The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Joe Hill

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy
™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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ISBN
978-0-544-44977-0

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

e
ISBN
978-0-544-44984-8
v1.1015

“Skullpocket” by Nathan Ballingrud. First published in
Nightmare Carnival
, October 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Nathan Ballingrud. Reprinted by permission of Nathan Ballingrud.

“The Relive Box” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. First published in
The New Yorker
, March 17, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

“The Thing About Shapes to Come” by Adam-Troy Castro. First published in
Lightspeed Magazine
, January 2014 (Issue 44). Copyright © 2014 by Adam-Troy Castro. Reprinted by permission of Adam-Troy Castro.

“How the Marquis Got His Coat Back” by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Rogues.
Copyright © 2014 by Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission of Neil Gaiman.

“Cimmeria: From the
Journal of Imaginary Anthropology
” by Theodora Goss. First published in
Lightspeed Magazine
, July 2014 (Issue 50). Copyright © 2014 by Theodora Goss. Reprinted by permission of Theodora Goss.

“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i” by Alaya Dawn Johnson. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, July/August 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Alaya Dawn Johnson.

“I Can See Right Through You” by Kelly Link. First published in
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
, no. 48, December 2014, and reprinted in
Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
(Random House, 2015). Copyright © 2014 by Kelly Link. Reprinted by permission of Kelly Link.

“Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead” by Carmen Maria Machado. First published in
Help Fund My Robot Army!!! And Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects.
Copyright © 2014 by Carmen Maria Machado. Reprinted by permission of Carmen Maria Machado.

“Each to Each” by Seanan McGuire. First published in
Lightspeed Magazine: Women Destroy Science Fiction!
, June 2014 (Issue 49). Copyright © 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Reprinted by permission of Seanan McGuire.

“We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller. First published in
Lightspeed Magazine
, September 2014 (Issue 52). Copyright © 2014 by Sam J. Miller. Reprinted by permission of Sam J. Miller/
Lightspeed
.

“Windows” by Susan Palwick. First published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, September 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Susan Palwick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable” by Cat Rambo. First published in
Clarkesworld Magazine
, February 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Catherine Rambo. Reprinted by permission of Cat Rambo.

“The Empties” by Jess Row. First published in
The New Yorker
, November 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Jess Row. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

“The Bad Graft” by Karen Russell. First published in
The New Yorker
, June 9, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

“How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” by A. Merc Rustad. First published in
Scigentasy
, March 1, 2014 (Issue 4). Copyright © 2014 by A. Merc Rustad. Reprinted by permission of Merc Rustad, author.

“How to Get Back to the Forest” by Sofia Samatar. First published in
Lightspeed Magazine
, March 2014 (Issue 46). Copyright © 2014 by Sofia Samatar. Reprinted by permission of Sofia Samatar.

“Ogres of East Africa” by Sofia Samatar. First published in
Long Hidden.
Copyright © 2014 by Sofia Samatar. Reprinted by permission of Sofia Samatar.

“The One They Took Before” by Kelly Sandoval. First published in
Shimmer Magazine
, December 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kelly Sandoval. Reprinted by permission of Kelly Sandoval.

“Sleeper” by Jo Walton. First published on
Tor.com
, August 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Jo Walton. Reprinted by permission of Jo Walton.

“The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever” by Daniel H. Wilson. First published in
Carbide Tipped Pens
, December 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Daniel H. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Daniel H. Wilson.

T
HE PRIMARY REASON
this volume exists is a novel I read when I was eighteen years old:
The Stars My Destination
, by Alfred Bester.

I'd read a number of science fiction novels that I liked a great deal—books that I remember fondly to this day—but it wasn't until
The Stars My Destination
that I realized the heights that science fiction could attain.

That
prose!

Those
ideas!

That goddamn
sense of wonder!

My entire reading life was forever changed—it became all about finding other books like that one.

In Bester's classic, there's a paragraph early on that describes “common man” protagonist Gully Foyle's state of mind. A disaster has stranded him, the lone survivor, on a spaceship for 170 days. On day 171 another ship approaches his, ignores his distress call, and leaves him there to die:

He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thirty years like some heavily armored creature [. . .] but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the key to his awakening was in the lock.

In that moment Gully Foyle found new purpose and rebuilt his previously aimless existence into something entirely new.

That was the key to his awakening. I think of
The Stars My Destination
as mine.

This is a story I've told before—my origin story, if you will. The catalyst for what I was to become. Now
my
existence is all about finding stories that can make that same kind of impact—stories that are so good they make your eyes flicker with lightning, stories that demand you quote bits and pieces to your friends and to the larger world via social media, stories that once you read them, they become a part of you . . . stories that turn that key.

I'm new here, so let me introduce myself: I'm John Joseph Adams. I first started working in the science fiction and fantasy field in 2001, when I got a job as an editorial assistant at one of the genre's leading magazines,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
(founded in 1949, publisher of my all-time favorite story, “Flowers for Algernon”). In 2008 I published my first anthology,
Wastelands;
since then I've published more than twenty anthologies, launched two magazines (
Lightspeed
and
Nightmare
), cofounded Wired.com's
The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy
podcast, and been nominated for—or edited stories that were nominated for—numerous awards and honors, including the World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula Awards. All of which led to my being selected to serve as the series editor of
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Science fiction and fantasy are also new here, so let me introduce them as well.

Science fiction and fantasy (or SF/F as I will henceforth refer to them in this foreword) can be notoriously tricky to define—so much so that Damon Knight, founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the professional SF/F writers' organization, which presents the Nebula Awards), once famously said, “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.”

Obviously that's not a very
useful
definition, but it speaks to how thorny a proposition it is to provide a concrete definition of the genre. Also, Knight mentions only science fiction, but fantasy is essentially implied. Which might seem strange, since at first you might think that science fiction and fantasy are two distinct, and in some ways opposing, genres. But the more you drill down to their core attributes, the clearer it becomes that they're part and parcel of the same whole—which is why they're so often paired together, as they are in this volume.

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 . . . ?
What if one of the fundamental operating principles of the universe didn't work the way we actually think it does? What if technology existed that enabled you to upload your consciousness to a computer? What if the creatures from our myths and legends actually existed?

From there, SF/F is often broken down into subgenres, many of which even the most casual genre fan is likely aware of—if not by name, then by example. These include space opera (
Star Wars
), urban fantasy (
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
), military science fiction (
Starship Troopers
), epic fantasy (
Lord of the Rings
), dystopian fiction (
1984
), fairy tales (
Once Upon a Time
), postapocalyptic fiction (
Mad Max
), magical realism (
Pan's Labyrinth
), time travel (
12 Monkeys
), steampunk (
Wild Wild West
), portal fantasy (
Chronicles of Narnia
), sword and sorcery (
Conan the Barbarian
), and many others.

(Obviously, I could have dropped a lot of deep-geek literary references there to describe these subgenres, but I tried to stick with examples from movie and television pop culture to help ensure that everyone groks what I mean. Well, except for
that
reference.
Grok
is science fiction geek for “understand,” as coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel
Stranger in a Strange Land.
)