Fantasy stories are stories in which the impossible happens. The easiest (and perhaps most common) example to illustrate this is: Magic is real, and select humans can wield or manipulate it.
Science fiction has the same starting point as fantasy—stories in which the impossible happens—but adds a crucial twist: science fiction is stories in which the currently impossible but theoretically plausible happens (or, in some cases, things that are currently possible but haven’t happened yet).
That is a bit simplified, but it basically gets to the heart of the matter.* Perhaps, however, the best way to explicate the rules and boundaries of the genres is simply to present you with the stories in this book; the idea, of course, is that reading them will immerse you in the genre, giving you a grand tour that shows you what the genres encompass and are capable of.
As I was writing this foreword in April 2016, the world watched a science fiction magazine cover from the ’50s come to life as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket landed upright—on a drone ship floating in the ocean, no less—and saw the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, excitedly tweet: “I’m on a boat!” Days later the news broke that physicist Stephen Hawking partnered with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner (along with other investors, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) to launch Breakthrough Starshot, an interstellar mission to the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.37 light-years away, in the hopes of finding alien life there. Oh, and the plan is to get there via a fleet of iPhone-size robotic spacecraft propelled by a giant laser array.†
Though science fiction seems to be becoming reality before our eyes, fantasy stubbornly remains fantasy. On the other hand, the most famous and beloved writer in the world is a woman who once subsisted on welfare and who went on to write a series of novels about child wizards which are so popular that they made her one of the richest people in the world, and spawned not only a movie franchise that has now surpassed the books in quantity but also a theme park whose express goal is to bring the world of those books to life. A theme park. Inspired by books.
What other wonders dare we imagine?
Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work to be 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
I have no choice but to believe this game matters.
—“Rat Catcher’s Yellows”
A FEW YEARS back, listening to the radio while driving across vast stretches of countryside, I heard three stories in rapid succession. The first was about a woman in India who’d been found guilty of murder based on the evidence of her brain scan. When read a series of statements about the death of her former fiancé, those parts of her brain associated with experiential knowledge activated. The judge who ruled in her case leaned heavily on this evidence.
The second story involved a website where, for a monthly fee, a computer can be programmed to pray for you. The particular prayer is left to the choice of the penitent, the fee based on the length of the prayer chosen (as if the computer minds one way or the other).
The third story was about research being done at the University of California, Santa Barbara, by Dr. Kevin Lafferty. Lafferty has been studying the effects of Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite transmitted to humans through cats.
An earlier series of studies in Czechoslovakia had suggested that those infected with this parasite undergo significant behavioral changes and that these changes are sex-specific. Men become more suspicious, jealous, dogmatic, and risk-taking. Women become more warm-hearted, trusting, and law-abiding.
What Dr. Lafferty has added is a look at countries with high rates of infection—in Brazil an estimated sixty-seven percent of the population carries the parasite—to see if the effects might have an impact on national culture.
I was sufficiently shocked to learn that this widespread parasite affects individual behavior, never mind at the national level. But it appears that cats will be satisfied by nothing less than world domination.
Relax: this is normal.
—“The Daydreamer by Proxy”
A few other things to note about the world we currently live in:
Miami is drowning.
We’ve learned more about dinosaurs in the last fifteen years than in all the preceding centuries.
The U.S. Supreme Court has granted personhood to corporations.
The U.S. Supreme Court has not granted personhood to apes, even though it is now an incontrovertible and scientifically accepted fact that apes have as fine a culture as any corporation.
Jesus has appeared on a pierogi, a piece of fried chicken, and a fish stick. Unless that’s Frank Zappa.
A man in Texas has recently seen a spoon-shaped UFO over Possum Kingdom Lake in Palo Pinto County.
The ocean is choking on plastic waste.
Social media are affecting the way we wage war.
Mathematical modeling suggests an unsuspected ninth planet at the edges of the solar system. This planet will take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to circle the sun once. It has yet to be seen.
In 2014 the average U.S. citizen spent 7.4 hours a day staring at screens.
Could it be more clear that the tools of so-called literary realism are no longer up to the task of accurately depicting the world in which we live? (I may suspect that they never were, but that’s an argument for another time.)
She has a plan, but it’s risky, given her limited skills as a relatively new fungus.
—“The Mushroom Queen”
My personal relationship with science fiction is not as long-standing as my personal relationship with fantasy. As a child, I read the novels of Edward Eager, Robert Lawson, Betty MacDonald, P. L. Travers, and many others, same as every other child I knew, though perhaps more avidly and repeatedly than most. I came to The Lord of the Rings quite young, and I don’t suppose the outcome of a fictional book has ever mattered so much to me—I really didn’t feel that I could continue the charade of getting up every morning, going to school, having dinner with my parents, washing my hands, brushing my teeth, and all the rest of the nonsense if Frodo didn’t manage to destroy the ring.
I didn’t start reading science fiction until college—taunted into it by the man I later married—so I’m not so deeply imprinted with that. My introduction was through the feminists; as someone majoring in political science, I was impressed with the utility of the genre in exploring political issues. The ability to run thought experiments like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World added greatly to the larger conversation and gave me new ways to think about old problems. The Left Hand of Darkness in particular took my head right off. I have never been the same person, nor have I ever wished to be. The change was clarifying and exhilarating.
One summer around this same time, I took a class at Stanford from H. Bruce Franklin, a fact that I later had to confess to him, as I was not a Stanford student and didn’t so much take the class as walk into it as if I belonged there and find a seat. The class was very large and popular, and Franklin was locked in battle with the university over the Vietnam War at the time. There was no chance anyone would notice the extra student, quietly purloining her education. We read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and talked about the Strugatsky brothers, though little of their work was available then in translation. I came away with an impression of a deeply serious, extremely courageous political literature.
I remember a heated argument between a Jewish guest speaker and an African American student as to the relative sufferings of their people. I came away with an impression of a deeply serious, extremely contentious community existing around this literature.
I was by then a thorough convert.
Even so, it took me a long time to discover the short stories.
He’s awake when they put the eyes in.
—??
?By Degrees and Dilatory Time”
Those unfamiliar with the literature of science fiction and fantasy will not know, as I did not, what a lively, vibrant short-form world exists inside those genres. Some of the field’s current stars—people like Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Howard Waldrop, James Patrick Kelly, Carmen Maria Machado, Alice Sola Kim, Kij Johnson, and Carol Emshwiller—work exclusively or almost exclusively there. It has become the place where I find the strange, uncanny work I like the very best.
Several brilliant novelists—courtesy prevents me from calling out their names—are even better in the short form. Stories are written in response to other stories or as riffs off other stories, though every story must of course work as an independent text. Themed anthologies are common and often wonderful. It’s a heady, feisty, weird, wild brew.
Here is something about science fiction, which I’ve often heard stated (though never in fact believed): that, paradoxically, although it looks to the future, the literary techniques employed in it are quite conservative. The favored plot is the old one in which the protagonist, faced with a problem, tries to solve it, fails, tries again, and either succeeds or fails for the final time.
According to this formulation, the best prose is transparent. The reader should be undistracted by a distinctive style or musical rhythms or flights of poetry; the words themselves should be nothing but a clear window through which the story is seen.
There are two points to be made about this. The first is that prose of this sort is actually very hard to achieve.
The second is that those writers most admired in the field have always been fine stylists, their prose easily recognized by those who know it.
At the end of the day it’s the stories people tell about themselves that matter.
—“The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History”
So science fiction and fantasy readers, same as any other readers, wish to read an engaging and particularized voice. And certainly in the short form, at the very least, experimentation and lyricism are more common than not.
The short form is quite often where a new voice first appears—in a debut story that immediately marks the writer as someone to watch. As part of helping to administer the Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week summer program at UC San Diego (a similar workshop takes place each summer in Seattle), I spend several weeks each winter reading submissions. I can attest to the incredible talent we find among these mostly unpublished writers, each and every year.
An increasing number of these submissions are arriving from different cultures and different countries, drawing on different literary traditions and with different political experiences. The imagined future seems to finally be a more expansive place. And thank god for that. How lonely would all those white men have been, all by themselves in the great dark universe? (See Star Wars: A New Hope. Very lonely, indeed.)
In order to assemble this particular collection of short fiction, the inestimable John Joseph Adams chose eighty stories, and from those I chose twenty. The venues in which these stories were initially published were wide-ranging. I will confess here that the difference between fantasy and science fiction, while clear enough to me in theory, is often unclear when I’m faced with a specific text. I was grateful not to be the one making those decisions.
The decisions I did make, winnowing the eighty stories down to twenty, were hard enough. I’m still in mourning for several of the beautiful pieces I couldn’t include; I expect I always will be. I’m gratified that a number of those are on the ballots of various awards this year; they deserve this praise and attention. In every other way, the task was a pure pleasure. It has convinced me that the golden age of the science fiction/fantasy short story must be just about right exactly now.
I read everything blind, so it was a wonderful surprise to later recognize the names of many authors I already know and love. Even better were the names I had never seen before but am sure I will be finding again and again now.
There’s never been a world that isn’t a world at war.
—“The Thirteen Mercies”
Science fiction stories (fantasy, too) are always primarily a comment on the current moment in the current world. Based on these eighty initial stories, I’m prepared to say that one of the things occupying our minds just now is war.
The future of warfare was by far the most common theme, both in the stories I chose and in the ones I wished for but could not take. In this category, I include the so-called war on terror, though there was actually less focus on that and more on the old traditional carnage. Although the methods and motives for war may be new, the final outcomes remain, sadly, what they have ever been.
Though in some of the stories, the more interesting part of a war was how to survive it. And having done that, how to put it into the past and leave it there.
You don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost.
—“Interesting Facts”
Science fiction and fantasy are well suited to thought experiments and philosophical questions regarding the Other. In this literature, humans can be assessed directly through comparison with nonhumans. I read a great many stories that did this.
Sometimes the nonhumans were magical—wet gentlemen or jinn. Sometimes they had fairy-tale aspects.
Sometimes the nonhumans were aliens. We may call them lions or handmaids or vampires, but they are nothing of the sort and have their own inexplicable extraterrestrial agendas.
Sometimes the nonhumans were those other animals with whom we share our planet and about whom, for all our centuries of cohabitation, we still know so little, even of the ones who actually speak our language.
Sometimes the nonhumans were familiar fictional characters, like the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.
Sometimes the nonhumans were machines, and some of these machines helped us with our human tasks, and some of them were inscrutable, just as if we hadn’t manufactured them ourselves, and some of them even wanted to hurt us. In some stories, they constituted the entire world.
Sometimes the nonhumans were corporations and sometimes they were the world in which we lived.
Sometimes the nonhumans were creatures who used to be humans but had changed.
It hurt so much to see both sides.
—“Three Bodies at Mitanni”
The Turing test continues to preoccupy science fiction writers. Where and when might machines become so human that the difference no longer matters? I read several stories dealing with this.
But I also read a great many with the opposite trajectory. How much bodily modification can a human undergo, how many enhancements, replacements, reductions, before ceasing to be human?
And one final critical theme: where and when does our empathy run out?
Walk toward the point halfway between the moon and the cottage, and eventually you’ll come to the well.
—“Things You Can Buy for a Penny”
For all the important, inexhaustible thematic richness of the issues above (and all the others that science fiction and fantasy are uniquely able to illuminate), I’ve come to realize that my particular attachment is often simply a matter of setting. These are the only modes of literature in which a story can happen absolutely anywhere. Here are stories set on planet, off planet, underwater, underground, in the jungle, in the village, in the apartment, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the liminal space of Iram, in the corporate offices of Geneertech, in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, in the Stonewall Riots, in the post-apocalypse, and in the 0s and 1s of the virtual world. The stories collected here take place in the near and far past, in the future, and in the present. Some of them are set outside of time altogether.
As a result, you are never so aware of being completely inside the expansive, curious, and astonishing imagination of the writer in any other literature.
A few months ago, I got a lovely letter from an uncle I’d lost touch with. He’d read my most recent novel and wanted to tell me so. It was the first novel of mine that he’
d ever read. By way of explanation or possibly apology, he said that he rarely reads fiction. I hear this a lot. There are a great many readers who stick to nonfiction. They want to learn real things, they tell me, with a touching faith in the honesty of memoir and history.
But my uncle’s reason was different. I never want my own mind overwhelmed with someone else’s mind, he said. I read that sentence over several times, so struck with the strangeness of it, the surprise.
Because that being overwhelmed with someone else’s mind—that’s the whole reason I read. That’s the part I like the very best. In all the stories that follow this introduction, that was always the part I liked the very best.
It’s exactly what I hope will happen here to you.
As he once wandered the great expanse of the Gobi in his boyhood, so he now roams a universe without boundaries, in some dimension orthogonal to the ones we know.
—“Ambiguity Machines”
—KAREN JOY FOWLER
SOFIA SAMATAR
Meet Me in Iram
FROM Meet Me in Iram/Those Are Pearls
WE ARE FAMILIAR with gold, says Hume, and also with mountains; therefore, we are able to imagine a golden mountain. This idea may serve as an origin myth for Iram, the unconstructed city.
The city has several problems. (1) It is lacking in domestic objects. (2) It is lacking in atmospheres that produce nostalgia. In cities without the correct combination of—for example—hills, streetlights, and coffee, it is difficult to get laid. A playbill in a gutter, bleeding color, the image of a famous actress blurring slowly into pulp: This would be perfect. The word playbill is perfect. There are many ways to achieve the desired conditions. Iram has none.