The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (3 page)

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”

—K
AREN
J
OY
F
OWLER

SOFIA SAMATAR

FROM
Meet Me in Iram/Those Are Pearls

W
E 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.

No continuity without desire. There is no desire in Iram; the time of Iram is
not yet.

oh do you remember when we were courting

when my head lay upon your breast

you could make me believe by the falling of your arm

that the sun rose in the west

—
American folksong

The reversal of time expressed in these lines is impossible in Iram. In Iram, there is nothing to reverse. Every time I go there, I see my uncle on the same bridge, and he raises his hand to greet me in the same way. He always tells me not to say
every time,
but I can't help it; it's a habit. He wishes I had come to visit him in Jeddah. I couldn't go, I tell him. It would have meant an expensive trip. I would have had to wear an abaya. I couldn't do it.

My uncle is not at all angry. Well, he says. He pats my shoulder. Well. He's wearing the most magnificent orange suit. Like my father, who is waiting for us at the restaurant, my uncle has style. The men in my family are all very beautiful.

When I say that Iram is lacking in domestic objects, I mean that we haven't gathered enough. I try to bring something with me every time. Last time it was a collection of my father's audiotapes, crammed into a pair of black plastic bags. The tapes are dusty with cigarette ash and poetry. It is only possible to listen to them in the worst light. A white, ugly, institutional light that, despite its harshness, is too weak to travel more than a couple of feet.

Fortunately the tapes create the sort of light they need.

At the restaurant, my father has already ordered. As always, he's gotten the huge appetizer plate, more than a hundred appetizers arranged around a bowl of blue flame. I kiss his cheek. He waves, expansive: Sit down! It's important to order the biggest thing. The entire restaurant must smell my father's cologne. In Iram, this makes me happy. This is the good life. I don't know what the blue flame is made of, but it keeps everybody warm.

You can stop there.

My mother says: Your father had beautiful skin. This was before he began to suffer from psoriasis. Now he goes out in a hat and gloves, even on the hottest days. My father has become allergic to sunlight. How is that possible, my mother asks. He's a Somali—he grew up in the sun! My father puts on his hat and goes out to his car. His beautiful skin, my mother says sadly. The car starts up: a throbbing sound that remains, for me, after all these years, synonymous with fear.

The car pulls into the driveway. The children hear its long, low note. They hear the door slam. The children run upstairs and hide inside their rooms. They're giggling because it's beautiful and exciting to be a child. They're smart; like bugs, they can squeeze into any kind of space. The children make bug-nests for themselves out of torn-up letters and photos. They squirm around in the nests and eat a lot of paper. The children are going to turn out fine, but they'll be the kind of people who do not have many things they can take to Iram.