The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (3 page)

My own first experience with wonder came in the candy-coated package of science fiction: Richard Dreyfuss chasing aliens in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In some ways I never recovered from that first great detonation of amazement.

In one pivotal scene, Dreyfuss is stopped at a malfunctioning railroad crossing when an alien spacecraft passes overhead, spearing him with a great shaft of light and causing objects to blow about the cab of his pickup in a frantic storm. Afterward, the side of his body that faced the driver's side window is badly sunburned, although the incident occurred at night.

And this is very like the effect the movie had on me. After it was over I felt irradiated, aglow,
charged.

I never looked at a starry night the same way. The
clank-clank-clank
of the bell at a railroad crossing still evokes in me a shivery frisson of anticipation.
Close Encounters
shook loose a marvelous idea in my seven-year-old head: we are fish in the ocean of the universe, and there may be grand ships moving above us.

I experienced another of these walloping explosions of feeling a few years later, when I first read
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, Ray Bradbury's classic story of a carnival stocked with monsters and poisoned rides. No one who buys a ticket to Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show ever forgets what they saw there: the carousel that ages you, the illustrated man with a book of living stories inked onto his flesh.

My awe, though, was not merely a reaction to Bradbury's thrilling ideas. It was just as much a response to the shock of his sentences, the way he could fold a few words to create an indelible image, much as an origami artist may make a square of paper into a crane. One great verb, I discovered, had almost as much explosive power as any marvelous concept. The language of fiction could be as exciting as the subject matter. After
Something Wicked
, I could never look at my own sentences without asking myself if they were really packing their maximum charge. I had not known until then what a few words could do—that like gunpowder, they could ignite with a shocking crack.

This is the truth of science fiction and fantasy: it is the greatest fireworks show in literature, and your own imagination is a sky waiting to catch fire. And here is the truth of this book: we've got all the best, brightest, bangiest fireworks a person could want.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy
is not just a book but also an explosive device . . . one that is, fortunately, entirely safe to bring on a plane.

Science fiction and fantasy: two different but closely related compounds, both highly combustible.

Fantasy, it has been argued, could well describe all literature. Any work of fiction, after all, is an act of sustained invention—a fantasy—and a dragon is a dragon, whether it sleeps in a cave on a pile of gold or wears a human face and works for Goldman Sachs, destroying lives by moving numbers from one column to another. I once sat in front of two werewolves on a train to Liverpool. They wore Manchester United jerseys, showed their fangs at every passing lady, and barked at anyone who looked shy or weak. When we roared into a tunnel, it was all too easy to imagine them leaping on someone in the dark and tearing out a throat. As it happens, we reached our destination undevoured, and I got a good fantasy story out of the experience (“Wolverton Station”).

Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt? Fantasists all. Even those readers who would turn up their nose at a collection like this (perhaps to buy a copy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's
The Best American Short Stories
instead) are fantasy enthusiasts, whether they know it or not.

But for the purposes of this collection, our interest is not fantasy in the broadest sense but tales of the
fantastic.
The defining trait of such narratives is that the challenges in them are unreal or otherworldly. Familiar dangers have been rendered in mind-bending new forms, to help us see the problems of our lives afresh. For example, lots of stories explore workplace seductions, but in a book like this, the company is operated by vampires and the issues raised are not just moral but
mortal.
Children who fall far from the tree may test the love and patience of their parents in the extreme, but only in a collection such as this will a mother find herself looking after a gelatinous, mysterious cube.

If stories of the fantastic are a kind of firework, then their red glare may show you your own life in a truly new light, revealing who around you is a demon lover and who a ghost, who is the plaything of faeries and who has fangs.

Science fiction, on the other hand, might describe any literary work set in the modern day. Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket knows we've been living in the future for a while now. At the time of this writing, a man has only just moved into a small flat located 250 miles above the Earth. He plans to live there for a year. As has been noted by others, there is a planet in our solar system entirely populated by robots: Mars! How science fiction is that? Ray Bradbury would love it.

Anyone who writes a story in which someone sends a text or an email is writing science fiction. In a world where people own self-driving electric cars and maintain close relationships by way of daily video chats, it is not unreasonable to say every author is a science fiction author now. Again: Franzen, Smith, Tartt, etc. But go back even further—weren't the first stories to account for the Internet, circa 1990, working in a science-fictional mode? Weren't novels that mentioned the moon landing trying to reckon with a world in which the incredible had been calculated, computed, processed, and made credible?

Well. Leave it. As with fantasy, we will pass on the broadest possible definition of science fiction, and examine the genre only in its most potent form. Our interest is in those stories in which the science has been projected out from the marvels of now to the head-swimming possibilities of what might be
next.
We stand on the near shore of the twenty-first century, with the vast terrain ahead unknown, unmapped, only dimly apprehended. Science fiction stories are the dazzling flares we launch into the darkness, to catch a glimpse of the country before us and show us our way.

Both genres, really, are flashbangs to drive back the shadows. Fantasy shines its eldritch glare within, illuminating the contours of our dreams, our half-formed desires, and our irrational fears. Science fiction casts its blazing glare outward, into the brilliant night, at the smashed crystal ball of the moon and the future waiting beyond.

Put another way, fantasy explores the self, whereas science fiction asks you to leave selfhood behind and see your life for what it is—a bright mote of dust adrift in a vast and beautiful and terrifying universe.

The writers assembled herein—nineteen, with two incredibly different and equally breathtaking stories by a young she-can-do-anything star, Sofia Samatar—are a mix of old hands and fresh voices. If you've read John Joseph Adams's foreword, you know the deal: he read several thousand stories, whittled them down to eighty that he thought were truly remarkable, and I read through those, reducing them to twenty favorites. The authors' names were withheld from me, and everyone here fought their way in on their own merits. When their secret identities were revealed, it gladdened me to discover I was among some old friends, and excited me to be introduced to so many remarkable new talents.

I am also pleased that the finished collection organically arose as one of great diversity. Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experiences, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as
you
see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes here who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don't have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.

I hesitate to reveal many specifics about the stories themselves. A description of a fireworks show is never as good as seeing one. But perhaps I can offer a few general observations.

The apocalypse is totally happening . . . at least in the sense that it's a popular subject in SF/F right now (as for whether the apocalypse is
happening
happening, continue to watch the Weather Channel and keep your disaster insurance up to date). There are three end-of-the-worlders in this book . . . and there were at least three others I read that were almost as good as these.

We are increasingly anxious about our inability to look away from our ever-more-seductive screens and all too aware that what you get from your shiny new device may be very different from what was promised on the box.

Even demon lovers and occasional ghosts are depressed by reality television and tabloid websites.

The world needs mermaids.

Kickstarter and Craigslist have replaced the stake and the cross as our go-to tools for dealing with the supernatural.

Poverty is hard, even in the future.

The natural world may not ever be done playing pranks on us talking apes.

History is no longer just a story written by the winners.

Most of all, we humans will always be driven to take enormous risks and perform heart-wrenching sacrifices for our friends, children, partners, or parents, regardless of our costume, be it a spacesuit or a fantastic coat with pockets full of magic.

And that's enough by way of preamble from your faithful correspondent. I've talked myself dry, and besides . . . the hour grows late. The sun has long since set, and the first stars are out. Cricket song throbs in the high grass. Do you hear that? A bell
clank-clank-clanks
at a distant railroad crossing, although there's no sign of a train. Whoa—
spooky.

We're all here on our picnic blankets on a perfect evening and it's time for the show. Who's ready for some fireworks? Who's ready to watch the sky burn?

Oh good. I'm ready, too.

Strike the match.

Touch the fuse.

*!

(bang)

—J
OE
H
ILL

SOFIA SAMATAR

FROM
Lightspeed Magazine

“Y
OU HAVE TO
puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?”

She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. I mean everybody at camp was sort of a mess, we were even supposed to be that way, at a
difficult stage
, but Cee took it to another level. Herding us into the bathroom at night and asking us to puke. “It's right here,” she said, tapping the nightgown over her hollow chest. “Where you've got less nerves in your esophagus. It's like wired into the side, into the muscle. You have to puke really hard to get it.”

“Did you ever get it out?” asked Max. She was sitting on one of the sinks. She'd believe anything.

Cee nodded, solemn as a counselor. “Two years ago. They caught me and gave me a new one. But it was beautiful while it was gone. I'm telling you it was the best.”

“Like how?” I said.

Cee stretched out her arms. “Like bliss. Like everything. Everything all at once. You're raw, just a big raw nerve.”

“That doesn't sound so great,” said Elle.

“I know,” said Cee, not annoyed but really agreeing, turning things around. That was one of her talents.

“It sounds stupid,” she nodded, “but that's because it's something we can't imagine. We don't have the tools. Our bodies don't know how to calculate what we're missing. You can't know till you get there. And at the same time, it's where you came from. It's where you
started.
”

She raised her toothbrush. “So. Who's with me?”

Definitely not me. God, Cee. You were such an idiot.

Apparently a girl named Puss had told her about the bug. And Cee, being Cee, was totally open to learning new things from a person who called herself Puss. Puss had puked out her own bug and was living on the streets. I guess she'd run away from camp, I don't really know. She was six feet tall, Cee said, with long red hair. The hair was dyed, which was weird, because if you're living on the streets, do you care about stuff like that? This kind of thing can keep me awake at night. I lie in bed, or rather I sit in the living room because Pete hates me tossing and turning, and I leave the room dark and open all the curtains, and I watch the lights of the city and think about this girl Puss getting red hair dye at the grocery store and doing her hair in the bathroom at the train station. Did she put newspapers down? And what if somebody came in and saw her?

Anyway, eventually Cee met Puss in the park, and Puss was clearly down-and-out and a hooker, but she looked cool and friendly, and Cee sat down beside her on the swings.

“You have to puke it up.”

We'd only been at camp for about six weeks. It seemed like a long time, long enough to know everybody. Everything felt stretched out at camp, the days and the nights, and yet in the end it was over so fast, as soon as you could blink. Camp was on its own calendar—
a special time of life.
That was Jodi's phrase. She was our favorite counselor. She was greasy and enthusiastic, with a skinny little ponytail, only a year or two older than the seniors.
Camp is so special!
The thing with Jodi was, she believed every word she said. It made it really hard to make fun of her. That night, the night in the bathroom, she was asleep down the hall underneath her Mother Figure, which was a little stuffed dog with
Florida
on its chest.