The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (2 page)

As series editor, I attempt to read everything I can find that meets these selection criteria. After doing all my reading, I create a list of what I feel are the top eighty stories published in the genre (forty science fiction and forty fantasy). These eighty stories are sent to the guest editor, who reads them and then chooses the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the anthology. The guest editor reads all the stories blind—with no bylines attached to them, nor any information about where the stories originally appeared. Karen's top twenty selections appear in this volume; the remaining sixty stories that did not make it into the anthology are listed in the back of this book as “Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2015.”

As I did last year, 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
Analog
and
Asimov's,
to leading digital magazines such as
Tor.com
and
Strange Horizons,
to top literary publications such as
Tin House
and
Granta
—as well as several dozen 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 like
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and to stories in new publications like
Uncanny.

My longlist of eighty was drawn from thirty-eight different publications: twenty-four periodicals, thirteen anthologies, and one two-story chapbook—from thirty-eight different editors (counting editorial teams as a singular unit, but also distinct from any solo work done by either editor). The final table of contents draws from sixteen different sources: thirteen periodicals, two anthologies, and one two-story chapbook (from sixteen different editors/editorial teams).

I began my reading for the first volume of
BASFF
attempting to log every single story I read, wherever it fell on the quality spectrum, but that quickly became too onerous to do given the quantities involved, so I began instead logging only stories I thought were potentially among the best of the year. I followed that methodology again for this volume; consequently, I don't have the precise total number of stories I considered, but based on the data I did gather, I estimate the total to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 stories (including the approximately 180 stories I edited myself ).

Naturally, aside from my top eighty selections, many of the stories I read were perfectly good and enjoyable 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 seventy 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
Fireside Magazine, Galaxy's Edge, Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy Magazine,
and from anthologies such as
Stories for Chip, Thirteen: Stories of Transformation, Unbound, Hanzai Japan,
and others.

This foreword mentions only a few of the great publications considered for this anthology; 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. And if you love a story you discovered because of this anthology, please consider checking out the original publication it came from; the original sources vary in size and popularity, but they all need reader support to stay in business, and without them books like this one would not be possible. So please support them if you can—even if “support” just means telling a friend about them.

Now that I've laid out my workflow, you might be thinking that there's no way one person could have read all that material—if so, you're right! No editor could do all the work of assembling a volume like this one alone. 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 Christie Yant, with smaller but still noteworthy contributions by Rob McMonigal, Karen Bovenmyer, Michael Curry, Devin Marcus, Aaron Bailey, Hannah Huber, Zoe Kaplan, and Tyler Keeton. Thanks, too, to Tim Mudie at Mariner Books for all the strings he pulls behind the scenes to keep the show running.

In last year's volume, I spent a good portion of my foreword defining science fiction and fantasy and providing a historical overview of how the genre came to be and how it got to where it is now.

I don't want to repeat myself, but I do feel like perhaps I should at least reiterate the definitions, as more than one reader review seemed displeased with the proportions of science fiction and fantasy in the 2015 volume. But in truth the contents were divided equally between the two genres, and it is my intent that the contents will
always
be equally divided. (Though it was amusing to see that there were simultaneous opposing complaints—both that there was too much [or it was all] science fiction and that there was too much [or it was all] fantasy.)

To be fair, I understand how people can have these misconceptions about where the borders between the genres lie. A lot of us grow up thinking that science fiction stories are always set in the future (no) or in far-flung galaxies (raaaaaaah
^*
), or that fantasy always takes place in “fantasy worlds” à la Middle-earth (ú-thand
^†
) or always feature wizards (this line of thinking shall not pass
^‡
) or . . . well, you get the idea.

But I can't very well come up with new ways of saying those same things all over again every year, so instead let me briefly and selectively quote myself:

SF/F—which sometimes is collectively referred to by the larger umbrella term “speculative fiction”—essentially comprises stories that start by asking the question
What if . . . ?

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.

—J
OHN
J
OSEPH
A
DAMS

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.