The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Read online

  Caroline M. Yoachim’s story selected for inclusion, “Carnival Nine,” was also named a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. On the Notable list, Linda Nagata’s “The Martian Obelisk” was named as a Hugo Award finalist.

  As I’ve noted in past forewords, I don’t log every single story I read throughout the year—I only dutifully log stories that I feel are in the running—so I don’t have an exact count of how many stories I reviewed or considered. But as in past years, I estimate that it was several thousand stories altogether, perhaps as many as five thousand.

  Aside from the top stories I passed along to the guest editor, naturally many of the other stories I read were perfectly good and enjoyable stories but didn’t quite stand out enough for me to consider them among the best of the year. I did, however, end up with about thirty additional stories that were at one point or another under serious consideration, including stories from publications not otherwise represented in this anthology (either in the table of contents or on the Notable Stories list), such as Hobart, The Dark, American Short Fiction, Nature, and A Public Space, as well as the anthologies and collections named above.

  This foreword mentions many but not all of the great publications considered for this anthology; be sure to see the table of contents and the Notable Stories list to get a more complete overview of the top publications currently available in the field.

  Given all the stories I have to consider every year, it’s probably obvious that I can do this only with a considerable amount of help. So I’d just like to take a moment to thank and acknowledge my team of first readers, who helped me evaluate various publications that I might not have had time to consider otherwise, including Alex Puncekar, Becky Sasala, Sandra Odell, Robyn Lupo, Karen Bovenmyer, and Christie Yant. Thanks also to Tim Mudie at Mariner Books, who all along has kept things running smoothly behind the scenes at Best American HQ but who has now, sadly, moved on to other adventures—ad astra, Tim! Thanks accordingly, too, to our temporary behind-the-scenes maven, Melissa Fisch—who came in right at the end of the BASFF cycle for this volume but ably managed to put out some fires at the last minute—and to our new maven, Jenny Xu.

  I thought I’d reiterate here something I said in this space in the previous volume, because it’s an important thing to remember as fans: Support the Things You Love. This is especially true of anything to do with short fiction, whether it comes to you in the form of magazines or anthologies. Many endeavors that produce some of our finest short fiction exist mainly because the people publishing them are motivated by love for the form and the genre. Sometimes they’re able to make a little money doing it, sometimes not. But no one’s getting rich off publishing short fiction, and any venue you can think of needs—and I can’t stress the needs part enough—your support.

  Support need not always come in the form of spending money on the thing (though naturally it often does); there’s also word of mouth (both on social media and among your peer group) and writing customer reviews on sites like Amazon (where reviews seem to have the most impact) or Goodreads.

  One easy thing to do to support a magazine is to post a reader review for the magazine as a whole on its subscription page (on Amazon or the like). No individual issue of a periodical is ever going to amass a high number of reviews, but the subscription page might . . . and having a good star rating should help new readers decide whether or not to give it a shot. And if you enjoy a particular magazine, encourage your friends to check it out as well; many publications have some way to sign up for a trial subscription where readers get at least one issue for free, and of course many magazines, like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Clarkesworld, have extensive archives of fiction available online that new readers can sample as well.

  All that said, here are a few of the fallen—publications that gave it a go but have now given up the ghost (or at least gone on an extended hiatus) since we launched BASFF in 2015: Bastion, Crossed Genres, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago’s Wainscot, Fictionvale, Flurb, Gamut, Goldfish Grimm, Ideomancer, Inhuman, Jamais Vu, Nameless Magazine, Penumbra, Persistent Visions (rebranded as PerVisions), Scigentasy, Shattered Prism (no activity in 2017, presumed dead), Subterranean Magazine, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Unstuck, Urban Fantasy Magazine, Waylines . . . and, well, you get the picture. The graveyard of short fiction publications is many rows deep.

  In more nebulous territory are magazines such as Omni, a legendary magazine in the annals of science fiction that had been defunct for many years and had just recently been attempting a comeback. Alas, Omni put out only one issue before its parent company (Penthouse Global Media) filed for bankruptcy, thus leaving Omni’s fate in limbo. (It was around long enough to contribute one story to our Notable list this year, though!)

  Still, that’s one more magazine on a long list of publications that are on the bubble or already dead. And in the spirit of optimistically hoping that some other newer publications can avoid such a fate, I encourage you to check out some of these newer venues that have been publishing consistently interesting material since launching: Book Smugglers, Diabolical Plots, FIYAH, Lackington’s, and Liminal Stories. Those are just a few of the publications I’ve been reading regularly that seem to be flying under the radar to some degree, so here’s hoping that this little signal boost helps ensure they’ll live to fight another day.

  Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition, please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

  —John Joseph Adams

  Introduction

  Schrödinger’s cat involves a hypothetical sealed box, a flask of poison, and a thought experiment that was never really meant to be applied anywhere but at the quantum level. That’s the problem with good thought experiments, though—the cat doesn’t stay in the box. The purpose of science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin intimated in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, is not to predict the future but to describe the world as it presently is. Or does it do both at once? Can science fiction and fantasy, by helping us examine the present, in turn shape the future—and in particular shape it away from its current destructive path? Right now a shadowy cabal seeking to bring about a fascist new world order has become more than a thought exercise. They seem to think science fiction and fantasy are pretty important, to the degree that they’ve been standing in the schoolhouse door whenever possible; that call has been coming from inside the house for a while. How, then, have science fiction and fantasy answered, in 2017?

  With a whole lot of goddamn revolution.

  Not that this is anything new. Despite the cabal (or maybe because of it), fantasy and science fiction have long been literatures of revolution—most effectively because casual or unanalytical readers fail to recognize them as such. And as Le Guin noted, most readers presume that one of these genres (and only one) is future-oriented. They aggrandize the predictive nature of science fiction while dismissing fantasy as regressive, when in fact both genres are actually about the present: science fiction through allegory, and fantasy by concatenation (e.g., “War of the Roses” + “dragons” + modern moral relativism; “boarding school” + “magic” + the creeping cryptofascism of 1990s Britain). These genres’ power to reimagine the present is of course a double-edged thing, because those same unanalytical readers tend to become unanalytical writers who thoughtlessly replicate the worst of the status quo. I am obviously being generous here, however, because the genres also include bad actors who intentionally use the power of science fiction and fantasy to entrench notions like “only white people will ever matter” and “men will always rape” and “disabled people should yearn for death” and “fat people can only be miserable and gluttonous.” Fortunately, the powers that be—the fans who record the podcasts and organize the awards ceremonies and buy the books and review the movies—are getting better at acknowledging such readers as uncritical and such writers as harmful. That’s good, because revolu
tionary art forms should be bigger than their hype men.

  And what can be more revolutionary than “what if,” when that speculation speaks truth to power?

  So: herein are contained the twenty most revolutionary short stories from the year 2017. It might be helpful if you knew what I meant by revolutionary, though!

  As I read through the full set of eighty stories, there seemed to be a number of stories that tackled the theme of revolution in well-trodden or overt ways, like AI turning against their creators, cryptocurrencies disrupting economies, and time travelers going back to kill [insert problematic political figure of choice]. Nothing wrong with familiar explorations; we all need to be thinking about what war will look like in the future. But while these kinds of stories are both enjoyable and necessary, I found myself particularly drawn to those that revolted against tradition, revolted against reader expectation, or revolted against the world entirely.

  As an example of a revolt against tradition, Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Black Powder” fractures the Scheherazade fairy-tale structure, then kintsugis the cracks with school shooting imagery and rage against toxic masculinity. Kate Alice Marshall’s “Destroy the City with Me Tonight” wrings from superhero clichés an excoriation of the demands society puts on its youth.

  But then Samuel Delany’s return to science fiction sees a revolt against form itself—and propriety, and identity—in “The Hermit of Houston.” Other stories are similarly explicit in their rejection of the expected. Kathleen Kayembe layers Congolese folklore about twins onto a revenge tale, with surprising results, in “You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych.” In Micah Dean Hicks’s “Church of Birds,” the one-winged swan prince pleads to be set free from the agonizing expectations of a society that will not accommodate his difference. Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Resident” disrupts with more subtle, creeping dread as the protagonist performs that most clichéd of writerly rites of passage: heading off to a writing residency. But by the end of the story (no spoilers), her world has been turned inside out.

  Most fascinating to me were those stories that revolted against reality itself by scrapping it and starting over entirely. This is because worldbuilding, as the lone skill set unique to science fiction and fantasy writing, is the core of these genres’ revolutionary power.

  In a two-hour workshop on worldbuilding that I offer to beginning writers, I start by laying out the basic structure of a world. We talk about the macro scale of worldbuilding—what the physical structure of a planet is like, and how this affects climate—and its micro scale, where we delve into social structures and how these might affect an individual character. Microworldbuilding is usually where we discuss the artificially constructed nature of our own reality. We start by discussing speciation, then significant morphological differences within a species, then raciation (and other insignificant morphological differences), then acculturation, and finally power dynamics. For example, I often point out that, morphologically speaking, there’s nothing that makes women inherently incapable of combat. We live in a world that frequently employs child soldiers, after all, who tend to be physically weaker than women yet are brutally effective. Only cultural habits make us reluctant to accept that people other than adult cishet men can be capable soldiers—some of us to the point of conjuring up pseudoscientific hogwash to justify our habits (e.g., women are nurturers and therefore wouldn’t shoot back). As another example, I talk about the performativity of social status. In our world—the world that readers know best—people of higher social status literally take up more space than everyone else. Correspondingly, people of lower status are expected to compress themselves, and they often do. But what’s one of the easiest ways for a defiant person of lower social status to get on a higher-status person’s nerves? Take up just as much space. Stand taller, don’t hunch up, actually use that elbow rest between the airplane seats. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of how social structures like these are constructed—and how they can be challenged—is key if a writer means to establish trust with savvy readers.

  And here I found even more profoundly revolutionary stories. Like Charles Payseur’s “Rivers Run Free,” which replaces oppressed people with dammed/diverted/drained rivers who are anthropomorphically embodied—and piiiiiiissed about what humans have done to them. Here was Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Carnival Nine,” set in a clockpunk world whose people are born with windable springs; like Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory, it is a powerful, haunting parable of disability. “Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn,” by A. Merc Rustad, posits a world in which people can be transformed into obedient starships—and a woman thus enslaved nevertheless defies her masters for the sake of a stowaway child. I think my favorite of these were the absurdist worlds—like the one in which a posthuman CEO and bigot gets his comeuppance at the hands of a lowly maintenance robot (“Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” by Tobias S. Buckell). Or Rachael K. Jones’s brilliantly bat-shit “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant,” in which a cyborg chef tries to manipulate humans through their stomachs . . . well, just read it. It’s too good, and too gonzo, to spoil.

  But these are just stories, some of you will say. Just good clean robotic/sentient spaceship/clockwork fun. Is it not a stretch to label this revolution, when only a few of these stories feature people getting shot up against a wall?

  To which I reply by pointing at human history. The most revolutionary changes in our world have rarely been imposed quickly or violently, after all, and the gun has not been the primary instrument of lasting change. Ideas are far more dangerous to the status quo, over the long term. Consider gender as a binary, pseudobiological concept. Why did we ever fixate on the idea of just two? Well, not all cultures have; seems like they’ve had the right idea all along. Consider how it became easier for us to imagine an African American president in 2008, after multiple popular TV shows and movies featured one in the 1980s and 1990s. Philip K. Dick’s The Crack in Space introduced the idea to the zeitgeist in 1966.

  So the shadowy cabal is completely right: fantasy and science fiction are the means through which we ponder the slow ongoing revolutions of the present and foreshadow—or incite—the next revolutions to come. Maybe if writers sell enough readers on the idea, we’ll soon be able to imagine a woman president. Or a society without gun violence . . . or one in which every human life actually does matter . . . or one in which we prioritize education and health over corporate profits. Maybe as stories and novels plausibly depict decolonized or precolonial societies, we might more easily shed the legacy of four hundred years of colonialism.

  And at the bare minimum, maybe we can get rid of the damned shadowy cabal.

  Readers and writers who lived through 2017 get what’s at stake. Readers in 2018 and beyond get it too—and so they will find much to support them (now) and inspire them (later) in this collection. It’s about the present and the future. Schrödinger’s cat is dead in the box, alive in the box, out of the box, and partying on a beach in Goa.

  Meet y’all there when the revolution’s done.

  —N. K. Jemisin

  Charles Payseur

  Rivers Run Free

  from Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  Where viora falls used to leap four thousand feet into Lake Aerik, her every pounding breath a climax, a triumph, there is now a citadel. It is the great accomplishment of the Lutean Empire—Viora dammed, chained, all her rage and love harnessed now to power their wheels, their cogs and dials and machines.

  “They know we’re here,” Sainet says, voice soft as if unused to speaking. I’m not sure he had ever taken solid form before I found him in a cave system and brought him out into the light. Some say his past makes him cold, but that’s not the sense I get from him.

  “We have time,” I say, more hope than fact. The Dowsers are doubtless on their way, but they haven’t learned to fly. And we need to see this. Or I want to see this. To remember this. Whatever happens next.

  “Is it true what t
hey say?” Verdan asks. She’s the youngest, used to be a branch of the Burgora before the Dowsers diverted the river, cut daughter from mother. “Can they really kill us?”

  “As much as they can stop the rain,” Mor says, eir voice like iron. Mor, the most faithful to the old songs. The cycles. Change without death, waters without end.

  “They can do bad enough,” I say, looking down at Aerik, who is nearly dry, alive only by the gentle touch of Viora’s waters, not strong enough even to take solid form. He’s just a trickle, our reminder and our warning—see what happens when you go against the Luteans. See what happens when river pits itself against human. Everywhere east, where Aerik used to birth a dozen strong rivers that radiated out, bringing life to the valley, there is only the Dust now. See what happens when you resist, when you defy. We’ve seen what we needed to see. We all turn toward that bleak horizon across the Dust, where far beyond the sea might reside, must reside. We move.

  A truth about rivers: we have always been able to draw our water together into solid bodies, to walk on two legs. But it is not without risk, and not without cost. We lose much of ourselves in the transformation, and if there’s not enough of us to start with, well . . .

  We ride stolen horses over the choked earth.

  “It’s not working,” Sainet says.

  They’ve had our trail since the citadel, and there’s been nothing since to help us lose them. Sometimes the Dowsers get confused when waters cross, and using the dry riverbed as a road had seemed nearly safe. But nothing is—safe, that is. Not since the Luteans discovered what a resource we are.

  “We have to turn and face them,” Mor says.