The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Read online

  As series editor, I attempted to read everything I could find that meets these selection criteria. After doing all my reading, I created a list of what I felt were the top eighty stories published in the genre (forty science fiction and forty fantasy). Those eighty stories were sent to guest editor Joe Hill, who read them and then chose the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the volume. Joe read all the stories blind, with no bylines attached to them nor any information about where they originally appeared. 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 2014.”

  I could not have done all the work of assembling this volume alone (or even with only the help of our esteemed guest editor). Accordingly, many thanks go out to my team of first readers, who helped me evaluate various publications that I might not have had time to consider otherwise, led by DeAnna Knippling, Robyn Lupo, and Rob McMonigal, with smaller but still significant contributions by Christie Yant, Karen Bovenmyer, Michael Curry, Sylvia Hiven, Amber Barkley, Aaron Bailey, Hannah Huber, Hannah Mades-Alabiso, and Sarah Slatton.

  I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the work of editors who have come before me. Though this is the first volume of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, it couldn’t have happened without the brilliant work done by the various editors involved with The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and the rest of the Best American family. Our in-house editor at Mariner Books, Tim Mudie, was by my side throughout the entire process and was a diligent companion in helping a first-time series editor get up to speed.

  Likewise, I want to acknowledge the contributions of the many editors in the science fiction/fantasy field who have edited best-of-the-year volumes over the years, including Gardner Dozois, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, David G. Hartwell, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton (to name but a few of the prominent ones of my era as a reader). I consider their work the textbooks of my education as an editor. But if their works were my textbooks, then Gordon Van Gelder, former editor and current publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was my professor.

  And last but not least, thanks so much to Joe Hill for taking the helm for the good ship BASFF’s inaugural voyage. His comments about and criticisms of all the stories I presented him with were always astute and incisive, and he was both an amiable and a stalwart collaborator. Also, as you will no doubt agree once you read Joe’s introduction, he wrote as wonderful a love letter to science fiction/fantasy as I’ve ever seen. If you read it and are not moved by it, and are not made super-excited to read this anthology afterward, I daresay this might not be the book for you.

  I consider the mantle of series editor to be a tremendous responsibility, and the SF/F genre is vitally important to me, so this is a job I take very, very seriously.

  Being series editor of the first Best American title to focus on science fiction and fantasy puts me into several different roles. I’ll be an ambassador of the genre to the outside world, the genre’s proselytizer in chief, who will be called upon to spread the gospel of SF/F far and wide.

  But first and foremost I am a curator, with the mission to survey the field and ask, “What is the best American science fiction and fantasy?”

  In my effort to find the top eighty stories of the year, I read more than a hundred periodicals, from longtime genre mainstays such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, to leading digital magazines such as Clarkesworld and my own Lightspeed, to top literary publications such as The New Yorker and Granta, as well as sixty or more anthologies and single-author collections. I scoured the field for publications both big and small and paid equal consideration to stories in venerable major magazines such as Analog and stories in new niche zines like Scigentasy (the latter of which I’m pleased to say ended up with a story in this volume).

  By my calculations, my long list of eighty was drawn from forty different publications—twenty-four periodicals, fifteen anthologies, and one stand-alone ebook—from thirty-six different editors (counting editorial teams as a unit, but also distinct from any solo work done by one of the editors). The final table of contents draws from fourteen different sources: nine periodicals and five anthologies (from fourteen different editors/editorial teams).

  About halfway through the year I stopped logging every single story I read, as it got to be too onerous to do so; instead I started logging only things that I liked. I myself edited or coedited five anthologies and twenty-two magazine issues in 2014, which included approximately 185 original, eligible stories altogether. Including those, I have spreadsheets showing that I and/or my first-reader team evaluated approximately 2,600 stories, but how many stories in total I actually ended up considering is something of a mystery; if I were to venture a guess, I’d say it might be as many as twice that. Those numbers, I think—combined with how difficult it was to narrow down my selections to the top eighty stories—speak to both the extreme vitality of the field and the need for volumes like this one.

  Science fiction and fantasy has been an indispensable addition to our cultural heritage, one that has given us great masters such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Shirley Jackson, as well as the tools to inspire, enlighten, and ultimately, like Gully Foyle, transform ourselves.

  It is my immense privilege to be your guide and curator. I hope you enjoy the exhibit.

  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: Launching Rockets

  WONDER IS A blasting cap. It is an emotion that goes off with a bang, shattering settled beliefs, rattling the architecture of the mind, and clearing space for new ideas, new possibilities. Wonder is often thought of as a peaceful emotion, a sense of resounding inner quiet. Of course we would associate it with silence. The world always assumes an eerie hush after an explosion.

  Awe is TNT for the soul.

  My own first experience with wonder came in the candy-coated package of science fiction: Richard Dreyfuss chasing aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In some ways I never recovered from that first great detonation of amazement.

  In one pivotal scene, Dreyfuss is stopped at a malfunctioning railroad crossing when an alien spacecraft passes overhead, spearing him with a great shaft of light and causing objects to blow about the cab of his pickup in a frantic storm. Afterward, the side of his body that faced the driver’s side window is badly sunburned, although the incident occurred at night.

  And this is very like the effect the movie had on me. After it was over I felt irradiated, aglow, charged.

  I never looked at a starry night the same way. The clank-clank-clank of the bell at a railroad crossing still evokes in me a shivery frisson of anticipation. Close Encounters shook loose a marvelous idea in my seven-year-old head: we are fish in the ocean of the universe, and there may be grand ships moving above us.

  I experienced another of these walloping explosions of feeling a few years later, when I first read Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s classic story of a carnival stocked with monsters and poisoned rides. No one who buys a ticket to Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show ever forgets what they saw there: the carousel that ages you, the illustrated man with a book of living stories inked onto his flesh.

  My awe, though, was not merely a reaction to Bradbury’s thrilling ideas. It was just as much a response to the shock of his sentences, the way he could fold a few words to create an indelible image, much as an origami artist may make a square of paper into a crane. One great verb, I discovered, had almost as much explosive power as any marvelous concept. The language of fiction could be as exciting as the subject matter. After Something Wicked, I could never look at my own sentences without asking myself if they were really pack
ing their maximum charge. I had not known until then what a few words could do—that like gunpowder, they could ignite with a shocking crack.

  This is the truth of science fiction and fantasy: it is the greatest fireworks show in literature, and your own imagination is a sky waiting to catch fire. And here is the truth of this book: we’ve got all the best, brightest, bangiest fireworks a person could want. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy is not just a book but also an explosive device . . . one that is, fortunately, entirely safe to bring on a plane.

  Science fiction and fantasy: two different but closely related compounds, both highly combustible.

  Fantasy, it has been argued, could well describe all literature. Any work of fiction, after all, is an act of sustained invention—a fantasy—and a dragon is a dragon, whether it sleeps in a cave on a pile of gold or wears a human face and works for Goldman Sachs, destroying lives by moving numbers from one column to another. I once sat in front of two werewolves on a train to Liverpool. They wore Manchester United jerseys, showed their fangs at every passing lady, and barked at anyone who looked shy or weak. When we roared into a tunnel, it was all too easy to imagine them leaping on someone in the dark and tearing out a throat. As it happens, we reached our destination undevoured, and I got a good fantasy story out of the experience (“Wolverton Station”).

  Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt? Fantasists all. Even those readers who would turn up their nose at a collection like this (perhaps to buy a copy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s The Best American Short Stories instead) are fantasy enthusiasts, whether they know it or not.

  But for the purposes of this collection, our interest is not fantasy in the broadest sense but tales of the fantastic. The defining trait of such narratives is that the challenges in them are unreal or otherworldly. Familiar dangers have been rendered in mind-bending new forms, to help us see the problems of our lives afresh. For example, lots of stories explore workplace seductions, but in a book like this, the company is operated by vampires and the issues raised are not just moral but mortal. Children who fall far from the tree may test the love and patience of their parents in the extreme, but only in a collection such as this will a mother find herself looking after a gelatinous, mysterious cube.

  If stories of the fantastic are a kind of firework, then their red glare may show you your own life in a truly new light, revealing who around you is a demon lover and who a ghost, who is the plaything of faeries and who has fangs.

  Science fiction, on the other hand, might describe any literary work set in the modern day. Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket knows we’ve been living in the future for a while now. At the time of this writing, a man has only just moved into a small flat located 250 miles above the Earth. He plans to live there for a year. As has been noted by others, there is a planet in our solar system entirely populated by robots: Mars! How science fiction is that? Ray Bradbury would love it.

  Anyone who writes a story in which someone sends a text or an email is writing science fiction. In a world where people own self-driving electric cars and maintain close relationships by way of daily video chats, it is not unreasonable to say every author is a science fiction author now. Again: Franzen, Smith, Tartt, etc. But go back even further—weren’t the first stories to account for the Internet, circa 1990, working in a science-fictional mode? Weren’t novels that mentioned the moon landing trying to reckon with a world in which the incredible had been calculated, computed, processed, and made credible?

  Well. Leave it. As with fantasy, we will pass on the broadest possible definition of science fiction, and examine the genre only in its most potent form. Our interest is in those stories in which the science has been projected out from the marvels of now to the head-swimming possibilities of what might be next. We stand on the near shore of the twenty-first century, with the vast terrain ahead unknown, unmapped, only dimly apprehended. Science fiction stories are the dazzling flares we launch into the darkness, to catch a glimpse of the country before us and show us our way.

  Both genres, really, are flashbangs to drive back the shadows. Fantasy shines its eldritch glare within, illuminating the contours of our dreams, our half-formed desires, and our irrational fears. Science fiction casts its blazing glare outward, into the brilliant night, at the smashed crystal ball of the moon and the future waiting beyond.

  Put another way, fantasy explores the self, whereas science fiction asks you to leave selfhood behind and see your life for what it is—a bright mote of dust adrift in a vast and beautiful and terrifying universe.

  The writers assembled herein—nineteen, with two incredibly different and equally breathtaking stories by a young she-can-do-anything star, Sofia Samatar—are a mix of old hands and fresh voices. If you’ve read John Joseph Adams’s foreword, you know the deal: he read several thousand stories, whittled them down to eighty that he thought were truly remarkable, and I read through those, reducing them to twenty favorites. The authors’ names were withheld from me, and everyone here fought their way in on their own merits. When their secret identities were revealed, it gladdened me to discover I was among some old friends, and excited me to be introduced to so many remarkable new talents.

  I am also pleased that the finished collection organically arose as one of great diversity. Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experiences, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as you see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes here who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don’t have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.

  I hesitate to reveal many specifics about the stories themselves. A description of a fireworks show is never as good as seeing one. But perhaps I can offer a few general observations.

  The apocalypse is totally happening . . . at least in the sense that it’s a popular subject in SF/F right now (as for whether the apocalypse is happening happening, continue to watch the Weather Channel and keep your disaster insurance up to date). There are three end-of-the-worlders in this book . . . and there were at least three others I read that were almost as good as these.

  We are increasingly anxious about our inability to look away from our ever-more-seductive screens and all too aware that what you get from your shiny new device may be very different from what was promised on the box.

  Even demon lovers and occasional ghosts are depressed by reality television and tabloid websites.

  The world needs mermaids.

  Kickstarter and Craigslist have replaced the stake and the cross as our go-to tools for dealing with the supernatural.

  Poverty is hard, even in the future.

  The natural world may not ever be done playing pranks on us talking apes.

  History is no longer just a story written by the winners.

  Most of all, we humans will always be driven to take enormous risks and perform heart-wrenching sacrifices for our friends, children, partners, or parents, regardless of our costume, be it a spacesuit or a fantastic coat with pockets full of magic.

  And that’s enough by way of preamble from your faithful correspondent. I’ve talked myself dry, and besides . . . the hour grows late. The sun has long since set, and the first stars are out. Cricket song throbs in the high grass. Do you hear that? A bell clank-clank-clanks at a distant railroad crossing, although there’s no sign of a train. Whoa—spooky.

  We’re all here on our picnic blankets on a perfect evening and it’s time for the show. Who’s ready for some fireworks? Who’s ready to watch the sky burn?

  Oh good. I’m ready, too.

  Strike the match.

  Touch the fuse.

  *!

  (bang)

  —JOE HILL

  SOFIA SAMATAR
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  How to Get Back to the Forest

  FROM Lightspeed Magazine

  “YOU HAVE TO puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?”

  She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. I mean everybody at camp was sort of a mess, we were even supposed to be that way, at a difficult stage, but Cee took it to another level. Herding us into the bathroom at night and asking us to puke. “It’s right here,” she said, tapping the nightgown over her hollow chest. “Where you’ve got less nerves in your esophagus. It’s like wired into the side, into the muscle. You have to puke really hard to get it.”

  “Did you ever get it out?” asked Max. She was sitting on one of the sinks. She’d believe anything.

  Cee nodded, solemn as a counselor. “Two years ago. They caught me and gave me a new one. But it was beautiful while it was gone. I’m telling you it was the best.”

  “Like how?” I said.

  Cee stretched out her arms. “Like bliss. Like everything. Everything all at once. You’re raw, just a big raw nerve.”