The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Read online

  Periodicals

  I surveyed more than a hundred different periodicals over the course of the year and paid equal attention to genre publications both large and small. Likewise I do my best to find any genre fiction lurking in the pages of mainstream and/or literary publications.

  Outside of the two magazines I edit—Lightspeed and Nightmare—which are inevitably well represented in the top eighty, since one does tend to like one’s own taste in fiction, periodicals that were well represented include Apex (two); Clarkesworld (three); Eyedolon* (two); Fireside (three); FIYAH (two); Strange Horizons (three); Terraform (two), Tor.com (four); and Uncanny (three). The following periodicals each had one story in the top eighty: Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Future Tense, McSweeney’s, MIT Technology Review, The Paris Review, Stonecoast Review, The Dark, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Margins, and Vastarien.*

  Some periodicals that published interesting material that didn’t make it into the top eighty include Augur,* Cincinnati Review, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Future Science Fiction Digest,* Playboy, PodCastle, Shimmer, Reason.com, The Sun, Tin House, and Wired.

  It’s always nice to see new publications cropping up year to year, and so to celebrate that I’ve denoted with an asterisk above those publications that debuted in 2018. But the circle of life is, well, a circle, and inevitably all good things come to an end. This year is no exception: several periodicals have either gone extinct or embarked on an indefinite hiatus. These include Cicada (founded 1998), Dark Discoveries (founded 2004), Liminal Stories (founded 2016), Mythic Delirium (founded 1998), and Shimmer (founded 2005). Book Smugglers Publishing isn’t closing but announced in November that it will be largely scaling back its fiction endeavors. Two major magazines lasted through 2018 but have announced they will cease publication in 2019 after fourteen-year runs: Intergalactic Medicine Show and Apex Magazine.

  This is a good time to remind fine people like you who love short fiction enough to not only read this book but read this foreword that short fiction publishers need your support to keep their endeavors going. If you can, subscribe, review, spread the word. Every little bit helps.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d 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, Sandra Odell, and Christie Yant. Thanks also to Jenny Xu at Mariner Books, who is our current point person keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes at Best American HQ. Likewise I’m grateful to all the authors who alert me to their published eligible works by sending them to me via my BASFF online submissions portal (which is extremely helpful to make sure I don’t miss anything), and of course I also deeply appreciate the editors and publishers who take the time to make sure I get copies of the books or periodicals they publish. Thanks too to David Steffen, who runs the Submission Grinder writers’ market database, for his assistance in helping me do some oversight on my list of new and gone-extinct markets. And last but not least, a huge thanks to all the readers who have purchased (and reviewed!) previous iterations of BASFF and thus have enabled the series to continue; I hope we can keep it going for a long, long time. (If you read and loved a previous edition, please do consider leaving a review at your venue of choice; it really does help!)

  Submissions for Next Year’s Volume

  Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2019), please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

  —John Joseph Adams

  Introduction

  In an ideal world, I would have opened this essay with one of my favorite quotes from Salvador Dalí, the one he wrote in his diary about how he’s discovered that he’s always been painting the rhinoceros horn. It’s one of my favorite quotes about art, and I have always found its general thrust—the subtly singular focus of artistic obsession—to be funny, useful, and instructive.1 But instead I find myself feeling uncharitable, like a beleaguered parent driving a minivan across the Southwest whose fraternal twins are in the back seat drawing invisible lines down the upholstery and swatting at each other.2

  There is currently an unending, utterly exhausting fight between two particular writing communities: literary fiction and genre fiction. Fight might not even be the correct word, as it lacks both the acute thrill and the clear resolution of physical combat. You cannot attend a con, conference, or spend any time on social media without running into this petty squabbling, in which some writers and readers of the two communities find themselves thoughtlessly repeating a series of untrue truisms about the other in what they consider sympathetic or like-minded spaces: con panels, for example, or classrooms, or the surprisingly narrow scope of their Twitter universe. The untrue truisms are slightly different only in the most minor way: the clichés spouted by genre writers about literary fiction tend to be ignorant and defensive; the clichés spouted by literary writers about genre fiction tend to be ignorant and snobbish. “Literary fiction is boring and entirely about college professors sleeping with their students!” “Genre fiction is unserious and entirely about dragons and spaceships! Pew pew, pew pew.”3 They are such tedious clichés, and ones performed in such bad faith, that all they tell me is that the offending thinker is more interested in victimhood or condescension than in reading good work or becoming a better writer. It is solipsistic, irritating, and the opposite of useful. What a coincidence, I always think, that the fiction you think is terrible and not worth learning from is also one you’ve apparently never read.4 Blanket statements about these communities fail to be many things: they are not smart, not thoughtful, not generous, not a reflection of an omnivorous mind—all things you need as a reader and a writer!—but perhaps most criminally, they are not interesting.

  I’ve been teaching undergraduates for the better part of a decade, and spend much of my time telling them that literature is about potential, about the brazen and thrilling integration of other people’s history and art with their history and art, about ambitious leaps of genre and world-building and the ordinary magic of the human experience and the minute perfection of the sentence and pursuing your own obsessions and dozens of other wonderful things besides. And then they turn to the practitioners and readers of the craft and see endless, thoughtless squabbling, pointless category-enforcing, people who refuse to read outside of their comfort zones or even acknowledge their value, people who think of the work of certain writers as theirs instead of everyone’s. I am trying to show them that traditions are not destinies, that no community can own a writer or a book, that the existence of multiple distinct communities of literature means that there is more fiction to read, that the house is even bigger than you had imagined. And yet some folks are only interested in locking the doors, turning out the lights. It’s bullshit, and it hits every button of irritation I possess.

  Kelly Link has often spoken of how genre is, among other things, “the promise of pleasure,” and if you think of all fiction as possessing or belonging to a genre (which I do), the issue becomes less combative. Instead of How can I denigrate the category to which this story belongs, and by extension this story? you might ask, What kind of pleasure does this story bring me? (Or, What kind of pleasure might this story bring someone else?)5 With that perspective fiction becomes infused with promise. This story might bring the deep somatic thrill of terror or the alluring perfume of mystery; it might sting with familiarity or drag you howling into the unknown, or both. It might give you sentences so thoughtful and precise you feel dizzy with specificity; those sentences might defamiliarize the familiar or be a garden path into some fresh territory you’ve never seen before. It might tell a story that you, in your eternal human nearsightedness, have never encountered before. It might tell you one that you didn’t know you needed to hear.

  I read for this edition of The Best American
Science Fiction and Fantasy with no particular agenda other than my personal pleasure. These stories—as well as those listed as honorable mentions—come from literary magazines and publishers and genre magazines and publishers, from authors who have been recognized by genre and literary awards, by graduates of the Clarion and MFA programs, and by folks who haven’t done either. All of these details about the authors and the magazines that published their work are incidental. Here you will find an undeniable bias toward the use of formal constraints,6 vibrant and muscular prose,7 ambitious weirdness.8 Many of these stories unnerved9 me, and others impressed me with their scope10 and their intimacy.11 There are several stories that reveal my weakness for compelling, complex, tender narratives about animals and animal-like creatures.12 There is one story that made me salivate,13 one that made me stand up out of my chair,14 one that made me cry.15 All of them made me happy to be a reader and writer in 2019.

  And that’s all that matters, really. Why waste time drawing boundaries and performing ancient arguments and erecting dead horses and beating straw men and enacting coldness and smugness when you could be reading and salivating and standing and yelling and crying and learning and experiencing narrative pleasure and wonder and joy? Why, when you can do those things, would you do anything else?

  —Carmen Maria Machado

  Adam-Troy Castro

  Pitcher Plant

  from Nightmare Magazine

  The mansion is a study in architecture at war with itself. It’s not just the windows that don’t match and the turrets that don’t overlook anything and the roof that sits flat here while looming at impossible angles there. Nor is it just the exterior walls that seen from one angle seem rotted and decrepit and about to collapse, and seen from another gleam like jewels. Nor is it the gnarled skin of the columns that support the overhang at the front entrance, nor the glistening scarlet door that seems poised to open until you see that it’s not a real door at all but just a reasonable facsimile, carved with great love into what would otherwise be just a featureless brick wall.

  It’s the way that none of this stays the same for more than a second or two; the way you can focus on one bay window or one turret or one balcony only to see it shift, retract, and sink beneath the house’s surface like something swallowed by an amoeba, only to emerge, seconds or minutes later, wearing a different shape, a different character, a different purpose in the overall design. It is impossible to face the mansion without knowing that it has always been changing, plank by plank, brick by brick, for as long as it has stood in this damned and isolated place beneath scarlet skies, in a blackened country, far from any roads.

  You are impressed. Most normal houses provide no challenge to you. You’re not just an excellent thief; you’re the first thief. You find most locks nothing more than interesting trinkets, most fortresses nothing more than delusions built of mortar and stone. Some have required planning, some have been challenging, but few have stymied you for more than a few minutes. For you, the greatest difficulties involved in conquering any house have been first finding out that the house was there, then determining who and what were inside, and finally making the decision that the time had come to pass through the threshold, to claim those inside. But this house, by its very nature, has no threshold; it has no vestibule; it has no foyer. It has only a spastic geography that alters in hiccups. You are particularly fascinated by the moat: a gaping, watery trench that orbits the house like the blip on a radar screen, constantly excavating itself on one end while filling itself in on the other. The alligators that bob to the surface of that water, hissing and snapping, threatening bloody dismemberment to any wanderer unlucky enough to be standing on the grass when the earth beneath him becomes moat again, are no less threatening for being temporary. It’s a nice effect, determined to unnerve any potential intruders. You can only admire the tenants for their cleverness in managing such a thing, as you wait for the moat to fill in before you, enabling you to approach the house without wetting your feet.

  The outer wall is warm. Of course, most inhabited buildings are warm, in a way that has little to do with surface temperature. They glow, in their own special way, with the warmth of the lives within. All houses bear the mark of the births and deaths, the lovemaking and the hate, the complacency and the fear, of those within. It may not be possible to track the entire course of their lives with a touch, but it’s hard not to know that inhabitants exist. But this house is warm in a different way. It feels like it’s boiling. It feels like a sack full of cats, scratching and clawing and tearing pieces from each other in their desperation to be free. You pull your hand away as if burned. You touch the wall again. And this time you endure the heat, lingering on it, giving yourself time to feel the sheer weight of all the pain imprisoned within. There’s unhappiness here: desperate unhappiness. And hopelessness too. There’s so much that breaking in is going to mean taking a deliberate step into somebody’s personal hell. This won’t deter you, of course. You’ve seen suffering before. But it’s good to know such things before getting down to work. You nod, and take a step back, and watch the shifting textures of the wall before you as they shift from brick to stucco to stone to unfinished wood. You wait until a single open window, flapping a flyspecked pull-down shade, comes around the corner and moves across the building face before you. The view through that window shows no details but shifts color and brightness as quickly as a strobe light. It looks like an opening into a blast furnace. It would take insanity or unlimited self-confidence or unconditional devotion to duty to willingly enter such a place. You don’t hesitate. You grab the window as it moves by, hop up onto the sill, and slide into the mansion with an ease that makes you wonder why you ever thought this was going to be difficult.

  Your first glimpse of the mansion’s interior turns out to be a parlor. Its own geography doesn’t shift, which you find a relief after the crazy-quilt schizophrenia of the architecture outside. It’s still a nasty place, choked with dust, unlit except for a single shaft of sunlight entering through the same window that just admitted you. The sunlight doesn’t change angle or orientation, despite the window’s ever-changing attitude toward the sun; that by itself is enough to make you look back out that window so you can spot the motionless clouds and gnarled trees and the frozen position of a bird caught in midflight and from them make the determination that time inside the mansion has been compressed to fit inside a single captured moment. It’s an impressive trick, which bodes poorly for the number of even more impressive tricks that the tenants might still have waiting for you as you penetrate deeper and deeper into the house. You take it as a welcome indication that you’re now free to take as much time as you require.

  Turning from the window, you regard the rest of the shadow-choked room: the bookshelves stuffed with volumes chosen for their bindings instead of their literary value, the fireplace sitting black behind an iron grate, the trophy heads of a rhino and a moose looming over a grand desk. Something—a rat, or perhaps something stranger—scratches in a corner. A pair of carved mahogany doors sit invitingly at the far end of the room, but you don’t head there right away; instead you move to the desk, which bears a single yellowed sheet of paper so carefully centered that it screams set decoration. The dust covering the desk is so thick that the paper itself is impossible to read at first, but you sweep away the detritus of years and read the words that have been left for you in ink as black as your purpose here: LEAVE US ALONE! It’s the first pathetic thing you’ve seen since your arrival, and it lets you know the tenants are frightened of you. You crumple the paper without a thought and drop it to the floor, wondering just how long it will take the dust to bury the useless warning forever.

  A deadbolt seals the double doors, but it’s no challenge. You glide through the opening into a long gray hallway that seems to extend an infinite distance in both directions. The air is obscured with dust and vapor, but you can see that the walls extend at least as far as their vanishing points. There don’t seem to be any other doo
rs or branching corridors as far as you can see. The floor is ceramic tile; the walls are lit by a series of torches sprouting eternal flame; the air echoes with the distant sound of daggers sharpening on whetstones. You stand outside the parlor, glancing first one way and then the other, admiring the impossibility of the choice you’ve just been offered. It’s infinity both ways. You could very easily commit to one direction, or the other, and spend hours or days or years trudging toward an imaginary destination, always wondering whether it was truly up ahead or instead receding further with every step. You could, but you won’t. It’s too easy a trick to fool the likes of you. You know that there’s no life to be found either way, and that in any situation where you’re offered two equally unacceptable options, the only true solution is to make a point of choosing neither.