The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (46 page)

All of the anthology's contributors were also asked to provide short accompanying author's notes: the assignment was to “reimagine yourself as a fantastical beast.” This was mine:
The Dexter Palmer lives in the darkened corners of libraries, dining on ink and wood pulp. Its gestation period is unpredictably long; its offspring are unnatural, no two of them alike.

Salman Rushdie
is the author of twelve novels—
Grimus, Midnight's Children
(for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker),
Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life
, and
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
—and one collection of short stories:
East, West
. He has also published four works of nonfiction—
Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands
, and
Step Across the Line
—and coedited two anthologies,
Mirrorwork
and
The Best American Short Stories 2008
. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of the PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

• I've long been interested in the jinn, and also in the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës), in honor of whom my father renamed our family. They come together in this story, forming a union of reason and fantasy, as Francisco Goya recommended. Eventually, this story grew into the novel
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
, which carries the love story of the jinnia princess Dunia and Ibn Rushd forward into the present day, or something like it.

Sofia Samatar
is the author of the novels
A Stranger in Olondria
(2013) and
The Winged Histories
(2016). Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

• “Meet Me in Iram” grew out of my interest in the intersection of speculative fiction and autobiography. Every word of it is true.

Vandana Singh
was born and raised in New Delhi, India, and has been a denizen of the Greater Boston area for over ten years, where she is also a physics professor at a small and lively state university. Her short stories have been published in numerous best-of-the-year volumes and most recently include a novella,
Of Wind and Fire
, in an anthology about women scientists (
To Shape the Dark
, ed. Athena Andreadis). She is a winner of the Parallax Award and a Tiptree Honor, was a participant in Arizona State University's Project Hieroglyph, and was a guest of honor at the Science Fiction Research Association annual conference in 2015. Her work includes a short story collection,
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories
(New Delhi), reprinted in 2013, as well as an ALA Notable children's book,
Younguncle Comes to Town
.

• When a young friend told me of a dream he had about a strange machine, it occurred to me to conjure up a lexicon of impossible devices. The first story in the triptych is embroidered around the possibility suggested by the machine in the dream—thank you, JLH! When the dust had settled after the first story, it suggested something, a pattern in the sand that took me to another place, another story, and a quite different machine. That in turn provoked the third story. But it wasn't a linear process because as I wrote one story, I necessarily had to change the others until they were braided together in a way that made literary topological sense. Yet they remained disparate until I found the context that knitted them into a canvas: a space—the greater space of impossible machines where perhaps we might bridge the gulf between human and machine. Yearnings, longings, separations, distances both literal and of the heart, the way that the physical and psychological subtexts of the world inform each other—these are the things that move me and move the story.

Julian Mortimer Smith
has published more than a dozen short stories in some of the top speculative fiction magazines, including
Asimov's Science Fiction, Terraform, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
, and
AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review
. He's also written nonfiction articles about such topics as the North American Conker Championship and the Shag Harbour UFO Incident. He has worked as an editor for a romance publisher, as a copywriter for a Web design company, and as a clarinetist for an army. He currently resides in a small lobstering town in southwest Nova Scotia but has lived in various cities across Canada and the UK. He is working on a novel for young adults.

• When I was in university, I went to see a talk by Professor Barbie Zelizer on how photojournalists depict war. She pointed out that we rarely see photographs of dead bodies in newspapers. The images we see of war are often highly aestheticized, sanitized for consumption around the breakfast table. When images of death do appear in newspapers, they provoke strong reactions—outrage, letters to the editor, canceled subscriptions. They are sometimes even shocking enough to galvanize peace movements.

In “Headshot,” I tried to imagine how our appetite for war might change if ordinary civilians had to give their consent and bear witness to each act of killing. I set out to write a hopeful story, to imagine a world in which we weren't allowed to look away. But I think it turned into something of a bitter satire. You be the judge.

Rachel Swirsky
is a short story writer living in Bakersfield, California. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She's twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella
The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window
and in 2014 for her short story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005. She once played the Mock Turtle in a children's production of
Alice in Wonderland
.

•
Alice in Wonderland
is one of my father's favorite books. It was always part of my life. When I started working on this story, my father gave me a worn, annotated copy that's about as old as he is. I love the derangement of
Alice in Wonderland
. The odd images and strange characters are disconcerting in the best possible way. Unlike a lot of other children's books, the novel holds up well to adult rereading. Clever prose and insight keeps it sharp.

Retellings fascinate me. I'm endlessly intrigued by the ways people can recombine characters, plots, and imagery. I wrote a scrap of the first hatter/hare scene on a whim and then set it aside, but found myself coming back to it over several years.

The story didn't develop in a linear way. I played with quotes; I shuffled passages; I didn't know what would happen next. A surprising amount of text came about almost by coincidence. I'd sit down to write a parody of one of the poems from the original, and how it came out shaped the way the story moved. Quotes steered conversations here and there of their own accord. I chased after tidbits and irony.

I don't know if I could set out to write another story like this one because the process was so idiosyncratic. But I really loved the way it turned out and am gratified that others have enjoyed it, too.

Catherynne M. Valente
is the
New York Times
–bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including
Palimpsest
, the
Orphan's Tales
series,
Deathless, Radiance
, and the crowdfunded phenomenon
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

• The seed of “Planet Lion” was an idle joke about “psychic lions” made one late night around the house. The idea sort of took hold, and I could not let go of the image of a planet of psychically networked large carnivores. I wanted to contrast the immediate, first-person experience of this alien animal consciousness wakening within a technology matrix that they couldn't fully understand and had to translate into a language meaningful to their experience, with a traditional military science fiction story of space warfare and its repercussions. It's a story, ultimately, of colonization, careless colonization, and how a technologically superior force can take much more than just territory. It can take the very minds and memories of its victims and replace these with something in its own image. This process is essentially the core goal of any imperial project—to copy and paste itself into every cell in the universe.

Nick Wolven
's short stories have appeared in
Asimov's Science Fiction, F&SF, Analog, Clarkesworld
, and the
New England Review
, among other publications. His writing has been republished in
The Best Science Fiction of the Year
, edited by Neil Clarke, and
The Year's Best Science Fiction
, edited by Gardner Dozois. He lives in New York City.

• I can't for the life of me remember what made me think it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story based on Eudora Welty's classic meditation on middle-aged romance, “No Place for You, My Love.” Why mess with perfection? Why trivialize the sublime? Why invite invidious and unflattering comparisons by juxtaposing one's own writing with a work that's already unquestionably amazing? I can only say that at some point I found myself with a half-finished draft of this piece on my hands, and it seemed only right to finish it. And then, at a later point, I found myself with a contract to publish this story on my hands, and it seemed only right to take the money.

There must have been an earlier point at which I thought to myself, “Hmm, you know what would be cool—a satire of the modern dating scene that's
also
a tribute to the great American genius of southern lyricism.” But one trick to the act of writing (if not the art of writing) is that you learn not to probe too deeply into the sources of your own inspiration.

At any rate, the Welty story is well worth a read, for those who haven't heard of it. Of the contemporary dating scene, speaking as a New York denizen, I can only say: Beware!

After several years as a book agent in New York and then a film agent in Los Angeles,
Liz Ziemska
finally gathered together enough courage to try this writing thing herself, only to discover that it was much, much harder than it looked. Eventually, she completed an MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was David Gates, her first teacher at Bennington, who told her to quit imitating (insert famous author) and let her voice be as strange as it wanted to be. Her work has appeared in
Tin House, Interfictions:2
, and
Strange Horizons
and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and longlisted in the
Best American Nonrequired Reading
. “The Mushroom Queen” won a Pushcart Prize.

• I've always been interested in science and have an undergraduate degree in biology, though I decided in my senior year not to go to medical school. When I became a literary agent, I loved scouring scientific trade magazines in the hopes of finding scientists who were also beautiful writers. A friend of mine directed a documentary about global warming. In the goody bag given out after the premiere party I found a book called
Mycelium Running
, by Paul Stamets. I put it on my bookshelf, promising to read it one day. When I started writing fiction, someone told me that I should try dream journaling to fight writer's block. For years I would wake up, pull the journal from my nightstand, and scribble away until I got the dream down before it could evaporate. One night during a particularly bright moon, I woke up in the middle of the night and had a reverie of a woman, my putative twin, standing at the edge of the lawn next to the jade plant. I wrote that down and put it away. One day, while cleaning my bookshelf, I found the mushroom book and started reading. Then I knew exactly whom I had encountered on that moonlit night. A scientist I admire has a book out this year that asks the question “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” My story asks the question “Are we smart enough to know how smart fungi are?”

Selected by John Joseph Adams

ANDERS, CHARLIE JANE

The Last Movie Ever Made.
The End Has Come
, ed. John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey (Broad Reach)

ARIMAH, LESLEY NNEKA

Who Will Greet You at Home.
The New Yorker
, October

BACIGALUPI, PAOLO

City of Ash.
Matter
, July

BAILEY, DALE

Snow.
Nightmare
, June

BEAR, ELIZABETH

The Heart's Filthy Lesson.
Old Venus
, ed. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam)

BELL, HELENA

When We Were Giants.
Lightspeed
, November

BOLANDER, BROOKE

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead.
Lightspeed
, February

BUCKELL, TOBIAS S.

Pale Blue Memories.
Old Venus
, ed. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam)

BUNKER, KARL

Caisson.
Asimov's Science Fiction
, August