Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free Space | 1997 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 2 | The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe | 2007 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 3 | The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection | 2007 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 4 | Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition | 2008 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 5 | The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21 | 2008 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 6 | The New Space Opera 2 | 2009 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 7 | Timeless Time Travel Tales | 2012 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 8 | The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection | 2012 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 9 | The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 4 | 2012 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 10 | The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 | 2012 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 11 | Galactic Empires | 2017 | John Barnes | Buy |
Free Space, published in 1997 and edited by Barnes alongside Brad Linaweaver, is an original anthology of stories set in a libertarian space-faring future. It gathered stories from a range of science fiction writers and remains one of Barnes’s editorial credits alongside his fiction career.
The other anthologies here are best-of-year compilations – Gardner Dozois’s long-running Year’s Best Science Fiction series, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the Year’s Top Ten Tales collections – in which Barnes appeared as a contributor. His inclusion across multiple volumes of these major series reflects his standing in the short fiction community through the 2000s and early 2010s. Specialty volumes like The New Space Opera 2, The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe, and Galactic Empires similarly feature his work alongside other significant genre writers.
For readers tracking Barnes’s short fiction career, this list maps where his stories appeared in the most visible anthology venues of the period. The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21 and the Jim Baen’s Universe collection both came out in 2008, a productive year for his shorter work.