanderMeer, Carl Engle-Laird, Liz Gorinsky, Diana Pho

3.0

This was a pretty good collection of Tor.com's short fiction - this is the third one of their annual collections I've downloaded (for free, no less, so that's already one thing going for it), and I'd say that I enjoyed this one overall more than the 2015 collection, thought maybe not quite as much as 2014's. Just like last year's, the format of the collection (assorted short stories/novelettes in wildly varying genres organized roughly alphabetically by author) has advantages and drawbacks: the variety is nice, since you never quite know what's coming next, which lends itself to pleasant surprises; the drawback being that some of the shifts in genre and tone are utterly jarring, and the quality does fluctuate between stories and writers. Some of the stories are really great, though; my favorites were “The City Born Great” by N. K. Jemisin; “The Art of Space Travel” by Nina Allan; “Finnegan’s Field” by Angela Slatter; “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” by Alyssa Wong; and “Everything That Isn’t Winter” by Margaret Killjoy. These are offset by several others that seemed to end before they had a chance to go anywhere; some others went on far too long for their own good. Still, not a bad assortment overall.