The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (45 page)

In 2015 Jennifer and Guillermo were asked to contribute to a special issue of the art journal
e-flux
as part of the 56th Venice Biennale, and they suggested publishing the text from our collaboration. I hadn't written the text to stand alone, but it turned out to work pretty well even when removed from its intended context. That was how “The Great Silence,” the short story, came to be.

Seth Dickinson
is the author of
The Traitor Baru Cormorant
and a lot of short stories. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios' Destiny, and helped develop the open-source space opera Blue Planet. He teaches at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.

• We all want to survive, but not at
any
cost, right? Some tactics are abominable—plunder, infanticide, torture. We'd rather die than resort to atrocity. But what if someone
else
makes an awful choice, survives, thrives, and inherits the universe? What if, in the long run, everyone and everything will tend to sacrifice their values in the name of competitive edge, because it's that or go extinct?

As we gain more technological control over our own bodies and minds, we also gain the ability to shave away more of ourselves in the pursuit of advantage.

This is a story about how much we might sacrifice to go on. Three lovers armed with a doomsday weapon must decide whether to exterminate an elegant mutilation of the human condition . . . and whether their own very human flaws make the choice impossible.

“Three Bodies at Mitanni” was deeply inspired by Peter Watts's
Blindsight
. Readers interested in the fears that drive the story might want to Google up a case of parallel evolution called “Meditations on Moloch.”

Maria Dahvana Headley
is the
New York Times
–bestselling author of the young adult novels
Aerie
and
Magonia
, the historical fantasy
Queen of Kings
, the memoir
The Year of Yes
, and the novella
The End of the Sentence
(with Kat Howard). With Neil Gaiman, she is the editor of the young adult monster anthology
Unnatural Creatures
. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards and anthologized in many best-of-the-year collections.
The Mere Wife
, a novel-length adaptation of Beowulf, is forthcoming in 2017.

• I bought a crocodile in the Catskills. The crocodile dealer only took cash, and so I slipped her a wad of bills I'd earned making up stories. It was basically my last money on earth. I was a year out of a marriage, and in the sort of dark place everyone who's ever bought a deacquisitioned Victorian museum diorama element has ever been in. I tripped over this taxidermy under a tarp and knew my life would be healed if only I had a crocodile. My crocodile is nearly eight feet long. I live in New York City. This was the purchase of a batshit person. I called my journalist best friend to help me hang the crocodile. We blithely drilled almost entirely through the fuse box in my apartment and then praised heaven we had not been electrocuted. The drywall defied us. The crocodile was astonishingly heavy. I put in an emergency call to my friend the accordionist, who took one look at our wrongful methods (we were drilling blind, through crocodile feet) and diagrammed a new notion, that of hanging my crocodile with chains. We did that. It took three of us, swearing and spitting all the while. I told the Internet about the hanging of the crocodile. People, in particular the poet Matthew Zapruder, insisted this ought to be a Borgesian story. I wrote said story for two years. During those years, the world remained in ever-increasing war, my best friend the journalist died suddenly and randomly on assignment, and I walked the streets of New York weeping for weeks, attracting a mob of men who followed behind me insisting that I smile, as though my expression were their only magical hope for happiness. I went dark some more. I tried to fathom the world by analyzing all of its details. Somewhere in there, I read the torture memos. Somewhere else, I realized that all I ever wrote about was ferocious resurrection, underestimated women, vengeance and mercy. I decided I didn't care if that was all I ever wrote about. I sold “The Thirteen Mercies” to C. C. Finlay at
F&SF
, and for him I tore it up and reassembled it again. It's about bad magic, good magic, unfair mortality, dangerous old women, following wrong orders, and trying to figure out what mercy means. But underneath, it's all about crocodile hanging and those who help you do it.

S. L. Huang
has a degree in mathematics from MIT, which she now uses to write an eccentric novel series about a superpowered mercenary mathematician. The series started with her debut novel,
Zero Sum Game
, and the fourth book was published this year with the fifth upcoming. Her short fiction can be found at
Strange Horizons, The Book Smugglers
, and
Daily Science Fiction
, among others. She currently lives in Tokyo, where she's on the lookout for a place to race motorcycles.

• I never intended to publish this story. I wrote it for catharsis during treatment for my second cancer, then later sent it to a friend and said, “Do you think this is submittable?” and she said yes. Every piece of this story is an aspect of my own health experience refracted through a science fiction lens, and in that way, it's the most personal story I've ever written.

But the most important part of it, to me, is that this story was also very much a reaction against every other story about cancer I saw growing up. My first cancer happened when I was twelve, and it has continually frustrated me how media represents cancer as some sort of noble, beautiful tragedy that exists to teach people important lessons about the meaning of life. It's not. It's real, it sucks, and it has an impact—but not a one-dimensional one. Above all else, I wanted this story to be honest about that. I wanted to write a cancer story in which nobody dies, in which nothing is noble or enlightening . . . and in which, afterward, the world moves on. Because in the end, that's all I'm striving for myself: moving on.

Adam Johnson
is the author most recently of
Fortune Smiles
, winner of the 2015 National Book Award and the Story Prize. He is also the author of
The Orphan Master's Son
, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other previous books are
Emporium
, a short story collection, and the novel
Parasites Like Us
. He is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.

Kij Johnson
has won three Nebulas and the Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. Her most recent books are
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
and the short story collection
At the Mouth of the River of Bees
. She received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2012. In the past, she has worked in publishing, comics, trading-card and role-playing games, and tech. Currently she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Kansas and the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

• I try never to do the same thing twice: always a new voice, a new mode. That said, there are some things I turn to again and again. I write consistently about animals, as creature, metaphor, stand-in, symbol. I write a lot about loneliness, the gaps between people and whether they can be bridged. I also seem to be incapable of playing with form; even conventional narrative is for me a game, to see what I can do with it. Finally, I love impossibilities that might (or might not) be possible. “The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary” started as a single entry, but I realized that there was a lot that could be said in the intersection of these recurring elements. Strangely distanced as it is, it's also very personal.

Will Kaufman
received an MA in English from UC Davis and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah, and attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. His stories have appeared in a number of journals, including
The Collagist, PANK, Unstuck, Lightspeed Magazine, 3:AM
, and
Unlikely Story
. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their hopes for the future. You can find him online at
kaufmanwrites.com
.

• This story is a direct result of the six weeks I spent at the Clarion Workshop in 2013. The form and style is definitely a response to the pressures and inspirations of Clarion.

For my little fairy tale, I started from the idea that the division between the community and the individual is naturally an elided thing, and with the notion that what we presume to be private is not. For me, the warning of this sort of story has never been “be careful what you wish for,” but rather to never forget that your desires never affect you alone—and neither do your punishments.

“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” was a strangely easy story to tell myself. I wrote the opening first, starting from a simple joke and progressing to a simple setup: Timmy would go to the well, and the well is not a good place. Although, I confess, I'm not sure where the wet gentleman actually came from. Was “a gentleman” a convenient vessel for a creature of rules, or was he always waiting? Then I wrote (out of order) the interactions between my victims and the wet gentleman—between people struggling with rules both real and imagined and a creature required absolutely to abide by a set of rules. The rest only took a nudge to fill itself in around those vignettes.

This story appeared in a night, and the only real changes I made to that first draft were to the ending. I realized that the objects of desire had not yet had a chance to speak, to have their own desires recognized. And that's how the wet gentleman got his wish.

Kelly Link
is the author of four collections, most recently
Get in Trouble
(2015). With Gavin J. Grant, she runs Small Beer Press. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. If you want to know anything else, you can ask her at
twitter.com/haszombiesinit
.

• I've been thinking about this story for over ten years now. For a long time, the first sentence was “The vampires were conjugating in the courtyard.” But I never got any further than that, until deciding that what I really wanted was to write something in the same genre as Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. I owe thanks to Cassandra Clare, who supplied a swimming pool that I could swim in whenever I got stuck. (A swimming pool is about as close as I ever want to get to outer space.) I'd also like to thank Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Joshua Lewis, and also Richard Butner and the Sycamore Hill workshop, which took a good, hard look at this. I didn't take all of the suggestions, but I liked every single one of them.

Sam J. Miller
is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in
Lightspeed, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons
, and the
Minnesota Review
, among others. His first book, a young adult science fiction novel called
The Art of Starving
, will be published in 2017. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards; he's also a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and
this
story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He lives in New York City and at
www.samjmiller.com
.

• The seed of “The Heat of Us” was planted on the night Donna Summer died. I was walking home from work, feeling pretty blue—I think “Bad Girls” is probably the second-best album of all time—looking across at the sad lonely lights of the city coming on, all those people by themselves, all the separate sadness that a certain group of people would be feeling. And I remembered that the Stonewall Uprising happened on the night that Judy Garland died. And I thought “revolutions are born on nights like this.” But that seed didn't break into blossom until I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop and I saw how exponentially my writing improved through being part of a community of writers and readers, how I could share their strengths and (hopefully) lend them mine. So this is a story about community—about how people are stronger together than separate, and how when we work together we can achieve things so incredible they're indistinguishable from magic.

Dexter Palmer
is the author of two novels,
The Dream of Perpetual Motion
(2010) and
Version Control
(2016). He holds a PhD in English literature from Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

• Though I've published two novels, I rarely write short stories. “The Daydreamer by Proxy” was part of
The Bestiary
, an anthology of original material edited by Ann VanderMeer and published by Cheeky Frawg Books/Centipede Press. The premise of the anthology was that each of the invited writers was given a letter of the alphabet and asked to write a story that described a fictional creature whose name began with that letter. Thank goodness I was assigned the letter D: not too common; not too unusual; perfectly acceptable to work with.

The composition of the story was influenced by the fact that I knew the hardcover edition of the anthology would be illustrated. What sort of odd thing did I want to see someone try to draw? How much descriptive detail would be enough, without being so much that it would constrain the artist and bore the reader? The illustrator, Ivica Stevanovic, did a great job: his drawings are uniquely imaginative while being faithful to their source material and are just as unsettling as I'd hoped they'd be.