The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Read online

  Periodicals

  More than a hundred periodicals were considered throughout the year in my hunt for the Top 80 stories. I read magazines both large and small and sought out the genre stories that might have been lurking in the pages of literary and/or mainstream periodicals.

  The following magazines had work representing them in the Top 80 this year: Anathema (two), Asimov’s Science Fiction (three), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (two), Clarkesworld (two), Fireside (two), Future Tense (two), Lightspeed (nine), Nightmare (four), Terraform (two), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (four), Tor.com (four), and Uncanny (eight). The following periodicals had one story each: Amazing Stories, Escape Pod, FIYAH, Foreshadow, PodCastle, The New Yorker, The Verge (Better Worlds), and Weird Tales.

  The following outlets published stories that were under serious consideration for the Top 80: MIT Technology Review, Strange Horizons, Catapult, the Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, Factor Four Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, Futures, the Southern Review, The Sun, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Tin House, and a little venue called the New York Times. This last I’ll expand upon a bit, because it was an intriguing project: the Times published a series of “Op-Eds from the Future,” which produced very good material by contributors including Ted Chiang, Brooke Bolander, and Jeff VanderMeer. Being in “op-ed” format, however, they didn’t necessarily feel like stories, though some of them were close enough to warrant consideration. They’re worth checking out online.

  And now we come to the periodical graveyard, or, in some cases, a temporary resting place. As noted in this space last year, the long-running magazines Intergalactic Medicine Show and Apex Magazine both announced they were ceasing publication, with neither publishing any new content in 2019. However, as I was in the midst of this writing (mid-May 2020), Apex announced that it would be returning in 2021. Other publications that ceased operations (or went on indefinite hiatus) in 2019 include: Bastion, Factor Four Magazine, and Mad Scientist Journal. Additionally, one appeared and then shut down in 2019, the interesting but short-lived Foreshadow.

  In tribute to these magazines that have gone the way of the dinosaur, I implore you to support the short fiction publishers you love. If you can, subscribe (even if they offer content for free), review, spread the word. Every little bit helps.

  Acknowledgments

  It would essentially be impossible for me to do the work of BASFF properly without the able assistance of others. This year, much of that work fell to my newly minted assistant series editor, Christopher Cevasco (who used to edit a pretty great historical fiction/fantasy magazine called Paradox back in the day); bringing him on board feels like one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Additionally, Alex Puncekar and Christie Yant again provided editorial support. Huge thanks to you all.

  I’d also like to thank Jenny Xu at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who kindly put up with my delay in turning in this foreword, and otherwise keeps the gears turning back at Best American HQ. Thanks too to David Steffen, who runs the Submission Grinder writer’s market database, for his assistance in helping me update the list of gone-extinct markets mentioned above.

  As always, I’m most appreciative when authors alert me to their eligible works by dropping me a line or sending their work via my BASFF online submissions portal. Likewise, I’m grateful to the editors and publishers who do the same—particularly the ones who proactively make sure I get copies of their works without me having to ask (and/or ask . . . repeatedly!).

  And finally, I’m eternally grateful to all of the readers of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy—both those who have read every volume and the newcomers. And a special thank-you to readers who have left positive reviews on Amazon or Goodreads or the like; reader reviews really do help bring attention to this series, as does talking about BASFF—or any book or story you love—on social media.

  Submissions for Next Year’s Volume

  Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2020), please visit johnjosephadams​.com/​best​-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

  —John Joseph Adams

  Introduction

  There’s a haunted room in my house. It’s the back bedroom on the first floor—though I doubt there’s ever been a bed in it. In fact, no one in the family has ever been able to use that room for anything, for long.

  My grandparents built the house in 1938; I own it now. In 1952 my grandfather died in the house—suddenly, from a pulmonary embolism. My mother and I were there at the time, but I don’t recall the circumstances, as I was two weeks old. Five years later, my grandmother died and my mother inherited the house. We lived there for the next nine years.

  During that time, my parents tried repeatedly to use the back bedroom for an office, a writing room, file storage, a small library . . . but no one ever stayed in the room for more than half an hour at a time, and sooner or later, whichever parent was trying to do taxes or write lesson plans would be doing it on the coffee table in the living room or the kitchen counter.

  The back bedroom is always cold. Its door opens onto a small central space where an old floor furnace supplies heat to the master bedroom, a small bathroom, the living room—and theoretically, to the back bedroom. Even with the door wide open and the furnace going full blast three feet away, the room is always cold.

  We moved from that house when I was fourteen. It was another fifty years before it occurred to me that my grandfather might have died in the back bedroom.

  His name was Harold S. Sykes, and he was the mayor of the city we lived in. He also wrote fantasy and science fiction stories,1 some of them published in Amazing Stories, Super Science Stories: The Big Book of Science Fiction, and other magazines of what-wasn’t-yet-called speculative fiction. My mother had kept several of the magazines, and as I read everything else in the house, I also read those.

  Now, while reading through the eighty finalist stories submitted for this anthology, I’d noticed certain common themes and concepts among them, which rang a faint, subliminal bell for me. There were echoes from a long life of reading everything I could get my hands on, including a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but there were plenty of new themes, too. And as I was reading some of these stories in my old family house, it occurred to me to wonder what had (and hadn’t) changed in the years between 1930 (when my grandfather’s first story, “The Insatiable Entity,” was published in Science Wonder Stories) and 2020.

  “Fantastic” stories dealt (and still deal) with pretty much everything, but if you look at a lot of them, it’s easy to see broad general categories. Let’s look at a few.

  First, there’s Doomed Earth. This one has always been with us, apparently. As well it might be: it’s an inherently human concept, heavy with hubris, and ever more engorged in later years. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, Earth tended to be doomed by external forces: asteroids, alien invasions, planetary discombobulations. In the modern forms, it’s always humans. We are responsible for the death/destruction of the planet!

  What’s interesting about the differences in early and later doom stories is that in both types, the destruction/impairment of Earth is often merely the instigating factor for a second type of story—Escaping Spaceship/Seeds of Humanity—but in the more modern versions, you often see stories that don’t deal with escape as much as they deal with entrapment. People stranded on a dying world, meeting the notion of personal obliteration with everything from courage and unselfish love to pettiness and abnegation.

  Now, even the Escaping Spaceship stories are less straight adventure and more psychology. One very interesting evolution is that many such stories involve extensive worldbuilding: the painstaking composition of a new onboard culture, frequently one whose Earthbound roots have long since decayed.

  (One of the very interesting stories in this anthology is actually a twofer: “Between the Dark and the Dark” involves two parallel stories, one onboard suc
h a multigenerational ship whose humans have long since lost direct touch with Earth—though their ship hasn’t—and one on Earth, showing the equally changed culture of the people who stayed behind to deal with natural and political disasters, whose long-term hope lies in those deaf space-seeds, hurtling outward.)

  One thing you always run into when dealing with SF/F is that slash between the Fs. There’s a rough rule of thumb for what’s fantasy and what’s science fiction, but there’s often a lot of overlap.

  Where do Aliens fall? It often depends on how the writer has drawn the specs. Invasion of Earth by (usually, but not always, inimical) aliens can be—and often is—straight SF, so long as the world of the story is drawn with internally consistent rules.

  Invasion-by-hostile-aliens stories were much more common in the earlier days of speculative fiction than they are now. (I read a story in one of my grandfather’s magazines called “The Bas-Relief,” which dealt with the periodic invasion of Earth by a race of giant eel-men, who were using Earth as a breeding ground for food, i.e., humans. This one scared the pants off me when I read it. I was about eleven, I think, but still.)

  Now, writers seem much more inclined to think that humans are the nastiest thing around, and thus much more likely to go invade, exploit, or ruin some hapless other planet. This may be the result of them growing up with the actuality of space travel, rather than merely the concept of it—and with a basic conception of humanity formed by social media rather than, say, philosophy or religion.

  Putting aside invasion stories, though, aliens offer a kaleidoscopic view of humanity—particularly one sort of story that’s almost completely modern: AI/Tech stories.

  In 1930 computers didn’t exist. You didn’t start seeing stories involving machine intelligence until the late ’50s (hey, ENIAC is only eight years older than I am), but such stories pretty much exploded through the last quarter of the twentieth century. And the major modern fictional innovation is that the tech often becomes real characters, rather than simply part of the worldbuilding.

  This in turn led to more psychologically oriented stories asking metaphysical questions about the nature of intelligence—and of emotion (sometimes by contrast with a machine intelligence; sometimes by imitation or evolution of one). But a story lives or dies on its characters. Said characters may be “tech” themselves, but they still embody human preoccupations with themselves, and AI stories let writers do their favorite thing and explore themselves, while still dealing with novel situations that are disturbingly possible.

  Another subset of Alien stories goes in the opposite direction, squarely into fantasy. These are the stories that are based on and drawn from extant folklore, magical beliefs, and history. Most such stories (as opposed to novels) deal with a particular human attribute—sexuality, greed, charity, identity—metaphorically expressed, and you’ll see this particular story form going way back—perhaps the oldest form of speculative fiction. Homer, anyone? Beowulf? Gilgamesh?

  As noted, one subset of folklore/myth crosses into the Alien concept. Another deals explicitly or referentially with real cultural beliefs and stories, and the third takes invented folklore/fairy story/myth material, but presents it stylistically in a traditional manner of storytelling.

  I’m kind of putting aside discussion of stories written ostensibly as fantasy, but primarily for the purpose of political or social commentary, often using a standardized fairy-tale setting. There’s a certain amount of this in many stories—in fact, a good story almost always includes a layer of social commentary—but in latter years, I’m seeing many more explicitly political stories. There’s one included in this anthology—“Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters”—and I chose that one for its wit, elegance, humor, and heart.

  Going on from the concept of using fairy tales and folklore as the basis for a story—whether merely as the setting of a world, or using the storytelling style—we come to the notion of Trope stories.

  Trope stories are those wherein the writer deliberately takes on a popular style or trope and either uses it for humor (“The Galactic Tourist . . .”) or goes further, into metafiction (“Another Avatar”). This is a fairly modern approach. You do occasionally see this in older mid-twentieth-century stories, but almost always in the form of a futuristic murder mystery (cf. Isaac Asimov).

  So—is all writing essentially navel-gazing? Well, yes, but consider where that phrase came from: the Greek term omphalos, which translates roughly as “navel,” but which referred originally to the “navel of the world”; i.e., the metaphorical center or hub of something. Good navel-gazing is the ultimate in speculative fiction, where a writer can express a greater truth by means of a microcosmic experience that takes the reader to the heart (or the navel . . .) of the matter.

  Navel-gazing risks being boring by a lack of specificity. Someone contemplating the downfall of humanity is a bore (you’d think modern Twitter minds would realize this, but nooo . . .), whereas someone contemplating their own imminent demise is pretty fascinating.

  Overall, in this very informal survey of trends, I’d have to say that twenty-first-century speculative fiction expresses a lot more personal anxiety than did older stories from the mid-to-latish twentieth century—though such writing has always been used as a means of dealing with Fear of the Unknown.

  The major difference I see is that the unknown now openly and explicitly encompasses ourselves. One of the stories in this book, “Erase, Erase, Erase,” could as easily be a literary short story dealing with alienation and powerlessness, or a straight psychological description of the results of child abuse. It’s only fantasy because we don’t know whether the first-person writer is mentally deranged or not; either way, they’re telling the truth.

  I don’t recall much political moralizing in the older stories, either overt or veiled. (There were a couple of stories in the entry pool that so clearly were focused on Voldemort—you know, “He Who Must Not Be Named” because everybody already knows who you’re talking about—that the authors were metaphorically jumping up and down in agitation, waving their arms and pointing a thousand-watt flashlight, wordlessly shouting, “Him! It’s Him I’m talking about!” I mean it’s HIM!!!)

  On the other hand, there’s a real place for what might be called Domestic stories: stories that take their shape from ordinary modern life and its historical imperfections . . . and run with it. There are three of those in this book: “Life Sentence,” “Shape-ups at Delilah’s,” and “Up from Slavery.” These all feature explicitly political/social commentary, but it’s used as the springboard of the story, not the ultimate point. The stories are about real people, not animated megaphones.

  As a final note, there are speculative stories that overlap with classic SF/F story types—ghost stories and horror stories. (See Fear of the Unknown, above.) There were a few entries along these lines, and while they were very effective, I didn’t choose to include any of them. (Too many good stories, too few pages!) Not that all ghost stories are necessarily scary. After all, in the end, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

  Last year, a house my parents had owned was sold, and my sister and I were obliged to belt up to Flagstaff, Arizona, and spend a frantic three days salvaging old family papers, photographs, dishes, silver, and What-the-Hell-Is-This? items from the storage space under the house. Most of this was carted next door—to my grandparents’ house, the one I now own.

  Among the salvaged artifacts was a big, very old, very battered leather suitcase. We hadn’t looked inside it, but when I started shoveling things out of my living room months later, I stopped and opened the suitcase, out of curiosity. It was full of typed manuscripts; my grandfather’s stories.

  I took it to the back bedroom. One of these days, I’ll take a chair and a lamp in there to read the stories, and meet again a man I haven’t seen in a very long time. I’ll leave the door open, though. For warmth.

  —Diana Gabaldon

  MATTHEW BAKER

  Life Sentence

  f
rom Lightspeed

  Home.

  He recognizes the name of the street. But he doesn’t remember the landscape. He recognizes the address on the mailbox. But he doesn’t remember the house.

  His family is waiting for him on the porch.

  Everybody looks just as nervous as he is.

  He gets out.

  The police cruiser takes back off down the gravel drive, leaving him standing in a cloud of dust holding a baggie of possessions.

  He has a wife. He has a son. He has a daughter.

  A dog peers out a window.

  His family takes him in.

  Wash is still groggy from the procedure. He’s got a plastic taste on his tongue. He’s got a throbbing sensation in his skull. He’s starving.

  Supper is homemade pot pies. His wife says the meal is his favorite. He doesn’t remember that.

  The others are digging in already. Steam rises from his pie as he pierces the crust with his fork. He salivates. The smell of the pie hitting him makes him grunt with desire. Bending toward the fork, he parts his lips to take a bite, but then he stops and glances up.