Summary:
This is an anthology that collects all the short stories and novelettes (and one novella) that made it on to the 2019 Hugo nominations list but didn’t have enough votes to make it to the finals. This second part of the review looks at the nine novelettes and one novella (the first review covered the short stories), which includes very good work by Suzanne Palmer and Kij Johnson, and good or better work by Kelly Robson, Carolyn Ives Gilman, José Pablo Iriarte, Brooke Bolander, and Greg Egan.

ISFDB link
Amazon UK/US copy

Other reviews:¹
Goodreads, Various 1/2

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Editor, David Steffen

Fiction:
Mother Tongues • short story by S. Qiouyi Lu ∗∗∗+
Field Biology of the Wee Fairies • short story by Naomi Kritzer ∗∗
Meat and Salt and Sparks • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+
Sour Milk Girls • short story by Erin Roberts ∗∗
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child • short story by Isabel Yap ∗∗∗
The Starship and the Temple Cat • short story by Yoon Ha Lee ∗∗
Waterbirds • short story by G. V. Anderson ∗∗∗∗
You Can Make a Dinosaur, But You Can’t Help Me • short story by K. M. Szpara ∗
And Yet • short story by A. T. Greenblatt ∗∗∗
She Still Loves the Dragon • short story by Elizabeth Bear ∗
An Agent of Utopia • novelette by Andy Duncan ∗∗
A Study in Oils • novelette by Kelly Robson ∗∗∗+
The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births • novelette by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗
No Flight Without the Shatter • novelette by Brooke Bolander ∗∗∗
How to Swallow the Moon • novelette by Isabel Yap ∗∗
A World to Die For • novelette by Tobias S. Buckell ∗
Thirty-Three Percent Joe • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗∗
The Privilege of the Happy Ending • novelette by Kij Johnson ∗∗∗∗
The Nearest • novelette by Greg Egan ∗∗∗
Umbernight • novella by Carolyn Ives Gilman ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Poisson D’Arte • cover by Amanda Makepeace
Foreword • by Dan Steffen

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This is the second part of the review of this anthology, and it looks at the nine novelettes and one novella (the first part, which you may want to read before this, considered the ten short stories).

The first of the novelettes (and the only story in the book that doesn’t come from a free online magazine) is An Agent of Utopia by Andy Duncan which, given the story opens with a traveller visiting Thomas More in the Tower of London, will be of interest to those of you who have read or watched Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The man tells More he is Aliquo, and that he comes from Utopia. The significance of this latter comment becomes clear in a conversation Aliquo has later with More’s daughter (for those of you, who, like me, are unaware that Utopia is a fictional work of More’s):

“Call me Aliquo,” I said.
“Your position?”
“In this land, only emissary.”
“From whom? What business had you with my father?”
Heeding her manservant’s warning, I chose the truth. “I offered to free him,” I said, “and to convey him home in triumph.”
Her eyes widened. “You are mad. How? Home to Chelsea? Home to me?”
“No, Madame. To my homeland across the sea.”
“The impertinence! What name is given this homeland?”
“It is called Utopia. Your father wrote of it.”
She laughed aloud, and a score of heads turned our way in shock as the echoes rained down from the arches above. Beside the tomb, without interrupting his recitation, the guide shook his head, placed the stump of a finger to his chin, and blew.
“He wrote of it, indeed!” she said, in a lower voice. “A fairy story for his friend Erasmus, invented of whole cloth! A series of japes at the follies of the day.”
“Is all this a jape?” I asked, with a gesture at the soaring chapel all around. “Is this statue atop the tomb a jape, because he has a silver head, as the king did not in life? Mere representation is not a jape, Madame. Your father represented us, but we are not his invention.”

More is later executed off-stage, and the rest of the story concerns Aliquo’s attempts to retrieve More’s head from a spike on Stone Gate at London Bridge. This adventure is entertainingly and colourfully relayed, and has some good descriptions of London life at the time. However, at the end of the story (spoiler), Aliquo begins to hear More talking to him from the severed head. After he gives dead man’s remains to the daughter he then hears More’s voice in his own head. This is all a bit baffling, and never explained, and it spoils what had been a pretty good story to that point. That said, if you like Leiber’s ‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ stories, you’ll probably like this, regardless.
A Study in Oils by Kelly Robson² has as its protagonist a Lunarian ice-hockey player called Zhang Lei, who has had a “disable switch” fitted, the result of an on-pitch fight where he killed an opposing player:

The day after he’d killed Dorgon, Zhang Lei’s team hauled him to a surgeon. Twenty minutes was all it took to install the noose around his carotid artery, then two minutes to connect the disable button and process the change to his ID. His teammates were as gentle as they could be. When it was all done, the team’s enforcer clasped Zhang Lei’s shoulder in a meaty hand.
“We test it now,” Korchenko said, and Zhang Lei had gone down like a slab of meat.
When he woke, his friends looked concerned, sympathetic, even a little regretful.
That attitude didn’t last long. After the surgery, the team traveled to a game in Surgut. Zhang Lei’s disable button was line-of-sight. Anyone who could see it could trigger it. He passed out five times along the way, and spent most of the game slumped on the bench, head lolling, his biom working hard to keep him from brain damage. His teammates had to carry him home.
For a few weeks, they treated him like a mascot, hauling him from residence to practice rink to arena and back again. They soon tired of it and began leaving him behind. The first time he went out alone he came back on a cargo float, with a shattered jaw and boot-print-shaped bruises on his gut. That was okay. He figured he deserved it.
Then one night after an embarrassing loss, the team began hitting the button for fun.

As a tribunal considers Lei’s case he flees to Earth to escape a gang of “Lunnite brawlers” who are searching for him, and hides out at an artist’s retreat in Paizuo, in China. After he settles into the artists’ colony, the rest of the story focuses on his painting (a career he would have pursued instead of ice-hockey if it had paid), as well as the culture shock he and the other artists experience there—the area is unusual in that it is a natural environment, and has a limited amount of the enmeshed tech and overlaid virtual reality of their time:

All of the Paizuo guest houses answered immediately. A map highlighted various routes up and down the valley. The guideway landing stage sent him the past two days of traffic history and offered average travel times to various downslope destinations. A lazy stream of ID information flowed from the guest artists, thirty in total.
Several hazard warnings floated over their targets: Watch for snakes. Beware of dog. Dangerous cliff. But no pings from the locals, or any of the crops, equipment, or businesses. Not even from the wooden hand-truck upended over a pile of dirt at the side of the path. But no way this village ran everything data-free.

Indeed, one of the great strengths of this piece is how Robson creates, in information dense but clear prose, a vivid and convincing future world which, unlike many other SF stories, almost stands up in 3D off the page.
In between Lei’s travels around the area (he speaks to the locals, fishes with his bare hands in the rice paddies, takes a water buffalo for a walk, etc.) Lei completes a painting:

His old viewcatcher compositions and stealthily-made reference sketches were gone forever, so he worked from memory. He attacked the canvas with his entire arsenal, blocking out a low-angle view of Mons Hadley and the shining towers of Sklad, with the hab’s vast hockey arena in the foreground under a gleaming crystal dome. The view might be three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, but it lay at his fingertips, and he created it anew every time he closed his eyes.
The paint leapt to Zhang Lei’s brush, clung to the canvas, spread thin and lean and true exactly where it should, the way it should, creating the effects he intended. After a week of flailing with sappy greens and sloppy, organic shapes, he finally had a canvas under control. He worked late, muttering good night to the other artists without raising his eyes from his work. When dawn stretched its fingers through the studio’s high windows, the painting was done—complete with a livid crimson stain spreading under the arena’s crystal dome.
He didn’t remember deciding to paint blood on the ice, or putting crimson on his palette. But the color belonged there. It was the truth. It showed what he did.

The painting is integral to the story’s conclusion, when (spoiler) his social worker Martha presents it to the tribunal as evidence of Lei’s regret.
I have a couple of minor criticisms: first, the idea of Lei’s disable mechanism is a rather draconian sanction from a culture that encourages a form of hockey akin to blood-sport; second, the story drags at the end, and it would have been better to have had the ice-hockey fight scene inserted between the water buffalo and pre-festival material (which, together, end up reading like What I Did On My Summer Holidays). But these are relatively minor niggles about what is otherwise a cohesive story set in a particularly well-realised future world.
The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births starts with Jamie and Alicia, a couple of teenagers, watching a new arrival at their trailer-park—a man called Benjamin who is a recently released murderer. Then Jamie recognises the man, and we learn that Jamie is a reincarnated immortal who has had several past lives—and one of them was the woman that Benjamin murdered . . . .
The rest of the story charts Jamie’s growing pains (he is bullied at school because of his gender identity), his desire for a relationship with Alicia, and, predominantly, his effort to clear Benjamin’s name when he remembers/realises that Benjamin didn’t kill him/her.
The story is a bit on the slight side, and there is no explanation or examination of Jamie’s ability to reincarnate but, that said, there is some good story telling on display here and there are some neat one-liners.
No Flight Without the Shatter by Brooke Bolander has an impenetrable start (think R. A. Lafferty at his most oblique) but it eventually resolves into a story about a young girl called Linnea, the last human on an despoiled and exhausted Earth. She is cared for by three aunties who appear to be animals in human form, and they are building a spaceship.
Other animals arrive in the form of humans throughout the tale. Then one night they put their skins back on and tell their stories. Once they finish their testimony, they pass through the campfire so their shadows can board the ship. The last ones to do this are Linnea’s aunties, and then the ship leaves:

Shades marching two-by-two onto a shadowy ship—shadows of tiger and thylacine, dodo and dingo, elephant and sharphorned rhinoceros. They hop and fly and pace up the gangplank in silence. The fire beneath them dies to embers as the light in the east grows and the last disappears inside, the rusted old hatch slamming shut behind them with a clang.
Nothing happens, at first. Then there’s a slow rumbling from within the rocket’s guts, a rust-rattling, bolt-testing shudder that grows and grows and grows until the entire ship and all the ground around-abouts it are shaking like a penny in a tin can. The first red rays of the sun set fire to the scaffoldings and fins, the soldered seams that patch the scavenged eyetooth-length of the thing together. Orange dust rises like smoke. The long, pointed shadow at its base jitters faintly.
The ship begins to topple over. At the same time, its shadow pulls itself free of the dusty ground, ascending with a noise like a hurricane wind made up of the calls of every animal to ever creep or crawl or flap or low, a joyous, cacophonous menagerie. It lifts higher and higher, charging to meet the dawn as, far below, the ship collapses completely. The air is full of sand and twigs and old litter picked up by the whirl—candy wrappers, plastic bags, feathers. Chunks of scaffolding tumble-bang to earth end-over-appetite, adding their own clattering boom and roar to the morning as the shadow pulls away. It is a cloud—a bird—a mote swimming across the eye—and then it is nothing at all.
The triumphant menagerie song fades to an echo. A trick of the wind, occasionally interrupted by another piece of the ship’s struts coming down with a tooth-rattling thud.
Goodbye.

The story ends with Linnea building an airship and travelling the world to collect all of humanity’s spirits.
This plot synopsis doesn’t show, however, that this is really a discursive fable or elegy about the ills done to the Earth and its native species (there are several sections where an omniscient narrator invites the reader to view events from the Earth’s viewpoint, for example). As to how successful this is . . . well, that varies: the first half is more opaque than it needs to be, but the second is clearer and, at times, quite poetic too. A more straightforward beginning would have produced a stronger piece, but it’s still worth your time.
How to Swallow the Moon by Isabel Yap is the writer’s second story in this anthology, and it is set in a world where there is myth/history about a dragon eating two of the Earth’s moons, leaving only the one we have now. It opens with Amira the servant coming to Anyag (a cloistered noble woman who she secretly loves) and taking her down to the river to bathe. After some background material a suitor later comes to the court, and Amira realises that she will lose her mistress and have to return to her village.
The rest of the story has the pair admitting their love for each other, and charts their efforts to be together. At the conclusion of the story, the pair plan to flee after the wedding, but Amira catches the suitor (who she now realises is the dragon who ate the moons) taking Anyag away on a boat. They fight, and when Amira wins, the suitor transforms. The two women then end up in the dragon’s stomach, and they use song and magic to defeat it.
This is essentially a relationship story with fantasy trappings, and one which uses a lot of words to tell its slight tale.
A World to Die For by Tobias S. Buckell gets off to a Damnation Alley/Mad Max-type start as raiders in a post-Collapse middle America attack a trade convoy trying to pass through their patch without paying fees. However, the convoy is a trap, and the raiders surrender to the heavily armed Hauz Shad mercenaries who surprise them. They are looking for Chendra, the narrator, or someone who looks like her. When they find her, she is taken to Armand, who is a black marketeer who slips between various parallel worlds trading valuable goods and people.
After a variety of adventures in various climate-change challenged worlds, Chendra meets a version of herself called Che (who smuggles people from the bad outcome universes to an Edenic one), the story dissolves into an extended and tedious lecture which replicates the dystopian piousness of many current climate change stories. That is to say: set up a future world or worlds that have an environment far worse than anything predicted by the last IPCC report, and then do a lot of simplistic finger-wagging (there is, among the other bumper stickers here, a We Have to Make Hard Choices. Gosh, really?)
Those of you who liked Suzanne Palmer’s 2018 Hugo winning novelette, The Secret Life of Bots, have another treat waiting for you in Thirty-Three Percent Joe. This starts with Joe the soldier’s Cybernetic Cerebral Control unit welcoming a new replacement elbow and introducing it to Joe’s other AI body replacement parts. It isn’t long, however, before we see them squabbling in the wake of a comment that Joe’s visiting mother makes about his military service record:

[CC] While this is a matter that falls into your operational jurisdiction, Left Ear, it is my recommendation that, while Joe has the right to access all conversation made in his presence while he has been unconscious, we do not log this one or bring it to his attention unless pressed to do so by more urgent circumstances. Are you agreed?
[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I agree.
[CC] I am open to direct and confidential dissent.
. . .
There being none, let the record show the vote was unanimous in favor. I am logging confusion from our provisionary New Elbow Unit on why we might do so, so I will explain. Joe did not aspire toward being a soldier at all, but a baker. The Mother Unit exerts influence on Joe through counterfactual and manipulative means that causes Joe to act in ways not optimal for his own well-being, or by extension, ours. Many of us are not the original cybernetic replacement parts.
[SPLEEN::UNIT] I am. I should be in charge by reasons of seniority, or at least get double the votes over the rest of the idiots here.
[HEART] You couldn’t manage shit, Spleen, you asshole.
[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] Hey. Watch it.
[CC] New Elbow, I am informed by the external diagnostics systems that you have been given a perfect passing score.
[. . .]
Welcome to Joe.

In between these exchanges, and the CC’s attempts to keep Joe from getting killed in the battle to retake Ohio, we see matters from Joe’s point of view. These sections mostly take place in the mess hall, where he banters with his friend Stotz, the base cook, and, with the CC’s help, Joe improves the quality of the food and indirectly his chances of survival. These latter sections are reminiscent of Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero, and have the same dark humour.
This is the story that I have so far enjoyed the most.
The Privilege of the Happy Ending by Kij Johnson is set in what initially seems like an early medieval version of the English countryside, but there are a couple of significant differences. The first is that the protagonist, a five-year-old girl called Ada, is accompanied by a talking chicken called Blanche, and the second is that the countryside is about to be overrun by swarms of wastoures, voracious creatures which resemble velociraptors—as Ada and Blanche find out when they hide up a tree in the forest:

The wastoures came. The trees shook and the tall grasses shivered, first from animals fleeing, every deer and mouse and marten and vole running for its life, but then from the wastoures themselves. They trampled the grasses as they poured like a flood across the clearing, eddied wherever they found some living thing to eat, crashed against the trees and scoured the bark with their claws and talons, until swarming they swept past. But always more.
The night was bright-mooned, alas. Ada saw a fallow doe pulled down in her flight (for she would not run faster than her fawn) and skeletonized quicker than a hen lays an egg, and the fawn even faster than she. The wastoures swirled around a pile of stones in the clearing until they unearthed a fox den and ate the kits. There was a great anguished roaring in the forest, which Blanche whispered surely was a bear pulled from her hiding place and killed. The wastoures could smell Ada and Blanche, and some spent the night leaping at the elm tree’s trunk. But wastoures cannot fly, nor could they jump high enough to reach that first low branch. After a while Ada saw that they could not get to her.
Hour after hour; the moon set, and still they churned below, a seething darkness in the dim starlight. Ada feared she and Blanche would fall, for she was not very good at knots yet, but nothing bad happened. She was only rocked gently like an infant in its cradle, far above the tossing sea of wastoures, and at last she slept, for a child cannot always be awake even in a time of terror.
But Blanche did not sleep, watching from her bright golden-black eyes.

The rest of the story tells of Ada and Blache’s return to their devastated village, and their further travels throughout the ruined land in search of sanctuary. After various adventures we find that Blanche cannot only talk but that she (spoiler) has the ability to face down the wastoures, and compel them to kill themselves and their own. The story ends with a climactic encounter in the lair of the wastoure queen.
What would be a pretty good fantasy adventure is further improved by the quirkiness of the talking hen, and also by the author’s frequent knowing asides to the reader about the fate of numerous minor characters. These comments range from the world weary to the mildly belligerent:

Are you counting the deaths in this story, keeping a roster, keeping score? Is it higher or lower than The Wizard of Oz? There are more than I have told you.

I can see why this story won the 2019 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, and it is another one of my favourites in the anthology.
The Nearest by Greg Egan opens with a police sergeant called Kate arriving at a murder scene where a husband and two daughters are dead and the wife is missing:

When Kate reached the house there were two squad cars and a SOCO van parked in the street, but their presence had attracted no onlookers; it seemed the neighbors here had the decency not to flock around the blue-and-white tape, gawking, while the ever-economising clickbait sites were probably waiting for a chance to outsource their photographic needs to the next fast food delivery that overflew the crime scene.

The rest of the opening convincingly details the drone and VR examination of the site, and this is then followed by backstory which shows us Kate’s homelife with her husband and kids. Then, a day or so later, Kate gets a call that the wife’s car has been found.
At this point the story takes a major right turn, and chapter four opens with Kate waking up and realising that there is a strange man beside her in bed. When she gets out of bed and rushes to see if Michael, her baby, is alright, she finds something that looks like a mechanical doll in his bed. She then threatens the stranger and questions him about her son’s whereabouts before forcing the man to lead her to him. What the man does is take her to a nearby hospital, insisting that she gets examined, but security arrest him when she identifies herself as a detective. By the time Kate gets home, however, she finds the police there and sees Michael being taken away. She realise that the police are part of what is happening.
The rest of the story follows the renegade Kate as she tracks down other people who have suffered similar events—i.e. their close family members turning in to “hollow men” like her husband—and she eventually (spoiler) meets a group hiding out in a warehouse. They think the hollow men have been infected by a virus, and are planning an uprising against them.
All of these events take place in an atmosphere of Dickian paranoia, which crests when Kate phones an old friend abroad and realises that she too has become a hollow person. However, when Kate thinks about the call afterwards, she realises that a hollow person wouldn’t rerecord their phone message. Then she realises that—if there is a virus—then she and her fellow conspirators may be the infected group, and that their view of reality may be altered.
This—the idea that a virus could affect human perception so as to make it impossible to tell who correctly perceives reality—plays out in an interesting manner. However, the ending is, perhaps unavoidably, anti-climactic (not so much ‘I woke up and found it was all a dream’ as ‘I woke up and found I was mad’). It is a worthwhile read for all that.
Umbernight by Carolyn Ives Gilman is set on human-settled planet called Dust, which has a peculiar binary star system whose characteristics force the columnists to live underground: during “Umbernight,” the system’s second star Umber rises, and periodically opens its “shroud,” (i.e. the position of the shielding planetary nebula changes to allow deadly radiation to reach Dust):

I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”
After that, I had nightmares in which I looked up at the sky and there was the face of a corpse hanging there, covered with a shroud. I would watch in terror as the veil would slowly draw aside, revealing rotted flesh and putrid gray jelly eyes, glowing with a deadly unlight that killed everything it touched.
I didn’t know anything then about planetary nebulae or stars that emit in the UV and X-ray spectrum. I didn’t know we lived in a double-star system, circling a perfectly normal G-class star with a very strange, remote companion. I had learned all that by the time I was an adolescent and Umber finally rose in our sky. I never disputed why I had to spend my youth cooped up in the cave habitat trying to make things run. They told me then, “You’ll be all grown up with kids of your own before Umber comes again.” Not true. All grown up, that part was right. No kids.

The narrator Mick, their planetary surveyor, returns to the habitat to find factional wrangling about whether or not to go and recover a cargo capsule sent by their ancestors. The problem is that the package will land at their old base, Newton’s Eye, which is 200 hours travel away, and Umbernight has already begun. In particular, they are approaching the period where the shroud has previously opened.
Eventually the decision is made to send a team, and the first part of the story tells of their journey across the planet’s surface to Newton’s Eye. This is engrossing stuff: well characterised, and with good world-building. After a series of mini-challenges (partly with the environment, but also with each other) they arrive at the initial landing site:

We were moving fast by now, through a landscape formed by old eruptions. Misshapen claws of lava reached out of the darkness on either side, frozen in the act of menacing the road. At last, as we were thinking of stopping, we spied ahead the shape of towering ribs against the stars—the remains of the settlers’ original landing craft, or the parts of it too big to cannibalize. With our goal so close, we pushed on till we came to the cleared plain where it lay, the fossil skeleton of a monster that once swam the stars.
We all stood gazing at it, reluctant to approach and shatter its isolation.
[. . .]
The eastern sky glowed a cold pink and azure. The landing site was a basin of black volcanic rock. Steaming pools of water made milky with dissolved silicates dappled the plain, smelling of sodium bicarbonate. As I watched the day come, the pools turned the same startling blue as the sky, set like turquoise in jet.
The towering ribs of the lander now stood out in the strange, desolate landscape. I thought of all the sunrises they had seen—each one a passing fragment of time, a shard of a millennium in which this one was just a nanosecond of nothing.

After the team recover the payload and start back (spoiler), an X-ray alarm warns them the shroud has opened and, from this point forward, it becomes a different sort of story entirely as the planet spawns many forms of life which thrive in the high radiation environment. These life-forms are hostile, and the team has to fight and run to survive.
The story is a great read but it has a few suspension-of-disbelief problems that you don’t want to think too hard about. The first and greatest of these problems is their discovery of the planet’s alien life forms, whose existence is hinted at on the journey out. But it is not until the journey back—when they appear to come under attack from what seem like malevolent poltergeists—that we realise that something is really going on. When Mick later puts a luminescent look-through tree leaf across his faceplate, another world is revealed:

What looked like a rocky waste by the dim starlight was suddenly a brightly lit landscape. And everywhere I looked, the land bloomed with organic shapes unlike any I had ever seen. Under a rock by my feet was a low, domed mound pierced with holes like an overturned colander, glowing from within. Beneath the everlives were bread-loaf-shaped growths covered with plates that slid aside as I watched, to expose a hummocked mound inside. There were things with leathery rinds that folded out like petals to collect the unlight, which snapped shut the instant I turned on my lamp. In between the larger life-forms, the ground was crawling with smaller, insect-sized things, and in the distance I could see gauzy curtains held up by gas bladders floating on the wind.
An entire alternate biota had sprung to life in Umberlight. Dust was not just the barren place we saw by day, but a thriving dual ecosystem, half of which had been waiting as spores or seeds in the soil, to be awakened by Umber’s radiation. I knelt down to see why they had been so invisible. By our light, some of them were transparent as glass. Others were so black they blended in with the rock. By Umberlight, they lit up in bright colors, reflecting a spectrum we could not see.

This world, with its invisible-one-moment-visible-the-next flora and fauna, was the part of the story I had the greatest trouble with: I couldn’t understand why, at the very least, they wouldn’t have noticed these organisms underfoot as they walked.
Other problems with the story’s credibility are the team’s apparent lack of radio or GPS (the dog could have been picked up if they radioed base to send someone to follow them and pick it up, and GPS would have stopped Mick getting lost in Mazy Lakes on the way back). Maybe these technologies would not work in the high radiation environment, but if this was explained, I missed it.
Setting those quibbles aside the story has a realistic setting, an absorbing story, and the last part is quite a ride. If you are a fan of Hal Clement then you’ll like this as Gilman appears to be channelling that writer in the first part of the story, and outdoing him to the power of n in the second. I can see why this tale was selected for so many of the Year’s Bests, and I would have probably done so too.

There isn’t much non-fiction in this volume. The lovely cover, Poisson D’Arte, is by Amanda Makepeace (shame they had to shotgun it to death with all the author names—could the designer not have reduced the type-size and layout to avoid overprinting the flying boat—or at the very least dump the “Featuring”?)
There is also a very brief Foreword by Dan Steffen, where he praises his cover artist (who contributed the series’ previous two covers) and encourages people to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards.

In conclusion, this volume is, almost inevitably, a mixed bag of stories—and a selection that almost exclusively comes from the free online magazines (you wonder what the Hugo nominators missed in the print and paid parts of the short fiction field).³ That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading my way through it, and I feel marginally better informed about the current state of the field than I did before. Steffen should be commended for assembling these volumes.
I’ll look forward to seeing how these stories compare with the finalists for the year, and the Best of the Year volumes, all of which I’ll try to get around to reading in due course.  ●

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1. I don’t understand why this volume has been so overlooked by reviewers (at least according to ISFDB and a brief web search). Not even Locus seem to have covered it.

2. Robson’s story is apparently the fourth in ‘The Lucky Peach’ series. The ISFDB page for that is here. I’ll be digging out the others in due course (one of which was a Hugo Finalist).

3. It is worth looking at the contents of this volume is terms of which publications they come from, and how many of them appear in the other Best of the Year anthologies.

Publications: Clarkesworld (6 stories), Uncanny (4), Tor.com (3), Lightspeed, (2), Asimov’s SF, Apex, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Agent of Utopia: New & Selected Stories—an author collection (1 each). The stories I liked mostly came from Clarkesworld, and those I disliked mostly from Uncanny.
These stories, like the Hugo Award finalists, bias heavily towards free online magazines (there is only one selection that didn’t appear in that form), although recommendations in various social media bubbles may also have skewed the choices—it is easy to link to an online story online, so to speak.
I note that you only needed between 23 to 48 nominations to appear as an also-ran short story or novelette—not a lot of votes; the finalists gathered between 53 to 216 nominations—not much more.

Best of the Years: the other volumes published for 2018 were The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 5, edited by David Afsharirad; The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke; The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eleven, edited by Ellen Datlow; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019, edited by Paula Guran; The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, edited by Rich Horton; The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories, edited by Allan Kaster; Best of British Science Fiction 2018, edited by Donna Scott; The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
The stories from The Long List Anthology that also appeared in these volumes are (A=Afsharirad, C=Clarke, G=Guran, H=Horton, K=Kaster, Sc=Scott, St=Strahan; no stories appeared in Ellen Datlow’s anthologies):
Lu (C, St), Kritzer (St), Larson (C, K, St), Roberts (C, G), Yap#1 (G), Lee (H, St), Anderson (Sc), Szpara (-), Greenblatt (G), Bear (-), Duncan (St), Robson (-), Iriarte (-), Bolander (-), Yap#2 (-), Buckell (-), Palmer (A), Johnson (-), Egan (-), Gilman (C, H, K).
The Larson and Gilman stories make it into three volumes; the Lu, Roberts, and Lee make into two; half a dozen of the others make it into one.
A lot of the no-shows are not surprising, but I’m puzzled why no-one used the Johnson—although there is no annual Best Fantasy anthology. I find it odd that the Roberts and the Lee both made it into two other volumes.
There appears to be a distinct lack of overlap between the tastes (or rather the declared choices) of the Hugo nominators, and those of the Best of the Year anthologists. Maybe the latter just read more widely.  ●