The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  ADAM-TROY CASTRO. Pitcher Plant

  SEANAN MCGUIRE. What Everyone Knows

  N. K. JEMISIN. The Storyteller’s Replacement

  SILVIA PARK. Poor Unfortunate Fools

  THEODORE MCCOMBS. Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women

  SOFIA SAMATAR. Hard Mary

  ADA HOFFMANN. Variations on a Theme from Turandot

  NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH. Through the Flash

  LASHAWN M. WANAK. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good

  BRENDA PEYNADO. The Kite Maker

  P. DJÈLÍ CLARK. The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington

  ANNALEE NEWITZ. When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis

  USMAN MALIK. Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung

  SARAH GAILEY. STET

  KELLY ROBSON. What Gentle Women Dare

  DARYL GREGORY. Nine Last Days on Planet Earth

  NINO CIPRI. Dead Air

  LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH. Skinned

  MARTIN CAHILL. Godmeat

  ADAM R. SHANNON. On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog

  Contributors’ Notes

  Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2018

  Read More from the Best American Series

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Carmen Maria Machado

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  ISSN 2573-0797 (print) ISSN 2573-0800 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-328-60437-8 (print) ISBN 978-1-328-60406-4 (ebook)

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Cover illustration © Galen Dara

  Machado photograph © Art Streiber

  v1.1019

  “Through the Flash” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. First published in Friday Black. Copyright © 2018 by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Reprinted from Friday Black by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  “Skinned” by Lesley Nneka Arimah. First published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 53, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author.

  “Godmeat” by Martin Cahill. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 96, May 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Martin Cahill. Reprinted by permission of Martin Cahill.

  “Pitcher Plant” by Adam-Troy Castro. First published in Nightmare Magazine, April 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Reprinted by permission of Adam-Troy Castro.

  “Dead Air” by Nino Cipri. First published in Nightmare Magazine, August 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Nino Cipri. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djèlí Clark. First published in Fireside Fiction, February 2018. Copyright © 2018 by P. Djèlí Clark. Reprinted by permission of P. Djèlí Clark.

  “STET” by Sarah Gailey. First published in Fireside Fiction, October 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Gailey. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Gailey.

  “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory. First published in Tor.com, September 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Daryl Gregory. Reprinted by permission of Tor.com.

  “Variations on a Theme from Turandot” by Ada Hoffmann. First published in Strange Horizons, May 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Carolyn Lamb. Reprinted by permission of Carolyn Lamb.

  “The Storyteller’s Replacement” by N. K. Jemisin. First published in How Long ’til Black Future Month?, November 2018. Copyright © 2018 by N. K. Jemisin. Reprinted by permission of N. K. Jemisin.

  “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” by Usman Malik. First published in Nightmare Magazine, November 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Usman Malik. Reprinted by permission of Usman Malik.

  “Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women” by Theodore McCombs. First published in Nightmare Magazine, February 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Theodore McCombs. Reprinted by permission of Theodore McCombs.

  “What Everyone Knows” by Seanan McGuire. First published in Kaiju Rising 2: Reign of Monsters, November 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Seanan McGuire. Reprinted by permission of Seanan McGuire.

  “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” by Annalee Newitz. First published in Future Tense Fiction, December 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Annalee Newitz. Reprinted by permission of Annalee Newitz.

  “Poor Unfortunate Fools” by Silvia Park. First published in The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project), November 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Silvia Park. Reprinted by permission of Silvia Park.

  “The Kite Maker” by Brenda Peynado. First published in Tor.com, August 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Brenda Peynado. Reprinted by permission of Brenda Peynado and Tor.com.

  “What Gentle Women Dare” by Kelly Robson. First published in Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Kelly Robson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Hard Mary” by Sofia Samatar. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 100, September 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Sofia Samatar. Reprinted by permission of Sofia Samatar.

  “On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog” by Adam R. Shannon. First published in Apex Magazine, December 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Adam R. Shannon. Reprinted by permission of Adam R. Shannon.

  “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good” by LaShawn M. Wanak. First published in FIYAH, Summer 2018. Copyright © 2018 by LaShawn M. Wanak. Reprinted by permission of LaShawn M. Wanak.

  Foreword

  Welcome to year five of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy! This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2018 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor Carmen Maria Machado.

  About This Year’s Guest Editor

  Simply put, Carmen Maria Machado is one of short fiction’s contemporary masters. Indeed, if you pay attention to short fiction at all, you almost certainly have already read—and been blown away by—her work. She’s a force in both the literary and the genre worlds, first publishing a plethora of much-lauded short fiction that made her a star and then going supernova with the release of her collection Her Body and Other Parties. That book, which gathers much but not all of her body of work, won many awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize
, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for many others, including the National Book Award, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (L.A. Times Book Prize), the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Kirkus Prize, and others. And if all that weren’t impressive enough, it’s also in development as a television show at FX.

  In genre, Machado’s short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Fairy Tale Review, Interfictions, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Lightspeed, Nightmare, PodCastle, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Unstuck, and in literary circles her fiction has graced the pages of such periodicals as Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, Granta, McSweeney’s, The American Reader, VQR, Gulf Coast, and others. In the realm of nonfiction, Machado is also a vibrant voice, with essays and criticism that have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, NPR Books, the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, Catapult, Guernica, and The Believer.

  But there’s more! She has had stories in anthologies such as Watchlist, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, Mixed Up, New Voices of Fantasy, Help Fund My Robot Army!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, Sunspot Jungle Vol. 1, Grave Predictions, and Latin@ Rising. She has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy twice (in the 2015 and 2018 volumes), The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Best Women’s Erotica of the Year. Her story “A Brief and Fearful Star” (published in Future Tense in 2018) was reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year and would have garnered serious consideration for this volume as well if Machado were not the guest editor.

  Machado holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded a slew of fellowships and residences from such august bodies as the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Times listed her as a member of “The New Vanguard,” citing Her Body and Other Parties as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

  Selection Criteria and Process

  The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2018. The technical criteria for consideration are (1) original publication in a nationally distributed American or Canadian publication (periodicals, collections, or anthologies, in print, online, or as an ebook); (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian or who have made the United States their home; (3) publication as text (audiobook, podcast, dramatized, interactive, and other forms of fiction are not considered); (4) original publication as short fiction (excerpts of novels are not knowingly considered); (5) story length of 17,499 words or less; (6) at least loosely categorized as science fiction or fantasy; (7) publication by someone other than the author (self-published works are not eligible); and (8) publication as an original work of the author (that is, not part of a media tie-in/licensed fiction program).

  As series editor, I attempted to read everything I could find that met these selection criteria. After doing all my reading, I created a list of what I felt were the top eighty stories (forty science fiction and forty fantasy) published in the genre. Those eighty stories were sent to the guest editor, who read them and then chose the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the anthology. The guest editor read all the stories anonymously, with no bylines attached to them nor any information about where the story originally appeared.

  The guest editor’s top twenty selections appear in this volume; the sixty stories that did not make it into the anthology are listed in the back of this book as “Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2018.”

  2018 Summation

  As per my standard practice, in my effort to determine the top eighty stories of the year, I read and considered several thousand stories from a wide variety of periodicals, anthologies, and collections. Winnowing down the list to just eighty was (as usual) extremely difficult, and so beyond the top eighty I had several dozen additional stories that were at one point or another under serious consideration.

  The top eighty this year were drawn from forty different publications: twenty-three periodicals, ten anthologies, and seven single-author collections. The final table of contents draws from thirteen different sources: eleven periodicals, one anthology, and two collections. Nightmare Magazine had the most selections (four); Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, and Fireside Fiction had two each.

  Four of the authors included in this volume (Adam-Troy Castro, N. K. Jemisin, Seanan McGuire, and Sofia Samatar) have previously appeared in BASFF; thus, the remaining sixteen authors are appearing for the first time. Sofia Samatar has the most BASFF appearances all-time with four; this is the second appearance for Castro, Jemisin, and McGuire.

  This year marks the first appearances of four periodicals in our table of contents: Apex Magazine, Future Tense, The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project), and FIYAH. Periodicals appearing in the top eighty for the first time this year include Eyedolon, MIT Technology Review, The Paris Review, Stonecoast Review, and Vastarien.

  Adam-Troy Castro and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah had the most stories in the top eighty this year, with three each; several other authors had two each: Alyssa Wong, Annalee Newitz, Carrie Vaughn, Daniel H. Wilson, E. Lily Yu, Elizabeth Bear, Kelly Robson, Kurt Fawver, N. K. Jemisin, P. Djèlí Clark, and Seanan McGuire. Overall, sixty-six different authors are represented (which is, weirdly, the same number of different authors as in last year’s volume).

  P. Djèlí Clark’s story selected for inclusion, “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and was named a finalist for the Hugo and Sturgeon Awards. Daryl Gregory’s “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” was named a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards. Sarah Gailey’s “STET” is a Hugo and Locus finalist. The selections by Annalee Newitz (“When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”) and Adam R. Shannon (“On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog”) were both finalists for the Sturgeon (and Newitz was this year’s winner), and Usman Malik’s story, “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung,” was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. N. K. Jemisin’s “The Storyteller’s Replacement” was a Locus finalist.

  Among the Notable Stories, three were finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards: Brooke Bolander’s “The Only Harmless Great Thing” (Nebula Award winner, and also a finalist for the Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Awards); “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,” by Alix E. Harrow; and “The Court Magician,” by Sarah Pinsker. The following Notable Stories were also Locus finalists: “Okay, Glory,” by Elizabeth Bear; “Queen Lily,” by Theodora Goss; “Firelight,” by Ursula K. Le Guin; and “The Starship and the Temple Cat,” by Yoon Ha Lee. “And Yet,” by A. T. Greenblatt , and “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births,” by José Pablo Iriarte, were named Nebula finalists. Joe Hill’s “You Are Released” was a finalist for the Stoker.

  (Note: The final results of these awards won’t be known until after this text is locked for production but will be known by the time the book is published.)

  Anthologies

  The lone anthology to have a story represented in the table of contents this year was Kaiju Rising 2: Reign of Monsters, edited by N. X. Sharps and Alana Abbott; several other anthologies, however, did have stories in the top eighty, such as A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, edited by Elsie Chapman and Ellen Oh; Flight or Fright, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent; Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller; Particulates, edited by Nalo Hopkinson; and The Devil and the Deep, edited by Ellen Datlow. The anthology with the most stories in the top eighty — four — was Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush; Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, edited by Gary Whitta, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey, had three; and Infinity’s End, edited by J
onathan Strahan, and Welcome to Dystopia, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, had two each.

  Here’s a sampling of the anthologies that published fine work that didn’t quite manage to make it into the top eighty but are worthwhile just the same: The Book of Magic, edited by Gardner Dozois; Future Fiction, edited by Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso; Hath No Fury, edited by Melanie R. Meadors and J. M. Martin; The Cackle of Cthulhu, edited by Alex Shvartsman; A Year Without Winter, edited by Dehlia Hannah, Brenda Cooper, Joey Eschrich, and Cynthia Selin; By the Light of Camelot, edited by J. R. Campbell and Shannon Allen; Toil and Trouble, edited by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe; Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath, edited by Kevin J. Anderson; Fresh Ink, edited by Lamar Giles; Phantoms, edited by Marie O’Regan; Lost Films, edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle; Shades Within Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law; Underwater Ballroom Society, edited by Tiffany Trent and Stephanie Burgis; Sword and Sonnet, edited by Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler; and Sunspot Jungle Vol. 1, edited by Bill Campbell.

  Additionally, the Amazon Original Stories program released several interesting SF/F works in 2018 in two “collections,” Warmer and Dark Corners; they aren’t quite anthologies per se (nor are they collections in typical publishing parlance), since the stories are downloaded individually, but otherwise that’s what they feel like. I think of them as deconstructed anthologies, so I’m including them in this section.

  I don’t keep close tabs on all-reprint anthologies since by definition nothing in them is eligible for BASFF, but among those worthy of note released in 2018 include: The Future Is Female!, edited by Lisa Yaszek, and The Final Frontier, edited by Neil Clarke.

  Collections

  The two standout collections this year were Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (three stories in the top eighty, one selection), and How Long ’til Black Future Month?, by N. K. Jemisin (two stories in the top eighty, one selection), which are also the only two collections to produce BASFF selections this year. Other collections that had stories in the top eighty were Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, by Kelly Barnhill; Guardian Angels and Other Monsters, by Daniel H. Wilson; and We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories, by C. Robert Cargill. Fine work was to be found in several other collections (some of which contained only reprints and thus had no eligible material), including The Promise of Space, by James Patrick Kelly; All the Names They Used for God: Stories, by Anjali Sachdeva; The End of All Our Exploring, by F. Brett Cox; The Dissolution of Small Worlds, by Kurt Fawver; The Merry Spinster, by Mallory Ortberg; The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales, by Michael Bishop; Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction, by Rich Larson; Night Beast, by Ruth Joffre; Godfall and Other Stories, by Sandra M. Odell; Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, by Vandana Singh; Acres of Perhaps, by Will Ludwigsen; Half Gods, by Akil Kumarasamy; An Agent of Utopia, by Andy Duncan; The Ones Who Are Waving, by Glen Hirshberg; Alien Virus Love Disaster, by Abbey Mei Otis; All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma; The Future Is Blue, by Catherynne M. Valente; How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, by Jane Yolen; The Dinosaur Tourist, by Caitlín R. Kiernan; and Starlings, by Jo Walton.